[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 202 (Wednesday, December 3, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H5020-H5023]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
FUN WITH MATH
(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, to begin, I am going to yield to
Chairwoman Foxx, and then we will have some fun with math.
Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague Mr. Schweikert for
yielding to me.
Mr. Speaker, this past weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to
stop in at Top of the Mountain Farms in Ashe County and support a local
small business selling Christmas trees and wreaths.
Becky and Bill Fairchild, the owners of this Christmas tree farm,
were very welcoming. I was fortunate to meet their three daughters--
Bailey, Brooke, and Blair--along with other members of the family
during my visit.
Western North Carolina for many years has produced impeccable
Christmas trees that have been featured at the White House and are the
most beautifully grown anywhere. The Fraser fir, the true Cadillac of
Christmas trees, is what our area is known for producing.
Christmas tree farms play such an important role in the economy of
North Carolina, and I want to highlight them especially during the
Christmas season.
The beautiful tree that I picked up that day is now in my living
room, and I will be enjoying it until January.
I thank the Fairchild family for such an enjoyable visit and for
helping me pick out a tree of my own. I look forward to stopping in
again to see all of them in the future. May God continue to bless them
and may He bless our country with a very happy and joyous Christmas
season.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, the good news for the team here, I am
not going to use the rest of the hour. I
[[Page H5021]]
promise you I am not going to go that long. That is the only happy part
of this I have for you because I thought I would actually use this
week, I would come and show you all the creative ideas we have to take
on debt and deficit and get wages growing.
{time} 1820
Mr. Speaker, we had an incident today where the Budget Committee was
inviting Members to come in and sort of give our priorities.
My comments to the Budget Committee--I brought them some work that
has been done by the Joint Economic Committee economists. One of my
only joys I have here anymore is I am blessed to chair the Joint
Economic Committee. I have a handful of Ph.D. economists. It turns out
they are really good at math. I handed it over. I said that we need to
tell the truth about math. I say this almost every week, and I beg for
someone out there to hear it.
Regarding debt and deficit, we are buried in debt, but it is
primarily interest and demographics. I would love to blame the
Democrats. They want to blame us. I have shown over and over that, as a
country, 40 years ago, our fertility rates started to fall. I am going
to show it on the board.
This year, we functionally have double the number of 65-year-olds as
we had 20 years ago, but we have the same number of 18-year-olds. It
gets worse next year. The year after that, it gets worse. The year
after, it gets worse. Yet, we built Social Security, Medicare, and
these things on a model that had population growth.
Mr. Speaker, I am only one-third through the paper. It is always
dangerous to come behind the microphone and act like I know what the
hell I am talking about. Let's actually walk through it.
This was brought to me by some of my economists. The National Bureau
of Economic Research has a number of folks from Cambridge. It is not
Cambridge, England. It is Cambridge, Massachusetts. There are little
institutions hanging around there such as Boston University, MIT,
Harvard. Apparently, they are freaking good at math.
The headline here should actually make us pucker up, ``Measuring What
Matters: Why Italy May Be in Better Fiscal Shape than the U.S.'' Then,
we go in here and start to understand the punch line of this paper. I
will do my best to describe this.
Please, someone out there, if there is anyone listening, it basically
says that if we keep things the way they are--the current tax policy,
spending policies, and pension policies--to cover Social Security,
Medicare, military retirement, and Federal employee retirement, it will
require 104 percent of the income of the next generation.
This isn't building bridges. This isn't modernizing the military.
This is just the retirement system of the United States. Doing so
requires levying lifetime net tax rates exceeding 104 percent.
We need 104 percent of the next generation's income. It is not 100
percent of their income but 104 percent of their income to meet our
pension healthcare obligations. Is that going to work? We have the
research.
How many people are going to come behind this microphone the rest of
this year and the next year and actually say: Hey, we have a
demographic problem. We have a spending problem.
Let's actually walk through some of the things we do know. Every day,
I send out something called the ``Daily Debt Monitor.'' It is a text
message. We have a few thousand people who subscribe to it. We have
probably a lot more people who don't want to get it. It tells us how
much we have actually borrowed.
