[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 171 (Tuesday, November 19, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H6103-H6106]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
AN HONEST DISCUSSION ABOUT MATH
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, first, I am going to ask everyone's--let
me extend an apology. I have fairly severe asthma and just got off an
attack, so I am pumping down some inhaled steroids, just routine.
Also, last weekend, I lost my voice. Should I be worried that my wife
said it was the best weekend of our marriage and that staff was
thrilled and upset I got my voice back?
Here we go. This is like my therapy hour, because I have some things
I think we need to share. One of the number one things I want to
accomplish tonight is please let there be some of our incoming Members'
future staff and the Members themselves listening.
I know there is no one in the room. That is the way it is supposed to
be. People are supposed to be in their meetings and reading and trying
to understand what is going on. Don't fuss at people for not sitting
here. We are on probably a thousand televisions around the Capitol
campus.
One of my frustrations is--we just got off election season. Would you
believe during elections, people--what is the term? Oh, yeah--make crap
up. We need to have an honest discussion about something called math.
Let's actually have some fun.
{time} 1745
Have you ever had someone say that we are going to grow ourselves out
of the debt and deficit?
Let's actually do some math off the top of our heads. This year's
debt is going to be $2 trillion. How much does the economy have to grow
to produce enough tax receipts to cover $2 trillion? It is actually
fairly simple math.
Mr. Speaker, 1 point of GDP is about $300 billion, so you get about
17, 18 percent of GDP in tax receipts. So let's see if $300 billion, 17
percent is $48 billion, so if 1 percent of GDP growth only gets me $48
billion, you do realize that means you, in a single year, have to have
40, 41, 42 percent GDP growth to cover the debt and deficit of this
year.
It is absurd. I beg of people: Learn your math. Mr. Speaker, don't
let the political consultants make crap up and then put it on our
brochures and then tell you to go out and say it.
It is now time to do adult-like math and the understanding--and I am
going to do this three or four times tonight--every dime of deficits
from today through the next 30 years is the very thing we are not
supposed to talk about.
It is demographics. We got older as a society. Our brothers and
sisters who worked their 40 quarters and who paid into the system now
start to get their benefits.
Mr. Speaker, if you actually look at the inputs of debt the last
decade, but particularly what we expect the next three decades,
healthcare, Medicare, interest--then, 9 years from now, do we backfill
Social Security or do we double senior poverty when the trust fund is
empty?
We are not supposed to talk about those things. Actually, I need to
share something. I believe the Democrats engage in something--I won't
call it evil, but it is absolutely dystopian and cruel when they
basically attacked members of the Republican Party for actually talking
about ways to save Social Security. Even mentioning it and having the
conversation, they do an attack ad on you, and then you wonder why they
come back and say that we need bipartisanship, that we are going to
work together--except you are not allowed to actually say anything that
actually has a basis in a calculator. It is perverse.
Mr. Speaker, is the left actually okay, in 9 years, doubling poverty
of seniors in America? We already have reports right now of baby
boomers who have retired and are becoming homeless because of the
inflationary cycle we just went through not being able to pay their
rent. It is just this level of cruelty.
The solution isn't spending more and more money because we don't have
it.
Let's actually walk through a couple of the other bits of math here.
I was talking to some constituents this week. Actually, I was listening
to them because I had almost no voice. One of them was talking about
some things they saw in the press: What would happen if we got rid of
this department or this department? I did the math for them.
For the entire civilian nonuniform workforce in America, last year's
salary cost was about $213 billion. Think about that, Mr. Speaker. If
we are borrowing $2 trillion, if you fired every nonuniform person in
the Federal Government, every one, they are all gone, you just covered
10 percent of the shortfall this year.
There is a lack of understanding of the scale, so we are going to
actually do a little bit of that.
First, I thought tonight I would come to the floor and say that we
just crossed $36 trillion. We are close. We are very close. It looks
like the Treasury may have reached into a little bit of their cash
supply.
Remember, Mr. Speaker, Treasury sometimes keeps from $400 billion to
$800 billion of cash. $500 billion is more normal, but we will hit this
before the week is over.
Think of that, Mr. Speaker. We clicked off another $1 trillion, from
$35 trillion to $36 trillion, and we did it in about 113 days. The
projection is that we will go from this $36 trillion to $37 trillion in
about 100 days.
Think of that, Mr. Speaker. We are functionally borrowing about
$70,000-plus a second.
