[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 26 (Friday, February 7, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H576-H580]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
UNITED STATES DEBT BY CBO IS PROJECTED TO BE $37.2 TRILLION BY
SEPTEMBER 30, 2025
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2025, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, forgive us, as we are getting ourselves
organized. The gentleman from Texas ended a couple minutes sooner than
we expected.
Mr. Speaker, for anyone listening, whether it be staff, another
Member, anyone that actually gives a darn, give me your first 4 minutes
because in the first 4 minutes, I need to explain why we have been
joking about it, in a dark way, that we are in the budget wars.
It is about reconciliation. Why is there such angst by some of us--
Mr. Speaker, I chaired the Joint Economic Committee, so I am the idiot
with all the economists. I am number four on Ways and Means. I am not
good at many things in life. I am okay at math. What is going on that
is stressing us?
Last night, I could barely sleep because I had read report after
report after report and the math was devastating.
This is what we need to understand.
Here is our reality. Forgive us, we have been going as fast as we can
in our office to find some way to explain what the hell is going on.
At the end of this budget year, September 30, the United States debt
by Congressional Budget Office is projected to be $37.2 trillion. They
are projecting over the next 10 years, we will add another $20
trillion.
The debate that has been going on is, we have these provisions of the
2017 tax reform that are expiring at the end of this year. If you go
take it to 2035 because that is sort of the 10-year window, in 9 budget
years, it is another $5.5 trillion. Then you add on to that the
interest because it turns out if you were to finance it, not pay for
any of it, that is another $1.3 trillion on top of that. Then if you
were to come in here and then take the President's requests--we have a
couple Members here that say, just do everything. Make everyone happy.
Screw my retirement and the next generation. America will be fine.
If you add it all up, by 2035 you have over $74 trillion in debt. You
are somewhere in the 155 percent or so of the entire economy is
borrowed. Today, we are a little less than a 100.
The point I am trying to make here is, even if you do the calculation
of publicly sold debt because, as I have tried to explain, you have the
Social Security trust fund, which is gone in 8 years. We borrow the
money out of that and we do pay interest on it, but if you take
everything where we sell bonds to the world, to each other, to our
retirement accounts, to pensions, the day we got elected, Mr. Speaker,
a long time ago in November, U.S. sovereign debt that was held by the
public was around $28 trillion.
These numbers right now say that number that took 240 years of
publicly held debt, we intend to double in 9 years. In 9 years, we are
going to functionally add another $28 trillion of publicly held debt.
Actually, it will be a little more if we finance them and don't try to
pay for them.
This is my 4-minute spiel. When you see some of us stressing out,
when you see some of us--he is being disharmonious, maybe it is because
I own a damn calculator. If these numbers don't make you pucker up and
scare the crap out of you, you don't understand. Yet the hallways
around here are full of people demanding we give them more money or
they want more barriers to entry or they don't want to change their
business model. They want to do it in archaic fashion because it might
make them have to compete.
{time} 1215
This is no longer the next generation. This is your own retirement.
Look, I accept that I traditionally tease behind this microphone that I
am pathologically optimistic. My wife and I are both 62 years old, and
we have a 2\1/2\-year-old we have adopted. We also have a 9-year-old.
When my little boy is 24 years old, the math says every single tax in
America needs to be doubled just to maintain baseline services.
The wheels are coming off. Do you really think the bond market will
say, ``Oh, we want to keep buying U.S. sovereign debt even though you
have gone and doubled it in 9 years''?
We did a math problem a couple of weeks ago on this floor and showed
that if we stress the bond markets, if we got up to a 6 percent
handle--and it wasn't that many decades ago U.S. sovereign debt was
kissing up around 6 percent--in 9 years, 45 percent of all U.S. tax
receipts went to interest.
Do you think this is a game? The bond market is on the edge of
running this country, not us.
If you are a Member of Congress and claim that you care about debt,
deficits, the next generation, working people, and people's retirement,
and you don't have this poster up somewhere in your office, how do you
understand the math?
The wheels are coming off. I am going to show in a bunch of these
slides that there is a path. We can produce some level of
stabilization. It means doing really hard things, which you know how
good we are at doing hard things because, once again, there will be an
army of people outside the door all upset with us because we are trying
to do hard things.
