[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 73 (Thursday, May 1, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H1795-H1801]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ECONOMIC ANXIETY
(Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr.
Schweikert of Arizona was recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of
the majority leader.)
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, as always, I apologize to the bored
staff, and I will try not to speak like a machine gun.
Mr. Speaker, we are going to do basically three things. I am going to
make fun of us. I am going to actually walk through some debt and
deficit numbers, interest, those things that are scaring my economists,
myself half to death; and then I am going to touch on some of the--and
it is a technical economics term--bedwetting in regard to the
reconciliation budget and how people are making things up. Let's have
at it.
Due to the fact that I sit in an airplane 10 hours a week, and I have
some weird reading habits, I actually came across a paper written last
year, published just recently. It is in Nature Human Behaviour. It is
one of those quirky--excuse me, those academic, but actually what they
did is they went back to the late 1800s, and they took all of our
congressional speeches up until 2022, and they ran a data set on them.
They ran AI, and can you believe it, Mr. Speaker, they figured out
that our congressional speeches have become less and less and less
based in facts. I know this is hard for us to believe, but apparently
the quality of idiots--I mean, people like me--getting up in front of
these mikes and doing presentations and walking through our job has
crashed in quality, in facts.
As a matter of fact, they used the word intuition. I basically say we
make public policy now by our feelings because, God forbid, we go to
our voters and tell them the truth about the math.
It made me feel better because I have mocked us for years on how much
of public policy we now make on feelings. It is great television. It
gets you followers on social media. You get a hit on cable television
tonight if you are willing to make crap up, but do it with passion and
feelings, but if you actually want to talk about the math of what is
going on in this country, it turns out it is how we are rewarded now as
elected officials.
Now, what was interesting is they had the curve actually starting to
fall in 1970, and it has just gotten steeper. Part of it and part of my
conclusion is television, then moving to cable news, and then moving to
social media, we have crashed the diet of robust facts in our speeches.
Now that we are going to make fun of ourselves, let's go on to the
next thing. Mr. Speaker, for anyone who asks, we have been running the
current data on how much we are borrowing. What would you guess we
borrow per second right now? Right now, it looks like we are burning
$72,000 every second. We are borrowing $72,000 every second. My best
guess right now is we will borrow 7.37 percent of the entire economy
this year. Try to keep that number in your head because we are going to
come back to that in some charts and explain why that is so
devastating.
{time} 1215
Mr. Speaker, it is like we don't care about people's retirement, our
kids, the next generation, and how the hell they will actually cover
any of the scale of debt. Then we lie about what drives the debt.
Mr. Speaker, our best guess is we go from that $72,000 a second this
year to maybe about $82,000 a second next year. This is hard for people
to accept, but it is the math. Over the next 10 years, the baseline
borrowing was about $22 trillion. We are trying to figure out how to
extend the expiring tax provisions. We have the requests from the White
House. We have other disasters and things we are trying to cover.
We are basically looking at--and I am going to show this multiple
times--the United States, the day we were elected, Mr. Speaker, how
much debt. We will double it. We will double 240 years of borrowing in
this 10-year period.
The majority of that borrowing over the next 10 years is interest and
Medicare. God forbid we are not allowed to tell people the truth. Most
of the debts, deficits, and demographics is the fact we got old. We
stopped having children. We have a shortage of young people in this
country. We are terrified to tell our brothers and sisters the truth
about the math.
Let's have at it. For anyone out there paying any attention--and this
number, actually probably right now is a little bit worse. We now think
about 75 percent of Federal spending is on autopilot.
Mr. Speaker, when you become a Member of Congress, everything you get
to vote on is borrowed. When you vote on nondiscretionary, when you
vote on defense, every dime of that is borrowed and about $400 billion
of what is mandatory spending, which means formulaic. When we work so
many quarters, we get our benefits. When we serve in the military, we
get our benefits. For those who are part of a Tribal group or part of
our treaty obligations, certain things are coming to them.
Then there are the things we vote on and the things we try to balance
the budget over. We need more money for defense, and we have threats in
the world. We get down to where we are trying to balance the budget on
about 13 percent of our spending because we are terrified to talk about
everything else. We can't touch interest.
[[Page H1796]]
I am going to show a slide here in a moment. This one should scare
the crap out of people. I know my language is becoming more and more
inflammatory, but I can't seem to break through.
This is from something called Moody's Analytics. It is one of those
fancy subscription services. They have a bunch of economists and they
collect data. They have us in nine budget years, 30 percent of U.S. tax
collections will go just to interest.
Mr. Speaker, you pay your dollar in taxes, and 30 cents of that in
2035 goes just to interest. Does it not scare anyone? When the interest
growth is bigger than everything we are talking about in trying to
say--by multiples, by multiples--we calculate this fiscal year, the one
we are living in right this second, we could spend $1.1 trillion to
$1.2 trillion in just interest.
