[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 109 (Friday, June 28, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H4431-H4436]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              JOINT ECONOMIC REPORT CONCERNS AND SOLUTIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, Congressman Al Green and I are almost 
oceans apart, as a traditional Democrat and a conservative Republican. 
Yet, since the day I have been here, he has always been remarkably kind 
to me. He is one of my little girl's favorite people because he is 
sweet to her.
  I think it is a demonstration that we may see lots of the world 
differently--and he knows I am passionately trying to convince him that 
the morality of making people healthier is the most powerful thing we 
can do on income inequality and some of the afflictions that exist in 
our society today. One day, I am going to close that deal. I thank the 
gentleman for being so kind to my family and me.
  Madam Speaker, this one is going to be a little thick. I apologize 
right now to the person who has to try to take these words down.
  Last Friday, we issued the Joint Economic Report. The Joint Economic 
Committee has a really neat history. In 1956, I think, it was 
chartered. Right now, I am finishing up the autobiography of Milton 
Friedman, and he talks about the number of times he came in front of 
the committee and presented ideas.
  It is a unique committee. It is Senate and House, and we rotate the 
chairmanship back and forth between the Senate and House. So, this 
year, Mr. Heinrich in the Senate has the chairmanship. I have the vice 
chairmanship. If we are blessed to remain in the majority and the 
Speaker so chooses to let me keep the chairmanship, it comes back to 
me.
  As Republicans, we tried to do something last year and this year, 
which was, instead of just taking shots at the President's economic 
reports, the President's budget, we not only pointed out where they 
were wrong mathematically, but we also pointed out solutions.
  The hardest part here is trying to get the heads around this place, 
the thinking around this place, the intellectual calcification that is 
this place, and get them to understand the baseline math and how 
incredibly difficult it is.
  I am going to say this three or four times as we are going through 
this. I know we are in the time of election year math, so like last 
night's debate, there were a couple of moments when I

[[Page H4432]]

had to shut the television off because I am bouncing off the ceiling, 
saying that is my President, like what he said about Social Security, 
that if we tax rich people by like 1 percent or so, we are fine.
  I have done presentation after presentation after presentation here 
with five Ph.D. economists showing, hey, raise the cap for everyone 
over $400,000, you cover about 38 percent of the shortfall.
  Mr. President, learn your math because when you say that in front of 
a national audience, you steal away the seriousness of how we have a 
discussion, a debate, a mechanism to fix the real problem because now 
you have millions and millions of people saying that the President said 
it, so it must be true. You make our job so hard, trying to make a 
calculator do its job, because, at some point, the math is going to 
win. Your feelings are not.
  Let's start to do some basic education on what is in the Joint 
Economic Report. I am going to walk through the scale that has moved 
against us, some of the things in the report that we find very 
concerning, and then we are going to walk through some of our 
solutions.
  The point we have made over and over is the left's tax policy that 
they are going to tax people over $400,000, maximize their income tax, 
their estate tax, their capital gains tax, all these things. You can 
only get about 1.5 percent of the GDP of the economy.
  For us on the conservative side, we want to cut, but if you limit 
your cuts to only nondefense discretionary, you can only get about 1 
percent of GDP. Add those two together, every tax, every cut, and you 
have 2\1/2\ percent of GDP. This year, we are borrowing--what?--8, 
almost 9 percent of GDP. Does anyone see a math problem? It turns out 
what is great rhetoric, great campaign slogans, is crap math.
  Let's do some real math. First off, for all of my brothers and 
sisters who--and if you are upset watching at home and see that the 
Chamber is empty, that is because we are on 1,000 televisions on the 
campus, and part of this presentation is not only to Members of 
Congress but to their staff because often the staff are the ones who 
are young. We are talking about their future, and maybe they will help 
their Members understand actual math.
  We are now at 74 percent of all U.S. spending. Seventy-four percent 
is now on autopilot. Meaning, 74 percent is mandatory spending, so the 
next time you have someone from the political class say that if we just 
get rid of foreign aid, we will be fine, you can point out to them that 
it just covered maybe a week, a week and a half of borrowing.