You have known this has been coming for decades. When I was an idiot
kid in the 1980s, I remember my statistics professor basically did a
chart in, like, 1983, saying: Okay, here are baby boomers. This is
going to happen. There is this huge bubble.
[[Page H577]]
The thing we weren't prepared for is that U.S. fertility rates
started to collapse in 1990. We don't have enough young people. I am
going to show some charts of how hard it is to keep up productivity and
growth, and it is not just in the United States. It is all across the
world. There is a shortage of young people, but we are going to pretend
that we can just grow our way out of things. That is a complete
untruth.
If we do what a handful of our Members are asking and just look the
other way, just give everything to everyone without paying for it--and,
look, I think it is outrageous there is a discussion. It would be
immoral, I believe, to allow the tax rates to go up on working people,
but it is also immoral not to find a way to pay for it.
Are you ready to condemn this country in 9 budget years, 10 calendar
years to functionally a financial Armageddon? This is actually in the
10-year window now. This is not some theoretical number years and years
and decades from now. It is here.
If interest rates were to move against us, it is functionally almost
Armageddon.
I am going to bounce around a little bit.
Think about this: Why are some of us trying so hard to get as much in
the way of modernization, cost changes, those things, so we have $5\1/
2\ trillion, if you do 2035, of expiring provisions that would raise
taxes on our brothers and sisters in this country.
We need that not to happen. Understand its actual cost. It is not
only the $5\1/2\ trillion. If you just did it, if you just pass it, it
is another $1.3 trillion of interest over those 10 years. That means,
in 2035, the interest handle for America is $2 trillion a year. Just
interest will be $2 trillion a year in 9 budget years if we don't find
ways to do offsets.
How can this not terrify people? Are there people in the White House
who have calculators? Our brothers and sisters here, do they really
think the debt markets want to buy that much more U.S. sovereign money?
Look, there is a funny--an interesting fact. It is not necessarily
funny. The world today has the highest ratio of debt since the
Napoleonic wars. If you remember your history, after that, there were
years and years of misery as governments tried to figure out how to
unwind and go to war with each other and those things because of the
depressions that it caused.
We are not the only country bingeing on debt. I will say this a
couple of times, and it is the one thing that gets me really hateful
emails and text messages: Almost 100 percent of the next 10 years of
debt is interest and demographics. Almost all of it is Medicare.
Our brothers and sisters, people like me, baby boomers, gray hair, we
are moving into our earned benefits. We didn't set aside enough money,
and we have been unwilling to modernize how we deliver services because
it annoys the lobbyists and the people at home. People get
uncomfortable. ``Oh, David, you want to use technology.'' You don't
have a choice. You just don't have a choice.
It is not my feelings. It is math. You start to look at this, if you
look at the data right now, if we were to do the expiring tax
provisions within the budget window, the United States would pay $2-
plus trillion a year just in interest. That is at today's interest
rates. That is without even a calculation of interest rates going up.
I have been trying to figure out how to explain it. I can say this
one easier. We are going to come close to spending 7 percent of the
entire economy this year in borrowed money. If we do these things
without paying for them, in 10 years, we are not going to be borrowing
7 percent of the economy. We are going to be borrowing up around 9.2
percent of the economy. This is not a game.
Let's walk through one or two more of these to try to get our heads
around what is actually going on. You have to understand--do you see
the blue here? Okay, dark purple, if that is purple. This is interest.
That is our debt we are at, and here is our problem. What happens this
year, if we borrow a couple trillion dollars this year, realize half of
that is interest. Half of it is now interest. Interest now is the
second biggest expense in the United States Government. Defense
is actually number four.
I always love it when I am having a conversation with one of my
friends on the left. ``Well, if we just cut defense.'' Defense is now
number four on the spend stack. Interest is number two. There are a
couple of models that if we keep borrowing and interest rates move
against us, in a decade or so, interest could be the number one expense
in the United States Government.
I have done presentation after presentation of this concept called
interest fragility. I think I am probably the only one who listened to
it. Sometimes I wonder if I even listen to myself.
