Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, for anyone out there who is insane enough to have C-SPAN on, I may suggest requisitioning a life.

If you don't want someone to talk to you like an adult, if you don't want someone doing big math, big numbers, and being serious, I am sure there is a video out there of a parakeet playing a piano someplace. Please leave now.

Today I was actually going to try to come here and do the happy, positive talk. I actually had put together some boards on some really good things that happened.

Then we made the mistake on my flight; the staff actually looked at the trust funds that were collapsing over the next few years.

People forget. The Medicare trust fund is gone within 7 years. We can't actually work out the math of how devastating that will be because about 40 percent of all Medicare spent comes through that trust fund. It is almost all the money that Medicare patients receive at the hospital level.

I do have one happy slide, so we are going to do that one, and then we are going to go on to the reality.

Let me sort of make a point. We are going to have the fight over the continuing resolution or the budget or these things.

People are going to do their political posturing, and we are going to fight and fight. Please understand. It is all important. It is rounding of the rounding of the rounding errors of what is really going on.

You are going to see some slides here where you have got to understand every dime we vote on as Members of Congress is now borrowed--plus another $300 billion--and that is in this fiscal year. It gets dramatically worse over the next few years.

If you actually somewhere in your head think: Well, if we just got rid of waste and fraud and got rid of foreign aid, we would be fine.

Foreign aid is 12 days of borrowing.

Why is it so hard for this place to grow up and understand the most basic parts of math? I went off track there. I apologize.

Let's go back. How many of you saw this article? These are happy things. These are also things that are moral. They could make incredible differences. They could also save billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars.

I have been tracking the researchers on this, and I think it is the University of Chicago. They had this crazy idea. We will give people a vaccine to train their body to attack things.

How about if we gave a vaccine to train their body not to attack things? If you think about it, multiple sclerosis is your body attacking your nerve systems.

One of the reasons I am interested in it, we had a horrible, horrible family tragedy in regards to multiple sclerosis when I was very, very young.

It is the concept of sort of an inverse vaccine to take on autoimmune diseases, and it turns out type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease.

I have been coming to the mike for years talking about the research on being able to replant islet cells back into the body, either through stem cells or the one that has been now FDA approved which actually is islet cells that are bleached from cadavers and adjusted with CRISPR so your body doesn't need antirejection drugs to know this concept of we are just going to teach your body not to attack. This is a big deal. There are some wonderful things happening.

Now, here is the really interesting question: Will we be so broke as a country and a society that the ability to actually make the investment to do what is moral actually lowers future borrowing?

Look. Today, we finally crossed the $33 trillion, and some people are going to light their hair on fire. It is a big deal. It is about to get dramatically worse. We are going to look back fondly on this number the way we are going right now.

Do understand we now have--and we don't bet money--but we do have a little pool going with some of our staff and some of our economists of what will the fiscal borrowing be this year.

Remember, the administration is trying to play some games where they are going to try to credit themselves back some of the student loan money that the Supreme Court said they can't spend, so we are actually looking at the real-life borrowing number, not the fiscal deficit number, which has a journal entry fraud in it.

As of a couple of hours ago so far this fiscal year--and we still have a couple weeks left--I think we have borrowed $2.158 trillion. Now, I don't want to win because I am the idiot who said we are going to borrow $2.2 trillion. Please understand, a year ago, the Congressional Budget Office, 2002 May, said, this year we would borrow about $860 billion. Does something seem wrong in those numbers--$860 billion? Now it looks like we are going to borrow $2.2 trillion and almost every dime of that growth is healthcare costs which have exploded, particularly Medicare.

Tax receipts have fallen fairly dramatically. So much for this Biden socialized economy. We have handed out a couple of trillion dollars of money to build factories, to subsidize this and subsidize that. This was actually their modern monetary policy. You now have proof in the pudding. They set off inflation, and tax receipts have actually fallen. If anyone wants to write an academic paper on modern monetary policy, you have got the laboratory right in front of you. It collapsed.

What is the third thing that has actually gone against us this year? Interest. The bond market has not been treating us kindly. We were playing with some math the other day, maybe another additional, on top of everything else, $160 billion of interest. Those are big numbers. Almost no one can process that sort of math, but let's actually walk through it in a way you can all understand.

If you look at the last 12 months, we borrowed over $72,000. We borrowed, not spent, borrowed because we are borrowing about 30 percent of all of our spending. We borrow about $72,000 a second, and $20,000 a second is interest. Next year, my math--look, I am a little more dour than some of the people around me, but my math has us closing in on $800 billion of interest, just interest, next year.

I am going to show you a chart. Please pay attention. That is almost all defense. There was a time this place would have been losing its mind if I came to you and said interest next year will be pretty much what we spend on defense. Oh, David, that could never happen.

How many times have you heard anyone come behind these microphones showing any concern? Instead, we are going to do the theater on rounding errors. I am going to stop another $50 million here. That is a big deal. It is fine.

Did I mention we are borrowing over 72,000 a second? This is really difficult math, and it is really uncomfortable.

Let's go back to my opening statement. If you are someone that doesn't like hearing something that is uncomfortable, please go watch something else.

What is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt? A bunch of it, at least

the current cycle, is a bunch of stupid things the Democrats did last year when they had power here. But no. Right now, today, and over the next 30 years, what is the primary driver? It is our demographics.

We got old. We made lots of promises. They are moral promises, they are commitments, and we don't have the cash for them. We don't have the cash flow for them, and we are going to run out of the borrowing capacity for them, but we are not allowed to talk about them because if you talk about them, you will get unelected around here because it is the see-no-evil thing.

We had a President stand behind that podium on the State of the Union and say, you are not allowed to talk about Medicare and Social Security, and everyone got up and applauded. That was immoral, absolutely immoral. In 9 years, we double poverty in America.

Last week, I came here and was showing some stories of the number of baby boomers who are in retirement living on the street and in that article it talked about how many more by the end of this decade are expected to be living on the street. This is retirement in America, and in 9 years we cut the average couple's Social Security by $17,400. That is the morality of this place, but you are not allowed to talk about it because that is difficult.

For those who are not good at math, but like pie charts, let's do this one. The entire discretionary budget--and this chart is a little off because the actual fully appropriated discretionary budget was $1.831 trillion, but we will use the $1.7 trillion because that is what they printed.

You have got to understand: What you see in orange, Members of Congress do not get to vote on. We should, but it was this politically safe thing to make Social Security, make Medicare, make veterans' benefits on a formula, they just happen. What we vote on is all of defense and the rest of what you think of as government--the State Department, the Supreme Court, our salaries. Every dime of that is borrowed.

My point here is just simple: If you have about $1.7 trillion, $1.8 trillion, that is the entire discretionary budget, including defense, and we are going to borrow $2.2 trillion this year. Every dime we vote on is borrowed, plus about $300 billion.

We will have people here who have little temper tantrums over rounding errors. Because these numbers are so difficult and so hard to get your head around, we will do the theater because the theater actually sells. Let's actually walk through how ugly some of this math gets.

I have done entire presentations of this concept of interest rate fragility. I just showed you that we crossed over the $33 trillion of borrowing. About $27 trillion of that is what we call publicly borrowed, the rest is actually transfers from trust funds.

The money that is in the Social Security trust fund gets borrowed by the Treasury, Treasury gives them interest. We are going to pay $50, $60 billion at the end of the month. It is our monthly interest that we pay out to the trust funds through borrowing. That is why I think my $2.2 trillion borrowing this year is correct. You forget about all the other bonds that have to be refinanced.

If any of you like to watch markets, go grab your phone and go look at what interest rates are right now on a U.S. 2 year. How about a U.S. 10 year?

You are at the very top of the range. You are seeing interest rates that we have not seen in a dozen years and that is what we are going to be refinancing, and here is the punch line: $9.6 trillion, $2 trillion of that will be new issue, new borrowing, but the rest of that is what we call refinancing. It is the bonds that come due.

When we are talking about these higher interest rates, it is not on the new virgin borrowing; it is on almost $10 trillion of U.S. sovereign debt that is coming to market.

There was this old adage that if I have a U.S. debt instrument that when it comes due, I will just put it right back in. That is not what happens.

Foreign governments start to roll out of U.S. sovereigns, but you also see other people that say, look, I can go get this interest rate, but now I can go buy corporate paper or I don't trust U.S. inflation, I got to go put it some other place.

If you are bringing almost $10 trillion to market in 2024, is there a chance of a stressed bond auction? Is there a chance of a spike? Sure, there is.

Now, we have some games with the fed and the Treasury we can play to gobble up an issuance, but the moment that happens, be prepared that the interest rates we have today look charmingly quaint.

This is the reality. This is what we have done to ourselves, but we are not allowed to talk about it because that requires math.

I sort of already gave this one away, but let's do it anyway. The defense appropriation bill is about $830 billion and our best guess for interest is $800 billion next year. Think about that. I just need you to process.

Do you remember the old days when you would meet a liberal and the first words are, just raise taxes on rich people and cut defense spending; we will be fine. However, interest now is pretty much equal to defense spending. Does anyone care? Will anyone talk about this? Will anyone pay attention, or will we just go back to our theatrics because there is no reporter that is going to write this? There is no blogger out there paying any attention to it.

If you are selling clickbait on the internet, you are not going to do any of this. This requires an intellect. This requires thinking. It may even require a calculator. I have just grown so weary.

How do you save a society? Remember, the very first lie: There are good things happening if we would embrace those things and run with it.

I have done entire presentations here week after week on showing if you took on diabetes--I even came here and talked about things you are not allowed to talk about. I took on obesity in America. Turns out it is the single most powerful thing from a debt standpoint and economic growth standpoint and morality standpoint of making your brothers and sisters healthier or letting them be healthier.

A handful of academics were just thrilled to death that Schweikert is willing to talk about this. Everyone else goes, yeah, but it didn't make me angry. The political class around here on the left and the right, we just sell having people be pissed off. Great. Did I mention we are borrowing over $70,000 a second?

I do this almost every day with reporters. The working middle class in this country have every right to be angry. It would be crazy if they weren't. They are poorer today than they were a couple years ago. If you live in my community, Scottsdale, Phoenix, and you are not making 20 percent more today than you were 2 years ago, you are poorer today.

This is what the left brought upon us, and when they go, oh, no, it wasn't us; it was supply chains. Read your own academic papers. Even the most moderate academic papers say about half the inflation came from the excessive spending the Democrats engaged in, their insanely named Inflation Reduction Act, and now the last several months is 100 percent the derivatives of their excessive spending. Read your own literature. You might need a dictionary.

