[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 16499-16500]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




            STOP BUREAUCRACY FROM CRUSHING OUR OPPORTUNITIES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, first, I appreciate being recognized for 
these 5 minutes, although it is always dangerous when a Member starts 
walking towards the microphone and they are doing it because something 
hit their desk and it annoyed them.
  We have been working on something in our office to try to explain an 
intense frustration I have, and that is Washington and its embracing of 
delusional math. Look, I have only been here 3 years, and I have come 
to the conclusion that the single biggest problem I see is not the 
right-left continuum, but those who own calculators and those who 
don't; those who live in a world where math actually has a value. And 
this will make sense, hopefully, in a moment.
  I am right now holding a CBO report, the ``2013 Long-Term Budget 
Outlook.'' Yet I have not heard someone else come to this microphone, 
but there is just the beginning of a paragraph that should terrify you:

       Federal debt as a percentage of GDP in 2038 under the 
     extended baseline is projected to be about twice as large as 
     the amount estimated in last year's report.


[[Page 16500]]


  Do you understand what this report is saying? That because of the 
policies from this administration, the policies coming out of our 
bureaucracies and the things we need to actually deal with in this 
House, the numbers are almost twice as bad as they were last year. That 
is the speed we are going to hit 100 percent of debt to GDP. And the 
thing you need to understand is that it is worse than in the long-term 
budget outlook forecast because there are delusions built into that, 
because we here as a body instruct the Congressional Budget Office 
saying, Follow current law; that's what you need to budget off of.
  How many of us here come January when the SGR is up, and many of you 
will know it as ``doc fix,'' are going to hold the numbers, hold the 
current law with the understanding at the end of about a dozen years, 
doctors who see Medicare patients are going to be paid 73 percent less. 
So we will walk onto the floor here probably in December or January and 
fix the SGR so doctors are compensated so they continue to see their 
Medicare patients, and we blow up the numbers in the long-term budget 
forecast, and we do that on lots of things. So when you actually do the 
adjustment for math reality, policy reality, the long-term budget 
numbers are much, much worse than we talk about around here.
  And now to my point.
  A year and a half ago, we actually did something bipartisan. We did 
something called the JOBS Act. In the scale of things, it was small; 
but there were some neat things in there. One of the things I fixated 
on was something called ``crowdfunding,'' an opportunity to help the 
truly little entrepreneur. This was only up to $1 million, and it was 
using this thing called the Internet to be able to raise money so if 
you are the cupcake shop or the mechanic shop, or you have some idea 
where you can begin getting some angel investment and get going, well 
the SEC took a year and a half to do what was supposed to be a simple 
rule set, so they are a year late.
  And here is what they brought us: this is the law, these handful of 
pages, six, seven pages is the crowdfunding portion of the JOBS Act. 
Here is the 550-page proposed rule-set.
  So if we are in a world where we have crushing debt screaming towards 
us, and some of that is coming now because we are being told that the 
new normal is a 2 percent GDP growth, we need to be doing things that 
accelerate that economic growth, or we are in incredible trouble.
  So as the House, bipartisan, we passed the JOBS Act, which is one of 
the little increments that is supposed to reach out and help grow the 
economy, and then the bureaucracy hands us crushing rules that make it 
almost impossible to use.
  So for whoever is listening, watching, caring about things like the 
crowdfunding rules that are before the SEC, you have 90 days from now. 
Please go online, make comments, help them understand that this is 
supposed to be helping the next generation of small entrepreneurs in 
this country, and don't make it 550 pages of bureaucratic legalese. It 
can be simpler. We can handle this. We can do great things in this 
country, but we can't do it if the bureaucracy continues to crush our 
opportunities.

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