[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 115 (Wednesday, July 15, 2026)]
[House]
[Pages H4537-H4540]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1840
                      OUR BORROWING IS TERRIFYING

  (Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. 
Schweikert of Arizona was recognized for 30 minutes.)
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, and to the room, I apologize. I was 
doing a tour for a former firefighter, who actually was paralyzed in 
the scope of his duties, but we were close.
  Mr. Speaker, I am going to take 1 or 2 seconds here to try to 
straighten this out just a little bit.
  The presentation tonight is going to be a little bit technical. Sorry 
about that. If you don't like math, if you don't like demographics, if 
you don't actually want to deal with the math I am going to give you, 
now would be a good time to go find something on Netflix.
  I have been trying to make a point over and over around here that our 
borrowing is terrifying, and it is much worse than almost anyone is 
willing to talk about.
  We actually had some of the Joint Economic economists meet with some 
of the Penn Wharton modelers over the last couple of days. When they 
used their population statistics, some of the coming years are even 
uglier than we get from CBO, what we get from OMB, and actually what we 
get from some of the other scorers.
  Let's actually just sort of start this and put this in perspective 
and then understand there are solutions. You don't pay off the debt, 
but you can stabilize it.
  What is the number one driver of U.S. sovereign debt? It is shocking 
how many of even our brothers and sisters here in this building get the 
math wrong. It is demographics, and it is the one thing we are really 
not supposed to tell the truth about.
  Next year, there is a model that says we will have fewer under 18 
than we had 20 years ago, but we will have almost double 65 and up than 
we had 20-plus years ago. It is baby boomers, and we have gone decade 
and decade without enough children. It is just math. Is that Republican 
or Democrat? It is just math.
  Once again, all right, let's do this. For those of you who have 
actually paid attention over the years, you have noticed that over the 
time we talked about discretionary outlays. Today, it is down to about 
25 percent. What is blue here is what you remember that Congress 
actually gets to vote on. What is red here is almost all formulaic, and 
that is part of the problem.
  As Members of Congress today, we could all hold hands, sing kumbaya, 
love each other, get rid of every dime that is discretionary--now, that 
is nondefense and defense, but it is what we vote on--and you still 
couldn't balance the budget.
  Remember, last year, for every dollar we took in, we spent $1.43. So 
far this year--and, look, I am hoping it bends back down, but this 
year, the number is even worse.
  Interest this year, our model--just interest, total interest, so the 
interest we have to pay back the trust funds, the interest we have to 
pay the people who are willing to buy U.S. bonds, it is the second 
biggest expense in the Federal Government, so Social Security, 
interest, Medicare, Medicaid and ObamaCare subsidies, defense--once 
again, remember, defense, the thing that is in the Constitution, is 
actually number five.
  That interest may come in close to $1.3 trillion this year. That is 
about 20 percent. One of my charts is going to say 19, but my math is 
closer to 20 percent of all tax receipts go just to pay interest.
  I am going to say this two or three times in different ways. In 9 
budget years, we have a model that says 30 to 33 percent of all the tax 
receipts will go just to interest. So you pay a dollar. In 9 years, 
what happens if a third of that money's function is just covering the 
interest on the debt pileup?
  It is important to understand this chart and why I show it. I start 
with it all the time.
  All right. Let's keep doing this.
  Net interest as a percentage of total revenues would approach 30 
percent, and understand, we have a model that actually is over 30. It 
is actually as high as 33 percent.
  Here we are. Right now, we are in this slot here, so 19 to 20 percent 
of all of our tax receipts is going to interest in 9 budget years.
  This should terrify you. How many bridges, how much helping people 
get healthy, how many benefits is the interest paying? No. I mean, it 
does benefit those who buy the bonds, and there is the Ray Dalio theory 
that it is still money circulating back into the economy, but it is 
money that does not go to meet the mission of the Federal Government. 
It is basically paying for past spending.
  The ethical question here is: Is borrowing a tax hike? Now, for some 
of the antitax groups--I love them. I would cut spending dramatically. 
I voted that way, and I am in a tough district.
  Let's be honest, what is the running joke here, Mr. Speaker? No one 
ever got unelected by spending too much money.
  It is sort of perverse, but the bond market will basically be running 
the Federal Government in the next few years because of the influence 
it will have and the damage it can do to us.
  That is a percentage to understand.
  Let's actually dig in a little bit more. The boards, because I 
started late, are all upside down. So forgive me, I am going to be 
bouncing these around.
  The rising national debt will lower wages. This is something we have 
been looking at over and over. We keep talking about affordability. Two 
weeks ago, I brought an academic paper and showed some charts that 
basically said if mortgage rates--a 30-year home loan rate today is 
what? Today, it is running 6.5, 6.7. If we weren't borrowing as much 
money as we are today, it would

[[Page H4538]]

be 5.5, a full percentage point lower. I was showing how that is 
several thousand dollars a year on the average home price in America.
  The next time someone is talking about we need to do stuff on home 
affordability, we absolutely do. One of the most powerful things we 
could do is actually convince the bond markets that the borrowing isn't 
going to keep going up and going up, that actually the Federal 
Government--and, remember, it is federal governments all over the world 
just bingeing because of their demographics. They now have their 
retirement populations. They need to finance those benefits, and almost 
everything we are doing now is on borrowed money.