To my brothers and sisters on the left: Take responsibility for what you did. You made people poorer and now you want to know why they are angry. Next year every dime equal to defense will be borrowed. Does that not set off any alarm bells?

Some of these next slides are just going to get geekier and geekier, but they try to make a point. This isn't Schweikert math. We grabbed these things from CBO and OMB and some of the academic institutions because it has been shocking.

We spent hours and hours and hours today trying to work on the Medicare trust fund, which is gone in 7 years. It is empty in 7 years. You have to understand how hard it was just trying to find out where that several hundred billion dollars that goes to hospitals, what is the remaining cash flow able to cover if the trust fund is gone? We will have to spend another week working on that. You think that would pop. It is within 7 years.

We couldn't find any decent research that was walking us through the math. That gives you an idea of how sick this place is. These aren't little numbers. These are the types of things you plan decades for, except we are not allowed to talk about things like that.

Look, I have been trying once again to sort of show even the numbers we

know today. I am not going to take a shot at CBO. CBO's job is to do projections as they know it. But, darn it, they have been missing the numbers.

First off, the interest rates we are at, we weren't supposed to be here right now. Remember, we were all supposed to be in the economic slowdown, interest rates were supposed to be falling, so we are even doing some math just sort of showing things. Even in some of our worst case scenarios, we are off by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in additional interest if we start using these current interest rates.

We did this one because this one is the simplest to understand. If interest rates rise by 1 percent over the CBO projections--remember, CBO has already missed the projections by I think it is 1-plus percent. The fiscal year 10 years from now budget deficit will be about $500 billion more than we already expect.

Are you prepared in the 10-year window, so 9 budget years from now, we will functionally have a $3.7 trillion deficit. That is 9 years from now. This isn't a projection. This is pretty much where we are at. We are at $3.7 trillion in 9 years because our brothers and sisters on the left needed to spend lots and lots of cash, hand it out, buy their votes, buy their industries, buy their love from corporate America, which they did.

They set off inflation, and they won't admit it. They made people poorer. Now they wonder why they are angry. Now we have to figure out how to survive this.

Let's actually walk through some of the Democrats' solutions. How about we use this one, even confiscating all income over $500,000, so we will actually take--first off, the deficit number on here is absolutely wrong, but this is an old chart. If you took one of the Democrat proposals saying if you make $500,000, the next dollar is all government. You pay your regular taxes, and then if you make over $500,000, every dime over is government money. It is Federal Government money, not your State and local. The Federal Government takes every dime of it.

We are now actually seeing a deficit projection of a couple trillion dollars next year. Taking every dime over $500,000 produces about $1.5 trillion. It wouldn't even come close to covering this year's deficit. This is taking every dime over $500,000. Huh? I was told by Bernie Sanders we would be fine.

I have done this dozens of times, so I am not going to belabor it. We have actually--one of the real ways you would do this sort of math is you do it by percentages of GDP. We did those, and we walked people through showing that all the Democrat tax proposals of confiscating money or doing something that is probably unconstitutional, we will know probably this time next year, of taxing and confiscating unrealized capital gains; you know, the oligarch taxes and those things some of the hard left are pushing where you actually just say, well, you have got a building, you have a family business, you owe us 8 percent of the business.

This is a chart, and this one is easy to find. Just go Google Manhattan Institute, Brian Riedl. He has done all sorts of charts like this where he just takes CBO numbers, OMB numbers, and makes them sort of understandable. You see all the little tax ideas don't get you anywhere close, but we can lie and pretend, right?

Let's do a little more of this. As you start to understand the drivers of what is going on, remember, I told you one of the deep, dark secrets we are not allowed to say, 100 percent of the borrowing that is scheduled for today through the next 30 years, Medicare is 75 percent of it, Social Security is 25 percent. That includes interest, so if you want to throw interest in there, but that is rolled into those, the financing of those programs. The rest of the budget is actually pretty much flat.

When you look at charts like this--and you can find this one everywhere; I think we have even put it up on our website--you start to understand, when you start to see the explosion here, these three lines are net interest, Medicare, and Social Security, and everything else just lays flat or actually falls as a percentage of discretionary. However, we are not allowed to talk about this because it doesn't fit the narrative where the political class has not told the truth.

Let's be honest, those of us on the right, it is waste and fraud, it is foreign aid, and then the Democrats are saying, rich people don't pay enough. I am going to show some more rich people don't pay enough slides and show you complete fraud in math.

Then there is the thing I am fixated on, and I am going to do more on Social Security because I am not comfortable enough with my Medicare numbers yet, but you have got to understand, highway trust fund, that is gone in 3 or 4 more years. Okay. It is big, but it is not ginormous. The Medicare trust fund, we have gone in 7 years. It is big, but it is nothing compared to Social Security, which is gone in 9 years.

Did anyone notice something there? The three big trust funds are gone within this 9-year window. How much discussion have you heard on how we are going to recapitalize these? We have a moral obligation to keep Social Security. We have a moral obligation to keep Medicare functional. Anyone here talking about how to do it?

I have come behind this mic over and over and over walking through how you could revolutionize the cost of healthcare. You have got to be willing to legalize technology. It turns out that upsets people because much of this is all about the money, but there are so many things we can do. There are so many good things happening out there, it is just will we allow the good things to come to us before we have got ourselves in such a debt crisis that all we are doing is just paddling to survive?

All right, let's do the thing that they train you the day after you get elected, a bunch of really smart consultants sit down with you and say, David, welcome to Congress. There is this thing called a third rail. It has something to do with subways. I am from the desert. We don't have subways. You are not allowed to talk about things like Medicare and Social Security because they will run nasty ads about you, and you will get unelected.

Therefore, let's tell the truth, let's talk about Social Security. In 9 years--it could be 8 years--this chart has a mistake on it; this is 2033, not 2034. In 2033, the Social Security trust fund is empty, and that causes about a 25 percent cut to the average recipients in America. This is 9 years away. That average cut will be $17,400, as we had testimony in the Ways and Means Committee. That will double senior poverty. Doubling of senior poverty is 9 years away.

I was here on the floor last week already showing you that because of rents and other things and Bidenflation, you are already seeing the number of baby boomers in retirement who are ending up homeless. This is 9 years away, $616 billion.

When you show this to someone on the left, Well, David, if we would just tax people over $400,000 a year and not give them any benefits, but we make them pay the entire 12.4 percent FICA tax, we are going to be fine. Then you do the math, and you realize they have never actually put a calculator to that, have they? One more time, in 9 years, $616 billion is the shortfall. In 9 years, everyone is getting a 25 percent cut.

Let's do the first suggestion given to us by our Democrat colleagues. Just create a doughnut hole. You pay your FICA tax up to $160,200 today. It will go up with inflation over the next few years. You create a doughnut hole, then people $400,000 and up, you get to pay the 12.4 percent tax from that to the sky's the limit, whatever you make, but you get no benefits for it. It turns out our best estimate, we have to work at these numbers to do this because for some reason no one wants to actually put these on charts. Our math comes out to about $86 billion.

You remember the chart before, let's do this again. Sorry, but this is important because almost no one ever wants to talk about this. Do you see the $616 billion? That is the shortfall in 9 years. Take taxing people the full FICA portion of Social Security at the 12.4 percent produces $86 billion. Does anyone notice a math problem?

Let's do the hard left suggestion, David, we just need to get rid of that Social Security cap. We will let them have benefits up to that $160,200, but every dime above that still pays the 12.4 percent tax, but you don't give them any benefits.

All right. So this is lifting the cap. I have had some of the most arrogant leftists over and over say that solves the problem. Does it? One more time. The shortfall in 9 years, our estimate is $616 billion. Lifting the cap, our best estimate produces about $164.7 billion. You get about 20 percent of it.

This is what the brain trust around here has as the solution. We are going to force the Republicans to just lift the cap on Social Security taxes, and we will be fine.

Really? Really? You have $420-some--$427, $428 billion, you are still short. That is in the first year. That is in one year. You are still doubling senior poverty at these numbers. This is the left's plan for us?

Come on, people. This shouldn't be Republican or Democrat. We had a President get behind that microphone and say we are not allowed to talk about this.

Please understand, it is absolutely just abysmal that we are going to spend the next couple weeks doing theatrics and fighting, and we will scrape out some savings, but those savings are going to be tiny compared to the scale of this sort of nuclear debt bomb.

This isn't way off in the future. This is no longer about your kids and your grandkids. This is you. This is your retirement.

Let's actually do a couple other pieces of math that really upset people, but it is math. Okay, we are going to do something called expected present values. Why this is important is you have a lot of folks who somehow believe that they have paid in stunning amounts of money into Social Security and Medicare and they are getting cheated. In some ways you actually are, but it may not be what you think.

What we are trying to show is lifetime taxes, lifetime benefits. The blue here, or is that purple, is Social Security, Social Security. Medicare and Medicare. On Social Security, the average couple, you get every dime back plus about $72,000.

Now, remember, if 25 years ago when George Bush tried--and he was absolutely nuked by the retirement--I have got to come up with a name for the folks that basically want to nationalize retirement and the Democrats. President Bush ran around saying could we just take a sliver of it and allow people to have their own private account? Oh, you are trying to privatize. Too late now. That window is long past.

You are going to put in several hundred thousand dollars into Social Security through your taxes. This is an average couple who works their 40 quarters. You get about a $72,000 SPIF. It would be several times more than that if over those working years you had been allowed to put that 15 percent or so into a private account, but water under the bridge. This is the left's brilliant economics.

Primary driver of debt, though, turns out this is the lifetime Medicare taxes. It is about $200,000. We are still working on updating the number, but our newest number is maybe just shy of $700,000 per couple on the benefits they are going to get from Medicare.

Does someone see a problem? Average couple--remember, there are 76 million baby boomers--that couple will put in a couple hundred thousand in Medicare, and they are probably getting close to $700,000 in benefits. That gap right there is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. Almost no one will ever tell you that.

Mr. Speaker, the reason I keep coming behind this microphone is I truly believe there are people out there in the public that want to be talked to like adults. Yes, some like getting the stimuli of having someone say something angry and crazy, but that is not how you save the Republic.

There are ways to stabilize this. There are ways for this to be another ``American Century,'' but that clock is ticking on us. Do you think we are going to recapitalize if the Medicare Trust Fund is how many billion dollars of shortfall starting in 7 years? I just showed you Social Security is 616 in the first year; transportation is also gone in that time. Plus, we are heading into 3 trillion-dollar-year deficits at the end of the decade. We are going to do 2.2 this year.