Walk through this math. Let's actually try to get a sense of what is
going on. This chart is a little hard to read, but I want to make a
point. I have done entire floor presentations here of showing here are
all the tax hikes that the Democrats have proposed and have been
scored, and then you do the economic adjustment and functionally get
about 1.5 percent of GDP. The things we want to cut, if you go to
nondefense discretionary, Mr. Speaker, and cut almost one-third of
nondefense discretionary, it is about 1 percent of GDP. You have our 1
percent, their 2.5, you add that together--excuse me, 1.5, our 1
percent, you have 2.5 percent.
We borrowed just a little under 7 percent of the economy this year.
Does anyone see a math problem when the left's tax hike solutions and
our cut solutions get you 2.5, and we are borrowing close to 6?
The reason I have this chart here, functionally, in 9 budget years,
we go from a little under 6 percent of the entire economy being
borrowed money by the Federal Government to 9.2. That basically means,
in about 9 budget years, we are borrowing close to $4 trillion a year,
and that is on the baseline right now. That is with all of our taxes
going up after next year. That is with none of the new programs and
none of the new spending. That is just where we are at today. That is
current law.
Does anyone see a math problem? At what point does the bond market
come in here and say that you guys are, by the end of the decade,
approaching 9-plus percent of the entire economy in borrowed money, so
maybe we need a higher interest rate?
Has anyone paid attention to the bond market the last 3 weeks? Mr.
Speaker, have you noticed that even though the Fed started to lower
interest rates, we are still sitting 4.4 or 4.5 on a 10? Does anyone
understand that is almost a full point higher than we expected at this
point in the cycle?
Mr. Speaker, do you understand what 1 point of interest means? Today,
interest is the second biggest expense in the Federal Government. Last
fiscal year,
[[Page H6104]]
14.1 percent of all of our spending was just interest.
We have an economist as part of the Joint Economic Committee, and we
are trying to model at what point does interest and the obligation to
pay it start to consume so much of our future.
Then, you get yourself in the debt spiral where interest rates keep
going up because you are considered riskier, and you are in this
interest trap. You almost don't have enough to cut. We are going to
show that to actually deal with the interest trap.
A point of reference, think of this, Mr. Speaker, the United States
is number 14 on the credit stack, meaning there are 13 other countries
that can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than we can. When Greece today can
sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States, when Greece today
is actually paying down its debt from the last decade, and we are
borrowing $71,000 a second, does anyone see a problem?
How many people have you seen come behind these mics and how many
people on the election trail stood up in front of you, Mr. Speaker, and
said that we have a problem?
I can stand here and promise you all sorts of stuff, buy your vote,
that we have actually no money to pay for so we are going to just put
it on your retirement or your kids' credit cards because that is what
we are doing.
Understand, Mr. Speaker, we have almost made a decision that, in the
next couple of years, Congress isn't going to run this government and
the President isn't going to run this government. The bond market is.
Last year, we had to bring in almost $10 trillion to market, $2
trillion new issuances, and everything else was refinanced.
If anyone is a finance or bond geek, the bonds we are issuing, we
have been staying very short in the curb, meaning we refinance and
refinance. It means you become very fragile to little hiccups in
interest. God forbid the bond vigilantes figure out there is some way
to start to screw with U.S. sovereigns.
This is important. This is just the baseline math. In 9 budget years,
9.2 percent of this economy will just be what we borrow in debt, and
this is a calculation with no wars, no pandemics, and no recessions.
Mr. Speaker, do you really think we are going to go the next decade
without a moment when the wheels are coming off?
We are living on the edge, yet do our brothers and sisters and does
our new incoming freshman class understand how dangerous and fragile we
are about to make the greatest republic in human history?
Remember, Mr. Speaker, the world, not only the United States, but the
world needs the United States to be prosperous. Prosperity is moral,
and we are squandering it.
Let's actually just work through some basic math. Here is one of my
great, intense frustrations. Here is basically fiscal year 2024 to
date. We shouldn't have done to date. We should have just done the
whole date, but we didn't want to reprint the board.
The ratio I want to point out is that everything you see here in the
red, Mr. Speaker, is individual income taxes. We are a country that
lives on individual income taxes.
Do you see this big blue there? That is functionally Social Security,
but we don't touch Social Security. Social Security functionally goes
to Social Security. A bit of it is unemployment, and a little bit of
Medicare, but we don't get to touch the FICA tax. The fact of the
matter is every month what we collect in payroll taxes for Social
Security actually isn't enough money for the checks that go out that
month.
Every single month, we collect the payroll taxes from your labor. It
comes into the Treasury, actually, and then it is sent over to Social
Security. Then, Social Security sends a little note over to Treasury
saying: Hey, I am holding a couple trillion of your bonds. I need you
to cash in $50 billion, $60 billion--whatever they are short--and send
us the money so we can get our checks out the door.