There is a dataset that if we do some of the things that we were
going to do, the Senate's reconciliation budget, with almost no money
to pay for it, in 10 years, interest could be a couple of trillion
dollars a year. The annual deficit will be three-plus trillion a year.
It will probably be $2.3 trillion this year.
Last year, for every dollar we took in in tax collections, take a
guess. What did we actually spend? We took a dollar in tax collections
last year. What did we spend? We spent $1.39. We take in $1. We spend
$1.39. This year was supposed to be better. We were only supposed to
spend $1.36.
We have a small problem. With some of the GDP growth numbers, just
that adjustment, we may have lost $200 billion in tax receipts in this
fiscal year, the end of September, between now and then. It just shows
how fragile we are with small movements of interest when we have to
refinance $9 trillion.
Think about this. A single point of interest on U.S. debt--and it
takes years for it to roll in because of how much we have to refinance.
So we will take about $9 trillion to market this year and refinance, we
will issue a couple of trillion new this year. A single point of
interest over 10 years costs $3 trillion.
Why does this not scare the crap out of people? Why do we not have
people coming behind these microphones? But we are better off getting
behind these microphones and telling passionate stories, anecdotes, and
those things, because that is what gets us on social media. That is
what gets people's dopamine hitting. But at some point the math is
going to win.
We have the really smart analytic firms saying they are scared about
U.S. sovereign debt. We see things happening around the world that
makes me very nervous. There is an appetite for going on the long end
of the curve.
The United States sells very short-term debt. Then we have 2 years, 5
years, 20 years, and 30 years. We are having real trouble selling the
debt on the long end of the curve. Do not pay attention to some of the
debt markets over the last month or two. Mr. Speaker, do you want to
know why? We are in extraordinary measures. We are up against the debt
ceiling. We are not issuing new debt. We are only issuing refinance and
what comes due within the cap.
What happens a couple of months from now when we all raise the debt
ceiling? I love the brain trust that says don't raise the debt ceiling.
Did I mention last year for every dollar we took in, we spent $1.39?
Tell me what 39 percent of the Federal spending we should stop doing.
When we don't raise the debt ceiling, we have to end all of that. More
than a third of all our spending is functionally borrowed. I am happy
to do it. Tell me which third we should stop financing. Those are the
very people filling up these hallways, demanding we give them more
money.
What happens when we raise that debt ceiling, Mr. Speaker, and we
have to come to market--Treasury has to come to market--with $500
billion to $600 billion functionally to catch up and refund all
the accounts we have been borrowing from? That is what is done in
extraordinary measures. We grab every account and use that cash, now we
have to refund it, and you take that much to market.
We have one analyst who is saying we will see a pop in U.S. interest
rates, maybe on the 10 year, hitting five, just, boom. Because suddenly
we are grabbing so much of the world's capital to finance what we have
been borrowing internally and now we have to pay it back.
Be prepared. These aren't surprises. We all know it, but no one reads
the damn documents. It is math, and it turns out telling the truth--
remember our story here that fact-based discussions on the floor no
longer get us elected. No one listens to them. No one cares about them.
We make things up because feelings is now how we make legislation.
This board is almost a year old, but it is to try to make a point to
our brothers and sisters, particularly on the left, that keep coming to
us and saying: Let's just tax rich people more. We show them--we are
going to show the slide here. I am probably going to have to say it two
or three times so it sinks in.
We have a detailed report that sort of walks through every tax hike
the left has proposed. We are guilty on our side of every cut we have
actually proposed. We take every tax hike and then do the economic data
on it and get about 1.5 percent of GDP. Our cuts come out to about 1
percent of GDP. If I can do that math, that is 2\1/2\ percent.
Mr. Speaker, do you remember at the beginning of this? We are
borrowing 7.3. The next time a politician says raise taxes on rich
people. And then they are shown that it is a fraction of a fraction of
what we even borrow every single day, that is a great rhetorical use of
language. It is horrible math; completely fraudulent math. Remember
demographics but we are not allowed to tell people that because it
means we as a society have to do hard things.
I have this chart here. I was just trying to make a point how
Washington finances 366 days of spending in 2024. The top 20 percent of
earners covered 201 days. For the next core tile down, the next 20
percent covered 41 days. The middle earners, the middle 20 percent,
paid for 17 days of government spending. The bottom 40 percent pay for
4 days of government spending. Then 103 days we finance by just
borrowing it.
I think we are tied for the most progressive income tax system in the
industrialized world. When we modernized the tax code in 2017, the
United States income tax system actually became more progressive. Yet
how many times have we heard Members say: Well, they gave money to the
rich? The rich, after 2017, were paying more of the Federal income
taxes.