Mr. Speaker, this always goes on. This is the conflict between the
White House, Congress, and those of us who actually have some
responsibility on spending, budget, economics. They say: David, you are
scaring people by telling people how much we are borrowing so far this
fiscal year.
Think of this. We are what? I should have calculated this in my head
before I got behind this microphone. What are we, 73 or 74 days into
this fiscal year, Mr. Speaker? In that 70-some days, we have already
borrowed $788 billion as of yesterday. If we stay at this rate, we will
click off another $1 trillion of borrowing. From October 1, the
beginning of this new fiscal year, to before Christmas, it is another
$1 trillion of borrowing.
Once again, the left will blame us. We will blame them. No one wants
to have a conversation of how healthcare costs are exploding on us, and
we refuse to do the things to lower healthcare costs. Instead, we will
spend months around here debating subsidies because we have turned
healthcare into financing and not the actual price of services and
healthcare.
Mr. Speaker, I need my colleagues to think about this. That $788
billion in that 73 days or so is like $148,000 a second in borrowing so
far this fiscal year. If we average it out over 12 months--I did see
the number. It is like $73,000 a second if we take the last 12 months.
That is what we are borrowing.
Don't worry. Be happy. Don't tell the truth. Yet, I have done
presentation after presentation over these years, saying that in 8
years, 8 budget years, 30 percent of all of our tax receipts in this
country go just to pay interest. If interest rates go up 1 percent, 45
percent of all tax receipts in 2034 or so go just to pay interest.
Yet, the clown show--excuse me--the Congress will find shiny objects
and will find things that will enrage them. They will go really hard on
getting on cable television tomorrow night and say something
inflammatory so the dopamine hits.
Mr. Speaker, how often do we go home and have meetings with our
constituents? There will be this one person who found something on the
Internet, and it sounds like a conspiracy theory. I would argue the
greatest conspiracy in our society is the unwillingness to tell the
truth about basic math.
Once again, let's go back. Let's go double down. I was told ``double
down'' is actually saying when I have a good hand. Maybe it is not
appropriate for this. Let's see what the report says. Assuming the
current generation makes no contributions to reduce the U.S. fiscal
gap--that basically means taxes, contributions, and incomes stay on the
track they are on, and there is not suddenly much higher taxes or much
further paydown--a newborn today, a new generation today, would pay a
104 percent net tax rate.
Mr. Speaker, 104 percent of their income would be required just to
cover Social Security, Medicare, military retirement, Federal pensions,
and railroad retirement pensions. It will not cover the rest of
government. It will not cover a new building, a new bridge, the State
Department, the FBI, or the military. It is just to cover our unfunded
liabilities, Mr. Speaker.
Where is the fiscal commission? Where is telling the truth?
What will happen if we don't get our act together and adopt the
technology, adopt the revolutions in healthcare, adopt the things that
make our brothers and sisters healthier, adopt the things that actually
raise wages, or adopt the policies on immigration that maximize growth
instead of the importation of poverty?
{time} 1830
We are being handed reports that say, if you actually look at the
underlying math: You are worse than Italy.
When Greece has a better credit rating--Greece, right now, can sell a
10-year bond cheaper than the United States--I struggle. Greece can
sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. I keep trying to
find out ways to describe this. Yet, in this place we call Capitol
Hill, I will walk into a room with some of the budget documents and
say: Hey, I am here not only as a Ways and Means member, I am number
four on Ways and Means; I am the Oversight chairman, so I chair the
Joint Economic Committee, our economists have come up with some numbers
we really should talk about. I look around and everyone is getting up
and leaving because we don't want to know.
So let's actually deal with a couple of other facts.
Remember, Mr. Speaker, last summer, I think it was July 4 this last
summer, we raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. We have already
burnt $2 trillion. So we borrowed $2 trillion of that $5 trillion of
authorization.
We are doing a calculation by April 27, so in 1 year and a few
months, we will hit the debt ceiling again.
Remember, Mr. Speaker, the debt ceiling is just the authorization to
borrow what you have already obligated.
