Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 107 (Thursday, June 25, 2026)

[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 107 (Thursday, June 25, 2026)]
[House]
[Pages H4257-H4260]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

PRESENTING THE 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, this is sort of our weekly attempt to
see if we can use math to annoy people, so let's actually have some fun
here. I am going to try three different things in this presentation.
One, we are going to actually talk about the real driver of interest
rates, housing affordability.
The second thing we are going to actually talk about is sort of the
cycle of fraud in so many of these government programs. Yesterday, in
my Joint Economic Committee, we did a high-level fraud in government-
sponsored healthcare, Medicaid, and other programs--some wonderful
data.
Then, the third thing, we are going to step on one of the third rails
of politics, and we are going to tell the truth about demographics and
the financing of Medicare and some of the things we are going to have
to do to actually keep it stable.
Let's actually start to tell the truth. How many of you have seen
this chart? It has been one of my opening charts for year after year
after year, trying to help everyone--staff, Members of Congress, anyone
who is crazy enough to watch this--with the reality.
You see the blue area here? That is functionally the only thing a
Member of Congress gets to vote on. You get to vote on defense and
nondefense discretionary. Everything else is substantially on formula.
Why this is so important is that I keep trying to explain to people
to understand that Social Security is the number one spend. It is going
to come in about $1.65 trillion. Interest is the second biggest spend
in our government at $1.2 trillion. Medicare is $1.1 trillion. Medicaid
and ObamaCare, ACA subsidies, are about a trillion. Defense is actually
number 5.
The thing that is in the Constitution is number 5 in our spending
stack, and we have a problem. If anyone was paying attention in the
math there, if we are going to take in $5, $5.5, $5.25 trillion in tax
receipts, did you notice that by the time I got to the Medicaid ACA
subsidies, we were out of money?
That means this year, my math is we are going to borrow about $2 to
$2.3 trillion. Once again--think about this, Mr. Speaker--last year,
for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.43.
Remember, Congress just passed the housing bill. I voted no on it
because there are a number of things in there--being a guy who actually
has a background and actually even a degree in finance and housing, I
don't believe it built another house. It created some programs,
expanded this and that, but it didn't produce another house. It didn't
do the things necessary.

One of the hardest parts is having an honest conversation around
here--I am going to show you. We have actually done some academic
literature. Your 30-year mortgage today is going to be at 6.5 percent.
Mr. Speaker, how would you like to be 5.5 percent? Do you know why it
is a full point higher? U.S. government borrowing. When almost

[[Page H4258]]

every single day we are borrowing about $7 billion, about $98,000 a
second, you are competing with your own government.
Here, we put together a couple of helpful charts. Housing
affordability sensitivity to interest rates--think about this. If we
were at 5.5 percent--and this is sort of using what would be a mean
mortgage size in my community, Tempe, Scottsdale, your house payment
would be $2,828. Add in that extra 1 percent of higher interest rates
because we borrowed so damn much money, it is not $2,800. It is $3,100
a month. That premium that you are paying is an object of our
borrowing.
Did you hear a single discussion around this place saying, hey, we
are going to talk about housing affordability, maybe we could actually
convince the debt markets we are going to stabilize our borrowing.
Instead, every data point we have, it gets dramatically worse over
the next 10 years, and it is the thing we are not allowed to tell the
truth about, Mr. Speaker.
We have a problem. Some of the math says, next year, we will have
fewer under 18 than we had 20 years ago, but we will have double the
number of 65 and up. I will be one of them. If you look around
somewhere here, I think my 4-year-old is running around--yes, my little
boy turns 4 today. I am 64 years old, and I have a 4-year-old and a 10-
year-old and a wife my age because we are really optimistic about the
future, or we did really bad retirement planning.
Look, this is just math. I have tried presenting this, and Members of
Congress get mad at me because the hallways here are full of people
showing up at our offices right now demanding more money.