This is moving away from us very, very, very fast, and I do need people out there to understand the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion. Play with your calculators to see how many zeros are the difference. Don't let someone trying to get your vote pander to you by making crap up if they are not being serious with you.

I will argue, this is the thing that destroys your Republic. This is what will make you much less free. This is what will take your freedoms from you, destroy your retirement, and heaven knows the misery we are leaving to our kids.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 16 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, September 19, 2023, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, as a courtesy and also the fact that the gentleman did a kindness to me a while back--so what goes around comes around--I am going to give Mr. Hoyer a couple more minutes to finish his speech.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Kelly) so that she may complete her comments.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Hoyer has been kind to me. There was a while back when we were beating each other up on the floor, I think he gave me more time to finish. Sometimes you remember those things.

Mr. Speaker, I am well caffeinated, and I am angry, so let's actually have some fun on the truth with math. I am terrified what is going on around here because we are making crap up. So let's actually do math.

Mr. Speaker, this is what we were borrowing per second over the last 12 months. Every single second we were borrowing $72,932. Every second we borrow 72,000, and 20,000 of it is just interest, and it gets dramatically worse between now and the rest of the decade.

There is a punch line here I need you to understand. How many times have you listened to Members walk behind these microphones and do this: Well, I don't get to vote on mandatory spending, I only vote on discretionary. Seriously, you have been here how long, Mr. Speaker? It is our mantra. Well, I vote on defense and nondefense discretionary, and that is like 30 percent of the budget. It is actually closer to 27.

Well, guess what? Every dime we as Members of Congress now vote on is borrowed. It is all borrowed money. Look, I threw together this chart-- thank you to the staff--but in the current budget year the appropriation was about $1.8 trillion, 1.8, 1.3, and in the July update we have spent about $1.7 trillion on discretionary. This is not Medicare. This is not Social Security. That is this orange part here. We have functionally in the last 12 months we have borrowed $2.3 trillion.

Does anyone see the math problem?

The 2023 discretionary spending budget was going to be 1 trillion, 831 billion, and we are going to borrow, when this fiscal year is over--my math is encroaching in on $2.2 trillion, so my staff thinks it is going to be 2.1. You know, what is $100 billion between friends?

I need you to process what I am saying. If anyone out there is listening, if there is any staffer sitting in your office watching the television, understand everything your Member of Congress votes on, everything is borrowed money.

Tell me, do you remember, it was a year--actually, let's go back where I can say something personal. In February, March I came behind this very microphone and I predicted saying, do you know I think we are actually heading towards borrowing $1.8 trillion, and I got mocked. I have to apologize, I was wrong. It wasn't $1.8 trillion. We are heading towards 2.1, 2.2. It is much worse.

You just heard the left talking about how wonderful everything is. Explain to me how in May last year, a year ago, May 2022, we thought the budget deficit for this year would be about mid-800s, 860, $870 billion, and now we are heading toward 2.2. What happened?

Medicare costs went up dramatically. Tax receipts have fallen. You heard about how wonderful this economy is. Isn't it neat? We are doing all these subsidized projects. The government is handing out money to anyone who wants to build a factory. Yay, a socialized, nationalized economy. We functionally soft nationalized the chip industry. Isn't it wonderful? Think of what is going on. Yet the tax revenues have fallen actually fairly dramatically. Brilliant economics once again from what the left did last year.

Then the third thing no one seems to want to fixate on, that Inflation Reduction Act that they passed, you know, that they were celebrating here, if you even read what the leftwing economists say in their journals, okay, about half of inflation was supply chain stress, and yes, half of it was the excessive spending.

Okay. So the people in my community, unless you have had a 20 percent pay hike, if you live in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, you are poorer today. You are poorer today than you were 24 months ago. Will the left take responsibility for that? Will they take responsibility for 50 percent of it?

This is the insanity, and the wheels are coming off, and no one else seems willing to come behind these microphones and tell the truth about what is happening.

Every dime we vote on--because remember Social Security, veterans benefits, and those things are on autopilot. They are mandatory. They are earned benefits. They are a formula. No one here votes on them. It is borrowed money. So the old days when you heard Republicans come behind the microphone saying, well, if we would just get rid of waste and fraud, if we would just get rid of foreign aid we will be fine. Foreign aid is about 12 days of borrowing, and I will show you a number of things where Democrats, the left, makes crap up.

The dollar amounts--well, if we would just tax rich people more, if we would just get rid of the threshold on Social Security. I am going to show you it gets nowhere near the types of moneys they misrepresent to you. We won't use the word ``lie'' tonight. I am going to try to do my best.

All right. We are just going to run through a number of these because I gave away a little time, and I only have a half an hour tonight-- actually, I probably only have 20 minutes left--trying to start to demonstrate how fragile we are.

There was a bond auction about 4 hours ago, 5 hours ago of 30-year paper here, and it all sold at the very top of the market, basically meaning if you thought interest rates were going down tomorrow, they are not. You are starting to see actually how fragile we are. We are starting to look at numbers within 10 years. Our interest rate calculations on what we are going to pay on the debt are absolutely wrong. They are absolutely wrong.

We are now starting to see math saying, we may be missing in--9 budget years from now total interest was predicted to be as high as 1.4 trillion, just the interest. I need you now to add another $315 billion to it, and that difference is just the marginal interest rate increases we have had over the last several weeks.

When you are borrowing $26 trillion from the public--when you hear the 32, $33 trillion, a bunch of that is money that we actually borrow from the trust funds, which are also running out of money. So why this is important: This big red hump here, that is defense spending for 2024. It is like $820, $830 billion. This one here is interest, just interest, we are going pay in 2024.

My math says, there is a very high likelihood that the interest this government pays in the next fiscal year will be equal to every dime we spend in defense. Interest will equal the defense budget. So next time you are talking to a leftist who says, if you would just cut defense spending--interest now is equaling defense, and that is next year. That is the budget we are working on right now.

Understand how much trouble we are in. I am going to go through some of these fast because there is not a lot of time, but this one is really important. Almost no one here understands or talks about it. It is not the $2 trillion we are going to issue as new debt next year; it is functionally the almost $10 trillion that comes to market next year. We have about $7.6 trillion that gets refinanced. Those are bonds from years ago that were at remarkably low interest rates. They are coming due.

We are going to bring almost $10 trillion to market of U.S. sovereign debt next year.

What happens when we bring that debt at these new higher interest rates? Anyone here paying attention?

We have gone off the rails. Well, we don't care. That is math. We don't do math here. This is a math-free zone.

Pay attention to this. This will be a story as we move through next year when you bring $10 trillion to market, and you have got to convince investors to buy this debt and that they won't get a better rate of return if they go buy a high-quality corporate paper over here or they should roll over their debt and buy U.S. sovereign and at the same time we are going to be issuing a couple trillion also as additional virgin debt.

This is where we are at.

You start to look at--we were doing this calculation a couple months ago, that just by raising the interest by a single point, which we have more than exceeded, you start to look out a few years, and by the 10- year window you might be having a $3.7 trillion a year shortfall, a deficit of $3.7 trillion and it is mostly that growth. This is not calculating in the new higher medical costs. This is just basically interest fragility.

This board is important to my Democratic brothers and sisters who basically--the comment I always get is, well, if we just would tax rich people more. Please, buy a calculator. Read some of the documents that your own leftist economists produce because if we would confiscate--I had a lot of caffeine today--next year, if we would confiscate every dime--so you make $500,000. The next dollar you make we just take it; the government takes everything. So you make $500,000, give everything up. So the guy that makes a billion dollars next year, we take

every dime of it, that would bring in about a trillion and a half dollars. A lot of money.

This number is already wrong. Before we were projecting a $1.7 trillion shortfall budget deficit in 2024. Now we are thinking if this year is 2.2 what will next year be? But confiscate everything over $500,000--how often have you heard, if we just tax the rich we will be fine? That is an absolute fraud. Remember, the number one driver of debt here is not Democrats, it is not Republicans, it is demographics; the one thing we are not allowed to talk about.

We are not allowed to tell the truth.

We made promises and we have no cash to keep them. At some point here I am going to set myself on fire after soaking in kerosene. We are going to talk about Social Security and how ugly the basic math is.

Oh, let's actually start that right now. Look, we have put together these slides just trying to demonstrate--on this side over here, these are the taxes you have paid over your lifetime, the average couple, the average couple. The one bar here I want you to get your head around is this orange bar, that is Medicare. Do you see that gap? These are the benefits you receive. That gap from here to here, that right there, that is 75 percent of all future debt. We are not supposed to talk about this because it gets people unelected. But the fact of the matter is unless we have a revolution in delivering the cost of healthcare, the 130--it may be dramatically more now; that number hasn't been updated in a while--of U.S. sovereign debt that we plan to issue over the next 30 years, 75 percent of it is Medicare, 25 percent if we cover the shortfall on Social Security.

I am not going to make you go through that one.

So let's actually have some fun with math. I had a sort of a group discussion. Most of the room were people on the left, but they were very polite. Every other person claimed to have a Ph.D., and we got to the discussion saying, hey, the actuary reports the CBO basically saying 9 years from now the Social Security trust fund is empty. It is empty. So that first year, 2033, $616 billion is the shortfall. If you are an average couple in America, that is a $17,200 cut to your Social Security check. We will double senior poverty. How many people have you seen come to this microphone and say, I give a damn about seniors; I don't want to double senior poverty? Have you seen the stories of how many baby boomers are starting to live on the streets in America? The projections--this is an article today, and I think this was actually-- God, I am not even sure where this was published--actually, it may have been The Wall Street Journal today. Read the article. Understand what is happening. The fragility. Then we are going to tell these people we are taking 25 percent of their Social Security check from them? It is 9 years from now.

But the problem is that first year we are short--let's just do 1 year of math--in 2033, that is $616 billion.

Let's do the Democrats' suggestion. We are going to tax people over $400,000. Tax everyone over 400,000, so there is a stone hold. You pay your Social Security, your FICA tax up to $160,200. Then you don't pay any, but once you hit 400,000, and everything up, you will pay the 12.4 percent Social Security tax. Great. It is $80 billion. The shortfall is 616, but the Democrats' solution is 80 billion.

Does anyone see a math problem?

So let's go on to the next one. Let's do Bernie Sanders' suggestion. Let's get rid of the capital. Every dime you earn you are going to pay 12.4 percent. When you do the dynamic score on it that is about $158 billion.