This isn't a game. There is a reason the British Government collapsed
this summer. Remember Liz Truss? Yeah, we are a hell of a lot bigger
economy. Do we really think because we have the two great,
extraordinary privileges of the reserve currency and being a country
that people want to do business in, live in, prosper in, do you think
we keep those things if we keep this sort of clown show going?
Let's actually walk through a couple more of these, and then I am
going to try to have a little fun mocking some of the suggestions that
keep coming in.
Debt held by the public under alternative conditions, trying to
make--increase in primary deficits--I need to explain. This is going to
be a little tricky. In 2033, because of what was done in this body in
lameduck, where we functionally took another couple hundred billion
dollars out of Social Security and paid it out without replacing the
money, now it looks like, in mid-2033, the Social Security trust fund
is empty.
Now, the law for Social Security says you cut seniors' benefits. The
math is about 20 percent. So, we will double senior poverty the
following year, but that is not how CBO is forced, under the law, to do
the math. There is an actual law that says you are not allowed to show
a zero balance. That is why we are doing this.
That means, in 2034, there is $600 billion of borrowing that is
shoved in that is actually to make up the shortfall in Social Security.
The next year it is more. If you add up 2023, 2024, 2025, there is like
another $1.7 trillion because Social Security is empty. You don't want
to double senior poverty, but we are also far too fearful to actually
tell our voters the truth.
The fact of the matter is, every time one of us idiots--excuse me,
me--gets up and tries to find a way to stabilize the Social Security
trust fund, that side starts running attack ads on you because they
care more about winning the next election than they do doubling senior
poverty in America.
The math, you start to look at what is going on here. If we are
really heading toward a time where just the primary deficit that is
publicly sold without the other requests from the President, we are at
$55-plus trillion. We are playing a very dangerous game here. My sense
of frustration is off the charts.
Look, this one is very simple. Within the budget window, publicly
held debt--not also the borrowing from the trust funds--publicly held
debt, if we were to do the expiring tax provisions without paying for
them, we are at 149 percent of debt to GDP. We will functionally have
raised U.S. debt by 50 percent in 9 budget years.
How many Members here ran on a promise that we are going to save
America, save our retirements, save our kids, save the future, and we
are going to pretend math doesn't exist? This is what is going on.
Let's walk through some of the ideas that have been coming into our
office. When I do this, yes, there is going to be a little tone of
sarcasm, but it is more for my own personal amusement. I am trying to
help people understand how big 12 zeros is and how difficult this math
is because if I watch one more idiot on cable television saying, ``All
we have to do is this,'' ``Look how wonderful that is,'' that is not
the math.
Let's actually have a little fun here. The Wall Street Journal
yesterday said, hey, there are 40,000 Federal employees who have said
they will take a retirement package. Okay. I am ignoring, hey, if they
took the package today, we pay them through the rest of the year. I am
just ignoring that math. What is 40,000 Federal employees times an
average salary? I think we used $106,000, which we got from one of the
reports, and just multiply that. Understand, this is the conservative
number. We are borrowing about $6 billion a day. The 40,000 Federal
employees leaving is a single day of borrowing. For an
[[Page H578]]
entire year, all those folks leaving is a single day of borrowing. You
have 24 hours of borrowing by 40,000 Federal employees leaving.
Yet, I watched someone on television last night saying, wow, look, we
are going to make a huge dent in the U.S. deficit with these 40,000
taking early retirement. It is 1 day of borrowing. That is not
spending--borrowing. Remember, by the end of the decade, that borrowing
is up per day dramatically.
Take this in. This is one of the grand solutions.
Now, the point I want to make is, we probably have to do it. You have
to do all of them. It is going to be dozens and dozens of things all
stacked up just to provide some stability because can we, as a country,
get back to just borrowing about 3 percent of our economy a year
instead of 7 or, God forbid, a decade from now over 9.
You have to stop lying to each other. Our staffs have to stop lying
to us. The press has to stop making crap up. We have to help the public
understand the scale of what the hell is going on. With 40,000
employees taking early retirement, the salary savings is 1 day of
borrowing.