[[Page H5022]]
When you get the clown show that says: You can't raise the debt
ceiling. Then I say, okay, I can do that. Tell me the portion of
government you want me to cut, Mr. Speaker? Because this fiscal year,
for every dollar of taxes we take in, we are going to spend $1.43. I am
happy to work with you. Let's not raise the debt ceiling.
Tell me the functioning half of government--because, Mr. Speaker, you
have to understand the economic effects if you stop the spending. So,
Mr. Speaker, what is the 50 percent of government you want me to cut
tomorrow?
Consider that only about one-quarter of U.S. spending is actually
voted on by Congress. We vote on defense and what they call nondefense
discretionary. The rest of the spending, the rest of the 75 percent of
the spending is Social Security and it is Medicare. They are the things
that we call entitlements. They are earned benefits that are on
autopilot.
Well, David, they stole my money.
No, they didn't. We just stopped having children.
The number is a couple of years out-of-date, but the average couple
in America gets about $73,000 more from Social Security than they put
in. It is a crap rate of return, but Congress, the AARP, and the union
groups back in the Bush administration--this was W--when there was
discussion of: Hey, can we take maybe a small sliver and put that into
markets? If we had done that 25 years ago, then today's retirees and
those moving into retirement would be dramatically better off.
It is too late. Remember, in only a couple of more years all the baby
boomers are 65 and up. So the demographic curve is here. It is just
math. It is just math. These numbers get worse. So that is the debt
ceiling.
Let's actually have a little bit more fun.
Medicare. There is a trust fund with Medicare. You pay it on your
FICA tax, Mr. Speaker, your payroll tax. Except we have a little
problem. We calculate in early August 2032, so 7 some years from now,
the Medicare part A trust fund is gone.
Hospitals are probably the largest lobbyists here in Washington, D.C.
They are all up and down the hallways.
Are they ready for the 11 percent cut in spending?
Because in less than 7 years this is coming.
So let's add something else on top of that. This is the one--and I am
told I need to stop cussing behind this microphone. It shocks me
because I will get some very important people around Washington, D.C.,
who get upset with me for this portion because apparently--particularly
as a guy who is in the 50/50 district--we are never, ever, ever, ever
supposed to use the word Medicare or Social Security.
So let's actually have some fun here.
The Social Security trust fund is projected to be depleted in late
2032, so 7 some years from now. When this happens, then we double the
poverty of seniors in America.
Mr. Speaker, if you are on Social Security, then you will get a 24
percent cut in your check. There is math and there are models out
there, and you will double the poverty of seniors, and we will double
the number of baby boomers on the street.
Do these two things together, the trust fund for Medicare and the
trust fund for Social Security, being gone in 7 years, to capitalize
it--so that is happening in 2032. If you took 2033--and I am sorry but
the dates are important--and said for that full year, we are going to
just reach into the general fund. We are just going to use the general
fund. It is over $600 billion, and then the next year it is bigger and
the next year it is bigger. So it is functionally about 60 percent of
the entire defense budget, just to make up that shortfall for that
first year.
Mr. Speaker, you would think something this--to use my little girl's
term--ginormous would be a big deal around here. Yet, what happened in
this place, because it is so perverse, is that right now there is some
leftist political consultant saying: Hey, Schweikert used the words
Social Security and Medicare, let's design our attack ads for the next
campaign.
They spent millions of dollars in the last campaign beating the ever-
living crap out of me because I cared enough to want to fix this.
When this place cares more about what the political consultants can
design as an attack ad, then where is our fiscal commission?
Where is the fact that we are putting people who can do math into a
small room, turning off the air-conditioning, and saying: Come up with
a plan to save the future? Or is just doubling poverty of seniors
functionally our political plan?
The left says that we are just going to raise taxes. I have done
presentation after presentation on the floor here. I have shown the
math. Every tax hike of the Democrats--so a tax on capital gains, a tax
on income, a tax on corporate taxes, you can go grab the entire Bernie
Sanders playbook, and we have had it scored, and you do its economic
effects, and we do the maximum tax rate before the tax receipts roll
over--produces about 1.5 percent of GDP of the economy.
I am so sorry for the staff because they have all heard me say this a
dozen times: When we do the cuts, the actual spending cuts and their
economic effects, it produces about 1 percent of GDP.