At some point we are going to have to have this really uncomfortable
discussion. Is it on the tax side or the spending side? I have done
entire presentations here on the floor where I have shown my
colleagues--go back to the last 65 to 75 years. Here is a time of very
high marginal tax rates. We take in about mid-17 percent of the economy
in tax collection. Very low marginal tax rates, we take in about mid-17
percent of Federal taxes. When we go up, the actual economy slows down.
This is what is taken in.
The secret is: How do we adopt regulations and modernize it? How do
we adopt tax policy that incentivizes productivity? How do we do the
whole thing and get them to interact?
We maximize economic growth, and that growth becomes tax collection
stability and gets us to the top of the total dollar amount, but we
will probably still constantly fall back into that mean of the
percentage of the economy. So have a bigger economy. It is not that
complicated.
Upper-income taxpayers overwhelmingly finance the Federal Government.
I know this isn't good politics. People like me are supposed to say:
Yeah, the rich need to pay their fair share. The top 20 percent of
earners pay 25.2 percent. The next core tile pays 15.8 percent. The
middle covers 11 percent. The fourth core tile down, the next one down,
covers 5.5. We send the bottom 20 percent of income earners money.
Remember that we have sort of this negative tax income system, earned
income tax credits, and those things. If someone is in the 20 percent
of the bottom core tile, we send them money.
Mr. Speaker, as a matter of fact, we have data--I didn't bring the
chart--that shows functionally in America, if you are in the bottom
half of the income earners, post-inflation, your life is miserable
because wages haven't gone up as fast as inflation did.
{time} 1230
That inflation was substantially created by stupid policies from the
previous White House and the Democrats
[[Page H1797]]
who spent like crazy. When we finance and dump that much cash into the
society, you set off inflation.
Mr. Speaker, it is your high school economics class, and here we are
a couple of years later. The poor are still poor because we still
haven't gotten wages growing faster yet.
What scares the crap out of me is I am now seeing some data saying
that we may have a year where inflation could be hovering around 4
percent by the end of the year. We have to do policies to get those
wages growing.
I have a chart that will show you, Mr. Speaker, that the bottom 50
percent pay about 4 percent of the income tax, but the bottom one-third
actually get money.
In some ways, that is just being compassionate, but we have the data
from post-2017, when we did tax reform, when we had the miracle of
income inequality starting to really shrink. We had 3 years there where
the poor were getting dramatically less poor. Why isn't that moral?
Good regulatory policy and tax policy maximizes that velocity.
Let's really annoy some of our leftist brothers and sisters. This is
an article in the Manhattan Institute written by, I believe, Jessica
Riedl. It is now about 1 or 1\1/2\ years old. What they did is they
went through basically all the proposals the left has on raising taxes
and, step by step, here is the tax raise, the economic effects, and
what we actually take in.
Remember, Mr. Speaker, our rules about the size of the economy, 17.1
or mid-17 percent of the GDP.
Individual income tax, investment tax, raising the corporate taxes,
and raising the State taxes, when you got to the end, Mr. Speaker, you
functionally were getting about 1.5 percent of new tax receipts for the
economy.
I look forward to the Democrats actually proposing this and being
willing to vote on it. That is because they throw these things out and
get them scored. They controlled everything here 1 year ago, a couple
of years ago. You notice they never did them, Mr. Speaker. They pretend
this solves the problem.
You get 1.5 percent, Mr. Speaker, and you will have stagnated the
economy.
Mr. Speaker, you have already heard the discussions of how close you
are to stagflation, which is partially driven because of the economics.
Remember, Mr. Speaker, at the end of the decade or within 9 years or
so, 22 or 23 percent of the population is 65 and up. We have a
demographic issue for productivity.
The point of showing this chart is the solutions you will hear, Mr.
Speaker, if, God forbid, you go on leftwing cable television, sometimes
even rightwing. They are mathematical lies.
We are borrowing 7.3 percent of the economy this year. Are we willing
to engage in a revolution of using technology and modernization? How
many businesses still run themselves as if it is still the 1990s?
Government does.
I had someone bring me, just the other day, a piece of healthcare
paperwork. I think it might have been from the Indian Health Service.
It was a three-part NCR paper for a purchase order for a healthcare
procedure that you fill out and, I think, faxed it in. Have we lost our
minds?
Yet, we get protesters from the left saying: Don't use technology.
You have seen article after article of the five major databases the
United States has, Mr. Speaker. None of them talk to each other. If you
are willing to actually read, then you saw the stories of the Small
Business Administration having--what was it?--3,300 people who had
taken out loans. Except the small problem was that all of them were 114
years old and up, meaning they were on to their rewards. They weren't
with us anymore. It turns out $300 million in loans, no one had paid a
dime back, but the Small Business Administration didn't have the
ability to bounce off the Social Security mortality or death file.
We have designed these walls to functionally--it is as if the
fraudsters designed our data systems here in the Federal Government.
Let's go fill out things, go get money, and steal the taxpayers' money,
but we are going to make sure that there is no way to check the data
that is being filled out because we want to protect their privacy.