  If you are burning through $8 billion to $9 billion a day, you have 
to understand--stop lying to the voters. Stop making crap up because, 
at some point, the bond market will be the ones in charge of this 
country. When you are borrowing $80,000 to $100,000 a second every day, 
when you have to bring almost $120 trillion to market this year, both 
in virgin and refinance, when the bond market gets cranky, it gets 
really expensive for us.
  Here is a point on this chart. Seventy-four percent is in mandatory 
spending. Madam Speaker, you and I don't get to vote on any of that. We 
have done it as a formula. Every dime a Member of Congress now votes on 
is borrowed and a sliver of Medicare. A sliver of even the mandatory 
now has to be borrowed money.
  When we go home and talk to our constituents about balancing the 
budget, if I get rid of every dime of defense, we still have to borrow. 
If we get rid of every dime of nondefense discretionary, that is the 
State Department, the Park Service, the FBI, all of those, you just get 
rid of all of government and no military, those add up to $900 billion 
and $800 billion, so $1.8 trillion, to just make the math simple. We 
are going to borrow $2.3, maybe $2.5 trillion this year. Now, find me 
the half a trillion dollars in Medicare or other mandatory spending you 
want gone.
  The next time you have someone say just balance the budget, that is 
not how the math works. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on today 
is borrowed, and a big sliver of mandatory spending now is on borrowed 
money. It is math. The math will win, but this place is unwilling to 
bathe in the facts.
  We updated this chart. I don't know about the colors. This number got 
slightly better. I think there is a mistake in it because it is 
basically calculated that there are no recessions, no wars, no 
pandemics, nothing else in here.
  From today through the next 30 years, the CBO update from last week 
basically says, over 30 years, you are going to borrow about $115 
trillion, $116 trillion. One hundred percent of the borrowing over that 
30 years is demographics.
  How many times do you hear anyone around here say that? It is 
healthcare, almost all Medicare, and a decade from now, when the Social 
Security trust fund is gone, do we just borrow, use general fund 
receipts to make up that shortfall, or will this place have the guts 
and a President who stops making crap up and gives us the opportunity 
to have Republicans, Democrats, the White House, maybe some actual 
econometricians, and people who have calculators come up with a 
solution to fix it.
  Social Security and Medicare run a $124 trillion deficit over the 
next 30 years, but the rest of the Federal Government has about a $9 
trillion surplus because their growth rate is expected to run slower 
than the growth of tax receipts.
  How do I get people to understand here that if you want to save the 
Republic, legalize the technology and bathe in the ways to crash the 
price of healthcare? We have done how many presentations here to say, 
here are cures, the cures are moral, and here is technology that would 
free you, give you more time, make you healthier, so can we legalize 
it?
  As I have said over and over, this place has become a protection 
racket. It is a protection of incumbency, not incumbent Members of 
Congress but incumbent bureaucracies and often people's business 
models.
  This board is really important. You can go to CBO and look it up 
yourself, or I think even Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute has 
tried to put out an updated deck of slides to make it easier to read.
  Let's walk through a couple other things here. We worked through part 
of this in our Joint Economic Report, but this was basically straight 
out of CBO. CBO projects that net interest and mandatory program 
spending will exceed revenues--it really should say receipts because 
revenue is something you earn; receipts are something you confiscate--
will exceed revenues by $1.689 trillion over the next 10 years.
  It is simply saying that if you put in the mandatory programs and the 
interest we owe, it consumes every dollar of tax receipts. If you come 
and say, David, tomorrow I need you to balance the budget, I can do it, 
but you have to be prepared to have no more military, to have no more 
government. We are just going to do the entitlements, the earned 
entitlements, earned benefits, and then pay the interest back to our 
bondholders. That is reality. It is called math.
  What else was in both the Joint Economic Report and then also backed 
up by the Congressional Budget Office this last week? In 9 budget 
years, net borrowing--we are going to talk about the difference between 
net borrowing and gross borrowing--is $50.6 trillion. When we say net, 
this is the stuff we have to sell to the public, to the nice family in 
China that takes their savings and is willing to buy a U.S. savings 
bond, your retirement that goes out and buys a U.S. savings bond.
  We are about to continue to consume--right now, China and the United 
States are basically consuming much of the world's savings, investment 
capital. We are just chewing it up. In 9 budget years, we are over $50 
trillion in publicly borrowed money, but where I think that number is a 
bit of a fraud is because we also take things like the money in Social 
Security, U.S. Railroad Retirement, and all these others and borrow 
that.
  Now, we do pay interest back, which is something that is a bit of a 
controversy for us on the economic side because we will show it as a 
benefit. ``Look, we have this money,'' but we often don't show the 
interest we are paying back, but we owe interest.

