[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 10084-10088]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            DEBT AND DEFICIT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Bergman). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) 
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio 
(Ms. Kaptur), who has always treated me very kindly.


                           NAFTA Negotiations

  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, as NAFTA renegotiation approaches, I rise to 
call attention to the mammoth U.S. trade deficit with our NAFTA nation 
partners.
  Our current deficit with NAFTA nations is $74 billion. This red on 
the chart translates into tens of thousands of lost U.S. jobs, all 
while wages are depressed for North America's struggling workers. Since 
NAFTA's passage, there hasn't been a single year of trade balance for 
this country. That translates into lost jobs.
  Thus far, President Trump has failed to correct these trade deficits. 
In fact, the trade deficit this year has ballooned to more than $22 
billion from the same period in 2016.
  Balanced trade accounts in 5 years should be first on our agenda. My 
bill, the Balancing Trade Act, H.R. 2766, requires the administration 
to address trade deficits of more than $10 billion with any nation.
  As negotiations near, let's focus on key principles such as 
vigorously enforcing a first world rule of law; including labor 
provisions that allow workers across this continent to improve their 
standard of living and outlaw labor trafficking; enact environmental 
standards for human health and forge an agricultural labor agreement 
that helps displaced farmers; reform the unaccountable tribunals called 
Investor-State Dispute Settlements so that they work for people, not 
just big corporations; address currency manipulation; and, finally, 
stamp out the illegal drug trade that is plaguing this continent.
  The wealth NAFTA created has not been shared by all, but only a very 
few, and often only the very rich. Our foundational principle for NAFTA 
reform must be free and fair trade among free people with a rule of 
law.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, this is one of those things I partially 
do, I think, as therapy. About once every other month, I ask for a 
block of time to try to take a bunch of very complex numbers and try to 
find ways to put them on boards and demonstrate them.
  I am going to take a little divergence just for a moment or two, in 
response to some of the things I have heard today. We are actually 
going to focus on debt and deficit and what is actually demographically 
driving them, what is really happening in this country, and what is 
going to drive all public policy in our life.
  You have had a handful of things said about the ACA--many people know 
it as ObamaCare--and our replacement. I know some of the things that 
the Senate is working on.
  There is a math problem--and it is very simple--in the individual 
market. So if you hear someone turn to you and say, This is about 
healthcare for everyone or this is employer-based, or Medicare, it is 
not.
  In my congressional district, less than 2 percent of my population 
actually purchased in the individual market. So you have to start 
putting this in perspective.
  Here is your math problem. Because the prices kept moving up and the 
deductibles kept becoming larger and larger, half of our population--
that 50 percent that only uses 3 percent of healthcare dollars--stopped 
buying.
  I came across a number earlier this week--I haven't had a chance to 
vet it, but it was in a publication--saying that, of the 18- to 30-
year-old population that would be in the individual purchasing market, 
only about 17 percent of them were actually buying the insurance.
  So those of you who do math, you start to understand what happens in 
a world where half the population that really uses very little 
healthcare services doesn't buy a product and those who are purchasing 
it are those who are the high users of it.
  Remember, 50 percent of all healthcare dollars are used by 5 percent 
of the population. So you start to see it is this hockey stick curve 
that shoots up. That is the math problem that is trying to be fixed.
  In the last 3 years, if you are from Arizona, you have had a 190 
percent price hike in the mean plan and you have a single choice. So if 
we are going to be intellectually honest, should we hold our brothers 
and sisters around here to their own words and their own promises? You 
remember the promises a few years ago about keep your doctor, $2,500 
discount, lots of choices, lots of options, well, in Arizona, your 
prices have skyrocketed, you didn't get to keep your doctor, and you 
now have a single choice.

