[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 113 (Tuesday, July 9, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H4519-H4522]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1815
MATH IS UNCOMFORTABLE
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. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Alabama
(Mr. Carl).
Honoring Baldwin County Sheriff Huey ``Hoss'' Mack
Mr. CARL. Mr. Speaker, I proudly rise today to honor Baldwin County
Sheriff Huey ``Hoss'' Mack, who will be retiring later this year and
will become the director of Alabama Sheriffs Association.
Sheriff Hoss Mack served as the county sheriff for the last 18 years.
His educational background includes a degree in criminal justice and a
master's degree in human resource management.
He began service in Baldwin County Sheriff's Office in 1989 before
becoming sheriff and was elected in 2006. Sheriff Hoss Mack has always
been heavily involved in multiple criminal justice organizations,
including both the Alabama and the National Sheriffs' Association. Not
only has Hoss served Baldwin County with the utmost integrity, but he
has been a friend of mine, and I appreciate that.
He is a true American and a true public servant. Baldwin County is
blessed to have had Sheriff Hoss Mack for the last 35 years, and I wish
him fair winds and good luck in his next endeavor.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do something a
little tricky this evening. You are going to see the continuing theme
of, hey, here is where we are borrowing and here is where the borrowing
is coming from.
Then I am going to hit on some of the things that--what is the next
one--drive me almost insane on the questions I get here, the things I
get on this stupid thing. I have come to this conclusion: We live in a
world where the propaganda, the fake information, and the distortion
fields around us actually do not want America to succeed.
That is a pretty dark thing to say, but let's actually walk through
my theory. I am going to make the point. On some of these
presentations, I have been blessed. If you go on YouTube, I had one a
couple months ago, I think there is, like, 1.3 million views. Go look
at the comments section. I will argue about half those comments are
bots. They are fake.
You see things like: Well, if you just didn't give any money to
Israel, we could balance the budget. You start to realize that there is
a world out there that takes advantage of our open society, that comes
at us with things that are lies, and the poor person out there who is
just trying to take care of their family, on occasion, grabs their
phone, tries to read little bits of news, maybe reads a comment or two,
and they don't realize the information coming at them is absolute crap.
Then the other problem that I am going to show here is when I have my
own President get behind a microphone, look at the American people, and
say things that are absolutely not true. Then an idiot like myself
tries to come up and say: I have a path. There is a path. If I can get
my brothers and sisters on the left to work with us on the right, there
is a path to save this country.
It is really hard when the State of the Union goes on that podium
right there and says things that are absolutely not true.
Does that mean they are also a deliverer of fake information because
math is hard? Math is uncomfortable. Telling the truth is hard. Maybe
this place has lied for so many decades that the public says: Look, we
are just going to believe whatever is comfortable.
Let's actually walk through, first, a little bit of reality here. I
will start with this chart because it sort of lays out where we are at
today. Do you see the red? That red area is 74 percent of the spending,
and 74 percent of the spending in this place is on auto pilot. We don't
get to vote on it.
Do you see the blue? That is what I get to vote on. That is defense
and nondefense discretionary. I get to vote on that. Every dime of it
is borrowed. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed
money. Also, guess what--we are in so much trouble--I have net interest
on this, which I think is unfair because there is this thing called
net. That is the publicly borrowed. That is where the Treasury sells
bonds.
I think, this week, we are selling $111 billion--maybe it is $112
billion or $113 billion--in three different auctions this week just to
finance our insatiable spending because, remember--this is one of the
things I find is uncomfortable even at home--100 percent of the
borrowing from today through the next 30 years, according to CBO, is
interest, Medicare, and if we backfill Social Security in a decade from
now. It is demographics.
Yet, how do you make policy? There are ways to fix it with policy.
When the leader of the free world looks into a camera and says things
that are just insane when it comes to being on a calculator.