{time} 1230
Let's have a little more fun. Yesterday, someone said: Okay, let's
get rid of the Federal subsidy on tax exempt bonds for stadiums. Okay,
great.
We calculate that is about 6 or 7 seconds of borrowing for a year.
Mr. Speaker, 7 seconds, but this is worthy? Yeah, I am going to throw
it in the stack, but is this really your debate line? We are not going
to subsidize tax exempt interest for billionaire sports team owners?
Great, okay. Fine, but it is 7 seconds.
Let's do a couple of the really popular ones. Absolutely, we are
going to have to do some of these things. The Department of Education
salaries: If we get rid of the Department of Education salaries--I
think this is all of them--is about 2.75 billion.
Remember, we still have got to transfer the loan portfolios and all
of those things, but we just got rid of the employees. That just
covered 9 hours of borrowing. Am I starting to make a point on the
scale of what we actually have to tell the truth and deal with?
Let's have a little more fun here. One of my favorite ones. I had
this the other day. Let's get rid of healthcare for those who are here
illegally.
Most of the math we did here is Obamacare subsidies for DACA
recipients.
Sorry, this is emergency services for the undocumented. We calculate
that to be about 2.1 billion a year. This is the emergency healthcare
on undocumented. That will give us another 9 hours.
Let's actually go to something a little bigger. Let's get rid of the
foreign aid. Foreign aid is gone. We get ourselves a week.
How many times have I heard--those of us on the right, I have been in
debate with another Republican--if we just didn't have foreign aid, we
would be fine. We have got to deal with the reality of what that does
to our military, our footprint in the world, protecting the reserve
currency.
Why are we the reserve currency? We are the reserve currency because
we have a footprint, we protect the trade routes. We should know that
from our history. If it was just wiped it out, a week of borrowing is
covered. Am I starting to make a point here? This is why it is hard.
Close the carried interest loophole. My math is not 12; it is 13
billion over 10 years. It is 13 billion over 10, so I get 1.3 billion.
I am going to talk around the chart. Mr. Speaker, 1.3 billion in a
year. We borrow about 6 billion a day. We get an hour, a couple hours,
but it is a great talking point. We should get rid of that carried
interest for those rich people. Fine, but don't act like it actually
solves something.
Back to interest fragility, Mr. Speaker. This discussion is a little
geeky, but it is really, really sort of important. About half of our
debt is in what we call notes. Look, there is bills, notes, bonds.
It is the hierarchy to this. A bill is very short-term. It can be
under a couple years. The notes are in the middle term. Right now, half
of our debt--actually, more than half of our debt--actually, about 72
percent of it is really short-term.
I was doing this calculation in my head. We are going to borrow about
2 trillion virgin this year, and we are probably going to have to
refinance 9 or 10 this year. That is not the roll. We have a lot of
roll where it goes 30 days, 90 days, 6 months.
If interest rates move against us, it moves into U.S. debt
calculations. Within a year or 2, it is all in there. That is why we
keep having this discussion of: Could we go out further? If you want to
know what others are, those are the inflation adjusted bonds.
That is why you talk about interest fragility. If suddenly the world
goes a little haywire on us, our inflation ticks up and interest rates
go up. It pounds the United States because the previous administration
and the one before that and Heaven forbid back into the Obama
administration, they stayed very short on the curve because it was a
little bit cheaper.
The danger of that is if interest rates move against us, it is a
technical economic turn. We are absolutely screwed. Back to the point
on all the notes. They are all the way down around 2.8. The actual cost
of a 10-year is 4, 4\1/2\.
All this is going to move into being dramatically more expensive.
They say: Who cares? By the end of this year when you have close to $30
trillion that has to be borrowed from capital markets from people
around the world, this is a big deal.
I showed a little while ago if we were to just finance the 5\1/2\
trillion of expiring tax provisions over the 10 years, that is just 1.3
trillion just financing that. Imagine the movement on everything else.
You will be happy to know, actually I think a little while ago, the
U.K.'s 10-year bond moved cheaper, less expensive, lower interest rate,
than United States. I think we are back to being the 14th best bet of
substantial countries in the world. Meaning, there is 13 other
countries with better credit ratings. Their 10-year bond sells cheaper
than the United States. Greece today can sell a 10-year bond almost a
full point cheaper than the United States. Doesn't that set off an
alarm in anyone's head?