So what is that, Mr. Speaker?
It is 2\1/2\ percent.
If we do the borrowing we did from the trust funds last fiscal year,
we borrowed almost 7.2, 7.3 percent of the entire economy, then does
anyone see the problem?
We borrowed over 7 percent, but all the solutions of raising taxes
and cutting spending over here come in at 2\1/2\ percent. It is called
a fiscal gap.
But, David, you are not allowed to talk about these things. We need
to just pretend.
What sort of pretending is it going to be in 7 years when grandma
gets a 24 percent cut in her check and when the hospital won't see her
because they had an 11 percent cut in their Medicare compensation and
they no longer can afford to see seniors?
This is coming. This is real. This isn't pretend. This isn't
feelings. It is called math.
Please understand. I am giving up. I have spent one-and-a-half
decades of my life behind these microphones running around here and
actually producing actual legislation to fix it. I can't even get my
fellow Members of Congress to cosponsor the legislation just to take on
fraud in Medicare part C, let alone fix things. You know, David, it has
the word Medicare, and we are not allowed to say that.
I need to do a correction from last week because I was going so fast
at one point, I didn't describe this chart well enough.
I was actually trying to just say that tax collections are up, but
capital gains are up 64 percent. Remember, Mr. Speaker, capital gains
are only about 7 percent, where income taxes and taxes on wages are up
5\1/2\ percent. That is amazing. However, remember, Mr. Speaker, income
taxes are over one-half of all income into the Federal Treasury. I
didn't want to say: Hey, 64 percent of all tax collections are up
because of capital gains. That is only the little sliver that is
capital gains.
{time} 1840
A 5.5 percent increase in wages is amazing. The problem is that
spending is up about 9 percent. If we could just hold our spending
flat--except our problem is our demographics. This year, every day we
have 13,000 of our brothers and sisters turn 65, they move into their
earned benefits. We made a social contract.
In 1990 or 1991, when the fertility rates in the United States
started to roll over pretty hard, we never built a model saying, oh,
heavens what happens when you don't have enough young people.
Let's make some more people mad with the truth. The customs duties,
the tariffs, have actually been very helpful. They are important. I
actually think we need to come up with a much broader scheme on
international tax collections, particularly imports and dealing with
other countries and their value-added tax, what we call a VAT tax, and
how they arbitrage or they refund it when you export to the United
States. However, if we send them something, they attach their VAT back
on. It gets a little confusing.
We actually held a hearing today in Ways and Means on the
international tax system because if the Supreme Court, whether it be
this month or in
[[Page H5023]]
the coming months, changes the President's authorities on tariffs,
maybe those of us on the tax writing committee should step up and do
our job.
I need to tell you the truth about the math. Let's have a moment
here. Let's do 2025. That is the chart here. The $77 billion you see
right there on the chart, that was already the law. That was before the
Trump Presidency. That was tariffs. Customs duties is the proper term.
The President added other rules, mechanics, tariffs, customs duties.
They gave us another--a total of $155 billion. That means we collected,
in the 2025 fiscal year, an extra $118 billion. That is a lot of money.
Remember, in 2025, we were borrowing $6 billion a day. You can do the
basic math. That is like 18 days of borrowing, was the increase we took
in 2025.
It is helpful. It is helpful. Do not walk away from it, but also
don't make up numbers that it is going to pay off the debt.
In 2026, we modeled that the base tariffs, base customs duties, would
produce about $84 billion. Wonderful. The total we model is $324
billion, meaning we are going to get an extra $240 billion this year,
if President Trump's tariffs are allowed to stay in. It is really
helpful, but it is basically 1 month of borrowing. It is 1 month of
borrowing.
If you go on cable news tonight or cable talk and you say: We are
going to get a refund--math is math, and I really wish this body would
get better at telling the truth about it.
Just a couple more boards, then I am going to give everyone back
their life. Then I will go home and deal with the angry text messages I
am going to get from people who don't like it when I tell the truth.
You don't want that one, but it basically says CBO actually did some
remodeling, and we calculate that total customs duties over the next 11
years will bring in about $3 trillion. That is a lot of money, very
helpful.