{time} 1430

So let's actually have a little fun here. ``Household Cost Impact of
Legislative Fiscal Policy. Cumulative Legislative Contribution Since
2015''--what the hell does that mean? It basically is saying if you and
I go back to 2015 and had 30-year mortgages, just the amount of
borrowing the Federal Government does has made that 30-year mortgage
$76,000 more over that 30-year time. That is what a single point of
interest on an average loan is in my part of the country.
What is the likelihood that we are going to convince our brothers and
sisters here that we are going to borrow less money?
The frustrating thing is you and I will go home, and we will have a
townhall or meetings, and this and that, and the public will turn to us
and say: It is all waste and fraud.
I am going to show you the slides. Waste and fraud are a big deal,
but it is a sliver. Our problem is our government functionally is an
insurance company with an army, and we are terrified to tell the truth
about it.
So let's actually have some fun here. Let's actually try to
understand where the real mismanagement of spending is.
We have more spending and leakage. What is leakage? I would argue
leakage is what we in the Joint Economic Committee have identified over
and over when we have written a piece of legislation poorly or the
lawyers, or CMS, or the Treasury have actually designed it, where the
smart lawyers out there find ways to exploit it.
We have done entire presentations here on something called Medicare
part C, Medicare Advantage. Mr. Speaker, 55 percent of our brothers and
sisters on Medicare use this managed care model. There is something in
there called risk scoring. There's something called a MedPAC report. It
is about that thick. We write it. We get it every year. No one bothers
to read it.
It basically says: Hey, Member of Congress, there is $100 billion,
$150 billion a year in what we would define as leakage, where these
insurance companies are able to come in and score grandma as being
sicker and, therefore, they get risk scoring, additional cash.
Well, that extra spending means we have to raise our borrowing. Do
you understand the problem? I just showed you our borrowing is raising
your interest rates.
We get over here, and higher interest rates cause us a real problem
because we make everything less affordable, and now interest is the
second biggest expense in our government. Some of the models actually
say that in a decade, interest will be our number one expenditure.
Look, when you have an almost $40 trillion debt, CBO's own report
said in 9 budget years--and this is without the recent higher interest
rates, without some of the additional supplementals and other borrowing
and spending we are about to do--in 9 years, the deficit is going to be
$3.1 trillion, and $2.1 trillion of that was just interest. $1 trillion
was actually the structural deficit. Hey, we are spending too much
money. Over here was $2.1 trillion that was just interest, and there
becomes the fragility.
I love that fancy word. Fragility means small movements of interest
going up, and it is a technical economic term, Mr. Speaker. It means we
are screwed.
The reality of it is, there is this whole concept--I have done
presentation after presentation after presentation about it--that is
called interest rate fragility. The bond market is about to run this
country. We aren't. What are we going to do to convince that bond
market--because, remember, we borrow money. The entire industrialized
world is borrowing money. China is borrowing money. Japan is borrowing
money. Now Germany is borrowing money. We are competing with everyone
for what is left in the world's savings.
What happens in the industrialized world when people are getting
older, and they are moving into their retirement years, and they are
not saving in the same numbers? You start to have this stress. Ray
Dalio talks about this all the time, and that is the world's savings
compared to the borrowing appetite. We have got a mismatch, and that
means interest rates go up.
Let's actually start to dig through some of the perversities we
identified in our Joint Economic Committee hearing yesterday, when we
were talking about where some of the leakage is in programs we have
designed. This isn't a--well, some of it is. This isn't something where
foreign nationals sneak into the country and set up a scam. Some of
this is we wrote a law, and we just did a really crappy job writing it.
So High New York Caregiver Pay--Medicare actually has a program where
States can set up a program where it is visiting. So you can have your
child, your cousin, your sister visit you on your Medicaid. We actually
have States like New York where the caregivers' salaries, just these
people who are coming and visiting you, are 50 grand.
Well, what happens if I come to you and say, over the last 5 years,
this program in New York City was the number one job creator? You start
to actually look at what is happening by categories, so Federal outlays
by major categories. We are going to bounce back and forth to try to
make the point that it is how we have designed the policy.
In 2011, you actually start to see where the leakage was. Here we are
in 2026, and we are spending $7.449 billion. Do you understand the
problem? Our tax receipts are only going to be about 5\1/2\ if we are
lucky. The rest of this ends up being borrowed.
So let's actually do the board that actually annoys most people here
when we get behind these microphones and say: It is waste and fraud. We
can balance the budget if we just got rid of that.
We can make a difference, but our best estimate is government fraud
is almost 7 percent of the spending. Think of that. We calculated it at
6.9 percent of our spending.
Did I mention a little while ago that last year, for every dollar we
took in, we spent $1.43? This is a hell of a lot of money, but it is 7
percent. Are you going to help me find the other almost 35 percent we
need? That is actually structural. That is how we have designed
programs. We have created incentives to basically exploit the system,
not help people get healthier, not do the most efficient things, but
the most profitable things. Then armies of lobbyists are all up and
down these hallways to stop us from fixing this.