                              {time}  1745

  That is the reality of the math. Sometimes it is just so hard sitting 
here when you hear people just pulling things out of the air, and then 
you go to the bill and say: But I can't find that.
  And you get these weird logic trains that if this happened and a 
meteor hit here and this and that. At some point we need to be honest 
with the American people saying it is a math problem. This is not about 
removing costs from the healthcare system. It is actually moving 
around, how you fairly distribute the cost of it.
  This summer now we are starting to work on it, just like we voted on 
about an hour ago a piece of legislation that starts to remove cost out 
of the system. It is these future pieces of legislation, like the tort 
liability bill that was just passed out of the House here, that will 
actually start to drive down costs.
  Remember a really important conceptual idea: in 1986, there was a law 
passed here, signed by President Reagan, that said you cannot deny an 
American health services if they show up at the emergency room, if they 
show up at the hospital.
  So if you actually look at the number of procedures in society in the 
last 30, 31 years, pre-ACA, after the ACA came into effect, what we see 
in the future, we haven't removed procedures and costs. We have just 
moved the money around.
  All right. So what is happening in our country? Do you remember when 
the President introduced his budget, what, about 6 weeks ago, 2 months 
ago, and the gnashing of teeth and the wailing and the crying?
  We have a math problem, and it is based on demographics. We are going 
to see this multiple times in these slides. I am one of them. I am at 
the very tail end. I am a baby boomer. There are 76 million of us who 
are baby boomers, who are heading towards retirement. That demographic 
curve is

[[Page 10085]]