Am I the only idiot--sorry. I don't mean to be going there. I am
trying to find some way to say this. I will get these criticisms.
David, you talked about math. I don't like math. You may not like it,
but the math will always win.
Back to a couple more points. The famous pie chart. Everything a
Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money. Every dime of defense is
borrowed money. Every dime in nondefense discretionary is borrowed
money. I think last fiscal year $300, $400 billion of earned benefits.
Look, what we call the mandatory, the red, most of it is earned
benefits. It is your Social Security. It is your Medicare. It is your
VA pensions, and those sorts of things. There is a portion that you get
because you are part of a Tribal population, part of a treaty
obligation, or you fell below a certain income, Medicaid, or those
things.
You are basically now in a world 75/25, but the numbers are actually
better now. In fiscal year 2024, for every dollar the United States
took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.39. Mr. Speaker, $1 in, $1.39 out.
It is better now. Tax receipts are actually up, so for every $1 we get
in, we spend a $1.36.
How do we go home and tell our folks the scale, that the simple
solutions are absolutely wrong? They are not truthful. It turns out we
have a brutally complex problem. It is going to require a complex
solution, and it is going to require doing hard things. We have people
who will say: I will only vote for it if I get this.
Those are the very people who I promise you aren't watching this
presentation. This isn't a game. These numbers keep getting uglier and
uglier.
Let's go back to the thing that gets me screamed at. This board is
getting old, and the numbers are actually worse.
Over the next 30 years, we believe the total debt number over the
next 30 years is now substantially higher, but this is the one I have.
Your country spends about $124 trillion in deficit, but the things we
vote on actually grow slower than tax receipts.
Here is the crazy thing: The defense and discretionary, if we had
actually followed the sequestration--which we will bust those caps. As
a matter a fact, that is part of the discussion we
[[Page H579]]
are having right now is it makes some of our folks unhappy, so we are
going to bust caps--but if we followed the actual wall, in 30 years,
defense and nondefense discretionary actually have what we would call a
$9 trillion positive.
They grew slower than tax receipts. Medicare and Social Security
together actually produce about $115, $116 trillion in deficit. It is
just those two programs, and they are interest. It is not Republican or
Democrat. It is demographics.
Telling the truth about demographics isn't great politics. Our job is
to blame the other side and them blame us, and then we will go back and
forth and have these incredibly petty, childish, mathematically void
debates.
Debt deficit and demographics, it is what we are. The difference is,
I believe, those of us on the right, those of us who are Republicans,
have the absolute moral obligation--we are supposed to be the math
people--to fix it. Let the other side lie about it.
We campaigned. We won. The American people gave us the House, they
gave us the Senate, they gave us the Presidency. Suddenly, the
obligation--you know, we did all this moralizing, and now we have run
away from the difficulty.
This is other thing where I am going to start to really make a couple
of my brothers and sisters annoyed around here. The United States,
according to the Census Bureau from last month, will have more deaths
than births in 8 years.
Not a single country in the world--and this is not just the United
States, it is basically all the industrialized countries, and much of
the world is way ahead of us in this almost dystopian collapse of there
being young people--no other country has been actually able to change
natalist, fertility rates, whatever pop culture word you want to use.
There are countries out there that will buy you a house after
delivering your third child. And all they did is move fertility forward
and, boom, a couple years later they just move back to the mean. Why is
this a big deal?
When you start to understand total fertility rates and what it means
to being able to grow an economy--I am begging you, give this a chance.
If you are watching this, you are obviously unusual. You are smart.
If you have a shortage of young people in your country, how do you
grow? How do you reach productivity? There becomes--we can do it by
policy. You are not going to have more children, but are you willing to
make it easier to adopt technology?
Are you going to be fearful of AI, machine learning? Are you going to
allow synthetic biology to cure diseases? Are you going to promote
automation everywhere you can because you are going to have a shortage
of workers?
