[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 5 (Thursday, January 8, 2026)]
[House]
[Pages H244-H246]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CONGRESS IS A MATH-FREE ZONE
(Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr.
Schweikert of Arizona was recognized for 30 minutes.)
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I was actually going to come here and do
some things on demographics and some things that are optimistic, but I
actually think we should first jump into the fact that we work in a
math-free zone.
If you listen to the people coming behind the microphones,
particularly today, it is as if they have read none of the CBO reports,
none of the HHS reports, or the other things, particularly in regard to
the ACA, which are subsidies. They are subsidies on top of subsidies to
insurance companies.
Did you read the reports? Last year, 41 percent of those subsidies on
subsidies of the people that had the enhanced subsidies paid no
premium, so they had no skin in the game, which is not what we were
promised when ObamaCare came into existence a dozen years ago.
We actually showed an economic report. I did entire floor speeches on
it showing that only a third of that $35 billion, $40 billion a year
subsidy on top of the subsidies actually goes to healthcare.
We also showed that a third of the folks never made a claim because
now we are finding rampant fraud of people who were signed up because
if they don't have a premium to pay, they had brokers signing them up,
and they had no idea they had coverage.
Where is the passion to actually deal with the fact that particularly
the left--and I have got to blame my brothers and sisters on the
Republican side, we have done the same. We have turned healthcare into
financial engineering, instead of having it be about the cost, access,
and delivery of having our brothers and sisters get healthier.
Is it you have sold your soul to the insurance companies? Remember,
the ACA model is an insurance company model. You promised them rates of
return, you promised them a market, so this is 7 percent of the
healthcare market, and 94 percent of that 7 percent gets a subsidy.
Let's actually do math because you have been listening to--oh, yeah,
there has been actually no math today as people talked about subsidies
on top of subsidies. The CBO report that updated yesterday--and I can
do this off the top of my head--basically said the 3 years cost $80
billion.
The reason it is lower than my $105 billion is because they made an
assumption that this year, if the Senate were to pass these, that there
will be a delayed sign-up, so there will be half a year or so where
people--but if they did a claw back, the actual number on these
subsidies is about $105 billion.
Okay. Even if you do the CBO's number of $80 billion for 3 years of
subsidies on top of subsidies, and then you put in the 10 years of
interest, you know, because of the interest window, this costs $111
billion.
{time} 1950
Understand what the left is telling you. They are basically saying
they don't give a damn about healthcare. It is financing. If we wanted
to change the price of healthcare, we would actually be looking at the
innovations that are going on and start to legalize them, but there are
too many damn lobbyists walking up and down our hallways here trying to
stop us.
Look, here is an article from 2 days ago. Bless the State of Utah. If
you are like me--I have hypertension. Can you imagine that? I have had
it since I was a teenager. I take a calcium inhibitor. It lowers my
blood pressure. Hopefully, I don't pop an aneurysm, but every 90 days,
I have to pick up the phone to renew a doctor's prescription or go
visit the doctor, even though it is the same prescription I have had
for decades.
Utah just created AI that will take my data and renew my
prescription. It will save a fortune for the people of Utah--cost,
access, not subsidies.
Stanford medical reviewed basically being able to use certain
wearables. Their new AI model predicts disease risk as you sleep from
over 100 health conditions. They take some data as you are sleeping off
your wearables, and boom, basically you are wearing a medical lab.
Except the problem is, it is not allowed to prescribe. That would be
illegal because that would require us to actually do things, modernize
access to healthcare, use the technology to crash--oh, we can't use
technology to crash the price. It would really annoy a whole bunch of
the lobbyists. People are lined up at our doors. People would show up
at our fundraisers.
OpenAI chat health to connect data from health apps medical records--
there is a revolution coming where we as people of America can stay
dramatically healthier.
Why aren't we doing the discussion of what to do to lower the price
of healthcare instead of having debates of another $100 billion that
goes on the very credit cards of the people who get--the insurance
companies that get the subsidy that only as--our model is 38 percent of
that subsidy actually ends up going into healthcare. We are still
trying to figure out where the hell the rest of the money went.
Have we lost our minds? Why is it so much easier to just keep
borrowing money and borrowing money and borrowing money and say: I am
giving you something, but I am putting it on your credit card. It is
like we are engaging in a level of financial lunacy here.
Now, let's actually go on to the even more difficult part of this
discussion. I am doing this because I want us to start to have a
benchmark. If there is anyone out there listening that has ever had to
tolerate--because I have been doing these for a decade, and I am just
exhausted. I am frustrated. I am angry.