changing the cost structure of government.
  On the slide you see next to me, this is 9 years from now. Remember, 
we are working on, what, the 2018 budget? So actually less than that. 
This is what the world will look like in 2026.
  Do you see the Social Security being 24 percent of all spending? Do 
you see Medicare being 19 percent of all spending? Do you see interest 
on the debt?
  If you start to add up everything, you have to understand the world 
we are in is we are heading toward a time where three-quarters of 
spending--actually, even more than that are what we call mandatory. 
They are formulas. You get this benefit because you turned a certain 
age. You get this benefit because you fell under a certain income. You 
get this benefit because you served in the military.
  But what so many of us talk about as being government is becoming 
tiny. In 2026, which is not that long from now, 11 percent of the 
budget is going to be defense; 11 percent of the budget will be 
nondefense. So that is your parks, that is your medical research, that 
is your education. That is this branch of government. That is all the 
branches of government. So 22 percent will be what we call 
discretionary. It is what I get to come down here and vote on because 
everything else is run by a formula.
  So if you are someone who comes to me and says: I really think we 
should be going to Mars. I really think we should be doing this type of 
healthcare research. I really think we need this money in education.
  Okay. I agree they are all incredibly important in our society. Are 
you going to help me find a way to reform what we call mandatory 
spending, entitlements?
  Entitlements--because of the aging of our population--is the primary 
driver, are consuming every incremental dollar.
  In a decade, this government will be spending $1 trillion more, and 
every dime of that will functionally have gone into entitlements. We 
will have gone 10 years where what we call discretionary spending--you 
know, these little two parts here--has stayed flat for a decade.
  This huge growth in government is actually in Medicare, Medicaid, 
Social Security. Certain other entitlements are things you get because 
you fell below a certain income, and interest on the debt. Until we are 
actually honest about this--because it is so dangerous for a political 
person to even say the words ``Medicare''--we have to look at the 
numbers and understand the trust funds are bleeding.
  If you really want to protect our brothers and sisters and protect 
retirees, some of these are things we should have done a decade ago. 
And we keep avoiding them because so often Washington cares more about 
the political up side of attacking each side from even mentioning what 
is going on demographically and in these numbers.
  We are going to try to run through a bunch of these slides. Some of 
them, I apologize, when you blow them up on the big printer, they are 
going to get a little fuzzy, but we are going to just try to walk 
through these numbers. Hopefully, they will make some sense.
  Why is this slide up?
  This one is really important.
  When you get down to the very last bar chart, do you happen to notice 
something? You notice how they basically touch each other.
  That is 2027.
  How many years from now--how many budget years from now?
  So about 9 budget years from now.
  Do you see the lighter blue?
  Okay. That is Social Security. The gray is the Medicare. Then the 
Medicaid. Then you get up to net interest. Then you see the green at 
the very top, and that is other mandatory.
  Oh, heaven. Do you understand what that slide is telling you?
  That is saying, in 9 years, just the mandatory spending consumes all 
revenues, meaning defense will be on borrowed money, meaning almost 
everything you think of as government--once again, the Park Service, 
medical research, education--will be on borrowed money.
  At that point we are going to be borrowing probably a little over $1 
trillion a year every year, and it gets worse and worse.
  I am incredibly blessed. I have a 20-month-old, and since the 
blessing of her coming into my life and my wife's life, I think 
constantly: In the time I am spending here in Congress, what am I 
handing to her?
  Because right now the game is we spend it today, we consume it today, 
and we are going to let our kids and our grandkids pay it back.
  How does this become ethical?
  Yet if you listen to the speeches that happened on this floor today, 
it was speech after speech of: We want more money for something.
  At the same time--this is important--do you know how much we are 
going to borrow today?
  We are going to borrow over $1.6 billion today.
  I have 1 hour to speak here to you. Hopefully, if we are all blessed, 
I won't go that long.
  Okay. So $1.6 billion divided by 24. Sixty-six million dollars an 
hour.
  Start to divide that and just think about that is just the borrowing 
side of spending, because we are going to spend about $11 billion today 
on a $4 trillion-plus budget. So just understand that this is where we 
are going. This is already baked into the cake. This is the math.
  It is time for almost revolutionary thoughts on we need to look at 
the budget holistically. That means no longer having this little silo 
over here of this is discretionary, this is mandatory; and if you even 
talk about mandatory, you lose your political office.
  In many ways, this one is sort of doing the same thing but letting 
you see what is happening on the debt side.
  Now, why is the debt side so incredibly important to also focus on?
  We have to pay interest on it. We are borrowing money from your 
retirement, from the Union retirement, from the State retirement, but 
we are also borrowing money from a thrifty family in China, and we owe 
interest on it. We also make ourselves, as a nation, much more fragile 
to the world markets.
  We have been incredibly lucky the last few years of these stunningly 
low interest rates.
  How many of you actually believe the interest rates when you look at 
a 10-year instrument today that I think was at 2.2 and believe that is 
normal?
  If we actually just moved back to nominal interest rates, our 
interest would grow very quickly in the next couple of years to be 
greater than our entire defense budget.
  As you look at this slide, look out to 2026, many years from now, 
except it is not that long from now. Do you see the green bar up there?
  That is total debt. That total debt is starting to crash in on $30 
trillion.
  A bit of trivia. You often hear the differential people say: Well, 
there is public debt and there is publicly issued debt, and then there 
is debt where we borrow from the trust funds. Okay. And many of the 
economists really only score debt that is sold in the open markets.
  Okay. Fine. I understand that is the practice, but there is something 
that is intellectually lazy, because we still owe the money back to the 
Medicare trust fund, to the Social Security trust fund. It has been a 
while since I checked this, but I think last year I checked, and we 
were paying a 3.1 percent interest spiff. So we pay a higher interest 
rate for borrowing those moneys out of those trust funds.
  Do we have an obligation to pay that back?
  Of course we do. But for the intellectually lazy, it is just so much 
more comforting to say: Well, let's just not look at that because, if 
we look at that, we are already over 100 percent of debt-to-GDP when we 
put in those dollars we have loaned to the general fund. Let's just 
call it that.
  Let's move on to the next one. If you look at this slide, you notice 
there is starting to be a theme here. I am trying desperately to get my 
brothers and sisters in this body to understand the greatest threat to 
our society is the money we are spending that we actually don't have a 
way to pay for. If you actually look at demographics and where this 
debt curves, it just blows off the charts.