                              {time}  1215

  If you add in the internal borrowing, the gross borrowing in 9 budget 
years is $56 trillion. Why isn't there a sense

[[Page H4433]]

of panic around here? Didn't anyone bother to grab the Joint Economic 
Report or the CBO report? We went out of our way to write our chapters 
so they are readable.
  Yeah, it is a funky-looking book. It looks like the type of thing 
where there will be 12 people that will read it, and it will sit on a 
shelf with dust on it. If you actually give a damn, learn the math 
because we talk in there about ways to help stabilize U.S. debt.
  If I come to you right now and say: In 9 budget years, you are 
crossing $50 trillion in borrowing, why wasn't everyone who came behind 
these microphones this week talking about this? Am I just an idiot for 
coming behind this mike week after week, year after year?
  I get people saying: Well, I am going to save a million dollars on 
this amendment, and you start to say: Great. I am proud of you. Thank 
you for doing it. Do you realize we borrowed more during the debate 
than the amendment saves because we are not willing to talk about the 
actual drivers of debt?
  It is healthcare costs. It is our demographics. Now it is in the 
interest we have to pay because the United States is now No. 14 on the 
credit stack. That means Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than 
the United States today.
  I need you to process that. One of the reasons the United States bond 
rates are so high is, if you read the S&P, read the Moody's, since I am 
told a bunch of people here are literate, in there, it says: We don't 
trust the United States Congress' governance. We pay a risk premium 
because we don't look serious about our debt.
  Think of that. There are 13 other countries that get to sell a 10-
year bond cheaper than the United States, and we are the reserve 
currency. There will be some troll on some fake internet site saying: 
Well, if we just didn't give money to this, we would be fine. Grow up. 
Just grow up. Deal with the reality.
  I am sorry. I have had a stunning amount of caffeine, and I am 
unwilling to cut back. If someone can start a 12-step program for 
coffee, I am going to be your first member, but I want to hold the 
meetings in a Starbucks. Actually, I have been backed off of Starbucks. 
Let's do Black Rock Coffee or something else.
  Interest and mandatory program spending will exceed revenues for 
fiscal year 2024. Guess what fiscal year we are in right now. This 
isn't some projection for the future. This is today. All discretionary 
spending is borrowed. I just tried to create another chart to make the 
point. Everything you think of as government today is borrowed.
  Also, in this, we actually think there are a couple of problems on 
those total receipts. It is a little quirky. We give ourselves credit 
for interest received but when we don't actually charge ourselves for 
the credit paid, that sort of stuff.
  Basically, the point is: Everything you think of as government is 
borrowed. When I would talk about that a few years ago, I would have 
Members here saying: David, you have to stop making up stuff. You are 
scaring my voters. Ta-dah, it happened. It is real.
  This chart is a little tougher, but I am trying to point out what the 
majority of income tax pays for. If you actually take every dime of 
income tax and you add it up, this year, 36.9 percent of all income tax 
will go just toward Medicare.
  Then you add in another 36.5 percent. That is net interest. If you 
want to be honest, you will do the gross interest, which is closer to 
40 percent. Start to think about that. In this year, almost all of the 
income tax is consumed by interest and Medicare.
  When we go out in time, it starts being beyond that. In 9 budget 
years, you will start having 43.1 percent of all income tax that will 
go toward Medicare. Another 42.3 percent will just go toward interest. 
If you, once again, plug in all net interest, it is closer to 45.
  That means, in 9 years--remember, we are an income tax-based tax 
system here and the majority of U.S. receipts come from income tax--we 
can't cover our interest and Medicare. We actually cross this 
threshold, I think, in, like, 5 years, meaning every dime of tax you 
pay will basically just be covering Medicare and covering interest.
  Getting older, turning 65, and your earned benefits, is that 
Democrat? Is it Republican? It is just demographics. I am going to 
spend some time here talking about what has happened in the world since 
1990. We spent a lot of time in the Joint Economic Report talking about 
this. We slowed down having children in 1990.
  I am going to actually walk through a couple of things here in some 
of the updated reports. There is a very good chance the data is now 
looking like, last year, the entire world actually decreased in 
population. If any of you have your economics degree or actually read, 
you have to start to understand what happens to a world's growth, 
economic vitality, GDP growth, productivity, when the entire world may 
be starting to shrink populationwise.
  Let's walk through a few more of these. Deficit reduction from 
granting permanent residency to legal immigrants with advanced STEM 
degrees. We are going to start to walk through some of the things. We 
say: We have to understand what is going on around us. If I come to you 
and say: The population in the United States has just flattened out--
and forgive the little Post-its here, but even our own charts were 
wrong--last year, the best data says the United States fell to 1.62 
children fertility rate, basically meaning the United States population 
has flattened out.
  I am going to show you one right here. Let's see if I can make this 
make sense. We are calculating that, in 15 years, United States will 
have more deaths than births. The United States, in 15 years, will have 
more deaths than births. We are a dying society. We need to grow up and 
accept it and realize the morality. We can fix it.
  There is no society in the entire world that has been able to change 
its fertility rates. It is beyond me. Is it cultural? Is it economic? 
Is it technology? All I can tell you is country after country after 
country, they call it natalist policies. It hasn't worked, so maybe we 
should start to prepare for the morality of is it moral to live in a 
country where you are having your fifth year in a row where prime-age 
males are dying younger?