  Just to understand, there is a principle out there, whether it be 
your home loan being actually over a full point higher in interest 
rates because of Federal Government borrowing, but we are also 
suppressing your wages. Because that capital, when it is in the market, 
helps a business, plant and equipment, keep investing in more 
productivity. Higher productivity actually means you can pay people 
more.
  Remember your old high school economics class? The two ways you raise 
wages: inflation--well, that doesn't get you anything; it just means 
your wages go up, but your purchasing power has gone down--or 
productivity. You are making more whatever you did because you invested 
in plant and equipment or better processes or better technology. That 
technology can't be financed because the Federal Government pushed up 
interest rates and consumed the capital.
  All right, that hopefully is making sense.
  Let's do this. Remember I was trying to talk about housing 
affordability? This is also another chart to just sort of understand 
what this means. On an average-priced home in my marketplace, which is 
the Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe sort of area, a home is just a little 
under $500,000 with no downpayment, so we just mortgage the whole 
thing. What if you could get what our model says, if we weren't 
borrowing so much, and get a 5.5 percent rate in today's market?
  If you actually look at what we have done to mortgage rates, that 
differential costs homeowners several thousand dollars over that year, 
just to understand what this does.
  Let's have a little more fun here. Now, I did this one because I am 
going to do a whole section here on labor force participation. You go, 
who cares?

                              {time}  1850

  It is a big deal, and we are seeing some really funky numbers out 
there in some of that, and some of it is because we are getting older. 
Some of it is younger people are entering the labor force later, but 
there is some hope on that side of the ledger.
  But there is some difficulty here. So I decided I would actually grab 
a couple of slides from Arizona just to sort of demonstrate labor force 
participation rates in Arizona. You see this red line here? So the blue 
is America.
  Why has Arizona crashed? Well, we actually had some problems. 
Arizona, particularly the Phoenix and Tucson area, had become sort of 
the back office, the call centers, the back-office accounting centers 
of America. Much of this type of job has now become automated, and now 
we are starting to see it in our job numbers and the number of people 
who are actually choosing to leave the labor force because they are 
older and they actually have given up looking.
  But take a look at this chart, and you start to understand what we 
are seeing, and this number is actually fairly recent. This is as of 
May 2026, so this is old data.
  We always think of Arizona as being this remarkable growth center. 
The reality right now: We have stumbled, and we are going to have to 
really do some things to actually start to deal with the reality of 
what is going on in our labor market.
  As you actually take a look at it even further--just because I love 
my State and I care--this is the national unemployment rate. You see 
this spiking here? This is basically us right now, particularly what 
has been happening over the last several months. Our employment rates 
are actually really starting to spike up more; we are starting to see a 
real differential in Arizona compared to the rest of the country. This 
is what happens when you don't fixate on bringing the next generation 
of employment into your marketplace.
  All right? So let's geek out a little bit more. I am going to show 
you this chart because it is absurd. It is a chart that makes me--
Social Security actuaries basically published a report, what, 3 weeks 
ago, and, yes, I have a tabbed copy, and I meant to bring it up here, 
but we were out doing the tour.
  I want you to see something. You tell me how the Social Security 
actuaries came up with this number. So right here, this is actually the 
U.S. population and they have it falling and falling and falling. So a 
little beyond--so call it 2027, and then, suddenly, they have the U.S. 
population coming back up.
  We don't see this on Census Bureau data. We don't see this in some of 
the university data. We don't see this on some of the population 
statistics groups. Somehow the actuaries for Social Security actually 
say that we are going to get several years down. The population is 
going to--you know, birthrates are going to continue to fall. Fertility 
rates are going to continue to fall, but then, suddenly, magically, 
they are going to come back.
  And that is why so many of us are so concerned about the long-run 
numbers they have published, because this growth rate in fertility 
population, I don't think matches reality.
  When you have people talking about in 6 years to 6 years and 3 
months, the Social Security actuaries have the trust fund being empty, 
but don't worry, because the long-run rate is we are in real trouble. 
But it actually has, we believe, completely unsupportable population 
statistics in it.
  All right. So that was my attempt to mock the Social Security 
actuarial report.
  I am sorry for me going fast, but I only have about 20 more minutes 
to try to do this.
  This chart is really, really important, and it is new to us.
  So net entries into the labor force. If the Social Security trust 
fund is empty in 6 years and 3 months, if the Medicare trust fund is 
empty pretty much at the same time, the model says that if we follow 
the law, those of us on Social Security will take a 22 percent to 24 
percent cut. That means the doubling of senior poverty in 6\1/2\ years 
to 7 years from now.
  The Medicare trust fund will be empty. One of our problems in the 
Medicare healthcare spending is that we refuse to have a conversation 
of how to lower healthcare prices. We keep having discussions of how to 
manipulate and do financial engineering on healthcare. So we have 
turned healthcare into a financing issue instead of the adoption of 
technology, where you can functionally wear your own medical lab, you 
can use technology to actually refer yourself, those things. Because we 
are terrified to actually explain to the armies in our hallways who are 
here lobbying us that in less than 7 years, Medicare spending will 
double.
  It will go from $1 trillion last year to some 6 years to 7 years from 
now, $2 trillion, and, at that time, the trust fund is empty. If you 
are a hospital, you are taking at least a 12 percent cut.
  This is what is happening in the numbers. Why this is important is 
that: One of the ways you grow an economy is either with a stable or 
growing population, and particularly if that population has risen in 
skill sets. That is why so many countries around the industrialized 
world fight like hell for talent-based immigration.
  You don't bring mass poverty across the border. You go out and 
recruit really smart people, because they pay a hell of a lot of taxes. 
This chart is basically saying that in just a few years, our labor 
force actually starts to decrease, and that is 2.8 million in 2030. 
That is how many years from now, Mr. Speaker? It is 2026. So think of 
this. In 4 years, the data says that the U.S. available labor 
population actually starts to shrink by over 2.8 million people.
  Now, you tell me. How am I supposed to make the money, the math, the 
data, and the finances work for these programs? You have to do the 
unified theory of--whether it be a talent-based immigration system, the 
adoption of