[[Page 10086]]

  This is an interesting little slide. This is a CBO slide for 2027. 
When you actually look at it saying: Okay. What does the world look 
like if mandatory-- Okay. Do you see the blue?
  That is mandatory and defense spending. Because many people say: 
Look, we are going to spend on defense.
  We will be down to only--11 percent of this budget will be things you 
think of as government. Everything else will be entitlements or 
defense.
  Just as a perspective, we did this slide just so you could sort of 
see. I hear candidates running for office say: We are going to take 
care of waste and fraud, and that will balance the budget.
  Really? When only 11 percent of the budget in just a few years will 
be everything that isn't mandatory or isn't defense?
  You have got to understand the scale.
  This one is a little hard to read. I am going to reach over to it and 
play with my pen.
  When you actually look at this, what I am begging of you also to 
understand is--I think this is the 2016 year--we spent actually a bit 
over $3.9 trillion, but we only took in $3.3 trillion.
  You see the nature of the differential?

                              {time}  1800

  And when you start to look at, first off, the beige there in the 
upper, we have been really blessed with incredibly low interest rates. 
So at a time where we should have actually been having an interest bill 
that would have been approaching a few hundred billion, we had less 
than $250 billion.
  Now, the dear Lord and the interest markets have been very, very kind 
to us. When you actually look at the curve, so much of the spending, 
once again, is what we call mandatory. But if you actually look at--we 
will call it the rust over there, something most people don't 
understand. I am going to reach over and point to what is the 
individual income tax portion. What most people don't understand is the 
individual income tax is the majority of the income to this country 
that is not intended for one of the trust funds.
  If you actually look at the corporate income tax, it has been going 
up, but it is still a fairly small sliver. Now, why did that change? 
And so often I will get people that bring me charts and say: ``David, 
25, 30 years ago, the corporations paid so much more.'' Well, also, 25, 
30 years ago, there was this new concept of pass-throughs: LLCs and 
partnerships.
  So what happened is many things that used to be corporations in the 
fifties, sixties, seventies, up and through the eighties, at the end of 
the eighties there was this revolution where States all over said: Hey, 
why don't we create these pass-through entities; they're more tax 
efficient.
  How many of you actually have had an LLC? Well, that is a pass-
through entity. But that is where you actually see the shift of 
corporate taxes going down and individual taxes going up. It is not 
that corporations all of a sudden start escaping taxes. It is their 
taxes now were actually booked as individual income. Just to 
understand, so when you see those charts, you have got to be able to 
sort of process and think that through.
  This is sort of important to understand where the taxes are. But, do 
you see that circle there, that 40 percent of the entire curve? That is 
payroll taxes. That is the income that goes into your unemployment, 
your Social Security disability, your Social Security, your Medicare. 
Those are revenues that are specifically for either your retirement 
future, if you have a break in your employment, or, God forbid, you 
become permanently or temporarily disabled, with Social Security 
disability having its definition of what temporarily disabled is.
  Just to understand, those are our revenue sources.
  Then you will see the little slivers on the bottom, and some of that 
is tariffs and some of the other fees that come in, partially through 
trade.
  I know, sometimes these slides are a little hard to see, so we 
actually blew a couple of them up. The idea here was just so you could 
actually see the total revenues.
  Now, this is for 2017, so this is our projection of what is going on 
this year.
  And my wife, right about now is when she would typically start 
texting me and saying I am putting everybody to sleep. But I am married 
to an accountant, so that could explain why we have no friends.
  That is the payroll taxes.
  Do you see the far side? Let's call it turquoise. That is the 
individual income tax. That is why those of us on the Ways and Means 
Committee, when we are actually working on tax reform, many of us 
believe we have to sort of do an organic, a unified budget or a tax 
reform proposal that actually does everything from what you see here, 
corporate, which actually is much of our job engine, over to the 
individual, which is also now a huge portion of our job engine.
  Do not let someone just talk about lowering rates and not also 
understand that what you see on the individual side may be what you pay 
as a worker, but also, if you are an employer but you are organized as 
an LLC or partnership or pass-through, you are also on that side, just 
to know it is out there.
  Now we get to some of the more fun stuff.
  You were just looking at some of our revenues. We already know that 
this year, if you use the President's budget--or Office of Budget and 
Management--we are about $600 billion short. If we use that of the 
Congressional Budget Office, we are, let's just call it, $550 billion 
short, meaning we are spending that much more money than we are taking 
in.
  But, once again, let's actually just look at where we are spending 
the money. So the turquoise, Social Security, Medicare, and other 
health programs, so Medicare and Medicaid. National defense is this. 
Then come over here. This is everything else, and this is interest.
  So, last year, we spent about $245 billion in interest. This year, we 
are still blessed with incredibly low interest rates. We are only 
expecting about $266 billion in interest. Still stunning amounts of 
money. But the little white area is what most people will think of as 
government.
  So if you look at last year--and the nice thing about using this one 
is it is booked. We know what it is. We took in $3.3 trillion; we spent 
$3.9 trillion. You already start to see the structural difference.
  So, if you actually start to come over here, now this is much better 
than it was a few years ago. The problem is, in this fairly strong 
economy, it is closed, and now, demographically, it is about to start 
to move away from us. This is the line you always have to constantly 
think about.
  If that is my revenues and I drop my line down, you have to start 
understanding that everything beyond that line is borrowed money. Just 
visually, I have always found this easiest when you actually start to 
show different groups saying: ``Look, this is just where we are at.'' 
And then you will stand up and say: ``Hey, why don't we do this? Tell 
me what I can cut because you want a balanced budget this year.''
  All right. Understand the math. If we are going to borrow $600 
billion, that is most of defense.
  Okay. How about the other side, everything else we call 
discretionary? We could actually eliminate all of it and, believe it or 
not, you still don't have enough money to cover the borrowing. So, if 
you are borrowing $600 billion this year, I believe that is greater 
than all of the nondefense spending in the government this year.
  So let's actually start going through a little bit more where we are 
at and what is actually about to happen. The frustrating thing here is 
we have a number of charts that we have worked on about why we have 
been so off on our economic growth projections. If you go back a couple 
of years ago, we had these fairly rosy pictures where we were going to 
be, yet the country has not grown nearly fast enough.
  We are hoping this year, with the new administration, you are 
actually starting to see economic growth that will take care of a lot 
of these sins. I