Once again, Mr. Speaker, our best estimates, fraud in the Federal
Government, if you do everything, is under 7 percent.
Here are some of the numbers that get really uncomfortable: a large
share of Medicare spending on age 65. So this

[[Page H4259]]

is the distribution, just so you understand. We calculate that over the
next 6 years, Medicare spending will double. We will basically go from
$1 trillion last year to $2 trillion per year. It is not a conspiracy.
It is not Republican. It is not Democrat. It is just we got older, and
baby boomers are moving into the higher utilization year of their
healthcare benefits.
I have had this question over and over, but what about all the people
that aren't 65? Well, look, you have some of this population over here,
renal failure, other certain categories, where you are able to enroll
in Medicare, but it is still a very small population. The majority, 82
percent of the population, on Medicare is 65 and up. It is an earned
benefit.

{time} 1440

Here is one of the punch lines.
Mr. Speaker, anyone who is willing to listen--and this is just math.
It is not personal; it is just math--what do you think we spend as a
Federal Government?
Remember, the Medicare trust fund only takes care of a portion of
Medicare spending. The majority of Medicare spending actually comes out
of the general fund and your copays.
So let's take a look here. Here we are in 2026. Your Federal
Government spends about $20,000 per enrollee in Medicare. In 9 budget
years, it is $34,000 a year.
Now, what, there are 67 million baby boomers. Does anyone start to
see a math problem?
Medicare spending on people 65 and up will accelerate--and this
acceleration is just demographics. As the baby boomer population gets
older, they are moving into higher utilization years.
Okay. So we can actually take a look at this. Think of this. In 2035,
$2.13 trillion. So in 9 budget years, over $2 trillion will just be the
Medicare budget. Now you start to see what I mean when I talk about
that the debt is substantially demographics.
Let's see how many more of these we want to torture you with.
Medicare spending will continue to expand. Look, this year, it is a
little over 4 percent of GDP. In 9 budget years, it is over 5.6 percent
of GDP. Do you remember how we in the House, the Budget Committee, the
Treasury, we all talked about how we want to get down to 3 percent of
borrowing--3 percent of the entire economy. Okay. That is great.
If you add up everything, including the borrowing from the trust
funds, this year, we are right now getting close to 7 percent of the
entire economy is being borrowed.
Does anyone see the irony? In a few years, just Medicare is taking
5.6 percent of the entire economy, just for that one program.
All right. Let's see what else we can do here that actually drives
people a little bit insane.
This is how bad we have been in our projections and not
understanding. Now, understand, since 2011, think of the things that
have happened. We had the financing of the mortgage bubble from 2008.
We had COVID. We have actually had these things hit. But debt held by
the public per capita--and remember when we were in 2011, we were
basically $33,000 per capita. Today, we are over $92,000, and that is a
176 percent increase since 2011.
This breaks my heart. When I got elected, I was part of the Tea Party
wave. We basically were pledging fiscal sanity and fidelity to the U.S.
Constitution. I am not sure we are doing either of those these days.
So when I am showing you those charts, I am using the CBO
projections. Remember, they were saying this year we were going to
borrow about $1.7 trillion. My math is saying we are up to $2.3
trillion. Maybe I am a bit pessimistic, but CBO's own calculation is,
in 2035, we are over $2.5 trillion in borrowing. If you actually look
at their February numbers, they had $3.1 trillion.
Okay. Let's see if we can make some of this make sense.
This is always difficult to talk about, and what I am arguing for is
we, as policymakers--what can we adopt? What can we do? I have done
entire presentations here week after week after week of here are ways
we can get rid of duplicative MRIs, X-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans, and
put those scans on your device so that when you go to your next doctor,
it is there and we get rid of the duplicates. We think that could be as
much as $35 billion in 1 year, $350 billion over 10 years. The
lobbyists hate that idea because of the excess spending.
My reason for my rambling is there are solutions. You are not
magically tomorrow going to say that 40 years of falling fertility
rates, 65 years of knowing we had baby boomers--the demographics aren't
magically going to change.
What are we about to do to grow productivity so fast that we can make
up for a country that is now at zero population growth and that Census
had a prediction that sometime in the next 5 years, we will actually
have 1 or 2 years with negative population growth.
You are not used to hearing that about America, but take a look at
this. Seniors per 100 working age adults, and I go back to 2011. I had
21 seniors for every 100.
In 2025, the last year where we had the data, it went from 21.9 to
32.2. Just trying to make the argument, Medicare, Social Security,
today's worker pays for todays' retiree. The total FICA tax and the
total payroll tax don't cover the benefits going out the door.
That is why they have to reach in and cash in their special T bills,
their special Treasury bills. That trust fund in the Social Security
actuary report that came out a week ago basically says that in a little
over 6 years, it is gone. The trust fund is gone.
Now, we can geek out for a while and explain that we already started
borrowing that money internally because Treasury has already spent it,
but Social Security holds those T bills so they cash them in. Treasury
has to go out and borrow the money to send them the money so they can
send their checks out.
But under current law, when that trust fund is gone in 6 years, 3
months, everyone over 65 getting a Social Security check under current
law gets a 22 to 24 percent cut. We will double the poverty of seniors
at that time.
The U.S. population age 65 and up in 2011, 41 million; 2026, so the
year we are in right now, 63 million.
It is just math. What drives me insane around here, just makes me
angry, it is math. Didn't we sort of know how old we were getting?
Didn't we know about baby boomers?
Heaven, in the early 1980s, I remember sitting in a statistics class
and the professor at that time was talking about this, and that is 40
years ago.
Here is one of the toughest things: The population of young people is
in decline as the population of 65 increases.
For those of you who are uncomfortable with the discussions I have
had on this floor of legalizing technology that could disrupt the price
of healthcare, of moving to a talent-based immigration system instead
of the migration of large populations of poverty into the country, of
designing systems, of cures--see if I can make this make sense.
So much of our spending around here is to maintain misery. I would
argue that the most moral thing we can do, particularly in healthcare,
is the elimination of a disease, moving toward a cure. I will give you
the classic example of 15 years ago, Hepatitis C, we had hospitals all
around the country getting ready to put up liver transplant centers.
And then a drug comes along--it was expensive--what is it--Sovaldi,
and then a competitor right after that crashed the price. Now those
liver transplant centers are not needed.
Would you believe, Mr. Speaker, we had lobbyists here trying to slow
down access to the drug so those folks who had built the liver
transplant centers could actually amortize their costs?
If this is our demographics, are we going to design policies where we
can actually disrupt the cost of delivering healthcare?