But you have got to understand, over the next 10 years, what took us
240 years to build up in debt, we almost double in the next 10. It is
estimated by 2035, we are somewhere around $63 trillion to $65 trillion
in debt. You actually start to see the squeeze where publicly sold
debt, compared to borrowing from the trust funds, goes because we are
depleting the trust funds so there is less money so borrow out of them.
In the next 10, 11 years, we almost double what took us 240 years as a
country to build up in debt.
Here is the thing that is really hard to talk about. I actually saw
Elon Musk this last week saying: We have got to have the productivity.
We have got to not be afraid of AI.
I wish he would also talk about synthetic biology and all the cures
and the fact that we are curing diseases. The President did an amazing
thing of getting the prices down on glutides. We know obesity is almost
47 percent of U.S. healthcare spending. If we could cut that in half,
could you imagine the growth of the economy, the family formation, the
savings to the debt and deficits, if we helped our brothers and sisters
get healthier.
There are policies that will work, but you never hear them
evangelized behind these microphones because either they are complex or
they don't set off a dopamine fit of anger.
We have got to deal with this reality, and this basically says
demographics. We have fewer 18-year-olds than we did 20 years ago and
almost double of number of 65-year-olds. That is going to continue. It
is happening all over the industrialized world. We are actually in much
better shape than so many other places in the world.
But we don't tell the truth, saying, hey, it is math. We are going to
have to find a way, because we are magically not going to have millions
and millions and millions of people in diapers, little people.
I am 63 and my wife is 63, and we have a 3-year-old and a 10-year-
old. I am optimistic about the future. I had better be. Either that or
my kids are coming to my nursing home. Sorry. I didn't mean to say
that. This is the reality we are up against.
Just one more board. This is hard to see. It is important for anyone
who is actually listening, who actually has a fondness for basic math.
This isn't that complicated.
We now model, in the Joint Economic Committee Republicans, that there
is over a 50/50 chance that the United States, this calendar year--so
2025, the calendar year we are in--will be close to zero population
growth.
Why is that a big deal? We built our Social Security system, we built
our Medicare system, and we built much of our entitlement, our earned
benefit system, on a concept that we grew population-wise and therefore
grew economically, therefore we grew in GDP, therefore we grew in
productivity, and therefore wealth grew in the country for everyone.
What we are trying to show in these charts is, you can see from 2004
to 2024, the difference--this was under 18. We functionally have the
same, but the number of those 65 and up going from 36 million to 61
million. Yet what is fascinating is if you go with no immigration, or
even with immigration, we still end up upside down. It is just
demographics.
Yet when the President tries to talk about this, he gets attacked.
When people like me try to say there is a way to set off productivity
so we don't live poor, that the future is prosperous, that this is
another American century, instead we engage in sort of clown-show type
politics because we want to satiate the theater instead of the
economics.
{time} 1850
There is a path to do amazingly good things for your retirement and
for my kids, but the fact of the matter is that, Matthew, my 3-year-
old, when he hits 23 or 24 years old, every tax in the United States
has to be doubled just to maintain baseline services.
Have we really made the moral decision that the next generation lives
poorer or will be poorer than we are? Is that what America has become
about? It doesn't have to be that way.
Are we on the cusp of an amazing productivity curve with artificial
intelligence, with synthetic biology curing diseases, and with robotics
being able to produce products cheaper and faster? Possibly, but you
have to understand that we have lots of laws that this place has made
that it is illegal to modernize a port. It is illegal to modernize a
rail system. It is illegal to actually adopt technology that can read
your body at home and prescribe to you.
We have barrier after barrier so that when we talk about deregulation
to make the economy grow, we also have to talk about the deregulation
that the armies of lobbyists in our hallways are here to stop us from
doing because it will force a change in their business models.
Once again, it can be another American century. The future can be
absolutely amazing, but we need to get our act together and stop lying
about the numbers, tell the truth about the demographics, and then
actually think boldly. We can do amazing things. I just haven't had an
amazing conversation around here in years.
Mr. Speaker, I am going to go and apologize to all of the people I
have just made mad.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________