Take a look one more time. Nondefense discretionary, defense, all of
that is borrowed, and a wedge--I should do a chart that shows you how
much is borrowed money. I originally thought we might be at $2.5
trillion borrowing this year. Some of the tax receipts are a little bit
better. Some of the spiking growth that we had in the first part of the
fiscal year on healthcare costs have flattened ever so slightly, so we
are probably going to end up borrowing around $2.3 trillion this year.
What that means is even part of the mandatory spending, Medicare,
because remember, Medicare isn't all on the trust fund. The trust fund
only covers 38, 40 percent. The rest comes out of the general fund.
Once again, look at this chart and understand your government
functionally is an insurance company with an army. That is meant to be
sarcastic, but it is meant to sink in.
Let's actually walk through. I am going to walk through a couple of
these just to sort of lay out where we are actually at. CBO predicts by
2054, so 30 years from now, budget deficits are entirely driven by
Social Security and Medicare shortfalls.
We are not allowed to say that, are we? Does anyone remember the
State of the Union? There was a handful of us, Democrats and
Republicans, who had been quietly working for a year trying to put
together a plan to save Social Security in the long run.
The President gets there and says: Promise me you won't talk about
Social Security or Medicare. People look terrified and go: Okay. Yes,
good campaign issue. They care more about winning the next election
than protecting seniors. It is the great lie around here. You talk
about it saying: I want to find a way to modernize and save, and you
will get the crap kicked out of you. You also told the truth.
You have to look at the data, the charts. Remember, the SSA, the
Social Security Administration's actuary numbers are actually
substantially more optimistic than the Congressional Budget Office, so
we are going to
[[Page H4520]]
use the more optimistic numbers. When you start to realize and when the
outlays are, over the next 30 years, starting to hit 17 percent of the
entire economy and revenues don't come anywhere close to that, there is
your crisis. We can just pretend because getting through the next
election is more important.
Look, you have all seen this chart over and over and over and over
and over and over that interest continues to grow, and we think
actually the interest calculation--this is important. Let's do this
right now. The hierarchy right now, today, Social Security will, this
year, be $1.480 trillion. The total gross interest because, remember,
just a couple days ago, I think we sent $36 billion to Social Security
because we borrowed the money. Treasury had borrowed the money from the
trust fund. We pay it back with interest. Total interest to the United
States will approach $1.2 trillion this year.
Then you have Medicare, and then you have defense. Defense is
functionally sitting as No. 4. How do you have a society that runs
around thinking, well, if we just cut some defense? I showed you the
chart before. You can get rid of every dime of defense, every dime of
nondefense discretionary. That is the Park Service. That is the FBI.
That is the Foreign Service. That is us. If you get rid of everything,
you still have to borrow money.
You look at the charts over and over, and when we have had high
marginal tax rates, we get about 18 percent of GDP in taxes. When we
have had low marginal tax rates, we get about 18 percent of GDP. You
have a long history--and I have done floor presentation after floor
presentation--that when you lowered the rates, you grew the economy,
you got about the same percentage of GDP. When you raised the tax
rates, the economy shrunk a bit or slowed down, and you got the same
percent of GDP.
The idea is grow the economy as much as possible, and then cut
spending everywhere you can. I have some charts, and I don't know if I
should do them again--actually, maybe I will just jump to them in a
moment--where you lay out almost every tax hike that are the dreams of
the left: Let's tax rich people who are over $400,000. Let's do this
tax and that tax.
I come here with the academic papers and showed you, when you
maximize all those tax rates, capital gains, income tax, estate tax,
just do it all, you get about 1.5 percent of GDP.
For us on a cut side, it is brutal, but I can come up with almost
$300 billion in nondefense discretionary. That is 1 percent of GDP. So,
hey, together, we came up with 2.5 percent. We are borrowing 6 or 7
percent of the entire economy, and we have used up everything.
I mean, understand what is going on here. Just another chart that
basically gives you a sense: Rising Social Security and Medicare
shortfalls driven entirely or nearly the entire 2019 to 2034 deficit
hikes. That means, in a 10-year window, almost all the growth of the
debt and deficit during that time period, interest, Medicare, and then
at the end of the decade, Social Security trust fund is gone. Right
now, you will get a Democrat saying: Well, Social Security doesn't add
anything to the deficit. They are absolutely correct until the trust
fund is gone.