Did I mention the first year shortfall is 616? $616 billion, removing the cap, tax everything, only produces $158 billion.

What is that? $437 billion shortfall. What would you like to do? Where would you like to get it? Our Democrat colleagues refuse to have the discussion, how we are going to save Social Security and not do the immoral thing and double senior poverty. They won't have the conversation, because the President stood right there and said you are not allowed to talk about Medicare and Social Security, and everyone applauded, because they are going to do attack mail and attack television ads because you talked about trying to do the moral thing and save this program.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining?

Mr. Speaker, let's actually walk through what this means. You are right now expecting that 17,200 or 17,400--there is a little dispute--the cut you are getting as an average couple in America in 9 years. Yea. Okay. Let's actually do that thing where we are going to tax everyone over $400,000. That cut now becomes 13,482. Remember, that is just on the first year. If you completely remove the cap and just tax every dime, without the dynamic score of how much of the economy you slowed down, the cut that average couple on Social Security is going to get is going to be approaching $11,000 a year. That is the Democrats' moral solution. Does anyone here own a calculator?

Then let's actually go a little bit further. The hard left here says: Well, let's do the oligarch tax. You say, huh? This is a tax that is unconstitutional, and it is I think in front of the Supreme Court this coming year, where the Democrats' solution is: We know we have been lying to the public. We are not going to tell them that, but we are going to offer another tax proposal where the Democrats want to tax unearned capital gains.

You say, huh? What is that? Well, you are rich. You have a building. You have a business. You have an asset here. You haven't sold it, but there are capital gains there. Every year, the government is going to come in and ask for part of it. If you are really rich, they might want 10 percent of it, but if you are only moderately rich, every year you might only have to pay 2 percent. It would be paying unrealized capital gains because that is where the real money is.

The problem is the fantasy of going after that money--and this is without a dynamic score. How so how does it change behavior? Remember, taxes like this change behavior. We won't do the geeky economics. It produces about $137 billion. That first year, it would produce $137 billion.

Do you remember the previous board? Social Security has a $616 billion shortfall in the first year, and the most radical tax proposal produces $137 billion. Am I getting the point across? Do you understand how difficult these numbers are?

They said we are going to come and do feeder. Oh, we are building another factory that there are no workers for and there is no one who wants the product, but we subsidize it. In our office, our new nickname we call this is soft nationalization of industry, because the Democrats figured out the way to buy the love of big industry, big business, is hand them cash.

As Republicans, we try to say let's fix the tax code so you have to compete with each other. You have got to go out there and engage in creative destruction and make these better, faster. Democrats say, make the same old crap you used to make, but we are going to give you the cash to do it. It is insane economics.

This board is a little harder to read, but we were trying to figure out if the hard left's theory of we are going to have all of these taxes but we are going to sweep the assets of rich people, which is unconstitutional and we will find out next year if my nonlawyer legal opinion is true from the Supreme Court.

The principle of this board is that the CBO has told us we are heading toward 115 to 120 percent of debt to GDP in sort of the 10-year window. With all of these new taxes of the Democrats, we are still about 111 percent of debt to GDP, and this is assuming every dime comes in. It is a fraud, and this is supposed to make you feel better. Oh, we have a tax proposal; just those nasty Republicans won't let us blow up the economy.

I know this is hard to read, but why this is so difficult is, you see these gaps, these lines are basically to say--you see the gap? The tax proposals being proposed by the Democrats to save the Social Security trust fund get nowhere near it. As you go out further in time, the gap gets bigger and bigger.

Part of the punch line here I need someone to process. That is in 9 years.

In less time than that, the Medicare part A trust fund, which is about 40 percent of all Medicare spending, is gone. The transportation trust fund is gone. We are hitting numbers. The $2.1 to $2.2 trillion we will borrow this year, we were not supposed to hit for a decade. We are borrowing now at rates that we were not supposed to see for years. This is the Democrats' economy. This is sort of nationalizing much of industry. The chips industry, now the green energy industry, we are handing out cash. Something happened. We are building all of these factories, but we are getting no tax receipts from it. Something has gone horribly, horribly wrong out there, instead of our brothers and sisters on the left and those of us on the right coming together and saying we have a moral obligation not to have baby boomers on the street as part of their retirement, not to double senior poverty.

To my young kids--yes, I am an old dad. I have a 14-month-old and an 8-year-old. Do they deserve to have a future? CBO math basically says in 20 years, if we wanted to maintain baseline services as they are today, we have to double taxes. That means my kids live in a world where they are dramatically poorer than how all the rest of us have lived.

You want to know why the middle class is so cranky? Once again, back to something I said in the beginning. The middle class in this country is poorer today than they were 24 months ago. If you live in my community, if you haven't had over a 20 percent pay hike in the last 24 months, you are poorer today than you were before. This is the morality?

Let's have the most difficult discussion this place a capable of. What are we going to do? I have come behind this microphone dozens and dozens and dozens of times showing you that if we could actually have a revolution in the cost of healthcare--and I have brought the ways to do it. I have brought all sorts of charts to say, hey, did you realize diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spending? Could we have a revolution there? Are we really going to do the same old farm bill? Are we going to actually understand we have ways to help our brothers and sisters live healthier lives, come back into the labor force, have some economic growth, and stop watching America die? In the next decade, we will have more Americans dying than being born in this country. We are dying as a society, and we are financing it ourselves.

The immorality of what we are doing, whether it be the debt or the way we are hiding from it, there is hope. There is a way it works. Is this place capable of actually thinking? Are we going to continue to do the petty, well, so and so hurt my feelings, so I am going to oppose this?

I mean, I like this. I am not going to read this. This is uncomfortable. I can't go home and explain this to my chamber of commerce. Screw you. This is a moment of action, so I am going to give you an absolute radical proposal that I just want you to ruminate. I accept it has no chance of passing, and I will use this year's numbers.

In the 2023 budget year, nondefense discretionary spending is--let's call it about $740 billion. About $326 billion of that is money that we are borrowing and sending to States, counties, cities, many of them for programs I absolutely love like justice grants and other things. I have always supported these, but we are borrowing money to send to entities that have their own taxing and borrowing authority. That is the definition of insanity.

For those who come in here and say, I want to defend the 10th Amendment, I have got a great way for you to do it: Stop borrowing money over here to send to States so they have to come and lobby and grovel at your office every 6 weeks. It would be hard. The hallways up and down might be depopulated because they won't be lined up at our door begging for more cash.

Is it rational for us to borrow hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars over here and hand it to entities that have their own taxing authority?

To my brothers and sisters on the left, this is the punch line. You bang on me saying, we just need to raise taxes. Great. You control most of these cities. Go raise the taxes and make it so we stop borrowing the money.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Langworthy).

Madam Speaker, tonight. We are actually going to continue on a theme. I am going to try to dial back sounding like a jerk tonight, but I have been trying to make a point on the scale of the debt, the level we are at, the misunderstanding on its growth, and some potential solutions.

We are also going to spend a little bit of time tonight--and this is what I was sort of pre-apologizing for--I am going to show that some of my brothers' and sisters' ideas from the left on raise this tax, do this, do that, don't even count as rounding errors.

Let's actually start with some of the boards here.

I have shown this a half dozen times, and I keep showing it because this is what I have bad dreams about. If you live in a world of math-- and I know

this is, functionally, a math-free zone--but when we finished the debt ceiling deal, we basically got some applause by economists saying you basically moved yourself from maybe 120 to maybe 115 percent of debt- to-GDP at the end of the 9 years.

That was the CBO number, but then some of the outside economists came in. Moody's Analytics said there are other things going on--the higher interest rates, the dramatic increase in spending in Medicare. Remember, the first 7 months of this year, we spent 16 percent more on Medicare. Next year's interest will functionally be three-quarters of a trillion dollars. We weren't supposed to hit numbers like that for years, but the one that took my breath away was when the Bloomberg economists--and these aren't slouches, they have a really good data system--said their model was coming back with higher interest rates, higher healthcare costs, lower labor force participation, and some of the other things we don't talk about because it doesn't really fit our scenario.

I am going to hyper-simplify this, and I have done this a handful of times, but I am trying to get the concept through. As part of the deal 6 weeks ago, this $700 billion that is in the nondefense discretionary, we are going to cut a hundred billion of that. Bloomberg economists basically say that the removal of that $100 billion is necessary, but it also slows down the economy by about a half a percent of GDP.

We don't seem to understand when we do policies like this, which we need to do, you also have to be adopting policies that backfill the growth. This place can barely walk and chew gum, and that is why this number here was so terrifying when the Bloomberg economists were saying, functionally, that 9-year window 10 years from now--and the reason we say 9 years is because we are already working on next year's budget and appropriations and spending--it is 130 percent of debt-to- GDP, $51 trillion of borrowing. If interest rates even go back to a somewhat more normal number, that is almost $2 trillion a year in interest.

That is functionally 9 years from now, and we are going to do what? We are not going to talk about it. We are going to be just giddy, and say, look at the hard work we did. We removed a hundred billion dollars out of discretionary.

I know my math is different than the Congressional Budget Office and at the end of September, we will find out which one of us had a better calculator; however, I have been right more times this year than they have. I know that is boastful, but I can prove it. Go back and look at some of my floor speeches and we have got the quarterly reports from Treasury.

I have us this fiscal year coming in around $1.84 trillion of borrowing. Why is that important? The 2023-fiscal year discretionary, Defense and nondefense discretionary included, was supposed to be a total spend of $1.836 billion; meaning, every dime of what you think of as government is on borrowed money this year.

When we go home and talk to our constituents, do we say, Do you know all of Defense, all of the Supreme Court, all of the State Department, all of everything you think of as government is on borrowed money? Is that what we do? How many times do we go home and we get someone that says we just got rid of foreign aid, and then I show them my chart that foreign aid is 12 days of borrowing. They just look at you with daggers, then say it is waste and fraud. But the Democrats do something that drives me insane when they say, just tax rich people more.

I am going to show you some boards here that basically show that is theater. It is not real math. Let's actually walk through some of the things going on right now, and I am going to go back and forth on some of these boards. There is going to be a reason why I am doing it this way. I spent the last 2 weeks, when I came to this microphone talking about obesity and diabetes--and that is a really dangerous thing sometimes to come and talk about, but diabetes is 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare. It is 31 percent of all Medicare spending. We need to talk about it. Our brothers and sisters in this country are dying, and we are afraid to talk about it.