Some of that is not privacy. They are asking for a government-insured
loan over here, and we can't check the death file? What idiots allowed
this to happen? Yet, we get protesters in front of our congressional
offices saying: Don't let DOGE and those actually make the system work.
I am sorry they are scared of change.
Did I mention that we borrow $72,000 a second?
How do we convince our brothers and sisters across the country that
we, as Members of Congress, the administration, and the bureaucracy,
are taking it seriously if we are not even willing to make the data
talk to each other?
Back to one of the things that has just annoyed the crap out of me--I
used this board a handful of times for some of my leftwing protesters
the last couple of weeks, and to their credit, some of them were
actually shockingly intellectually honest saying: Oh, that is not part
of our talking notes. No one told them the truth.
Mr. Speaker, it is on the internet. Trust me, I am not that bright. I
just looked it up. It is there. You can find it.
The next 10 years, the Federal Government baseline was spending $86
trillion over the next 10 years--$86 trillion. All we are talking about
in trying to modernize and change spending in this reconciliation
budget, if we did the high end, so the House, full, all in, high end--
which, please God, let us get there. The high end is $2 trillion. $86
trillion, we are trying to get 2, that is 2.3 percent, and that is
creating the bedwetting. Do they really love their money, this
spending?
Remember, Mr. Speaker, if you don't want tax hikes--I don't want tax
hikes. Borrowing is a tax hike. It is just paid for in the future with
interest. Stop thinking borrowing is free.
My wife and I have adopted a couple of kids. I have a 2\1/2\-year-
old. We are incredibly blessed. It looks like he is going to be fine.
He is going to be normal. He is absolutely a joy.
When he is 22 or so, just to maintain baseline spending in the United
States, we have to double every single tax. That is the morality of
this place.
For the lobbyists and the groups that are walking our Halls saying,
``We want more spending. Don't do this horrible, devastating 2 percent
cut in spending over the next 10 years,'' I say: Thank you for screwing
over my 2-year-old. You are absent in morality. If you are going to
walk into our office and demand more spending, then tell us where you
think we can modernize and change the cost of government.
We have come here and done presentations that the single biggest
expense we have in government, it turns out, is obesity. We did a whole
model for the last couple of years, huge amounts. Remember, Mr.
Speaker, I chaired the Joint Economic Committee, so I have five Ph.D.
economists. We did the data: $9.1 trillion in additional healthcare
costs.
It turns out the morality if we would help our brothers be
healthier--but we have to do it through the farm bill. We have to do it
through nutrition support. We have to decide we are going to have
access to glutides and other things. Are we going to use technology,
the wearables and the other things? I have one of those data rings on.
What would happen if one of the most powerful things we can do for
U.S. sovereign debt stabilization is a healthier society? Somehow, that
becomes a fringe conversation around here because people make money off
of our brothers and sisters being sick. It is absolutely perverse.
Mr. Speaker, if you actually go--I think it was 1 year or so ago. I
think Goldman Sachs did this huge report on GLP-1 glutides, and
somewhere in one of the footnotes that was sent to me, it had this
line, a couple of lines, saying that if there was wide adoption and the
United States actually became much healthier with much less morbid
obesity, there would be healthcare systems that would go bankrupt
because they wouldn't have enough multi-chronic sick people to pay
their bonds. Think about that.
Everything is about the money here, not about the morality of having
a society that is growing and prospering. Prosperity, I would argue,
Mr. Speaker, is moral.
How much of the crap we do here is not just satiating today's
Twittersphere screaming at us or something that is completely made up
but actually building a plan saying:
[[Page H1798]]
Here is the prosperity we are going to build for the future.
I probably have already had too much coffee today.
This is just to make a point, and this is more to mock the Senate. I
was talking to one of the Senators last night, who is also concerned,
as I am. Maybe they hear our voices.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, these are just the base numbers when they
are first scored. This number actually came in one-half of that. No
interest is attached to it. We stole this from someone else, but it was
to make a point.
Democrats complained about that. In the CARES Act, we complained
about the excess of spending. In the American Rescue Plan, we
complained about that. Then you add in the bipartisan infrastructure
act--it wasn't bipartisan. I think they had a handful of Republicans
who wanted projects in their district. If you add it all up, Mr.
Speaker, all the things we have fretted over over the last decade don't
even add up to the amount of borrowing that is in the Senate
reconciliation budget because it is so much easier here just to spend
and borrow it. There is this attitude here of: Give it to me now. You
guys will figure out something in the future.
We have worked with some of the DOGE folks because I have the
economists, but go on their official website right now. They think,
next year, 2026 fiscal year, we can save $160 billion. That is real
money. If we borrow $6 billion a day, that is 24, 23 days of borrowing.
That is everything we have gotten.
There is this inability for Members of Congress, our staff, and the
public to understand the scale of what we are up against.