There is the part that enraged me the other night. If any of you were
able to watch the Presidential debate the other night, my phone lit up
at one point by a bunch of reporters who wanted to double check a
number.
The President was asked about Social Security. I begin to make the
wealthy--okay. I begin--and this is his actual quote, so it is
disjointed, but this is what he said: `` . . . I begin to make the
wealthy begin to pay their fair share, by increasing from 1 percent
beyond, to be able to guarantee the program for life.''
He is talking about Social Security, so 1 percent. Then he went on to
say: ``Well, that one enough will keep it solvent.''
The left's definition of wealthy is over $400,000 income, right? The
President just told the American people 1 percent. I will fix Social
Security by taxing them 1 percent.
We have a math problem. The problem here is, the blue you see here,
that is not 1 percent. I had to make it 2 percent because the 1 percent
was so small we figured you couldn't even see it. I doubled what the
President said.
This is the shortfall. Half of this is what the President told you
would work.
I am enraged by all the fake crap that comes into my phone in my
office, our phones, our publications, all the things that you see on
Twitter, or X, or whatever we are supposed to call it today, that are
just made up by bots particularly and foreigners.
What happens now when my own President does it? How do I show up
here? How do I get my brothers and sisters here to actually make
policy? How do you make policy when the leader of the free world says
things that are mathematically just insane?
The immorality here, functionally 9\1/2\ years, we double senior
poverty in America. If we don't fix this, we double senior poverty. The
Democrats will weaponize it because they care more about winning the
next election.
We have a President who could have just looked in the camera and
said: Look, we haven't had the number of children, therefore, the
number of workers. We started the rollovers in 1990. It is just math.
It is not Republican or Democrat. Demographics are what we are.
Last year, the United States had 1.62 children fertility rate,
meaning, functionally, now our math is, in about 15 years, the United
States will have more deaths than births. I say that over and over
trying to get people to think.
If your brain is trapped somewhere in the 1990s' policy sets, none of
that math is real anymore. It hasn't been real in 30 years.
This place is absolutely immoral. I brought charts here over and over
and over, the Democrat solution saying: Instead of the President's 1
percent proposal, if you do the--what is it--the 14-point-whatever
percent, 14.4 or 12.4 total Social Security tax, not the Medicare, not
the unemployment, those things, and you put it on all income over
$400,000--I have shown a number of charts--if you use the CBO math, it
covers about 38 percent of the shortfall.
{time} 1830
That is using over 12 points, both the employer and the employee's
portion. I have a President who looks in the camera and says 1 percent.
Now, let's come together at a townhall or a meeting here and say: Hey,
guys, let's have an honest conversation because every day we wait, the
on-ramp is harder to save Social Security.
Oh, David, the President already told us we are doing 1 percent on
rich people. I can show you with the 12.4 you are covering only about
38 percent.
Why is this place so absolutely immoral? Do they really care that
much more about winning the next election?
After the President said that, I started to dig through the stories
other people had sent me. I had this woman text me weeks ago saying,
did you know that with the money in Ukraine that the First Lady of
Ukraine bought almost a million-dollar Bugatti, or however you
pronounce that car.
Well, the BBC did a very long article about how much is absolutely
fake coming into the U.S. marketplace of ideas. There are bot farms.
There are troll farms. They created fake photos, which turns out that
is what actually helped BBC identify that this is all fake stuff.
How do you make policy in a world where we are awash in things coming
in from our enemies, from the countries that want us at each other's
throats, make it impossible to do basic policy to save the Republic,
and then my own President is making crap up?
Article after article of disinformation that is crashing in, the
things I have that come into my office about Israel that are coming in
from bot farms.
We have article after article that Microsoft did an analysis of how
much was coming in from Chinese bot farms, Chinese servers. Apparently,
we just had a major disruption by stopping 968 Twitter accounts that
were completely fake and they were all coming from a bot farm in
Russia. That happened this week. The State Department just identified
that bot farm and got it shut down.