That is why the trust fund continues to shrink. They are cashing in
every month because payroll taxes don't cover all the benefits going
out the door, so you don't get to touch that.
Over here in the powder blue or whatever color that is, it will be in
about $450 billion when it is all done. This is corporate income tax.
What I want you to understand, Mr. Speaker, is if you take a look at
all of these tax revenues, when you strip out Social Security, and then
you realize that almost all that revenue barely covers our baseline
spending, meaning every dime a Member of Congress votes on this year,
every dime in defense and every dime of nondefense discretionary, will
be borrowed money.
So you have a Member of Congress here, a brand-new Member of
Congress: I get to go vote.
Every dime is borrowed.
The way structurally we are, we are also going to have to borrow
probably $300 billion of what goes into earned benefits.
Does that sound screwed up to people? Have you had other Members
explain this to you, Mr. Speaker? Think of that. Every dime a Member of
Congress votes on is borrowed.
If you come to me and start to say, let's do this exercise--look,
these charts are going to be unreadable, but I want to point out that I
am trying to make a point. This is actually a bunch of the outlays. Go
through all the outlays, and we are going to basically do it chart by
chart.
Then, the next outlay, what would happen if I came and said that we
are going to cut, but we can't cut Social Security, Medicare, and
mandatory spending? Those are earned benefits, but we are going to get
rid of all defense. All right, defense is gone.
Then, we will go to our next chart. We will get rid of defense, and
let's just get rid of a whole bunch of the discretionary budget. We go
through and get rid of foreign aid, not just Ukraine, all foreign aid
is gone. Let's close the IRS. Let's close all these programs. Go
through and basically wipe out--can't touch Social Security, Medicare,
and interest on the debt.
Remember, interest on the debt last year was almost 14.1 percent of
all our spending, but you have to pay your bills. You continue to just
get rid of all government.
At what moment are you in balance? It turns out--and I know these are
unreadable, but trust me on the point--you can get rid of every dime of
defense, every dime of discretionary spending, and if you keep your
promises of paying back your bonds, keep your promises to Social
Security and Medicare and a couple of the other mandatory programs, so
you just got rid of all government, got rid of all the military, Mr.
Speaker, you still would have to borrow money.
When you get the brain trust that goes: If we just got rid of foreign
aid, we would be fine, and you do the math and show them it is like a
week, 1\1/2\ weeks of borrowing, and they just look at you with these
daggers because they saw it on some brilliant Russian-sponsored X or
Twitter saying that if you just got rid of this, you would be fine.
Learn the math.
{time} 1800
You will hear the Democrats say: Well, we are going to cover it with
a tax gap. We will give $80 billion to the IRS, and we will just raise
more. We came here a couple of months ago, and we have done that for 2
years now. It looked like we had spent $13 billion or so, so far, in
trying to do tax collections of people over $400,000, and they
collected $1 billion. They had raised a fraction of a fraction of a
fraction, what they were able to get the Joint Tax and CBO to score.
One of the first things we have to do when we start is we have to go
back and rescore all of the frauds because it turns out there may be a
tax gap out there. However, you are not going to do it with an army of
people you can't hire; you are going to do it with technology.
I am going to show you the board that I get the most complaints about
because almost no one wants to hear this, but how do you fix things if
you are not willing to tell the truth?
Think about what a crap place this was last week. We had people come
to the floor here and spend $200 billion without offsetting it, and
they go: But I had constituents that wanted this money.
Great. Find a way to pay for it. In our own, we added earmarks again.
We chose not to prioritize the Debt and Deficit Commission because
those things would be hard.
You get up in front of a room and say: Every dime of debt for the
next 30
[[Page H6105]]
years is demographics. As soon as I say it, you can actually see people
running for the exits because, if you don't know it, you don't have to
go tell the truth to your constituents. It is math. It is not
Republican. It is not Democrat. It is demographics.
This is Medicare. This is Social Security in 9 years when the trust
fund is gone, but this is the rest of government. This is the CBO's
score on baseline right now, where the taxes are going up next year,
where there are no wars, no recessions, no pandemics. This is the
baseline. They still functionally have us at $115 trillion of debt.
Do any of you have kids?
Do any of you have grandkids? Do you like them?
Is it moral?
I have a 2\1/2\-year-old. Yes, I think that is moral. It is the
greatest thing that has ever happened. I have a 9-year-old also, same
birth mother. My wife and I, it is the greatest thing that ever
happened to us, to be able to adopt these kids.