This basically just reiterates what I am going to show a couple of
times here because I need it to sink in. If we do the Senate
reconciliation budget with our baseline, we double U.S. debt in 10
years. I am going to say it a couple of times so it sinks in. Debt held
by the public--and they are using 2034. We prefer to use 2035 because
that is more of an honest budget window. We start to look at what the
Senate resolution--this was baseline debt. They add another 32.7
percent to the debt. If we do what the Senate put out in their budget
reconciliation, we functionally double publicly held debt in the United
States.
What took us 240 years to do, bless us, we can do in 10 because we
are good at borrowing money, handing things out, telling people there
are no consequences, and making crap up, saying it is healthcare for
illegals. Okay, we shouldn't do that, but it is only a couple of days
of borrowing over 1 year.
We have to do lots and lots of difficult things. We have done entire
presentations where we have shown we could revolutionize the cost of
healthcare. We have actually looked at one dataset. We have been
studying this now for months. If I came to you, Mr. Speaker, and said,
just in Medicare, duplicative MRI scans, PET scans, X-rays, and
ultrasounds could be as much as $25 billion a year, duplicative scans.
Mr. Speaker, what if you have your knee scanned and attached it to this
thing so it is portable with you? That is one-quarter trillion dollars
over 10 years. Is that a cut? No. It is just a simple use of almost a
free technology that is out there where you can load them on this and
it is portable with you, Mr. Speaker.
We get lobbyists who don't like that idea because, apparently, they
make money on the duplications. The inefficiencies and the frauds,
those things are a business model now. Government controls functionally
one-quarter of all the spending in the United States, of all the GDP. A
big chunk of that is functionally waste, fraud, misallocation, or bad
design. Give it whatever title you want, Mr. Speaker.
Many of the lobbyists who are walking these Hallways are here to stop
us from modernizing the system and bringing us into this century. Just
use the technology. We walk around with a supercomputer in our pocket.
{time} 1245
This could crash the price of healthcare, make you healthier, give
you access, all these things, and there is an army of people trying to
stop us.
Remember, telehealth here was an absolute war. There were millions
being spent to stop it because it screwed up people's business models.
I am going to do this a couple more times, and then we are going to
do one more example.
If we do what is being planned right now, we finish the next decade,
10 years from now, with either $73.7 trillion of debt--our other chart
actually gets it up to $74 trillion of debt.
You will hear a Member on the Democrat side or Republican side
running for office: I care about the debt, but I am more afraid of
telling you the truth of what drives the debt. The fact of the matter
is, the people walking the hallways here, often our own constituents,
are screaming at us for more spending. Don't they have kids? Don't they
even care about their own retirements? It is the absolute vacuousness
of immortality.
I grabbed this from The Wall Street Journal. I can't imagine anyone
here has had protesters and people showing up in their office about
Medicaid, which is supposed to be our safety net for indigents and the
poor. I have some old experience with that. For a short time, I
actually chaired the Healthcare Committee in the Arizona State
Legislature when I was a child. For a while I actually worked on the
AHCCCS budget, which is the Arizona Medicaid system. We do something
unique. We actually buy managed care HMO policies for our poor people.
It is actually shockingly efficient. As a matter of fact, if you took
the rest of the country and adopted the Arizona model, you could save
hundreds of billions of dollars over those 10 years.
The Wall Street Journal did us a favor. They actually took the
Arizona system, which actually has a shockingly high satisfaction rate
and good outcomes. We can make it much better. The punch line here is
they are showing something called a provider tax. This was a scam--a
scheme. I have to openly admit, on part of it, which was the
disproportionate share--this is geeky stuff--I was actually part of
managing that many years ago. I was county treasurer, I managed money,
and we were part of the swath.
Part of the scam out there is to raise the cost of healthcare, create
a tax, capture that tax, and because you raise the price, you also
capture more money from the Federal Government in their percentage
match.
What The Wall Street Journal did was brilliant. They just produced
this chart that says: Do you know the Arizona government--and this is
most State governments--actually use this provider tax washing machine
and they make money. They actually take in more money. They are not
meeting their obligation of--it was supposed to be a partnership. It
was supposed to be a match.
Is this a cut? It is just saying there was a deal made in the late
sixties that we were going to share some of the risks and some of the
costs with our poor by providing healthcare. Then when Obama came in,
they did this expansion and 90/10 percent, even though it was going to
people who were still work eligible and those things.
Then States--we all knew this was going on, but it was supposed to be
temporary. It was supposed to be when coming out of a major recession.
We were going to go back to normality. Instead, it is padding for State
budgets. That cash isn't going into healthcare; it is financing other
things and raising the U.S. debt. This is borrowed money.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) for the
purposes of a colloquy.
Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona for his
steadfast devotion to highlighting for the American people the state of
our fiscal health, which is not good, and the extent to which we are
complicit in it.