Mr. Speaker, I say now to my Democrat colleagues that we have
actually had a couple stories come out that have some real fun stuff.
It turns out a
[[Page H4521]]
number of the Democrat activists are actually setting up fake
newspapers. Now, if that wasn't bad enough, one of these articles in
there actually has a section talking about that in American small town
newspapers as many as half process this, as many as half are actually
fake.
My wife pointed out to me that there was a newspaper from southern
Kansas, where she grew up, that went out of business decades ago that
somehow popped up in her news feed and it had this crazy stuff in it.
Turns out, that was on the list of the ones that had been spoofed. A
spoofed URL that looks like it is from Russia.
Think that about. In America, about half the small town online
newspapers you see are actually fake.
How many of our constituents know that? It looks like the Democrats
actually have decided, hey, this is a great business model. Let's make
up fake newspapers online, have it laced with leftwing propaganda, and
we will do it under a newspaper masthead.
How is this not a violation? Once again, the left proves they are a
hell of a lot smarter than we are when it comes to being mercenary on
campaigns. They figured out a way to get around the campaign finance
laws. Spend money, but it is free speech. It is fake, but it is free
speech. Then idiots like me get here and try to walk through the math.
Look, this is the MedPAC report. It is not that hard to read. You
have quotes in here that in 2022, 13 percent of all personal and
corporate income taxes collected by the Federal Government were
transferred to the Medicare trust fund.
By 2030--so that is how many years? 5 budget years? 4 budget years?--
22 percent of all tax receipts from corporate and individual income
tax, 22 percent will just go to Medicare.
Functionally in a decade, you have gone from 13 to 22 percent of all
tax receipts. It is demographics.
Why isn't this what we talk about around this place, how are we going
to save these programs? Oh, you can't do that because you are going to
have a President who is going to knife you by saying crazy things.
The Joint Economic Report we published a couple weeks ago, we tried
to provide brutally honest math, brutal detail with actual solutions.
Will anyone actually read it?
This one my staff was particularly fond of. It turns out that one of
the new spoofings out there that are coming into young people's phones
are celebrities with quotes that the celebrities have never said.
Are you all ready for this election cycle where you have AI memes
looking like a Member of Congress, looking like a President, looking
like a Senator, looking like a celebrity, saying things that are
completely fake?
Now come here and try to do difficult policy where you are going to
have to take on some bureaucracies, take on certain business models,
adopt technology to crash the price of healthcare. Are you going to get
hit by an army of bots, an army of fake videos, an army of fake
postings, saying they can't do that, because some group has figured out
that winning the election is stopping us from saving the country from
its debt spiral?
I am trying to explain it is bad enough having to take on the
bureaucracy, it is bad enough having to take on the calcified
intellect, of particularly some of my friends here, that say we can
just fix everything by taxing people more.
What happens when our voters have to face millions of absolutely fake
information videos that are crashing at them? I can't wait to see the
bots and the comments they put in the video below this posting.
Take a look here: ``Not touching Social Security means large benefit
cuts.''
When you start to actually take a look--and I think we did this
before. Remember, the number goes up and down depending on employment,
but we were working on one the other day from last year's CBO number
that basically showed the average couple would take about a $17,400 cut
in their Social Security a decade from now when the trust fund is gone.
This is immoral. Shouldn't this actually be a place where we actually
work on these things? Then you start to actually look at the lies--
excuse me--the misinformation that our brothers and sisters on the left
keep saying.
Oh, when we did tax reform, it was a gift to the rich. Okay. You got
a math problem. The higher income, the top 20 percent today pay 69
percent of all income taxes. It is more progressive today than the tax
code has ever been. The wealthy pay a higher percentage of Federal
income taxes today than ever before. The lower quartiles today pay the
lowest Federal income tax rates since income taxes, 16th amendment.
How often do you hear this? But that doesn't fit the narrative. Then
you have the jerks actually say things like this: Well, you guys had
$1.7 trillion spending. Yes. We got $900 billion more revenue than
expected, but that was horrible. We are going to spend about $2
trillion in grants and gifts and those things to big business because
they do clean energy stuff. It is like they don't look at themselves in
the mirror.