[[Page 10087]]

think GDP now, as of a couple of days ago, the Atlanta Fed's calculator 
was at about 2.9 percent of GDP. You would like to be substantially 
higher, but if we could hold 2.9 through the rest of the year, we will 
take it because it is so much healthier than where we have been the 
last few years.
  Why this is important is, I just want to show, the Congressional 
Budget Office's baseline for 2017, $559 billion more spending than we 
are taking in. But I am going to reach way over here and say, hey, what 
does the world look like 10 years from now? Ten years from now it is 
saying the annual shortfall, the annual borrowing, will be 1.4--
actually, let's be accurate--$1.408 trillion.
  So just the borrowing in 9 budget years will be greater than all of 
the discretionary spending of this year. And it is growth in 
entitlements; it is growth in mandatory spending.
  Why isn't that what you hear behind these microphones all day long? I 
have to believe that those of us who get behind those microphones, we 
love our kids and we love our grandkids, but this is absolute 
decimation of the future.
  And do not blame the parts of the government that we vote for, the 
discretionary, because the math doesn't show that. When you actually 
take a look at this, you see the darker and the lighter. The darker is 
defense, the lighter is nondefense.
  One more time, I know this is sort of geeky. But if you actually look 
from 1996 to 2001, yes, we have had certain economic upheavals; we have 
had an attack on our country. But if you actually look at the 
percentages of gross domestic product, which is how so many economists 
sort of look at our spending and say, ``Hey, you are spending 3 percent 
over here of your GDP on defense,'' it is pretty much identical where 
we were last year as to where we were 10 years or 20 years earlier.
  So, once again, what is exploding on us? Well, if you want to break 
it down, if you actually look at the different categories--and we are 
only going to do this slide for a second--the different categories will 
have stayed almost flat in the discretionary area for 10 years.
  So what is happening in our society? We are getting older. Something 
I thought was just fascinating because I have a great interest in the 
reality: We knew people were going to be turning 65. We knew baby 
boomers were going to be turning 65 for how many years? This body knew 
we had 76 million of our brothers and sisters who were born in an 18-
year period that would be moving into their time with their earned 
benefits, and we did what to prepare for it? So we are now about our 
fifth year into the baby boomers retiring, and we are now beyond the 
inflection point.
  If you went to school many years ago and you sat in a demographics 
class, they talked about, oh, in the 2000s, there is going to be this 
time where you are coming up against this inflection where the spending 
is going to explode.
  You are going to see a couple of slides in a moment where I am going 
to show you what has happened now where, when I was a child, for every 
$4 spent for children, $1 was spent for seniors. Today, that is 
reversed. There is some math difference in there and there is some 
population difference, but that is where we are at.
  This is an interesting slide. You do understand, as a nation, we 
functionally have zero population growth without immigration. In about 
25 or 30 years, the country of Nigeria will have more population than 
the United States. So when you hear someone talk, saying, ``Well, I am 
uncomfortable with trade,'' they have got to understand, if we need 
consumers for our products, we need to be finding these countries that 
are going to have lots of young people, and they are our future 
markets.
  We in the United States are moving down. I think our average age this 
year is 37.2, and that will continue to go up for about the next 25 
years.
  I just put this up because it is fascinating seeing where the young 
people are going to be in the world, and we need to start thinking 
about, if we are getting older as a society, how do we still use our 