I am going to spend the first part here sounding like an economist on steroids and I am going to try to explain what the cost is, then I am going to talk a little bit about just the simple morality of not doing anything.

Let's actually play a game here. Estimated deficit reduction for 2023, if you actually were just to take on obesity-related illnesses this fiscal year using current math, $283 billion.

Remember, the Democrats' tax proposal, the President's tax proposal was, we are going to go from 37 percent to 39 percent for top earners. That is a stagnant number. None of these are dynamically scored on the effects on the economy because if you made people healthier on this side, the economy would grow.

When you raise peoples' taxes, the economy shrinks, but the stagnant number is $30 billion. Just obesity-related spending will be $283 billion this fiscal year to the taxpayers and the Democrats, the President's tax hike produces 30 billion.

Does anyone see the insanity here? We basically did the math for everyone, saying Democrats would have to increase the top tax rate to 62 percent to raise the same amount of money as getting rid of obesity for people on government programs.

That is uncomfortable to talk about, but think about that. You basically have to raise the top tax rate to 62 percent just to produce the revenues of receipts for this population here. I am struggling, trying to find a creative way to get people to think about the path of having a healthier America is both moral and it is great economics.

Let's try it another way: Estimated deficit reduction for fiscal year 2024 to 2033, functionally, that is 9 fiscal years. We expect Federal spending on severe obesity, not the mainstream, to be $1.724 trillion. If anyone wants to see this report once it is officially voted on, this will be on the Republican side of the Joint Economic Committee, chapter 3. Read it. It is brilliant. $1.724 trillion over, functionally, that 10-year cycle, just for severely obese populations. These are for Medicare, Medicaid, Indian Health Services, veterans, taking care of our brothers and sisters, because of the illnesses that come with this.

You would have to increase the top tax rate to 49 percent to raise the same amount of money as getting rid of severe obesity. We are not talking obesity, just the severe obesity. Remember, last week, I brought the charts on how it is rated.

We are told, of the 4,000 human conditions, illnesses, misery, half of them are related to obesity. Are we willing to talk about it as we do the farm legislation? Are we willing to talk about it with some of the new technologies? I am going to touch on those that are available to us. Are we willing to talk about just what is happening with how many prime-age working males are not in the labor force? The number one thing we are seeing isn't substance abuse. It is close, but it is actually health related to obesity.

Let's try another one here. Let's see if I can make myself a complete pariah around here from telling the truth on the math.

Estimated deficit reduction for 2023, projected Federal spending on severe obesity, just that very top threshold, this budget year will be $115 billion. This is, once again, just in Medicare, Medicaid, Indian Health Services, and veterans. Democrats would have to raise the top tax rate to 47 percent to raise the amount of money just this population costs.

Am I at least making a point here that the discussions say, ``Just raise taxes. That takes care of it''?

Remember, what do we borrow per second over the last 12 months? $63,000 every second is what we have borrowed over the last 12 months.

One more of these. This is estimated deficit reduction between '24 and '33, the estimated deficit reduction, projected Federal spending on all obesity-related illnesses. Remember, this is a static number. There is also, we estimate, about another trillion-and-a-half that you would gain in productivity because these populations can actually come back and participate in society. Over that time, it is over $4 trillion that our government will spend.

Now, add in another $1.5 trillion on the economic vitality you gain, and

you would actually have to have a marginal tax rate of the top earners in this country of 65 percent to come close to covering that cost. That is for one illness.

It is the illness that is the most expensive in our society because it is related to diabetes, kidney failure, heart attacks, and everything else. Am I sort of making the point? We are seeing over $4 trillion just in the disease, and the Biden tax proposal produces $375 billion over the 10 years.

For those of you who are not really good at math, $375 billion is a hell of a lot less than $4 trillion. This is the lunacy here, where the theater is so much more important than the reality and the math.

Let's actually walk through this. Joint Economic Committee Republicans estimate the cost of obesity over the 10 years--the 10 years we are about to start the budget cycle on--is $5.6 trillion. If you want to start to stabilize debt to GDP, can we at least have a conversation about this?

You start to see the mortality statistics in this country, the number of working-age people, people who should be actually living their lives, who are dying and are dying early.

I am going to show you a chart in a little bit of our young people and what is going on there.

The game of avoiding this discussion needs to come to an end because the economics and the morality of it are here. Let's pull our heads out and have time to actually have that difficult conversation.

Let's do the next one. This one is really interesting. The estimated economic cost is actually $2.6 trillion of growth in the GDP. This isn't spending. I just showed you a few trillion dollars of spending. This would be actual growth in the size of the economy and participation because our brothers and sisters actually are not sick. Their ability to come back and be a part of society, $2.6 trillion over that 10 years.

We worked hard on this math. We spent months vetting it. I will argue that it is incredibly conservative math.

Let's have a little more fun here. Maybe you just don't care. Maybe you are one of these people that, you know, sends in things to my office, and all you care about is you want more money for something. Fine. Do you at least care about your kids and your grandkids? I have two young kids. When I look around, I am terrified of what I see. We are actually looking at the growth of obesity amongst our kids. Do you understand what happens to their life, their life expectancy, their ability to participate in their society when you start to see numbers growing like this?

We are actually starting to see a world where, at the end of this decade, 12 percent of our children will be morbidly obese. It is uncomfortable to say, but that is the math.

In 10 years, half of our kids are technically--is this moral? Should we not talk about it? It is going on. This is the math. Understand what it does to the society. An unhealthy society doesn't grow, doesn't have economic vitality. Then, you start to wonder why all day long our hallways are full of people saying: ``I need you to spend more money on this. Because we can't find workers, we can't do this.'' Yet, we come back and show data that basically says there are 3.5 million prime-age working males that aren't in the economy. Then, the economists come back and do the stats. The demographer comes in and sits there and rattles off the numbers, and we start to realize the number one cause wasn't substance abuse. It was obesity. Am I starting to make a point here?

This is life expectancy for 18 years old and older by their BMI class. Do you understand functionally, in the last 4 years, life expectancy in the United States has fallen? Is that moral? Does anyone care? Even when you adjust for COVID, our lifespans are falling in this country.

It turns out, in digging and digging, the primary reason is this. We have this stratified by different ethnicities, different genders, but you start to actually see what we are seeing here in the numbers. You start seeing in some of our populations that the life expectancy is 66 years.

A little while ago, the Congressional Black Caucus took the first hour, and they talked about the morality of their issues. I would argue this is their issue. This is all of our issue, but no one else will talk about it.

Yes, there is some happy stuff coming.

Part of the point I have been trying to make over and over is let's just talk about diabetes. Thirty-one percent of all Medicare spending is just diabetes. One in four TRICARE dollars in the United States is just diabetes. Thirty-three percent of Medicare benefits are spent for folks with diabetes. Sixty-seven percent of the $327 billion spent on diabetes is by government insurance, and that is from way back in 2017. Today, it is dramatically higher, but that is the last year we could actually get the number.

Five of the top 10 part D drugs--this one drives me crazy. Remember, we are having all of this debate about all this money: You are spending too much money on pharmaceuticals. These part D drugs are driving so much of the debt and deficit. Half of those top 10 drugs, half of them, are drugs for diabetes.

Does anyone see sort of the trend here? Am I making sort of a flow of a concept? Is consciousness coming with us?

The Joint Economic Committee Republicans: Medicare spending will double, functionally being $22 trillion over the next 10 years.

I have come here for the last couple of years and brought the chart that basically shows, over the next 30 years, 100 percent of the $130 trillion of borrowing, all of borrowing growth, 75 percent is the shortfall on Medicare and 25 percent is the shortfall on Social Security if we choose to backfill it.

Remember, we are functionally 9 years away from the Social Security trust fund being gone, and in that same 10 years, the transportation trust fund is gone, and the Medicare part A trust fund is gone.

We dink around with stupid stuff around here, not taking seriously that the wheels are coming off. It turns out there are some things that are absolutely moral we could be doing if anyone here actually gave a damn.

A couple more of these concepts, and then we are going to do some of the positive side, some of the plan.

JEC, Joint Economic Committee, Republicans, project annual healthcare costs attributed to severe obesity. This is interesting. This is for the sick person. This is for the person with obesity--severe obesity, not regular. They spend another over $14,000 per year on top of their other healthcare costs. The problem is a huge portion of this population is also on government-paid-for healthcare.

Here is the one that I expect I will get the nastygrams on tomorrow, so let's have at it.

Joint Economic Committee Republicans annual increase of Medicare expenses caused by obesity-related health: $3,500 a year per taxpayer. $3,500 a year per taxpayer is functionally what obesity costs. That is me sounding like the accountant on steroids, but the math always wins. I am sorry if it is uncomfortable. Bless you, but the math always wins.

Let's actually come back and say I have actually convinced someone out there that maybe we should make America healthier and actually have an honest discussion about what is going on because these numbers have just gone skyrocketing over the last 10 years.

Let's talk about a couple of things here. This is just another example. I have brought a handful of these. This is a blood glucose monitor you can have on your body. It is fairly cheap and incredibly effective on stabilizing someone with a prediabetic condition.

We are about to have a pill for obesity. It is the next generation of these GLP-1s. It is coming. It is almost through the process. There is a whole series of other categories of weight-loss drugs that are coming that are remarkably effective.

Studies actually are sort of breaking down. It turns out that one of the most moral things we could do is use the technology we have.

If I came to you tomorrow and said: Let's make a plan. Maybe we should make some changes in the farm legislation--that is really hard to do. The lobbyists marching up and down the hallways won't be happy with it, but we have to do it.

Number two, go back to access for people to be able to manage their blood glucose.

Number three, maybe we should start to look at the accessibility for those who are on Medicare, Medicaid, Indian Health Service, and veterans who actually really, really, really, really have comorbidities, lots of diseases, substantially because of their weight or because of diabetes. Maybe the moral thing is to make these drugs available to them.

Here is part of the holy grail. I have come back and talked about it multiple times, and I have been mocked--sorry, I don't mean to be personalizing it. I do mean to be personalizing it.

FDA approves the first cellular therapy to treat patients with type 1 diabetes. Yes, there is finally one of them. There are a half a dozen of these that are in FDA-approval stages or tests, but the first one is fully approved now. That therapy can get the body to start producing-- excuse me, accepts a replenishment of islet cells. Do you see the flow?

If we actually said we need a healthier society--oh, by the way, it is amazing for what it does in bending the debt curve. Oh, by the way, it is moral. Oh, by the way, it would mean extra populations can come back into society and we might get productivity gains. We have a way to help people manage their prediabetes with some technology. We have some ways to help people get their weight down.