Once again, I have done entire presentations here going through every
leftwing tax idea trying to add it up. Even when you don't do economic
effects--if you do economic effects, these numbers--and then try to
say, hey, you guys are only getting about a point and a half or so of
GDP out of these numbers, you are not getting anywhere close. You got
to do it through policy.
Then the fragility that no one was prepared for--well, some of us
were prepared for--are interest rates. How many of you think interest
rates are going back down, particularly in the long end of the curve?
Remember, what the Federal Reserve does is on the short end of the
curve, meaning shorter term bonds. When you start to look at 10-year
debt and up, some of the best bond traders and economists right now are
saying it is not going down. You might get a little bit of a tick.
The United States is now number 14 on the credit stack, meaning
Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than we can. You read the
notes on the S&P's and the Moody's, it is not--we have one of the
healthiest economies in the industrialized world, but one of the things
that is going on is they don't trust us.
Will our governance be disciplined enough to actually take on the
spending and the debt? The fact of the matter is, we are paying a
premium now. The United States now pays a premium on our debt.
This week, I told you we are borrowing about--there are three
auctions this week--$111 billion, and we are going to pay a premium on
that debt. Sometimes this place doesn't look like we are serious about
taking the debt on and managing our fiscal affairs.
First off, we are having great difficulties selling long-term bonds.
Do you remember a few months ago we had sort of a bond tantrum? Why do
you think Treasury moved things down to sell short-term, short-term,
short-term? A lot of investors out there don't even trust this
government enough to say, I am going to buy a 30-year U.S. savings bond
and I am going to be safe.
Once again, even a 100 percent tax rate on small businesses and
upper-income families could not come close to balancing the long-term
budget in this country.
Stop thinking you are going do it with tax hikes or even for those of
us who want to cut the size of government, you need to have
revolutionized the cost of this government. Stop being afraid of
technology. Stop being afraid of the things where we could change the
cost of this government because it might affect your business model.
Look, I was going to try to put up one or two slides last for happy
talk, until I realized one of the slides I wanted to show you was, once
again, another concept of why the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act is
the most Orwellian named piece of legislation in modern history.
They are very proud, saying we are subsidizing electric cars. My wife
has an electric car. She loves it, but the data basically said--when
they passed that, I came here to the floor and showed, hey, here is the
survey data. Almost everyone that is going to buy an electric car is
buying them with the subsidy, without the subsidy. It is a lifestyle.
It is almost a status symbol, but let's give away billions and billions
of dollars.
Now you actually have breakthroughs. Could you imagine if just a
fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that resource had gone more
into primary research? Looks like there has
[[Page H4522]]
been a breakthrough on solar cells, an additional 25.7 percent
efficiency, except the problem is it was developed in China.
The very people who preach at us to subsidize all this stuff, but
let's subsidize less generations or maybe even the generation before
that's technology.
You want me to put solar panels on my house, you want us to drive
electric cars, make it so economically sensible and make it so
economically affordable that it is the disruption.
Why did you stop going to Blockbuster Video? Because you had this
button you could hit at home and stream videos right to your home. Was
that subsidized by the government?
{time} 1845
The fact of the matter is that there are technology disruptions. Why
didn't we fixate on that? Well, it turns out that maybe the disruptions
don't write checks to your campaign.
The Democrats' planned economy, the control of the marketplace, the
arrogance that somehow they think they know what the future looks like
instead of building a tax system or regulatory system that is
competitive, that is disruptive. Some are winning; some are losing.
That is the way the American economy is supposed to work.
In many ways, we have now built a society of oligopolies, thanks to
Dodd-Frank and Democratic policies. They have made the big bigger, the
big really powerful, and the really big and powerful now your
constituency.
It turns out now that if you look at who votes for Republicans, it is
entrepreneurs, working people, and those who are being crushed by those
they have to compete with who now get subsidies from their political
allies.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________