intellectual prowess, our creativity, our manufacturing prowess to make 
things that are desirable to growing populations, and let's make sure 
we have built a world and environment here where we can sell things to 
them.

                              {time}  1815

  Because if we don't, we don't have the market ourselves. We are not 
going to have enough young consumers. So you have got to take that into 
reality.
  Once again, this one is a tough chart. It is on here just basically 
to understand what is happening in the world. What is incredibly 
fascinating is many Americans see China as our primary competitor, and 
in many products they are.
  On high-value products, countries like Germany, actually, are more of 
a competitor. But do you see this line here, this collapse? That is the 
Chinese demographics. If you understand that line, you understand a lot 
of things that China is doing around the world in trying to buy assets 
that produce income so they will actually have an income stream to 
start paying for their senior population.
  The United States is this dark here, and you will see--here is where 
we are at. We are sliding. But look at how many of our trading partners 
also are in the same demographic curve. It is just worth understanding 
that when you see many of us who lean towards being free traders, we 
are looking for where there are populations in the world that we can go 
sell things to. I am an American; I want to sell you something.
  Now, within the Nation, just fascination, if year 2000 the average 
age in the United States was 35.3, 16 years later, we are 37.9, that is 
a huge shift. I know that may not seem like a big difference when you 
start talking about two-and-a-half some points. That is a big shift in 
16 years on average age.
  But also what is fascinating is for those of us out in the West, we 
will actually be somewhat younger than the middle of the country and 
back East. I am blessed to be from Maricopa County, Arizona, the 
fastest growing county in the country. Come visit us. But it is also to 
understand that this aging of America also is going to require 
different societal needs, and different States are going to have very 
different approaches.
  If you actually look at a State like Utah, it remains fairly young. 
Some of our States back East actually get quite old and are going to 
actually have very different societal needs.
  This is the mandatory spending chart. I actually wanted to spend just 
a moment over here on some of the percentages. This one I know is 
really hard to read, but if you actually start to look at the second 
part over here, ``discretionary,'' do you see all of those little tiny 
percentages? This is where a lot of our discussions get very 
disingenuous around here.
  We will have people coming behind these microphones almost acting 
like their hair is on fire because some dollars have been removed from 
this agency, or dollars are going to be removed from this spending 
program, and the unwillingness to understand the scale that we are 
talking about. It is just real simple.
  If that is every dollar of discretionary spending plus defense, and 
every dollar of mandatory, the mandatory is what, two-and-a-half times 
bigger? So if you are going to have a discussion of spending 
priorities, are we going to be a mature enough group to actually deal 
with the reality where the dollars are at? I promise, we are down to 
the last couple of these.
  So the share of the budget outlays, and this one is more--I am not 
being judgemental on this. It is just more of a thought experiment. 
This is actually from the Urban Institute, which it is always 
interesting to see a Republican using charts from the Urban Institute. 
This is a couple of years old, and the chart now is actually more 
aggressive. I just couldn't get the newest one printed.
  Do you see this little edge right here? This is sort of the Federal 
spending. Ten percent is going to children. Forty-one percent of the 
spending goes to seniors. It is just a thought experiment. We want to 
honor and keep our