  We are going to talk about why. Be prepared. We are now looking at 
numbers that we were not supposed to see for a decade, and they are 
already here. Go to Mass. Go to your mall. Go to this. And realize when 
you look around that we are all gray hairs.
  I accept. My wife and I, we are both 62, and I have a 2-year-old, who 
turned 2 this week, and an 8-year-old. We adopted. It took us 10 years 
to do that. Yes, I have the old dad problem, but maybe once you have 
the hug of that child, you start to say: Maybe I have a moral 
obligation because the math says my children, when they enter the 
workforce, will be poorer.
  It will be the first generation in U.S. history which will be poorer 
than their parents. Is that moral because that is what we have done? 
Remember the charts I was showing you before of how much we are going 
to borrow to maintain the benefits? Remember, in 9 budget years, 
between 9 and 10 years, 23 percent of this society will be 65 and 
older.
  It is coming. It is not a black swan. It is not going to sneak up and 
bite us. It is a white swan. We see it. We are just going to live in 
avoidance because we have people like last night, my own President, say 
things that were mathematically absurd instead of using the moral 
opportunity to basically say: We need to take this seriously.
  Those children and this senior have the right to live in a society 
where they can prosper. There are things we can do policywise, but we 
are terrified to actually think because it requires thinking.
  You don't need to see that one. It is basically a chart showing the 
collapse of populations.
  Let's actually walk through solutions. We spent months with 
economists--many of these staff are much smarter than I am--saying: We 
already have things like the MedPAC report that was put out 1 month or 
2 months ago that actually tells us that, by 2030, so just 5-some years 
from now, 22 percent of all income tax revenues are expected to be 
transferred to just Medicare.
  It is here. I mean, if any of you act surprised a few years from now, 
it is your own fault. It has been being handed to us week after week by 
the economists who were warning us. If I came

[[Page H4434]]