My brothers and sisters here, Democrat and Republican, I like most of
these people, and I am crushed. I am just absolutely intellectually,
emotionally, even physically crushed at the inability to tell the
truth. We don't want to tell the truth because our constituents get
pissed off at us when we walk them through the math. The constituents
look back and say, so you have been lying or the politicians have been
lying to us for decades. The answer is yes, but it is not Democratic.
It is not Republican. Much of the crisis that we are facing is
demographic.
I am not going to explain all of this chart, but I am basically going
to tell you, if you look at the financial lines on this chart, Mr.
Speaker, it basically says, in 3 years, over half the money this
Federal Government spends will go to those 65 and up. In 3 years, half
the money we spend will go to those 65 and up.
Now, I need you to work through something with me. I have already
presented the Moody's Analytics report that is saying, in 8 years from
now, 30 percent of our spending, 30 percent of tax collections, will go
just to interest. You are now seeing, in 3 years, the majority of our
spending will actually go to benefits here. We have a math problem.
Today, we have fewer 18 year olds than we had 20 years ago, but we have
double the number of 65 year olds.
We can sit here and blame each other, but it is just demographics. It
is happening over the entire industrialized world, but we are not
allowed to actually have an honest discussion about it because the
moment you say something, the other side is writing political
commercials to rip your face off
[[Page H245]]
because you told the truth about math and demographics.
It is real simple. Mr. Speaker, you are going to run for U.S. Senate.
In your next term, the Medicare trust fund is empty. The Social
Security trust fund is empty. It takes that first year, 2033, to just
cover that shortfall that is over $638 billion. If you don't fix it,
you double senior poverty. You double the number of baby boomers who
will live on the street, and everyone's Social Security check has a 24
percent cut.
How many people have you heard this week get behind the microphones
and say maybe we should actually start to adopt technology,
modernization, deal with the reality of our fiscal cliff that is
coming? Instead, I watch a parade of my brothers and sisters here say:
I have an idea. It costs more money, but it is a really good idea.
Let's just put it on the credit card.
It is out of order, but I will get to it. I am going to say it a
couple of times because I did a presentation of a report from I think
it is the Massachusetts or Boston economic council, freaky smart
professors. If you use a 6 percent discount rate, which you can argue
something lower, but sometimes you have to talk about math. A child
born today, you need 104 percent of that child's lifetime income, so
more money than they make in their entire lifetime, just to cover
Federal pension benefits, Social Security, Medicare, military, Federal
employees, and railroad retirement.
Does anyone care? Does anyone care? What is wrong with this place?
The immorality that the next generation will be poorer than us--but we
are not allowed to say that because, let's be honest, people want more
stuff. If we keep giving them more stuff, they vote for us. They might
even contribute.
Look, let's just continue to do some of the basic demographics. From
2004 to 2024, you see this one line here, those are 18-year-olds.
Somewhat similar, but now you start to get to 2035 and start to
understand, without immigration, you have a world where you
functionally have more 65-year-olds than you have 18-year-olds.
We are having debates right now. There is a report out that--now, it
is not adjusted for self-deports--saying that the United States had
about 400,000 as a first snapshot growth in 2025. We have another
report that says the United States had zero population growth last
year. We have another report that says the United States will have zero
population growth this year.
{time} 2000
Mr. Speaker, are we going to tell the truth about math? You want our
Social Security. You earned it. You deserve it. You want our Medicare.
You earned it. You deserve it. In 7 years, both of those trust funds
are empty.
What are we going to do? The argument is we will just borrow more
money because, God forbid, we have any conversation about the cost of
delivering healthcare. That will upset someone's business model or
bureaucracy's model. It is hard to read.
The basic point was trying to show we are having terrific economic
growth. I will show some slides here. With our GDP growth, some of the
tax policies and some of the regulatory policies adopted in the last
year are working.
Our problems are spending. Almost all the spending growth is interest
because we are refinancing. We have $30 trillion out there we have to
bring to market over the next few years. I think this year refinance
was going to be about $11 trillion. That is bonds, notes, and paper
that come due, plus another $2 trillion probably in virgin. That is new
issuances. They are subject to the higher interest rates today than we
had 5 years ago.
That is why our interest coverage costs have gotten so much more
expensive. That is why if we do total interest from last year--the
interest we also pay back to the trust funds from the money we borrowed
from the trust funds--we spent $1.2 trillion on interest last year.
Interest was the second biggest expense in this government last year,
and it is getting worse.
What happens when we produce economic growth? We see this in red
here. Our debt projections are actually every bit as bad as last year.
That means for every dollar we take in, in tax receipts--remember that
our tax as a percentage of GDP is basically back to the mean that it
has been for decades. For every dollar we take in, we will spend $1.43.