[[Page H4539]]

technology, the redesigning of incentives, you are going to have to do 
dozens and dozens of things, and we are not willing to do that yet.

  All right. Look, this is a complicated board. It doesn't work on 
television. It doesn't really work on a floor speech, but I just need 
you to understand that what we are looking at is because we are aging 
as a population without enough young people, that our percentages of 
who are available to us--this is 2026. This is 1977. It would basically 
explain that when I was a kid in the 1970s, for every dollar we spent 
on seniors, we spent almost $7 on people who were functionally young.
  Today, that number has flipped, and it has just flipped because the 
demographics have flipped. It is the same thing as what happened here 
with who is available to be in the labor force.
  Much of our labor force population now is much older. The jobs 
available for the young are half what we had when I was young. It is 
just baby boomers.
  We knew people were going to turn 65 for how many years? I mean, this 
place, in some ways, is so incredibly absurd in its unwillingness to 
basically do basic math. I remember sitting in a statistics class in 
around 1981, and the professor then was talking about what baby boomers 
meant to the economy. Here I am, a Member of Congress all these years 
later, and it is like we are just now discovering it.
  All right. Here is actually something--it is hopeful, but the next 
slide will actually take the wind out of your sails.
  So prime-age labor force participation, so the people we consider 
sort of in their prime working years, actually, we are doing really 
well here. Some of the growth in the economy, some of the investment in 
the economy, for prime age, we have 84 percent. But here is my problem: 
Labor force participation of those 55 and up has been crashing.
  There are lots of reasons to debate this and discuss this. Is this 
skill sets? Is it the adoption of technology? Is it the wealth effects 
of as asset prices have gone up so much, we have people who are able to 
retire early? It is a combination of everything, but these workers are 
often our most productive.
  So just understand that prime working-aged people are actually doing 
really well working and being in the labor force. Those of us who are 
older, we have been disappearing like crazy, and we actually see that 
in our productivity numbers.
  All right. Mr. Speaker, I warned you this was going to be a little 
geeky.
  Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Arizona has 10 minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Excellent. I am probably going to use every one of 
them. No, I will try to go as fast as I can here.
  The U.S. population age 65 and up, and I go back to 2011: 41 million. 
This year, I have 63 million.
  Okay. Wonderful. I am one of these. I am basically 64. Now, 
understand, my wife and I are both 64, and I have a 4-year-old and a 
10-year-old, so we are very optimistic about the future, or we are out 
of our minds, but we all knew this was happening.