to you tomorrow and said: All right, Schweikert. We are going to do 
things. We are actually going to find ways to actually deal with our 
population flattening out and the incredibly high interest because, in 
fact, we are just moving back to normal, interest coverage and costs.
  By the way, we have a population that is getting older very, very 
fast, and they have their earned benefits. We made a deal. You earned 
your benefits. You worked your 40 quarters. You get your Social 
Security. You worked a certain amount. You get your Medicare. It is our 
societal contract.
  How do we pay for it? If someone says: We are just going to grow our 
way out. Back to the math we already did. All the taxes at about 1.5 
percent of GDP and all of our cuts, which we should do, about 1 percent 
of GDP, the baseline is borrowing about 6 to 7 percent of GDP. This 
year, we are just a couple of points above that baseline. You have a 
massive math gap there. Our rhetoric doesn't actually match reality.
  Let's actually walk through one. One of the things we have talked 
about is, if this data is true, that the entire world last year may 
have had zero population growth, which is crazy to think about. Think 
about all the things. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, you had that 
book, ``The Population Bomb.'' The only thing that the author actually 
got right was the spelling of his own name.
  It was wrong. The Malthusians have been with us for centuries, and 
they continue to be wrong. We are Americans. God gave us incredible 
talents and gifts to solve problems. Why don't we think about that?
  I want to make an economic argument. In the 1970s and 1980s, the 
world fought for hydrocarbons. In the last decade, we fought for rare 
earths. In the future, we are going to fight for smart people. Why 
don't we start to fix our policies?
  President Trump, to his credit, actually said last week: You know, if 
you had come to the United States and gotten a university degree and 
you can contribute to society, maybe we should keep you. That is from 
President Trump.
  We have actually found the economic baselines that are saying you can 
grow by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars the 
size of the economy. Just keep the people who have talent.
  My argument is that talent can be a skilled carpenter or a synthetic 
biologist. If you are going to grow with society at the same time the 
number of children--remember, we are closing schools all over this 
country, except we don't like to talk about it because we don't have 
enough children. Maybe actually keeping those who pay taxes, grow the 
economy, make your life better, and maybe make you healthier, we should 
fix our immigration system.
  You lock down the border. You don't import poverty. All right. This 
is a non sequitur, but let's do it. The immorality of the open border 
and the cruelty, you are the family whose mom and dad didn't graduate 
high school. You basically sell your talents. You tell your willingness 
to work. You hang drywall.
  What happens when, tomorrow, I add 4, 5, 6, 7 million people with 
similar skill sets? What happened to your income? The data is showing 
that what the President did on the border has made poor people poorer. 
We are working on a paper right now to also show that, when you add 
several million people with a limited housing stock, particularly the 
least expensive types of housing, much of the reason that inflation and 
that pricing went up: border policy. If you want to understand why you 
can't afford an apartment and you are working your heart out, it is 
border policy. It is economics. It is just math.

                              {time}  1230

  Oh, David, you are not allowed to talk about that. Screw that. Tell 
the truth.
  Let's walk through a few other things here.
  If I came to you and said, interest in healthcare costs are the 
primary drivers of U.S. sovereign debt. Why don't we find the most 
moral approach to help our brothers and sisters who are sick?
  There is an entire chapter in here that walks through the math, and 
it has a point in here that drives people insane, but the math is good: 
Obesity may add $9.1 trillion of additional costs to the United States.
  It turns out that the most powerful thing you can do to stabilize 
U.S. borrowing and the morality of letting people live longer is take 
on obesity.
  Is this place ready to have a conversation about changing the farm 
bill and nutrition support? Is it moral or nutritional support to hand 
somebody an EBT card to go buy onion rings? What are we going to do on 
the healthcare front?
  The technology is out there. We have learned that obesity is not just 
about willpower. Our brains are all wired differently. That is 
absolutely certified now. We need to help our brothers and sisters.
  The sidecar to that is, we have known for decades that 5 percent of 
our brothers and sisters who have multiple chronic conditions are over 
half of our healthcare spending. The dataset for this 5 percent 
majority is obese. Help them. Don't mock them. Don't shame them. Help 
them.
  Once again, when you are having your fifth year of prime-age males 
dying younger, we think it is drugs. No. We have looked at the data. 
Turns out, drugs are way up there. Just above drugs is obesity, 
actually.
  I would argue this place is absolutely immoral because of its 
unwillingness to tell the truth.
  If I come to you and say, the Joint Economic report spent years 
putting together the data and refining the data to demonstrate that the 
excess healthcare costs of obesity to this country over the next 10 
years is $9.1 trillion. Why isn't this an alarm bell?
  We have gotten some very nice editorials: It is neat that Mr. 
Schweikert is willing to tell the truth about where the real driver of 
debt and deficits are and things we could actually fix. Yet the brain 
trust around here just says, let's raise taxes, let's just cut things. 
It doesn't get you even close.
  We need to change policy. Changing policy would require thinking and 
we would have rooms full of lobbyists that don't want us to change 
their business model. We need to have bureaucracies that will think 
differently.
  I am going to show you in a couple other slides that you can replace 
much of the bureaucratics with AI, which is another thing we need to 
do.
  I did a whole presentation a year ago which said in the United 
States, 33 percent of all healthcare spending is diabetes, mostly type 
2. I showed you that Medicare is now the primary driver of U.S. debt, 
along with interest. Thirty-one percent of Medicare is now diabetes.
  If we could actually help our brothers and sisters, why don't we do 
it?
  Because we have an industry around us that needs sick people. It is 
about the money; it is not about solving their misery.
  Instead of me being a complete jerk over here, if you look at the 
differences in how we approach policy, my brothers and sisters on the 
left want to build more clinics so we can help people manage their 
misery. On our side we keep saying we are seeing research that there is 
a cure.
  Move the money and cure people. Ending someone's misery is much 
better than helping them maintain it. They are radically different 
views in the morality of cures.
  When I come to you and say: If you took this number on, it would be 
one of the single biggest things you could do to save Medicare and its 
future and end a hell of a lot of misery for our brothers and sisters 
who are older.
  Let's actually walk through actual solutions. If I came to you right 
now and asked: What is the single biggest thing you could do to disrupt 
spending? I am going to give you 6 months to do it. I need you to do a 
revolution today. I need you to actually think like a utopian 
economist, and you could execute it.
  Sixteen percent of all U.S. healthcare is calculated to be people not 
taking their statins, their calcium inhibitor.
  Can you believe I have hypertension, Madam Speaker? Can you believe I 
am wound a little tight? As long as I take my calcium inhibitor, 
apparently, I won't stroke out. The pill is just a few pennies.
  It turns out we could help our brothers and sisters with a little 
$0.99 pill-bottle cap that beeps at you in the morning, saying, hey, 
you really