I would just point out that this thing that the gentleman from
Arizona is talking about is so central to everything we are trying to
deal with right here, right now, in Congress, and if we don't fix that,
then we will have failed.
I want to be clear to my Republican colleagues: If we do not fix this
scheme, this scam--the gentleman didn't misspeak. It is a scam. If we
don't fix that, we will have failed.
Let me ask the gentleman a couple of questions.
Prior to the existence of Medicaid, there was no Federal subsidy at
all. This scheme couldn't have possibly existed in this way.
[[Page H1799]]
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, most of this was designed in the late
sixties.
I have this weird history. I was a child--in my early twenties. I was
a temporary page at the State legislature. Arizona was the last State
to enter Medicaid. It was bankrupting our counties because up to that
point in the early eighties, the counties were actually the provider of
healthcare. We entered this, but we created a really crazy system
saying we are going to do managed care to drive the price down.
Mr. ROY. So Medicaid was created, and Medicaid was created to
ostensibly provide an avenue to healthcare for the poor and vulnerable,
right, as a broad statement. Is that true?
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The actual language was for indigents. It was mostly
for women and children.
Mr. ROY. It was supposed to then be a shared arrangement between the
States and the Federal Government, correct?
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. In the early days, it was like a 50/50, not 100
percent coming from the Federal Government.
Mr. ROY. Now, fast-forward, and the current vulnerable population--
what we call the vulnerable population--the indigent, the poor, those
who need it, single moms, people who are sick, the frail--that
population, even under today's law, gets a Federal--we will call it a
match; it is really a formula--a match of 50 to 70 percent, depending
on the jurisdiction. Is that correct?
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yeah. It blends out closer to the 70.
Now, talking about the expansion population. That is where--
Mr. ROY. Let's fast-forward. What we are really talking about--for
everybody at home watching C-SPAN, all 14 of you--we have a situation
where ObamaCare expanded the Medicaid population, and it expanded it
massively to a population that is much bigger and much more able-
bodied, i.e., healthier.
Now, you would think is that good or bad? I have my problems with it
facially, but even if you were going to do it, would you then say, as
it does, that that population, the healthier, able-bodied population,
should get a 90 percent match from the Federal Government? Because that
is what is happening. They get a 90 percent rate for that expanded
population, then layer on top of that, and this is what you are now
dealing with.
The gentleman's chart that The Wall Street Journal did, where you
have the provider taxes, you have this high rate that they are able to
collect, and they are juicing it using the provider taxes. They get
this 90 percent Federal dollars, and then they are openly--California,
for example, has stated they are gaming the system to get Federal
dollars to use that to subsidize illegal aliens and people who are not
the vulnerable population and, frankly, put it in their general budget.
That is what the gentleman is talking about. That is the current state
of affairs.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, it goes further.
Have you had the occasion yet, Mr. Speaker, where a group comes into
your office--somehow, they were put on a plane, put in a hotel, those
things here, they have no understanding of the math, the mechanics, but
somehow there were Medicaid providers in your State that had plenty of
cash lying around to fly people out to come lobby. So we did this, we
pulled open another Wall Street Journal article from a week or two ago
talking about how many people in the Medicaid systems in the United
States are enrolled in multiple States.
You actually have billions and billions and billions of dollars here
that are enrolled in multiple States. Even for the discussion of could
we just match data, you actually get objections to this because the
fraud is part of the profit model.
I am on Ways and Means. This is something Energy and Commerce has in
their primary jurisdiction. They are working through it.
If you just stack up the cheating, the misuse--the vacuousness, the
absence of data to try to deal with the multiple enrollment population,
if you actually start to stack these things up, how dare you call those
cuts. How dare you. Why don't you care about the future of this
government and the future of this society? We cannot handle the
stacking of debt.
Did I mention the $72,000 we borrow every second? It only goes up. We
have a model that says in the 10-year window, we are up somewhere in
the mid-nineties per second in borrowing. We are terrified to tell the
truth.
Mr. Roy may not want to be in the room for this one, because this is
the stuff that gets you attacked at home. But it is the math, it is the
truth, and they are the CBO numbers.
Rising Social Security and Medicare shortfalls nearly drive the
entire 2019 to 2033 deficit. This board is a couple of years old, but
the facts are the facts.
We are terrified to tell the public the truth. The primary driver of
debt is demographics.
This board is actually today. We are waiting for the update, but we
have done some back-of-the-board math. The math is much uglier because
interest rates are up substantially from when we calculated this 2
years ago.
You functionally have a country that--this one is from 2 years ago--
the 30-year debt, we were going to borrow $124 trillion. If you remove
Social Security and its finance costs, Medicare and its finance costs,
the rest of the Federal Government actually grew slower than tax
receipts. We will probably have the update on this from CBO in the next
couple months with the higher interest rates and the higher running
debt.
We have models now that say over the 30 years, we are going to be at
200 percent of debt-to-GDP, that that number is no longer $124
trillion; it may be $170 trillion of borrowing.
