[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 6961-6963]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2120
                   DISPELLING THE POLITICAL FOLKLORE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is 
recognized for 30 minutes.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I actually didn't intend to do this this 
evening, but I got so frustrated with a number of the things I've been 
watching, both on television and from our brothers and sisters in this 
body, it became time to actually bring some of the slides we actually 
do in our town halls back in Arizona. I like to refer to it as a 
combination of truth on the numbers and also dispelling some of the 
political folklore that is rampant, both in this town.
  I'm going to say a number of things this evening that I promise you 
will offend all sorts of Members, all sorts of this Washington, D.C. 
But, look, I'm a freshman. I've been here 140-some days, and 
Washington, D.C., has systemically not told the truth to the American 
people. I don't know if they're fearful of looking the American people 
in the eyes and saying, Look, here's what we've done to your future, 
your kids' future, your grandkids' future is so scary that they don't 
get reelected.
  Well, I got elected to come here and do the numbers, and so my goal 
is very, very simple. The numbers are straight up. The numbers come 
from 2010 on a lot of the charts, so we know exactly what was actually 
spent. On a number of charts outside that, we're also going to use the 
President's numbers.
  But let's run through this. We were just watching Judge Carter a 
couple of minutes ago walk through some of the economic impacts of what 
happens with drilling. I'm going to even touch, through this, on the 
folklore of, well, let's go tax Big Oil and what it actually produces.
  First of all, the slide right next to me, this one we put together 
just to make it simple and visual. Imagine a country that borrows 42 
pennies, 42 pennies out of every dollar we spend. We all know that's 
not sustainable. We can't do this. You couldn't do it in your family 
budget. Think of it. Over the last couple of years, it's been tough out 
there. Your family, my family, we all cinched our belts. The American 
families got tough and did what was necessary.
  What did the Congress do? What did this government do? What did 
Washington, D.C., do? They just kept spending. But the way they spent 
is they found people who were willing to buy U.S. sovereign debt, and 
they kept borrowing. And today we now borrow 42 cents out of every 
dollar.
  Now, why is that so terrifying? Well, it's terrifying because you 
start to realize the speed the debt is growing, and then you start to 
understand some of the other drivers in that debt.
  One of the things that happened January 1 this year, you know, what 
was the big change? Baby boomers. Every 8 seconds, someone turns 65 in 
this country for the next 18 years. So think of that. Ten thousand a 
day for the next 18 years.
  That's why you see many of us around here saying we need to tell the 
truth how devastatingly ugly these numbers are, and that if we step up 
and deal with it now, we can fix it. But you can't deal with it with a 
bunch of silly rhetoric.
  So let's walk through some more of these slides.
  Right here is the 2010, and you see this blue. The blue is, we'll 
call it mandatory spending, entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social 
Security, interest on the debt. But look, when you step up, when you 
step up to what is functionally four budget years from now, because we 
just did the 2012 budget, looking at 2016, you start to realize the 
growth in the spending, the growth in the entitlements. One of the 
things that keeps not being shared with the American people is, when 
you look at our 2010, and the 2011 number here would be out a little 
bit further, we don't take in enough revenue today to even cover the 
mandatory spending. If you see our revenue line, it cuts through right 
about here.
  So think of that. Every dime of defense is borrowed. Every single 
dime of discretionary is borrowed. And we're about $100 billion short 
on even covering the entitlements, the mandatory spending. We borrow a 
little piece of those dollars that go into the entitlements, and it 
continues to explode in the future years.
  I know these are a lot of slides, but when we get down to the ending 
part, I think you're going to find some of them sort of fun. But we 
first have to walk through sort of an understanding of the pie chart.
  This is 2010. 2010, the mandatory spending was sitting about 63 
percent, 62 percent of all the spending in government. Defense 
Department, other discretionary. And when I said ``all the spending in 
government,'' understand things like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac aren't 
even part of this. They're off the books on this.
  Now, when you look at this line here, that blue, look how fast it 
starts to move up. In 2016, it goes from here, where we're about 63 
percent, and now we hit 72 percent. Think of that.
  We just did what? The 2012 budget. 2016, four budget cycles from now, 
the mandatory spending, the entitlements are consuming 72 percent of 
our budget. The amazing thing is, in that cycle, the money that is 
going to discretionary, actually, we predict to go down in those 4 
years.
  So you start to understand the mandatory is consuming what we are. 
You