Oh, by the way, those people that do get their weight down, the 30 percent or so, and their body is so damaged that they can't produce insulin anymore, it turns out we can replace the islet cells in their body now. It is here. It is moral. It is optimistic. It is joyful.

When was the last time you had an idiot like myself standing here and sounding like an accountant on steroids, and saying, I actually have a solution. It doesn't solve the whole problem; it only solves a portion of it.

This would do more than all the jaw-moving around here that you have heard so far this year, and it is doable. Is this Republican or Democrat?

I will just argue it is the right thing to do.

Is this place capable, Madam Speaker, of actually doing the right thing?

Is it capable of doing something that is great math, it is morally wonderful, and actually would be really good for everyone?

Dear God, I hope so.

Madam Speaker, thank you for tolerating my tantrum, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 3 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, July 26, 2023, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Madam Speaker, I am going to yield to the gentlewoman from Florida such time as she may consume when she is ready.

Madam Speaker, I thank you for your patience as the clock, as you know right now, sped up on us, and we are all running around like crazy people.

Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time for a moment as the gentlewoman is looking for the poster, we are going to use most of the remaining portion of the hour when we start. We are going to cover a lot of territory, so for the poor folks who have to try to keep up, just please wave at me if I start speaking too quickly. They never seem willing to throw something at me.

Madam Speaker, I am going to one more time yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Salazar), because it looks like we found the poster.

Honoring Carlos Alberto Montaner

Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, I apologize to Ms. Salazar for having to speed up our clock here. It is sometimes just the nature of when someone else on the Democrat side cuts their time short or didn't show up.

Madam Speaker, as we start to go, we are going to walk through a couple of things here. Part of this is actually going to be something I don't get to do that often. It is going to actually be optimistic with a potential solution that will functionally soak myself in kerosene and play with matches.

I come here every week. I am incredibly terrified, and I am incredibly dour on what is happening with the debt, so let's actually first set up part of this conversation.

We have borrowed in the last 12 months--does anyone want to give me a guess how much we borrowed per second--per second--in the last 12 months?

We borrowed $63,000 per second is what the United States Federal Government--Federal Government--borrowed.

Madam Speaker, if you start to actually dig into it deeper, when you start to see stories popping up of cities like Chicago with a $35 billion debt crisis coming, and that $63,000 of borrowing is just the Federal Government, that does not include a bunch of other types of pension obligations which are another--I think we had one that was showing another couple dozen trillion dollars of obligations. Now do municipal debt, now do State pension debt.

Do understand, Madam Speaker, the debt monster is not just the fact that the United States functionally right now has, what, $32.5 trillion, and out of that 25, $26 trillion of that is publicly borrowed.

That difference we tried to explain is when the Treasury borrows from the trust fund, and the trust funds are given--so you are the Railroad Retirement Trust Fund, the Social Security trust fund, they are given sort of IOUs. They are paid interest, and they have a functionally negotiable security that can only be cashed in with Treasury. So if anyone says that they stole the money, that is just not true. They just inter-borrowed, but they have the obligation.

In the coming weeks, probably when we get back from August, we are going to do a presentation on just the scale of borrowing.

Madam Speaker, do you remember the debates we had here on the floor 2 years ago of the multiemployer pension systems?

They were bankrupt. They had no money, and our brilliant brain trust around here, instead of fixing them, we just sat here and said: Here, here is $135 billion, here is lots of cash.

Except even that money now has been pretty much burned up.

We have a crisis. Much of the political leaders, the union leaders, and others from the seventies, eighties, and nineties were unwilling to tell workers that we need to set aside more money to cover these costs.

Then the other thing we didn't prepare for was healthcare costs. So I am going to show in here just the scale from today through 30 years the best calculation, without using the new interest rates on debt as we have had the last year, it is about $130 trillion of borrowing coming.

Every dime of that is demographics. Madam Speaker, 75 percent of that $130 trillion is the shortfall of Medicare. The other 25 percent is if we backfill Social Security, because remember, in 8\1/2\, 9 years, the Social Security trust fund is chewed up. It is gone.

Seniors take a 25 percent cut in their check, and we double poverty in the senior population of America. It is immoral, but once again, we have no partners here to actually work on it.

If you actually go into many of our home districts right now, the Democrats are running ads saying, David Schweikert is willing to talk about Social Security, trying to save it. He is a horrible human being. They are doing this because they care more about winning the political debate than saving it. It is just immoral.

Something started to happen the last 2 weeks--and I just brought up one of them--because the number of times the handful of us here who actually care about debt have almost been mocked, and then something happened.

Suddenly, we have some of the most leftist publications in America--I mean, here is The Atlantic. It turns out that debt matters after all.

What is happening? Our brothers and sisters on the left all of a sudden had an epiphany, going oh, God. Maybe what some of those people on the right have been saying, that it is out of control--did I mention $63,000 a second?

The debate used to be you would come behind the microphones and say, don't you care about your grandkids? Then the math got so bad, we started to come and say, well, don't you care about your kids?

It was shocking. It was just shocking, the input we would get. We would often get seniors saying nah, screw them. I hope that is just a tiny, tiny, tiny part of the population. You would be just taken back at some of the inbound to our office when we talk about what was happening in debt and that it was demographics.

I mean, demographics aren't Republican and Democrat. Now the math has gotten so bad, it is no longer your grandkids, your kids; it is now you and I. It is those of us who will be heading into retirement. It is us.

I'm going to show here some of the outside estimates on how bad the math is. If any of those outside estimates are accurate, in 9 years, this place is a basket case.

There is one estimate done by Bloomberg Intelligence, and they have a really sophisticated model. They have some top-end economists. They are saying it is not the 115 percent of debt to GDP at the Congressional Budget Office. They say if their model is correct, it is like 130 percent of debt to GDP, meaning just interest costs 10 years from now is a couple trillion dollars a year.

The other punch line. I came here last week, and we were trying to recalculate what the Supreme Court's decision with regards to student loans meant and was that going to be a placeholder to move up and down some of the debt numbers.

We basically took what Treasury was saying, and we couldn't make the math work. So we spent a couple days saying, okay, if we take the historic of the last quarter we are in of the fiscal year and say here are the tax receipts we typically get, here is the spending we typically get, we will borrow more money this year than all of defense and all of discretionary.

I take back what I said last week saying, hey, we might be getting a bit of a reprieve. It doesn't look like the reprieve is actually in that math.

One of the models, if you use the mean number--not the outliers, the mean--it basically says we will borrow more money than every dime of what you think of as government; all of defense and all of discretion. That is what we get to vote on. We will be on borrowed money.

We were not supposed to be hitting numbers like that for a few more years, and it is a combination of multiple things.

Healthcare costs have exploded. We know because we have documented this one. In the first 7 months of the year, Medicare went up 16 percent. Spending on Medicare went up 16 percent.

Interest is up dramatically. Next year, just interest will be functionally three-quarters of a trillion dollars. How many people have you had talk about it, that interest in just 4 or 5 years will be bigger than all of defense?

Tax receipts have started--because of this great Biden economic economy, well, the tax receipts are starting to collapse because you don't go and sell assets and pay capital gains when your capital gains are mostly inflation. The wheels are coming off, people, and we need to take it seriously.

Let's actually do a couple of our boards here and just sort of set up what we see happening, and then we are going to walk through something that is semi-hopeful.

We always start with this chart, and one day I will actually update it because it is now almost 2 years old. For anyone watching, you see the red? Mandatory. That is on auto pilot. You

see the green and the blue? Okay. Let's just pretend that is like 26, 27 percent of all of our spending. This right here, this year, every dime of that is borrowed.

Your government, if you think the State Department, your poverty program, this, that, you care about if it is not in the mandatory, it is borrowed money.

The brain trust around here that will come in and say, well, if you just get rid of foreign aid, foreign aid is about 12 days of borrowing.

You can make an argument and say we need to think about ourselves. Ukrainian funding--okay--whether you are for it or against it, it functionally might be 3 weeks of borrowing in an entire year.

Now we are actually working on the budgets, and this is just a placeholder. When you have someone tell you we are holding discretionary spending flat, or we are holding it flat from the couple pandemic years, which were incredible spikes, but if you actually do it, the right way to look at a spending chart, go pick a base year, add in inflation, what does that curve look like? Nondefense discretionary is up 154 percent if you use 1990 as your base year, and just say, here is inflation. Here is what the line would look like if we held it steady, but it is up 159 percent. Defense is only up 35 percent over the inflation trend line.

I get more crap for showing this board from the poor folks who are having to try to build the budgets and the hallways in this place being full of people begging for more cash, but there is no cash. Understand. It is all borrowed right now.

The trust funds. So you come in here and say the Social Security trust fund is gone in the 10-year window. It is all gone. The highway transportation fund is gone in 4 years.

The highway trust fund, all that money is gone. The Medicare trust fund is actually gone about a year before the Social Security trust fund being the whole Part A, Medicare trust fund, the hospital portion, which is close to about 40 percent of all Medicare funding. The trust fund is gone. All these are empty--and functionally--within this 9-year window.

It is actually important when the Senate passes something. Ten seconds of levity. When you became a freshman here, you probably had the same experience. You sit down--and it is always a member from Texas. They plop down next to you and go, David, our freshman Member of Congress, you see them on that side? They are Democrats. That is your opposition. Your true enemy is down the hall. It is called the Senate. That joke has been here for, like, 200 years.

Back to being serious. I just showed you a chart that the trust funds are gone in the 10 years. We will need not hundreds of billions, trillions to backfill, particularly when you put in the Social Security trust fund.

How much discussion do you hear? Instead, you see it used as advertising. We had a President that got behind that podium there and basically said, you are not allowed to talk about Medicare or Social Security, and the room applauded.

A number of us have spent the last year of our lives trying to find a way to save it, Republicans and Democrats. Remember, when the President gave his State of the Union, he knifed a number of Democrat Senators, too, who had been willing to have an honest conversation about how we were going to do the moral thing and save Social Security, but it was just too tasty of a political issue.

Then you get this: I get this question often when I am talking about U.S. sovereign debt. Yes, but all of our debt is owned by China. It is not true.

The number one holder of U.S. sovereign debt is Japan. It is a little over a trillion out of that 25, 26 trillion that is publicly held that is not inner transfers.

China now, and for the last several years, has been dialing back their U.S. sovereigns, meaning today, China holds about $800 billion.