I don't know how many of you plan to still be alive over the next 30
years. Do you really think the world's financial markets are going to
finance our debt? We have Ray Dalio, the multibillionaire hedge fund
manager, who is now retired, has actually been coming here to Congress
saying: Warning, warning. The entire world's capital markets--because
China is borrowing, Japan is borrowing, and now Germany is going back
into the debt markets--there is not enough capital in the world.
When the United States is consuming 30 to 40 percent of all the money
that goes to sovereigns, to governments--what happens when there is a
shortage of savings in the world to finance? We can print money. Of
course, that will set off inflation, so your life just becomes more
miserable. Since so many of our benefits are inflation-indexed, you
can't inflate yourself away from them because they go up. Or we can
just pay the higher interest rates.
Now, you already saw the beginning chart, that Moody says in 9 budget
years, 30 percent of our tax collections is interest. We have a model
that shows a 1 percent increase rolled into our refinancing. In 10
years, 45 percent of all U.S. tax collections, all of it, is interest.
Yet, Mr. Speaker, you have Members here running around here saying: I
need more money for SALT. I want actually more money for this program.
I want more money for this.
Okay. Bring us ideas on how we modernize spending, how we can reduce
costs by technology, by better systems, by a healthier society. Stop
showing up at my door demanding more spending. There is no more money.
Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I don't want to take away any of his thunder.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, he actually just stopped me from
cursing, so he did good.
Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, the question I have for the gentleman: When I
graduated from law school at the University of Texas in 2003, the
national debt was somewhere in the $6 trillion range, $6.5 trillion
dollars. When I came to Congress, when I was campaigning to come to
Congress, it was just over $20 trillion. That was 2018. Today, we are
pushing $37 trillion. Is that roughly correct?
{time} 1300
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes, if you add in internally financed.
Mr. ROY. Correct.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The CBO says we will end this year at about 37.2. My
number is 37.3, so yes.
Mr. ROY. Now, I bring that up because nobody at home understands
that. You are doing a good job trying to put it in context.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes, 12 zeroes.
Mr. ROY. You are trying to explain it about the amount of money we
are borrowing per family or taxpayer per second. Yet, to put it in
stark terms, what
[[Page H1800]]
we are talking about with the debt and the deficits, what it really
means is the inability to afford a house for the average American,
right, because the impact that flows from it is, as you alluded to,
higher interest rates, an inability for the Fed and for Congress to
continue to borrow and print money because of what you are describing
worldwide. The ability to have people to buy, our debt goes down.
The cost of debt is going to go up, the interests are going up,
inflation is going up, and the average American family is going to take
it on the chin. That is what we are talking about.
The reason I bring that up is because our colleagues, as you point
out, run around here saying: I need more money for the program. I need
more money for--fill in the blank. I need more money for Medicaid. I
need more money for SALT. Why? It is because they feel like they have a
political interest in doing so.
I am sure the gentleman had, like I did yesterday, the farm bureau
coming into your office and needing help. Guess what? I understand why
they need help. It is because we, the Federal Government, have messed
up their lives quite vociferously.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. We distort.
Mr. ROY. We distort, and so they want help. I get it. Yet, what do I
do? Do I vote for food stamps?
I am a cancer survivor--you know that--and I have cancer groups
coming in and asking for money. I look at them, and I say: Well, can
you go find some way to pay for it?
A lot of my colleagues don't want to do that.
I will close with this. President Reagan had a great quote on ``The
Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,'' a late-night show in the 1970s,
before he was President, in which he said:
Every program that a politician brings forward should have to come
with a tax increase attached to it.
Why is that? Was President Reagan pro tax increases? I know the
gentleman from Arizona knows that not to be true. President Reagan
believed in tax cuts and more money in the pockets of Americans to
create wealth and to create economic growth.
Yet, why he said that was because we promise things that we can't
deliver. We promise things that we deliver that are fake because we are
doling out money and printing money to pay for programs. Then, on the
other side of the ledger, we never want to say: We need a tax increase
to pay for it because we rightly understand that tax increases
constrain the economy. In other words, in short, we put ourselves in
the box we have created.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Roy, we use the term ``socialize.'' How do I get
it to part of our folklore, our use of language? Borrowing money is a
tax hike.
Mr. ROY. Correct.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. You have to understand. Okay. You are not going to
raise taxes. I despise raising taxes.
Mr. ROY. Correct.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I want as much velocity in the economy. I am a
classic free-market economist.
Mr. ROY. Yes.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. But borrowing money is a tax hike, and it is a tax
hike with interest on it.
Mr. ROY. Yes.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It is just to be paid at a future date. Yet, because
the curve is now steepening--remember that I just showed you some
charts that says we may double U.S. debt this decade. The curve is like
this.