How do I explain to that 2-year-old that, when he hits 21, 22 years
old, baseline says United States has to double every single tax--every
excise tax, every corporate tax, everything--just to hold current
services, and that our kids will be the first generation in American
history to be poor?
This is the morality of this place, and it doesn't have to be that
way. There are incredible solutions to disrupt the cost of government.
For a bunch of the Members here, it almost seems easier for them to go
cut something or raise a tax than actually pass pieces of legislation
saying: We are going to adopt technology to crash the price of
government. Even though it would be moral, you could make people
healthier, you could make the air quality cleaner, and you just change
the current bureaucratic model.
We all walk around with these supercomputers. You do realize this is
part of the solution?
If anyone is listening, the four or five people who may give a damn
enough to watch this, environmental crowdsourcing--YouTube Schweikert,
I have a little YouTube video that is 90 seconds that I did 7 or 8
years ago. I have been trying to do that as a piece of legislation that
says: Why don't we just crowdsource air quality?
You could wipe out the bureaucracy like this.
You could have a building permit, but if you screw up, we catch you
instantly. It would be really good for the environment and really pro-
growth and it would wipe out the absurdity that shoving paper in file
cabinets makes the air look cleaner. It is basically documentation for
the trial lawyers.
Do you think I could ever get a hearing here? It is creative, it is
disruptive, and the air quality engineers are going to come lobby
against it.
How about the ginormous drone that flies the pipeline path? We all
have had this conversation over and over. We need permitting reform.
Great. Let's do permitting reform. You have to change the inputs on
how you do your NEPA, your environmental study.
What happens if you could have that ginormous drone, put ground-
penetrating LiDAR under it, and it runs back and forth over the
pipeline path, the power line path, and it does your archeologicals, it
does your soil, and it does your plant inventory? With technology, you
could get much of your NEPA report written in 6 days by AI. That is
thinking disruptively.
I am incredibly hopeful that our incoming President really will
follow through with the brains of people like Elon Musk and others who
are willing to think, saying: Is there a better, faster, and cheaper
way where it is moral, our world gets better, healthier, but we crash
the costs and crash the size of government?
When you show charts like this, the Democratic solution always turns
out being: Well, the way we will take care of healthcare is we are
going to subsidize it more.
How about if we embrace the technology that made it less expensive?
The thing you blow into that tells you, you have a virus, that orders
your antivirals. Do you know that technology exists?
It is just illegal because we are allowing an algorithm to write a
prescription.
We can crash the price of healthcare. Remember, the ACA, ObamaCare,
was a finance bill: Who gets subsidized, and who has to pay?
The Republican alternative was better. Actuarially, it was better,
but it was still a finance bill. The Medicare for All Act is a finance
bill. They are not discussions of what it takes to lower the cost of
healthcare.
My Joint Economic economists did something we thought was really
risky, and it was shocking. We even had Democrats and Republicans who
said: Yeah, you are going the right way.
Last March, we did a study. What do you think obesity will cost in
America over the next 10 years?
It turns out we calculated it could be $9.1 trillion in additional
healthcare costs, plus the fact that our brothers and sisters are
dying. This may be the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are
dying younger.
The concept of making America healthier, it may mean having to do
things that are hard. It may mean reexamining the farm bill, what we do
in nutrition support, how we help our brothers and sisters, but our
brothers and sisters are dying.
Also, it would be great fiscal policy because it turns out obesity is
the single biggest cost in government. It is moral.
Is that Republican, or Democrat?
I am sure we will make it partisan because someone will contribute to
one side or the other and then we will go to war over it.
The fact of the matter is there are actual solutions that are not
hacking apart government or raising everyone's taxes, but it is
changing how we do things.
Right now, when 31 percent of Medicare spending is just diabetes, why
do we do this to ourselves?
Why is it so hard to think disruptively, to think morally, to
challenge the armies of lobbyists who are walking up and down our
hallways--remember, those lobbyists aren't always corporates. They are
good government groups. They are societies that just want to be
subsidized. They are bureaucrats--and basically looking at all of them
and saying: What is more moral: Making people healthier, or sticking
more cash into the maintenance of your misery because the model right
now is we spend a fortune maintaining your misery?
Put the money in things that produce cures. We are going to talk a
little bit about that.
Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about how serious we are on this. We have
been trying to do simple things. If you read some of the stories, The
Wall Street Journal gets amazing credit. Over the last few months, they
have done amazing stories on Medicare fraud.