                              {time}  1900

  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. We did what to shore up the trust funds? We did what 
to basically incentivize our brothers and sisters to stay in the labor 
force if they wanted to?
  We had dozens of things--I have been here 16 years, and I have spent 
most of that time trying to get this place to actually deal with the 
reality of let's save Social Security. Let's actually save Medicare. 
Let's do those things that help us grow. Let's adopt the technology so 
we can crash the price of healthcare.
  I have had some success on the edges, but I lose to the armies of 
lobbyists that are in the hallways here that lose their minds because 
we may change their business models.
  Mr. Speaker, we are now borrowing about $90,000 every second. Today, 
we will borrow about $7 billion. The current burn rate so far this 
fiscal year, just this fiscal year, we are going come in close to $2.2 
to $2.3 trillion of borrowing, and yet, we have higher interest rates.
  How long is the bond market going to keep saying we are going to 
finance you because how much of the benefits that our brothers and 
sisters who are older have earned we are actually borrowing the money?
  Seniors per hundred workers--and actually, here is just the simple 
math. How many of us grew up always hearing you have got 23 people per 
retiree, and that is how we finance Social Security? I have shown some 
charts here where in the end of a decade from now, you have about 2.3, 
and it is this: In 2011, we had 21.9 working-age folks per senior. 
Today, actually, that number has eroded 47 percent increase in that 
change. It is almost a 50 percent change in that time, and it actually 
steepens. Part of the steepening isn't because we have more seniors. It 
is also because we have substantially fewer young people.
  All right. Mr. Speaker, 65 will continue to grow as a share of the 
population. In 9 budget years, 21.4 percent of the population will be 
in their benefit ages. Our system wasn't prepared for this. In 25 or 26 
months from now, I should have double checked the math, over half of 
the Federal spending will go to those of us 65 and up. That is not half 
of the tax receipts.
  Remember, if we are borrowing $2.3 trillion on top--but think about 
that. Our government functionally is an insurance company with an Army.
  All right. This is actually one of my intense frustrations. Let's 
take a look. The trustee's report projects this significantly more 
optimistically than the other sources. Remember I showed you a chart 
there, and I was somewhat mocking the trustee's report, basically 
saying they have this magic thing where fertility rates crash and crash 
and crash, and that is within the next 9 years, and then suddenly, 
magically it explodes upward. No one else has that.
  Here is the Medicare and Social Security actuary's trustees saying, 
oh, well, we are going to go along, but magically when we get to 2030, 
they are going to start to go up. This has created a distortion. That 
is actually why you see groups like my Joint Economic Committee, Penn 
Wharton, so many of the others, saying the trustees are missing it. The 
debt the United States is in is dramatically more devastating.
  Mr. Speaker, 2030, 2035 isn't that far away.
  I am sure we are all going to get together and decide we are going to 
do a debt deficit commission. I am sure we are all going get together 
and lay out the incentives of how we actually manage this crisis. I am 
sure we are going to do those things to convince the bond markets that 
we are creditworthy because here is part of the frustration.
  Greece, today, can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United 
States. Greece today has a better forward credit rating than the United 
States. We are now 13 or 14 on the credit stack where other countries 
can actually sell a 10-year bond cheaper than we can.
  And I keep wondering. I have been coming behind this microphone for 
almost a decade and a half. We have been introducing pieces of 
legislation that could revolutionize the costs of healthcare, could 
actually make government dramatically more efficient, and I almost 
can't get a single Member of Congress to consponsor any of this 
legislation because you have to go to war with all the lobbyists 
because it means changing the bureaucracies or the business models out 
there. It is like they basically have this attitude: Screw the society. 
Screw my kids. Screw your retirement, as long as I don't have to tell 
the truth about the math.
  Today, your government borrowed about $90,000 a second. Yesterday, we 
borrowed about $90,000 a second. Tomorrow, we are going to borrow--that 
is like $7 billion today. We will argue for hours here on the floor for 
millions.
  I need you to see a chart. If this is a billion dollars, if this is a 
trillion dollars, millions is basically this tiny little--the lack of 
calculators here is a destruction of this Republic.
  There are those who actually tell me, David, it is waste and fraud. 
It is this and that. I have done presentations to show you our best 
calculations of waste and fraud. It is a problem, but it is a sliver 
because the majority of what we call waste and fraud is actually the 
waste. It is the way we have designed programs.

[[Page H4540]]

  Mr. Speaker, I don't believe my brothers and sisters here are 
actually willing to do the hard things and tell the truth about the 
math and then redesign these programs because it means getting the crap 
kicked out of you by the lobbying and the business models out there. 
That means creating a revolution of taking on the debt and deficits.
  We will pay a remarkable price for the fact that the Penn Wharton 
models within a decade had us actually already approaching the no-go 
numbers of being able to sell our U.S. debt. At that point the bonds 
explode, and the bond market runs this country.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________