{time} 1450

Yet, every time I talk about this, I realize we are not only talking
about disrupting bureaucracies; we are talking about disrupting
business models, particularly in healthcare. Cures are moral, and they
are really amazing economics.
A while back, I did a series of presentations on something we are not
supposed to talk about but we really should: that 47 percent of U.S.

[[Page H4260]]

healthcare was somehow related to obesity.
Think about what I just said: 47 percent of U.S. healthcare was
related to obesity. Maybe it would be moral and really good economics
and just compassionate saying: What are we doing in nutrition support?
What are we doing in gamification of helping people eat healthier, deal
with multichronic conditions? What are we doing in access to new drug
categories and other things that could help our brothers and sisters
get healthier and the economic value of that?
It turns out being the single biggest thing you could do is to reduce
U.S. borrowing. It turns out, Mr. Speaker, those folks who talk about
MAHA and these things, they are actually partially exactly correct.
Health. If the biggest growth of our spending is within those
healthcare categories, what can we do to lower the price of healthcare?
Is it rationing or working for it using technology and other things to
help our brothers and sisters get healthier?
All right. I am going to see if I have one last board here.
All right. Apparently, we didn't print it.
Mr. Speaker, we basically just ran through sort of three categories.
U.S. debt is raising the cost for all of you. You are paying higher
interest rates on your credit card, your mortgage, and your car loan
because of the insatiable appetite of the Federal Government. And,
let's be honest, the insatiable appetite of borrowing from the Federal
Government is because our public actually demands it. They want things.
They don't want to be told no.
Number two, we talked about waste and fraud and how real it is, but
it is structural in so many of our programs. It is a profit model for
many of those who use these programs, but even then it is still under 7
percent.
The third thing is the reality of what we are as a country. It is
demographics. We have a lack of young people. We are getting older. We
have a whole bunch of benefits that we are obligated to because we made
promises. We made a societal contract.
I can give you a path that we keep our promises, Mr. Speaker, but
every day we refuse to deal with the reality of the math it makes it
that much harder to protect the future.
The little boy that is sitting behind me, he turned 4 years old
today. The math says if you use the 6 percent generational discount
rate, which is reasonable in today's world, we need 104 percent of his
lifetime earnings just to pay the pensions of the Federal Government.
Is this really what we decided we are going to do to our kids and our
grandkids? It is what we have done.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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