You actually go down--this is the reality. The rest of the world has been slowly over the last few years backing away from buying U.S. sovereign debt.

What do they know that Americans don't know? Why have they decided we are not that safe of an investment? Is it because United States does sanctions? Is it because of our creditworthiness?

The fact of the matter is foreign holdings of U.S. debt continues to fall, meaning we, as U.S. savers, have to finance that $63,000 we are borrowing every second, much more of that today. We have to finance with our savings.

Then you have the insane policies that this place did over the previous couple years when the left controlled it, when you had a Democrat House, Democrat Senate, Democrat President.

Do you remember the Inflation Reduction Act? Insane name. Had nothing to do with reducing inflation. It was spending money. It kept inflation going.

About 2 hours ago, the Wall Street Journal published an analysis of these grants that they are giving away to big industries.

Now, they are in the clean energy industries, but they are still really big industries. Well, it turns out the vast majority of the cash this government is giving out from last year's Inflation Reduction Act is going to foreign companies.

Yep. Our taxpayer dollars that were supposed to help us build a U.S. clean energy industry functionally structured--60 percent of clean energy projects awarded from the IRA, Inflation Reduction Act, are foreign-owned businesses. Yay, policy.

You see, we are borrowing $63,000 a second. We are crushing our kids, our grandkids, and many of your own retirements because they are the ones that have to pay this debt back, and we are doing projects funded by last year's legislation that was only supposed to cost about $280 billion. Only.

Then Goldman Sachs comes in and says, now, the spending on all of these grants and giveaways and these, you know, supplements functionally could be $1.2 trillion. CBO comes in and doubles their estimates. Now, we find 60 percent of that money is going to foreign companies.

This is not what we were promised. The President, the Democrats, promised us this was to create a U.S.-based infrastructure for clean energy, except the vast majority of their money--our money--is now going to foreign companies. Great job, guys.

It just gets worse because now we are starting to look at what is going on with interest. Do you understand how--well, sorry. I am trying not to be a jerk.

There is a concept of fragility. How many of you have ever--I will use an example from Taleb's book a couple years ago.

How many of you--you are going to go to school. For young people, it might be here, or those who have to go to the airport. You know if you leave at this time, you are always going to get there, except that one time out of 10, there is a car accident, and boom, you miss your airplane. You miss getting to class.

The concept is fragility. If you squeeze it too tight, just-in-time inventories, at some moment, something breaks, and that one time you miss the airplane, is it worth all the other times that you got 5 extra minutes at home drinking coffee?

Interest in a weird way is the same concept. Things are wonderful until they are not. Next year, we are estimated to borrow almost $750 billion.

None of that buys anything. It doesn't buy you a new bridge. It doesn't buy you a new program. It doesn't help you fund education. All of that is just paying bondholders back. $750 billion next year.

One of the things that this chart is trying to show is if you actually go out and then look at some of the higher interest rate possibilities, the math says a single point higher interest than what the Congressional Budget Office was estimating a year ago--over the 30 years, it is $30 billion or $30 trillion dollars.

Two points higher interest over that time--actually, it is closer to like 25, 27 years, every dime of U.S. tax receipts goes to cover interest. There is no more government. That is called fragility. You become subject to the whims of the debt markets.

This chart is starting to show the changes. We are over here, and here is our historic. All of a sudden, what happens to the cost of these programs with just simple marginal increases in interest?

When I talk about that $30 trillion--I am going to show it to you in a chart in a moment--how much of the financing of Medicare is actually not the delivery of healthcare but is actually the financing of the debt that financed the last increment of that Medicare.

This is a chart that should scare you to death. When you start to realize that if you had 3 percent higher interest, which isn't a stretch--go back 20 years ago, and these types of interest rates were normal for U.S. debt. In that 30-year window, you have over 345 percent of debt to the size of the economy.

You have to understand that this isn't a game. We are already right now at 100 percent of debt to GDP. The wheels are coming off, and we are going to dink around with little arguments saying, well, I have an idea, we are going to work on it all year, and our big success is that we are going to save half a percent on Medicare spending.

We have lost our minds around here with our unwillingness to do the things that are difficult because we have to explain it to a reporter or it will be an attack ad in one of our campaigns.

This is the end of your Republic. This basically means you will live in a country with, functionally, no growth and, functionally, every incremental dollar you have is trying to just cover the interest, the borrowing costs, of your country.

It is not tax receipts. We have chart after chart that demonstrates it is spending. It is mostly demographics. We got old.

A bit of trivia: In the 1970s, when I was a child--yes, I have gotten that old--for every $1 that went to seniors, $5 went to young people. Today, it is just reversed. For every $1 that goes to young people, $5 goes to seniors.

It is not actually really about a policy shift. Healthcare got dramatically more expensive. It is out of control. We cannot afford it. However, our demographics also changed rapidly.

Last year, we had a 1.67 fertility rate, meaning this country will have more deaths in 18 years than births. Half the States in this country today have more deaths than births. It is demographics from not having children. This started back in 1990. This didn't just happen yesterday. The fertility rates started to collapse in 1990. They just accelerated the last couple of years.

Next year, 12,000 Americans a day turn 65. Each day next year, 12,000 Americans turn 65, and our hallways will be full of people begging for more cash. I can't even figure out how to finance what our current obligations are.

You start to look at the reality of the money, the deficit projections. This is important to understand. When I say the wheels are coming off, go way back in history, May 2022, about a year ago. We were supposed to borrow $980 billion this year.

Today, our latest adjustment on the expectation--so a year ago, we were going to borrow $980 billion. What happened? Why has that number doubled? Within 1 year, we went from $980 billion to now we are estimating $1.84 trillion this year. What happened in 12 months?

Well, you have some of the Democratic tax policy, which, it turns out, is not raising any money and is actually slowing down parts of the growth in the economy. We are building factories like crazy with subsidized tax money that we have no workers for and no customers for. That is going to be brilliant.

The best part is that money, as I just showed you, 60 percent of it is going to foreign-owned companies. Brilliant. However, this is pretty much a math-free zone.

This is the one, and I keep showing this one because I almost have bad dreams about this one. I should disclose that I have a 1-year-old and a 7-year-old. As a matter of fact, my 7-year-old is here in Washington with me this week. What is their right? What do they get in the future because, today, the math basically says, in 23 years, all U.S. taxes have to have doubled. All U.S. taxes will have to double in that 23-year window just to maintain baseline services.

When my little people are out of their post-doctorates--because I have high expectations for them--they are going to walk into an economy that looks nothing like what we have today.

How many of you intend to still be alive 20 years from now? Are you ready to live in a country where all of your taxes will have doubled? Everything? That is the math. We can keep pretending it doesn't exist, but the math will always win.

What was so terrifying with what we did here is, when we did the debt ceiling deal, we, functionally, went from, ``Hey, we are projecting to head toward 120, 119 percent of debt to GDP at the 10-year window,'' to saying, ``Hey, we are going to get it down to maybe 114, 115.''

That is actually real money. That is $100 billion a year. Right now, we are spending about $700 billion this fiscal year in nondefense discretionary, and we are going to remove $100 billion of that. That is real money.

However, because no one here actually does economics, they also don't understand that when you remove that $100 billion--you have to do it; you don't have a choice because the wheels are coming off--but you also slow down the economy by about half a percent of GDP if you have not adopted other progrowth policies, whether it be fixing parts of immigration, fixing parts of the tax code, fixing parts of regulation.

However, without it, when you are doing the very cuts that you have to do, you also affect the growth of the economy. The really smart economists come in here and do the math. Moody's comes in and says, at the end of the 10 years, and where we are going with demographics, healthcare costs skyrocketing, higher interest rates, we don't think you are going to be down to 114, 115 percent of debt to GDP. We think you are going to be at 120 percent of debt to GDP.

Okay, if you do the math, that basically means your interest cost is probably a trillion and a quarter a year, so you are going to spend that sort of money to get nothing, to just pay the bondholders.

However, the one that takes your breath away is when the Bloomberg Intelligence folks ran their model, and their economists said: Hey, we see at the end of the 10-year window that you are going to be at 130 percent of debt to GDP.

If you do the math, when you are holding that sort of debt to GDP, that is like $2 trillion a year in just interest. Okay, pay attention with me--$2 trillion just in interest. I told you that this year every dime of discretionary is going to be borrowed. At that time, equal to almost every dime of discretionary, the discretionary will have grown a bit but stayed fairly flat. It will be pretty much just interest, meaning the borrowing 10-year window from now will have to be like $2.7 trillion in a year.

I mean, this is, functionally, 9 budget years from now. Dear Heaven, I hope this number is wrong, but they walk you through the math, saying you are going to have this many baby boomers in their benefit years. Due to that movement demographically, the economy is going to slow down. Because of what cuts you are having to do, the economy is going to have slowed down.

With the higher interest rates, financing is going to cost this much, and we are terrified to tell our voters this because our voters get all upset and say: Well, if you just got rid of waste and fraud and foreign aid, you would be fine. For the brain trust on the left, it is that if you would just raise taxes on the 2 percent of the population that makes over $400,000, that will finance it. I showed last week that is all fantasy. You don't get anything close to it. However, the political class here relies on the fact that our voters don't care about the math.

Our interest cost just this year is up 40 percent. That is a punch line. Remember, we were only going to borrow $980 billion. This year, it looks like we are going to borrow $1.84 trillion. One of the drivers of that is our interest cost is up 40 percent this year. How many people do you hear even bothering to tell you the truth?

This is the board that also gets me in trouble every time because it is 2 years old, and now the numbers are much worse. It is no longer $116 trillion. It is about $130 trillion in debt. A hundred percent of the next 30 years of debt is--I have already said it twice in this; is anyone listening?--75 percent is the shortfall in Medicare. We don't have enough money for it. The other 25 percent is if we backfill Social Security because, remember, functionally, in 9

years, the Social Security trust fund is empty.

This math was done before this inflation/interest rate cycle. You start to look at this and understand how much the direct spending is, how much the interest cost of financing those sorts of debt is. This is $130 trillion of borrowing over the next 30 years, and it is all demographics. We got old.

Pay attention. We are going to come back to this concept of if the vast majority of our borrowing, of our debt, is healthcare, we are going to get to a couple of points where we are going to have to have the willingness to talk about the drivers of that spending.

The JEC, Joint Economic Committee, on the Republican side, of which I am the senior Republican, Medicare spending will double. Fiscal year 2023, it is $1 trillion. In 10 years, we, functionally, go to $3 trillion. We are going to functionally add, over the 10 years, $22 trillion of--do you get it? Is anyone looking?--Medicare. This is not Medicaid. This is not Indian Health Service. This is not VA. It is just Medicare, $22 trillion in that 10 years.