That is $1 in and $1.43 out. How long can we carry that on, Mr.
Speaker? Yet, you start looking at where we are demographically.
What frustrates me is this is just what we are. There is not a magic:
Well, we will suddenly have more children. Really?
This is happening all over the industrialized world. We have
countries that buy you a house on your third or fourth child, and it
didn't increase fertility rates. Yet our pension systems were designed
on four or five workers.
Remember that Social Security and Medicare are pay as you go. We had
a benefit of building reserves when the baby boomers were in the labor
force. They ultimately were designed as pay as you go.
I have been in a 50-50 district for years. The political consultants
lose their minds. They tell me I am not allowed to talk about the truth
in math, but no one here wants to go near it, not even the people in
20-point or 30-point partisan districts. Will anyone here help us plan
for the future?
This future is coming fast. We have economists now say we have
functionally 3 years before we get in the interest cycle back and
forth. I will try to explain that one of these days.
You have to understand when we hit in--what was that? In 2020, we had
2.7 workers per Social Security retiree. We are actually getting to the
point over here where we think we are down to 2.3. In the coming
decades, it is even less. So you and your spouse, you and your partner,
functionally have your own retired person. It is just to understand the
basic economics of the math.
Then we have the brain trusts who say we will just borrow the money
each year. Did they hear the math? In 2033, the year the trust funds
are empty, it is well over $600 billion. You are going to borrow
basically half. That is 40 percent equal to what is the--well, actually
almost 60 percent equal to today's defense budget. We will just throw
that on the credit card. The next year it is bigger, and the next year
it is bigger.
There are good things happening. The GDP numbers, which means the
baseline economic growth numbers, are remarkably healthy. There is huge
investment going on right now in technology that could actually boost
productivity. Therefore, it will boost wages.
Where is the unified theory here? We are going to do another
reconciliation where we are going to tell the markets that we will
start limiting the spending so we get lower interest rates and so we
can have more market growth. People can afford houses, all the input.
Instead, you have a government that for every dollar we spend, we have
to borrow another 43 cents. This is insane.
I was going to try to walk through some things I consider really
hopeful. These are the contributions to GDP growth. Many of these
contributions in the GDP growth, if we can get our policies and our
regulatory designed properly, we can get some pops and productivity.
Pops and productivity means pops in people's wages and pops in tax
collections.
We have to get all the stars aligned at the right time. I just don't
see us doing that because somehow it is not part of our lexicon. I will
do presentations. We have too many people, particularly even on my
side, who say things that aren't mathematically true. We hear
something, and we repeat it. The customs duties, tariffs, are helpful.
It is not as much money as so many people think.
Mr. Speaker, I am blessed to chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am
number four on Ways and Means. I chair the Oversight Committee. I am
the guy running a bunch of committees and am responsible for a number
of these really uncomfortable investigations. I am blessed to have a
staff that is a hell of a lot smarter than I would ever have hoped to
have been at their age.
We start to work out charts like this. I am going to make some people
mad. As a matter of fact, I am not even going to bother with that one.
I will walk us through the straight number.
We are still vetting the number because we are doing predictions. All
of this could mean nothing if the Supreme Court tomorrow changes its
rules on the President's authority to
[[Page H246]]
do the enhanced tariffs--let's just call them that--and whatever
authorities the President may have to supplement those tariffs.
We have to understand our latest articles that we are looking at
saying, for 2026, $215 billion of what we call customs receipts--
tariffs--the baseline, if there had been no changes, it would have been
$84 billion. Mr. Speaker, is everyone working with me on this? That
means there was $131 billion of new tariff money coming into the budget
this fiscal year.
If we pull out our calculator, so far in the first quarter of this
fiscal year, we have been borrowing $8 billion a day. We are hoping it
actually comes back to the mean of being about $6 billion. Let's do
$131 billion divided by 8. We functionally are covering 2 weeks of
borrowing. It is helpful. It is not a solution.
Yet I will do the speech. I ask anyone who is watching if they have
some suggestions of how I can actually start to break through because I
am exhausted. Then I will watch someone come up. I am sitting in my
office, and I am watching the floor. On occasion, I will pull out my
calculator. I am just enraged because of the mathematical lying that
goes on behind these microphones over and over. This is the survival of
our Republic.
Let's actually do something that is semi-optimistic here. Let's look
at waste and fraud. I had a meeting with a wonderful woman the other
day. She actually is involved in our county party. She is really smart
and absolutely lovely. I hope I misheard her. She seemed to believe
that if we just didn't have that fraud in Minnesota, we could have
covered a whole bunch of our national debt. She was genuinely
concerned. It sounds like she was trying to quote what she actually
thought she heard on cable news.