[[Page H4435]]

should take your drugs, so you stay healthy.
  We calculate this to be almost $600 billion this year. Sixteen 
percent of healthcare is about $600 billion.
  How about just the technology of having this stupid thing beep at you 
in the morning, saying, hey, did you check your insulin? Did you take 
your calcium inhibitor? Did you take your statin? We have the pill-
bottle cap that beeps at you in the morning. This stuff all exists. It 
is incredibly cheap. We could do it.
  Yet we have lobbyists here who oppose trying to get people healthy. 
It is just absurd.
  Let's actually walk through a couple of other technology solutions.
  Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to my time remaining.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Hageman). The gentleman from Arizona has 
25 minutes remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, what would happen if I came to you 
tomorrow and said: Hey, you know that thing you can wear on your wrist, 
the FDA about 3 weeks ago said it was for your heart, it is a medical 
device.
  Apple got its watch certified as a medical device because the next 
generation is so at good managing hearts.

  What if there is a Dexcom or something else you can put on your arm 
that is over the counter that helps you manage your blood glucose? What 
if there is something you can blow into that tells you you have a 
virus? We are going to order your antivirals.
  Those technologies actually exist, and this place lays layer after 
layer after layer of bureaucratic crap down to make it unable to write 
you a script.
  My understanding is that the AMA is going to oppose me in my election 
because I am trying to cut the price of healthcare and make your life 
healthier and better.
  Unlike the Democrats who play these stupid games of we are going to 
help people get their insulin less expensive, let's give Big Pharma $16 
billion and we will buy down the price.
  How about doing things to actually make it so the co-ops, like Civica 
RX down the street that makes insulin cheaper, why would we have 
promoted crashing the price instead of subsidizing Big Pharma?
  It is actually insane. The left basically wants industrial policy to 
control you.
  We want markets to crash the price and make people healthier. Let's 
legalize the technology. It is moral.
  People have the right to take care of themselves. They have the right 
to be healthy. They have the right to use this technology, and this 
place substantially keeps it illegal.
  Let's do some other things. What would happen if I could adopt 
artificial intelligence to make your life of having to deal with 
government better, faster, cheaper, and a lot more accurate?
  We are working on an experiment with the IRS, and it is still crap. 
There was a report that came out just a couple days ago saying only 
about 80 percent of the calls are getting answered, which is 
dramatically better than 4 or 5 years ago when it was 5 percent of the 
calls.
  We have a level of AI chat--because you build a stack and it is just 
an expert on this; it is not terminator; it is not a generative AI--
that says, I just need help on this form. How do I fill it out? If you 
use technology, the voice will stay on the phone with you. It will help 
you fill out your form. It will even email or text you the form you 
need. Maybe even send you the video so you know how to do it.
  You could crash the cost of government by adopting technology. The 
IRS has already hired 6,000 more people to answer the phone. What is 
the pension cost on that? I am not being mean, but at some point I have 
got to figure out how to finance these things when technology would 
have been faster, better, more accurate, and you could have called in 
the middle of the night.
  I have gotten some of this. To my brothers and sisters here, they 
have actually helped me. For the VA, for the IRS, for the Pentagon, we 
have actually been able to get a number of our AI amendments to do 
things like this.
  We actually got attached to the NDAA something called the AUDIT Act. 
Turns out, I think we are in our eighth year where the audit of the 
Pentagon has been incapable of knowing the assets. The audit of the 
Pentagon is a failure. They can't audit it. It is unauditable.
  Turns out, we were able to get the amendments attached saying just 
use technology. Let the technology crawl through the data: Every 
invoice, every receipt, every this, every that, and find where all the 