You don't think we are not going to reach in and take some of your
retirement? This is no longer about your grandkids. It is no longer
about your kids. It is you, Mr. Speaker.
Yet, I believe the political classes lied their backsides off for so
long, or we play this game. You will see some people on social media:
You could save a million dollars doing this.
Okay. You borrow $250 million an hour.
Mr. ROY. Yes.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The borrow is $250 million every hour. Watch out for
the scam artists who play the game. They give you something that is
outrageous. Okay. Get rid of it. Yet, sometimes the things that we will
debate for hours here are minutes or sometimes seconds of borrowing.
Mr. ROY. Yes.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yet, the big stuff, since there are so many lobbyists
and constituencies who live off of that money, you are not allowed to
talk about that.
Mr. Roy, I am blessed. I have Phoenix and Scottsdale. I have one of
the best educated districts in America. I have been fairly prosperous.
They tolerate me. They sometimes are not happy with what I say.
Mr. ROY. Yes.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yet, at least they know that my math is good.
Mr. ROY. Would the gentleman yield on that?
One of the things that I have been saying in this building for the
last several months is this debate about what we call, I think somewhat
wrongly and incorrectly, ``mandatory spending,'' because it is not
mandatory. We have just chosen to put it on autopilot. It is automatic
spending. It is not mandatory.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. That is a better name.
Mr. ROY. I have been saying in this building repeatedly that the math
has to math. The math has to add up.
Would the gentleman agree that that is the fundamental and core
problem in this town when we are talking about the state of affairs?
For example, we in this process have taken Medicare off of the table
politically. The President has asked us to take Medicare off of the
table. We have taken Social Security off of the table because, by law--
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. We can't do it.
Mr. ROY.--we are not allowed to touch Social Security in the
reconciliation process, and then interest is off of the table because
you have to pay it. You can't just magically not pay the interest. That
adds up to what? It is about 47 percent of the total fricking budget.
It is half the budget.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes. Just understand, in reconciliation, which is the
one time where we are allowed to talk about mandatory spending, the
majority of mandatory spending, we are not allowed to touch--
Mr. ROY. Correct.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT.--because, between Social Security and interest, that
is probably 54 or 55 percent of all mandatory. Sorry. It is a weird way
I remember numbers. Well, let's risk our political careers. How many of
you have read--
Mr. ROY. I have done it before.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT.--The Wall Street Journal articles from the last year?
I think they have done five or six major, major exposes on something we
called Medicare part C. It is the Medicare Advantage. It was the sort
of managed care version within Medicare option that was developed by
Republicans in 2005.
One of their articles basically says that they identified about $63
billion of waste, fraud, and misalignment a year.
Mr. ROY. Right.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. A year.
Mr. ROY. Right.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. A year.
Mr. ROY. Yes.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The MedPAC report, since I am the only idiot who came
here to the floor with the MedPAC, but that is partially my
responsibility being on the Committee on Ways and Means. The MedPAC
report was all highlighted, and we showed the MedPAC report says:
Medicare Advantage, part C, is coming in at 120 percent of fee for
service.
Just that delta from where it was supposed to be at 95 percent--I
know that is a lot of numbers--when we designed Medicare Advantage,
long before you and I got here, it was supposed to come at 95 percent
of fee for service.
That 25 percent delta is $100 billion a year. If you do the curve
because of the growth of the program that is expected, that is $1.5
trillion over 10 years just putting it back to what it was supposed to
be. It is equal to everything we are talking about trying to reform in
our reconciliation packages.
How many conversations have we been willing to have saying: You do
realize we could modernize Medicare Advantage so that the incentive for
the providers is to have populations be healthier than running around
and scoring them as sicker? Just align the incentives. I just found you
$1 trillion.
Why can't we have conversations like this where we are trying to
preserve the programs and the future at the same time?
Mr. ROY. If the gentleman is asking a rhetorical question and the
gentleman does not have his--
[[Page H1801]]
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes. You don't have to answer that because, the
moment you answer, there will be an army of paid lobbyists, people
running ads in your district, probably now beating the crap out of me
on social media--
Mr. ROY. Yes.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT.--because, when it is that sort of money, you know
they are going to--
You also saw the articles 3 weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal.
There is criminal investigations now going on. Justice Department now
is diving into these folks, so there is more going on here.
I will argue, Mr. Roy--and some of our friends who are fiscal
conservatives but also want to modernize the delivery of services, help
me. We have spent almost a year diving into the data. What would happen
if fixing these misalignments, the waste and fraud--actually, it
doesn't get us where we need to be, but it starts moving us in the
right direction.
Mr. ROY. I will yield back.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Roy, I think I am actually against my time, so I
am going to do that moment.
I am going to first apologize to the folks who had to try to take our
words down for talking too fast, for the poor Speaker who had to sit
here and listen to this, and to my staff who is now going to have to
write lots of apology letters for all the people who I have just hurt
their feelings.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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