{time} 1245
Mr. Speaker, are we going to remove the regulatory barriers and
financing barriers to basically have a much more productive society? If
we don't, there is absolutely no way we can make the math work. This is
the reality.
A couple of weeks ago, I did a whole series of charts showing if the
United States would take on the rest of the world--because we have to
understand, besides the tax arbitrage the world uses by refunding their
value-added tax--yet when we send them something, they put it on. There
is already this tax arbitrage the world uses on us.
The other stupidity we engage in, in this country is we educate
people in our fine universities, and we send them home to compete with
us. The Wall Street Journal today actually has an article on drug
discovery and drug research and how fast China is basically competing
with us now in new biologics and those things.
The basic premise is that we educated the very people who are
competing with us because we sent them home because we are idiots. Yet,
I will get folks who are pounding out texts, saying they don't want
foreigners in here. Do they want us to pay their Medicare bills if we
don't get the growth?
What are the two extraordinary privileges of the United States? It is
our currency. The world borrows and trades and denominates in U.S.
currency. The economists will tell us what is worth even more than
being the reserve currency of the world is that people want to do their
business and investments, and bring their intellect, their passions,
and their entrepreneurialism, to the United States.
In the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the world was nice to each
other for hydrocarbons and oil. In the last decade, we competed,
whether we know it, for rare earths. The rest of the world figured this
out 10 years ago when Australia, Great Britain, and Canada all moved to
a talent-based and STEM-based system of saying they want smart people
to continue to grow.
I think the United States is the only major country still doing a
familial-based immigration system. This upsets people when I say this.
``I want to be able to sponsor my grandma.'' That is great. I am sure
she is lovely.
From an economist standpoint, if we are going to survive as an
economy and particularly if we are about to put together a package on
how we are going to cover the $5.5 trillion of expiring provisions by
saying here are the cuts and we are going to build growth in, are we
willing to do the things required to hit that growth number?
It turns out that, yes, modernizing regulations is great. It turns
out an economist can't hit the number without a talent-based and STEM-
based immigration system. We just can't.
Here is the problem. We have built the model. If we are going to
extend expensing for research and development so we are doing things
better, faster, and cheaper, what happens when the very companies that
are doing that and the research labs that are doing it continue to show
up in my office and say, ``We can't get enough people. We are being
squeezed. We will have to do part of the research on the other side of
the world. Have we lost our minds?'' ``Oh, but, David, you can't say
that. That will upset someone.''
The chaos created at the border the last 4 years crushed the working
poor because the working poor sells their talents and their willingness
to show up. Now, we have millions and millions of other entries. There
are a number of great articles out there that basically talk about the
working poor's wage growth, which will probably be flat for the next
decade.
Part of that same report says we are getting close--I think it was
$900 billion. It is almost a trillion dollars over 10 years of new tax
receipts if we move to a STEM-based, talent-based immigration system.
In the next decade, it is parabolic. It just explodes because that way
we are integrated in the economy.
Mr. Speaker, are we allowed to have that conversation saying that we
are going to do this? We are going to tell ourselves we are going to
start growing at these great rates. Are we going to do the very tools
that allow us to grow, that allow us to prosper, to allow us to raise
the productivity?
I know this chart is almost impossible to read. Its punch line is
very simple. Unless we have this productivity spike, we are going to
get poorer. We see it around the world that productivity and the
ability to have that productivity growth is how we keep up standards of
living.
We have had a great pop the last couple of years with the investments
in AI and those things. Are we going to keep it up? Are we basically
going to give our competitive advantage to the rest of the world
because we are going to educate the very talent that is bringing them
to us and send them home?
Mr. Speaker, I hope I accomplish three things here. One is to give
everyone a sense of how absolutely brutal the math is and why it is
absolutely necessary we do the moral thing of reducing the spending,
modernize the way we deliver services, make the tax code actually grow.
Then, we deal with the reality of what drives our debt and deficits and
then deal with the reality of how we maximize growth, productivity, and
wealth.
Prosperity is moral. I actually believe it is the American ethos. My
kids, our kids, deserve to be more prosperous than the generation
before them. Every data point we hold says our kids will be poorer than
our generation. Is that the morality we have decided to bathe in?
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
[[Page H580]]
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