[[Page 10088]]

commitments to the earned entitlements, but the reality of the 
demographics keep moving up, and as we keep those commitments, the 
pressure on everything else is going to get much more cantankerous, 
much more cranky, much more difficult.
  We have a saying in our office: It is always about the money. Some of 
the disharmony you hear around here is going to get louder because, as 
you have already seen, the trillion-dollar engine over the next few 
years that consumes the next trillion dollars is all mandatory 
spending, is all demographics. So that is just another thought 
experiment.
  Every once in while we will get the people who come to us and say: 
Hey, David, why don't you remove this program or that program? One more 
time, we are borrowing--so much for my writing--$1.6 billion every 
single day. And that is just the borrowing side, and we are spending 
close to $11 billion every single day.
  So on occasion, you will get a group that comes in and says: David, 
we want you to get rid of all foreign aid, but we want to make sure you 
still protect Israel, and we still want to help the countries that are 
trying to help us deal with narcotics.
  And you start to get down and say: Okay, so you want us to cut half 
of the foreign aid budget?
  Okay, great. Well, that would be about 14 days of borrowing--not 
spending, borrowing. Because remember, we are borrowing $1.6 billion 
every day. And there becomes the intellectual problem where you will 
get an individual who comes in and says: David, just take care of the 
waste and fraud. And there is waste and fraud out there, and we are 
going to have to do it. And we are going to have to be much more 
disciplined in the adoption and the use of technology.
  But a lot of that language is gimmickry until you have someone who is 
willing to step up and actually just talk about the demographics that 
are our Nation.
  So think about this: I will have stood behind this microphone--let's 
just pretend it is an hour. Do you feel like you got $66 million worth 
of speechifying? Because we are borrowing $66 million a minute, $1.6 
billion a day, and it is just not that.
  One of the reasons this is such a powerful chart--and this is from a 
private organization that does the U.S. debt clock. You do realize, the 
majority of debt in this country is borrowed.
  There was an article in Politico a couple of years ago that did this 
brilliant job. If you actually think about this, all of the student 
loans, all of the mortgages that have Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie 
Mae, SBA, all of these things, it was somewhere around 63 or 64 percent 
of all debt in the United States, you and I as taxpayers guarantee.
  The unfunded liabilities in Medicare itself over the 75 years, many 
actuaries have over $100 trillion. So when you see us fussing with each 
other down here, it is almost always about the money. And until we are 
willing to start talking about these numbers that are spinning out of 
control, the fussing is just going to get more and more angry until we 
step up and deal with the reality of what is driving our future, and 
that is demographics.
  Mr. Speaker, with that I yield back the balance of my time.

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