assets are. We think there is $4 trillion of assets we can't identify 
in the Pentagon. It is absurd, and a technology package solves that.
  I have offered this for years. All I've heard is: David, we can't do 
that. Turns out, this year--maybe I am making some progress because 
this got attached. We are finally going in the right direction.
  Let's actually walk through a couple of other things.
  AI's integration could add trillions of dollars to the global 
economy. There is a point out there that in the high end if we allowed 
technology to make governments more efficient, society more efficient, 
you could add a few trillion dollars in global expansion.
  Remember before how I was talking about what happens if the world is 
flat population growthwise? Where do you get the productivity?
  Remember your high school economics class? What are the two ways you 
are paid more? Inflation; well, that is crap because you basically 
tread water. The other is productivity. Your salary goes up because of 
productivity.
  Help the productivity enter our country and the world and let's have 
a more prosperous country.
  How many of you hear complaints over and over from patients, from 
doctors, from hospitals, from clinics, from insurance companies, 
everyone is mad at each other. They don't pay my claim. They don't do 
the claim right.
  We have a piece of legislation called Clean Claims. Just use 
technology to do it. We estimate for many medical clinics and doctors, 
we can cut their costs in half. What would happen to your price of 
getting healthcare if the doctor, the clinic, the surgery center you go 
to its overall cost is half? You want to change the price of 
healthcare. Do you do it by just changing the financing? That is all 
ObamaCare was.
  Remember, ObamaCare was a financing bill. It moved from who pays here 
to who gets subsidized. It just moved it to these folks get subsidized, 
so these people get to pay. In reality we just borrow the money now. 
Those are financing bills; they don't change what we pay. The 
technology changes what we pay.
  We have had multiple amendments we put together to actually study how 
we can do things better, faster, cheaper, and healthier. Instead of 
just putting a roomful of people together, it turns out AI can do the 
study in days and tell us how we can help our veterans have better, 
healthier outcomes and crash the price.
  We were able to get this attached. We are starting to make some 
progress. We did the same thing in other parts. We were able to move a 
million dollars around to actually administer veterans' benefits 
better, faster, cheaper, and you don't need an army of people to do it.
  Madam Speaker, in a moment, I will yield to the gentleman from Texas 
because he needed a couple minutes to share some things.
  I will make the point that the Joint Economic Committee Republicans 
didn't just do the typical sniping at the Democrats or the President. 
We worked through the math and the scale of the actual problems ahead 
of us, and then we actually laid out ways we could make it a better, 
healthier, more productive, more prosperous society.
  Is this body actually capable of reading a couple chapters, working 
with us, and saying, okay, maybe we could adopt some policies that 
crash borrowing, grow the economy, and make everyone's lives better? 
There is a path.

                              {time}  1245

  The other dystopian part, though, is I think we only have 3 to 5 
years, and then at that part, the bond market runs your country because 
everything we do will be to keep the bond market from ever getting 
nervous.
  As we calculate this year a single basis point--one point of interest 
is 100 basis points. A single basis point is $800 million, meaning 
sometimes when the clowns show up--excuse me. The Members of Congress 
here do dumb things. We can actually see the market stressing out.

[[Page H4436]]

  Sometimes just because someone here says something outrageous, the 
next day, it costs you a few billion dollars in additional interest. 
Remember, we are still borrowing $80,000 to $100,000 a second every 
day.
  To those of us who are baby boomers, do I have a moral obligation to 
keep your retirement solid but also not destroy the future of the 
younger generation?
  We can do it. You are just going to have to sort of realize the 
solution is complex. There is a way to get there.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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