[[Page 6962]]

get folks who start to raise their hands at some of the town halls and 
say, well, why not just raise the marginal tax rates? Let's go out and 
tax everyone a little bit more.
  There's some fascinating math on that, and we've got 60 years of 
history looking at it. This is one of my favorite charts. For someone 
that wants to follow this, you can actually go--and I have a tough last 
name--it's Schweikert.house.gov. You'll see these charts on there.
  This is when we had very high marginal tax rates back in the forties, 
fifties, early sixties, very high marginal tax rates. Over here is 
where we have very low marginal tax rates. And there's this normalizing 
effect. There's actually a couple of Ph.D.s who've written very 
detailed papers on this normalizing effect. Or even during times of 
very high marginal tax rates and very low marginal tax rates, guess 
what happens? We take in about 18.2 percent of gross domestic product.
  I don't know. Maybe in the math out there, maybe in the logic out 
there, maybe in the human nature there, when you tax people a lot, they 
find other ways to take their income. Maybe when you tax them low, they 
are willing to work more hours. But somehow, high marginal tax rates, 
low marginal tax rates, we basically take in the same percentage of 
gross domestic product, of GDP. It hits that 18.2 percent.
  So when folks look at you in the eye and say, oh, just raise marginal 
tax rates--we're going to tax the rich more; we're going to tax 
everyone more--it doesn't do it. It doesn't take care of this massive 
debt that is consuming us as a people.
  What you have to do is you have to grow that line, which is the size 
of the economy. You must grow this economy. Because as you start to 
look through these numbers, you come to the realization, yeah, we have 
a huge spending problem. But we can never cut enough. We have to grow, 
because it's two sides of this pendulum, and both of them have to be in 
motion. We have to grow, we have to cut the spending, and we have to 
deal with the reality that the mandatory spending, the entitlements, 
are eating us alive.

                              {time}  2130

  Let's actually start to walk on some of what I would like to refer to 
as political folklore.
  When we hold many of our town halls back in my district, and I am 
blessed to represent Arizona's Fifth District. It is an amazingly 
wonderful place. It is Scottsdale and Tempe, Fountain Hills, Ahwatukee, 
and Mesa, and we will often get hands that will pop up in the back of 
the room and say, ``Mr. Schweikert, or David, why don't we do this. If 
we go out there and tax Big Oil, we could balance the budget. Right?''
  They mean well. I believe the participants at our town halls really 
mean well when they raise that hand, because they have seen members of 
this body tell them that, and they haven't been told the truth.
  When you look at the numbers, here is 2011, hard dollars. You can 
call them subsidies, you can call them depletion allowances, you can 
call them incentives to drill and produce more petroleum products, but 
the gray here is fossil fuels. And just for comparison, we also put the 
$8.72 billion of the subsidies that go into green energy. But for the 
fun of it, let's just talk about this part right here, the $2.44 
billion that is in 2011.
  Well, think about this. If you are borrowing about $4.7 billion every 
single day, how can a Member of Congress look in the camera, look at 
you, and say, ``Well, if we would just tax Big Oil more, maybe that 
would help solve the debt problem?'' It doesn't even make a drop in the 
bucket.
  We can have a little fun with this, because I have been trying to 
find a way to talk about big numbers. I was blessed in my previous 
life; I lived in a world of big numbers. But how do you visualize $1 
trillion? How do you visualize $1 billion? How do you visualize $1 
million for many people? So we have been playing with the idea of, 
Let's make it time.
  So your government right now is borrowing about $4.7 billion every 
single day, every single day. So let's just think about it, $4.7 
billion every single day. Those taxes on Big Oil--let's make it this. 
Let's make it taxes on all. Let's just remove those depletion 
allowances, those tax credits, which are also tied to depreciation that 
all other businesses get. But let's just wipe them all out. Guess what 
it buys you? It buys you about 2.2 minutes of borrowing a day.
  Now, how many of you feel like you have been told that?
  You know, once again, we are engaging often around this place in 
political theater instead of math. That's been one of my greatest 
frustrations in my short time here: I wish I saw more Members carrying 
around their financial calculators so they could look the American 
people in the eye and tell them the truth.
  But think about that. The whole, we will call it, fossil fuels 
subsidies, tax credits, depreciation allowances, incentives to drill 
would buy you about 2.2 minutes a day. Oh, come on. And that's just 
assuming that every dollar came in, and you didn't slow the economy 
down and didn't slow energy drilling down or energy production down. So 
this is just throwing your hands up and saying, let's just pretend for 
a moment that we got rid of those, and it becomes pure income.
  Let's actually go to the next level, because there's always that 
other person that raises their hands and says, ``Well, David, I have 
heard that if we would go out and we would tax the rich more.'' 
Remember, that lame duck Congress last December extended what a lot of 
folks call the Bush tax cuts. Now, around here we often call them the 
Bush-Obama tax cuts because President Obama is the one who signed them 
in December. But they extended those tax cuts. And weren't those tax 
cuts for the rich, and wouldn't that balance the budget?
  Well, back to that small problem called math. Let's pretend for a 
moment that they hadn't happened, and let's pretend that it didn't slow 
down the economy, and let's pretend every dime that some folks have 
predicted came in. A lot of this place operates in a fantasy world. Why 
can't we? So we never had the tax extensions that happened in December. 
What would it buy you? Well, we once again borrow $4.7 billion every 
single day. It would buy you about 28 minutes. Think of that, 28 
minutes.
  So now I'm at my town hall. I've had two hands go up. The first one 
saying, ``Well, David, if we would tax Big Oil, then that would balance 
the budget.'' Well, what did we learn on the last slide? That was about 
2.2 minutes of borrowing every day.
  And then the other hand goes up saying, ``If we would tax the rich 
more.'' As a matter of fact, why don't we do in this slide that tax 
extenders never happened, so everyone, rich, poor, middle class didn't 
get the benefit of that extension of the tax cuts last December? Well, 
guess what. That buys you 28 minutes.
  So think about it. We are doing really well here. We are up to 28 
minutes plus 2.2 minutes. So now, let's see, what if we do this, 
because there's always the other hand that goes up and says, ``David, I 
bet you we could balance the budget and wouldn't have this debt and 
deficit if we did this: We tax Big Oil. And those Bush-Obama tax 
extenders that happened last December in the lame duck session, we 
never had that, because those help the rich. Oh, and by the way, if we 
had never had the wars, you know, if we didn't have Afghanistan, if we 
didn't have Iraq--and I believe actually in our number here it didn't 
even have Libya--we could balance the budget then. Couldn't we?''
  So we actually, literally a couple hours ago, sat down and said, 
Let's add it up, and let's make it on a per hour basis so the American 
people can understand the crazy spending that's going on around this 
place and how fast the numbers are eroding on us.
  Back again to our math: We borrow $4.7 billion every single day. And 
let's go back to our pretend world. Every dime of those oil subsidies 
and depreciation allowances and tax credits come in, and it doesn't 
actually slow down jobs or the economy and every