{time} 2010
Mr. Speaker, I had to walk her through saying, okay, here is the best
projection. Remember, some of this fraud may have happened over a
decade. We are still getting all the numbers. There have already been a
number of prosecutions, ``Minneapolis woman pleads guilty in $250
million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme.'' She stole $250 million.
There are a number of these articles that I have here, but you still
have to do the math.
The fraud, just to give you an idea of the scale of our Nation's
borrowing, is only a couple of days of borrowing. How do I help people
understand the perspective of the scale and the fact that everything
that we as Members of Congress vote on is borrowed?
If you told me today that I have to balance the budget, I can do it.
Every part of government has to be shut down--no Park Service, no
Congress, no EPA, no FDA. Everything that is discretionary is gone.
Today, my math is that several hundred billion dollars of mandatory
spending have to be gone. We are borrowing so damned much money now
that we have to borrow money just to cover our Medicare obligations.
Do we understand? What if I came to you tomorrow and said that I can
end most of the fraud in the IRS and the government and the SNAPs and
all of these subsidies, like welfare and nutrition support programs?
We have actually had a bill for 6 or 7 years to use AI to audit the
Pentagon. The Pentagon, I think, last year was its ninth audit. It
failed. It could not pass an audit.
The same technology that we wanted to use to audit the Pentagon, it
turns out that all of these programs, you just put that in the back
end. Instead of doing the pay-and-chase model that, for some reason,
the left seems to embrace, why let the fraud money ever go out the
door?
I want to give you a simple example. How many of you have a credit
card? How many of you have ever gone to a place where you have never
purchased from before, and you stick your credit card in because I am
going to buy some fishing tackle or whatever the hell you are buying,
and suddenly, you get this text message saying: Is this you? Can you
put in your PIN? Can you put in your code?
That technology has been around for a decade. If the credit card
companies now have even more advanced AI to know that someone isn't
you, that it is fraud, and that the data on your application and other
things are fraud, you are telling me that we put billions and billions
at risk trying to help our brothers and sisters, only to later find out
that we have been financing scammers.
I have a passion for dealing with the long-run debt of this country.
How do I convince the American people that we are going to have to do
hard things when they are able to point and say that you haven't taken
care of the filth and the stealing from our society, from our
taxpayers? How do I get them to trust me when I still have scam artists
robbing them?
Mr. Speaker, we have proposal after proposal to use technology to
stop the scamming. Will it ever get a hearing here?
There almost seems to be a war to stop us from using technology
because--I actually can't give you an honest answer. We know that, for
years, I have been trying to fix technology at the IRS, and the IRS
union loses its mind thinking: You are trying to get rid of us.
When we have been doing the audit at the Pentagon, the unionized
auditors come and want to have meetings with me. They are concerned
that we are trying to get rid of their jobs. I am just trying to
protect the American taxpayers, but the technology already exists in
the private sector. It is time we adopt it.
On healthcare, I just want to give this as an example. Utah, a couple
of days ago, announced that they are going to allow AI as a pilot
program in Utah to prescribe. It is for the renewal of your
prescriptions. As I was talking about before, my calcium inhibitor, my
hypertension medicine, the same one I have had for decades, I could
plug in my data to the AI, and it would order my prescription, and it
would be sent to me. It functionally has almost no cost.
We have dozens of examples that I have brought to the floor here over
the last--actually, dozens and dozens of examples that I have brought
to the floor here over the years, showing how we could crash the price
of healthcare instead of doing the scam of let's just keep subsidizing
the subsidy and the insurance companies. How about we change the
accessibility and use technology to make it less expensive?
We are actually working on a thought experiment--and this will be the
end--a crazy thought experiment. President Trump and the White House
actually get a lot of credit, though we worked on this for years.
Glutides, GLP-1s, I believe by the end of this month, one of the tablet
versions will be available for $149 a month.
If obesity is responsible for 47 percent of U.S. healthcare spending,
according to the Milken study, what would happen in our society,
particularly where we have States where technically over half of their
populations are considered obese? What would happen if access to the
drug and, hopefully, nutrition and all the other things that need to go
with it--but just do this thought experiment with me. The lobbyists
weren't able to stop access to the glutides.
You might be on the cusp of a revolution of people who are morbidly
obese, who have multiple chronic conditions, and who are losing their
feet are about to get healthier.
Let's actually start accepting the technology, thinking creatively.
With that, Mr. Speaker, we might be able to do some amazing things out
there.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________