We have pieces of legislation that functionally would use AI because
it is data science. The fastest way you find fraud in government,
particularly in things like Medicare and Medicaid, is data, not an army
of lawyers. It is data scientists. We think we can get you $60 billion
a year just on that.
Clean claims. What would happen if, just by using technology, the
constant battle between the doctor and the insurance company and the
healthcare provider, we just say: Look, we are going to use technology
that meets the doctor's notes, meets the insurance contract. Pay it. We
think we can get you $31 billion a year just doing that. It is
technology.
We have looked at other things. This is already a piece of
legislation, just wiping out some of the fraud in some of the employee
retention. We can still pay the people that we owe the money to, we
wipe out the fraud, and we think we just got you $79 billion a year.
Those are just a couple of the bills we already have. You add that
up. Didn't I just show you almost $150 billion?
We need $400 billion a year to cover the tax hikes that are coming.
My point is: The way that you cut the price of government, yes, there
are a whole bunch of programs we need to get rid of, but you have to
understand that some of the discussions are much tougher.
If you take a look at the $800-and-some billion that is in the
nondefense discretionary, you realize about 38, 40 percent of that is
money we take, we borrow, and we send it to entities around the
country--your city, your town, your State--that have their own taxing
authority. They are programs
[[Page H6106]]
we love, such as justice grants, other things. They are good programs,
but we are doing it with borrowed money, and we are giving it to
entities that have their own taxing authority. That is a tough
conversation.
Mr. Speaker, when we get back in December, I am going to do a much
more detailed presentation on this because this is one of those topics
that most idiots like me that are in public office are terrified to
talk about.
We actually spent part of our summer really digging into the math of
immigration and illegal border crossing and what it does and affects
because you are seeing these articles, particularly in the leftwing
press: Hey, these several million undocumented immigrants or asylum
seekers, look at the economic growth we are getting.
Then we overlaid it with: What is the cost? The social services, the
populations, and where you are in the tax--it is not personal. It is
just math.
Well, it turns out, when we dug into it, let's say you did a talent-
based immigration system in America, like Great Britain, like New
Zealand, like Australia, like Canada, basically the rest of the world.
Okay. Let's make a point.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the world fought for hydrocarbons. Remember,
no war for oil. In the last decade, it was rare earths.
The literature makes it very clear that, from today through probably
the next 20, 30 years, nations are going to battle for smart people.
Remember, there is math out there. If you go look at the data on the
Census Bureau's own website, it could be from 11 years to about 16, 18
years where the United States will start having more deaths than
births.
We are a dying society. If we don't fix things, we are a dying
society. Think of that. The shortest on the numbers is 11 years, more
deaths than births.
What if I came to you and said we are going to move to a talent-based
immigration system because it turns out people with advanced degrees
pay a boatload of taxes, they grow the economy, and they expand GDP?
Our brothers and sisters, they may be wonderful people, but it turns
out the economic effects of those without a lot of skills when they
come into the United States, they actually squeeze out and lower the
labor value of your domestic population that is often in those lowest
quartiles.
You are the couple that didn't finish high school, but you are out
hanging drywall and you are working your heart out. All of a sudden,
you bring in how many people with a similar skill set. What happened to
your labor rates?
That is the cruelty. What this administration did on the border was
incredibly cruel to the working poor.
What if I tell you, if we do some things right in the tax code fixes,
like we want expensing on research and development so we are always
innovating; well, it turns out, for that to really take off and grow
the economy, we need a lot more smart people.
Is it sane to be a country that invites people from around the world
to come do your graduate degree, get your college degree, and then say:
Congratulations. You learned the American technology, the American
ethos. Oh, you have got to get the hell out of here; send them back
home?
We are out of our minds, but we are the last country functionally on
Earth that still has a familial immigration system, where you come to
America because of who your family is. I know that seems compassionate,
but, right now, I am trying to figure out how to pay for the promises
we have made.
{time} 1815
Ideas like we need to move to a talent-based immigration system while
doing other things because it is a unified theory. I need this to make
this work so they both raise money for the government so we grow.
Mr. Speaker, thank you for being patient with me losing my voice. The
point I will make is, there is hope. There is a way you can make the
math work, but you can't continue to live in this fantasy world of, oh,
don't worry about debt and deficits, that it is somehow magically just
going to disappear. It is magically going to do this. It is magically
going to do that.
There is a way to make the math work and this becomes another
American century, but we can't keep doing public policy by our
feelings. We actually have to do it by a calculator and good quality
economics. It is how we will stay a free people because do you
understand the dystopian life our world will be when we smash up
against the debt crisis?
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________