[[Page 6963]]

dime of those taxes were to come in. Even though probably if you did 
that, you would slow down the economy and people would work less and 
you would have less dollars. But we are living in our fantasy world 
here. And because we didn't have the wars, none of that money would be 
going out the door, even though certain portions of that are actually 
already built into the defense budget. But every dime that is equated 
to Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya.
  What would it buy us? Well, we are borrowing that $4.7 billion a day. 
Guess what? It buys you 3 hours of borrowing.
  Think about what you have heard around here, and how many people you 
have seen walk up in front of a microphone and a camera look you in the 
eye and say, ``Well, if we did these things, we wouldn't have this 
debt?'' They are not telling you the truth. All those together are only 
3 hours of borrowing.
  And, let's see. If I remember correctly, there's like, what, 24 hours 
in a day? I'm looking for some honest discussion about the other 21 
hours a day. You've got to go back to those first boards that I put up 
and have an honest discussion about entitlements, about the mandatory 
spending, because they are what are exploding on us. They are what are 
consuming us as a people.
  We can do this. We can save the future for our kids and our 
grandkids. We can make sure that these programs exist. But we have to 
do it rationally, and we have to for once do it honestly, fact-based, 
maybe someone actually holding a calculator. Because the rhetoric 
around here, the political folklore around here, when they are willing 
to look you in the eyes and base their whole world on something that 
only buys you 3 hours of borrowing a day, you are not being told the 
truth.
  We try to add literally two to four slides a week. We are engaging in 
a little project. We are a freshman office, but we have some very smart 
young people who are very good with their calculators, and we are 
trying very hard to find a way to make these gigantic numbers 
digestible so we can all understand them so we can have a rational 
conversation of how we save our country.
  If you will go to Schweikert.house.gov, you are going to find a 
number of these slides. As a matter of fact, all of them are on there, 
and every week, I promise you, there are going to be more coming. And 
maybe if we all start to tell each other the truth about the math, we 
can actually tell the truth about how we are going to save the country.
  With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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