Look in the hallways of this place, and it is lined up with people who are wonderful and smart. They worked hard and cared about their patients, and it is more money. We are trying to figure out, with the wheels falling off, is anyone willing to tell them the truth?

JEC estimates--and this is where I am, right now, about to soak myself in kerosene and light myself on fire because, apparently, we are not allowed to actually talk to people and tell the truth. We have been writing the Republicans' side of the Joint Economic Committee report now for a couple of months. There are, functionally, five Ph.D. economists. There is an idiot like me doing some of the math, working on it. We are trying to figure out what moral approach we can take to save the country from the debt crisis that is here.

Did I mention the $63,000 a second we are borrowing this last 12 months?

There is a chapter 3 in here, and this chapter may get me unelected, but we calculated the cost of obesity. I can't tell you how many Members here are terrified when I start to want to even have a conversation overseeing the math. We know that diabetes--just, functionally, type 2--is 33 percent of all healthcare spending. We know our brothers and sisters out there who have multiple comorbidities, that 5 percent of the population, that is over 50 percent of all of our healthcare spend.

I have shown you chart after chart here, showing healthcare is the driver of our debt. We have 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who are really sick, and the most common morbidity within that population is obesity. Of the 4,000 human diseases--and I have this one really well documented--functionally, 2,000 are related to obesity, so 2,000 out of the 4,000.

Are we willing to basically have a moment of honesty? I am going to show you a couple of charts here. We are in trouble. Have you seen the latest obesity statistics for our kids? Have you seen the numbers of how many Americans are dying? It is immoral that we are terrified to talk about this.

You are going to see in the report, because we spent a lot of time working on the math, and they wouldn't let us use some of the more optimistic math because it wasn't properly vetted, so we had to find peer-reviewed studies with lots of math that could be recalculated and done.

But we are looking at--if we could stabilize the sickest in our obese population, both with productivity, because you get to come back into society and work, but also the healthcare costs associated, it is a few trillion dollars in the 10-year window.

There is a moral path to save us from the crushing debt. Are we willing to adopt policy that basically say we love and care for people and we would like them to live for a while, we would like them to not be miserable all the time?

Are we willing to discuss the farm bill? Are we willing to actually discuss the technologies that are out there right now where the watch actually has blood glucose, or the portable blood glucose monitor you can stick on yourself.

Are we willing to have--and I am going to show you a board here that talks about the GLP-1s, and this is not even with actually the new generation that is coming out, where FDA approves the first cellular therapy for Type 1 Diabetes.

The first one is now actually approved. It gets the body to start producing islet cells again. It is here, and there are actually four or five others in phase I right now.

Maybe we are on the cusp of technology miracles. The dear Lord gave us the ability to think, and it turns out really smart people are giving us a path. Are we willing to be smart enough?

The Joint Economic Committee estimates related projections, 12.3 percent of the 33 trillion, one out of every 8, functionally is, that spending is directly related to obesity. That is the most conservative of the numbers. Obesity risk.

You all know this. I am showing stuff people know. We all know it. I mean, heart, what is it, 1 in 12 cancers, the number of human misery that is directly associated.

Now, we get in to some of the more uncomfortable things to talk about. Life expectancy, for 18 years old and up, given their BMI class, and look, we all know there is controversy on the body mass index, but we have lots of data around it.

If you care about people, what is happening in society, because remember, functionally, in the last 4 years, Americans' life expectancy has gone down. We are dying younger.

Even when you remove COVID, and even then try to take a look, so for our prime-age working males, we have a data set I presented here a couple of weeks ago that just shocked me. It turned out, it wasn't drugs. Now, drugs was really close. It was actually obesity was killing more of our brothers in America. I didn't have a female data set to look at.

How many of us are willing to actually say, wow, so if we would actually take on the drug problem and the obesity problem, we would add how many years of longevity to Americans' life? That is moral and also it is really good economics.

We can see when we start to see some of these numbers, where 81 was almost healthy, down to 72, so they are losing almost a decade of their lives. You get into some of our minority populations and the numbers are even uglier.

So my brothers and sisters that keep coming here and saying, let's talk about income inequality, it turns out some of the data says health, taking on diabetes, hypertension, obesity may be the single most moral, fast, and economically rational path if you care about income inequality. You have just got to be prepared for the armies of lobbyists who we are about to change--if we did these things and actually took it on, we would be changing their business models.

Look, the number is going off the charts. This one actually just came out, I think, about 48 hours ago. The projections over the rest of this decade of how many of our young people, when we are starting to see some numbers where we are heading toward a time where half--the end of the decade--where half of our young people are technically obese.

This is a country that took on smoking and saved how many lives? We have seatbelts. We have air bags. We did it because it made us safer, healthier, we got to live longer.

When you are seeing a new study out, and it is a good study, and it is detailed, and it is a huge data set and saying, hey, at the current rate, in about a decade, half of our young people--are we willing to take this on?

Because just the economics, just the life span, healthcare costs, you are going to see things in our joint economic report, if it gets passed. It is not a report until it is passed by the committee, and I hope I can get the votes of my fellow members on the committee to support what we wrote.

But if it becomes an official report, you are going to see in there stunning amounts of money--for those who sound like accountants on steroids--that we would save by being healthier year.

Then you have the other side. Look at longevity. Look at the ability to participate in society. Look at the ability to have family formation.

This is as close as I have come up with for a unified theory of what we could do to save ourselves. How many

other idiots are going to be like me and get behind the microphone and be willing to talk about this and get ready for the television ads? He was willing to talk about this.

And here is some of the punch line. I believe this number is dramatically too low, but we are coming up with math that says, look, just the use of the GLP-1s for some of the highest BMI segments, potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, and that is without the economic effect, and that is also without the long-term health effects that are outside that 10-year window.

Madam Speaker pro tem, I appreciate you sitting there letting me go through this. I am trying to make a point. Instead of coming to this mike every week after week after week saying there is something horribly wrong in the debt data, it is getting worse dramatically faster. People don't understand how fragile we are becoming as a society because of the threats that debt means.

I am going to try to be better. I am going to try to demonstrate there is hope. There is a path.

This is only one of about four key things I believe we could do to become a much more prosperous society with dramatically--we are not going to pay off the debt, but we could stabilize it. There is hope, Madam Speaker pro tem, but is anyone listening?

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, tonight, I am going to actually have one positive and lots of things that are just terrifying, so let's have some fun with some math.

Mr. Speaker, we often start with this board just because it helps everyone sort of visualize what we are talking about. A couple of weeks ago, I actually beat up on some of the Republican ideas in regard to where the debt was coming from. Tonight, I am going to beat up on some of my brothers and sisters on the left on tax proposals and how little they actually do, but first, if you are not terrified right now about what is going on with U.S. debt, you don't own a calculator.

I have used this board for years. It is actually the 2022 board, but the concept is really simple. Mr. Speaker, you see this blue and the green. That is all we vote on. This wedge right here, that is all we get to vote on. That is what we call discretionary. The red is mandatory. That is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Those are the things that are on a formula. Recipients get those because they worked a certain number of quarters. They get those because they turned a certain age, are part of a certain Tribal group, or fall below a certain income. These are formula-driven.

This wedge over here, defense and nondefense discretionary, when we were here a couple of weeks ago, our math said every dime of that discretionary, defense included, was going to be on borrowed money this year.

The Supreme Court made its ruling in regard to student loan debt. That backs off roughly $300 billion of spending this year. We are having to redo the interest calculations because of what happened in interest over the last 10 days, and then there is the discussion of what we call paying back the extraordinary measures.

When we were having the battle over the debt ceiling, one of the ways they kept the government running is they borrowed from all sorts of trust funds. Well, now they have to sell lots and lots of debt. Remember when we borrowed a trillion dollars in a week? That was actually selling bonds to functionally pay back those extraordinary measures, and I am going to show some charts on that. Those bonds are now at the much higher interest rates. I haven't had the time to actually do those calculations.

The good news I am going to show on a chart is we may not borrow $1.8 trillion this year. It could be $1.5, $1.6 trillion. I am a little more dour. I think it is going to be closer to $1.7 trillion. We haven't done all that.

The point of the matter is, give or take a couple hundred billion dollars, all discretionary is pretty much borrowed this year. Think about that. If you are part of the brain trust that walks in--this is me beating up on myself and some of my friends--you walk in and say that we can balance the budget by getting rid of foreign aid. A couple of weeks ago, I showed the chart. That is like 12 days of borrowing.

Let's play a game. In your head right now, the last 12 months, how much have we been borrowing per second? What is the burn rate? What is the borrowing rate the last 12 months, not the fiscal year but the last running calendar 12 months? What have we been borrowing per second?

If you said $63,000 a second in your head, you are really good at math because, in the last 12 months, we have borrowed $2 trillion. That is over $63,000 every second.

There is a delusion that debt doesn't matter. Maybe it doesn't matter until it does. When it does, it is the poor and the working middle class that are getting their heads kicked in. It is immoral what is going on here.

In 9 years, when the Social Security trust fund is empty--and I am going to show the trust funds in a little bit--and grandma takes a 25 percent cut in her Social Security check, we double senior poverty. Is that moral?

Once again, you have heard me gripe about that, when the President stood behind that podium and made it toxic to have an honest conversation of trust funds being empty.

Remember, the Social Security trust fund will be emptied in this 10- year window. The transportation, the highway transportation trust fund is empty in just a couple more years. The Medicare trust fund is empty.

How many times today did you see people get behind these microphones and talk about the math?

Last week, when we were at home, I had a great conversation with a reporter from one of the big cable news networks. She had all sorts of questions, but they were personality, who's fighting with who, who doesn't like who. I stopped her and said: Do you realize how much of this year's discretionary spending is borrowed? She said: Yes, David, I watched part of your speech the other day. Understand, none of my national audience cares. My producers don't care.

Dear Lord, I hope that is not true, because it is the single thing that wipes out a republic.

Look at what has happened over history. The debt is what destroys you. Maybe that is why we are terrified to talk about it.

Once again, why this was important, is a year ago--let's go back, way back, like a year ago May. This year we were supposed to only borrow about $980 billion, only. As of 2 weeks ago, our best math--because remember, healthcare costs have gone up dramatically. I think our math in the first 7 months of this fiscal year had gone up--just Medicare had gone up 16 percent. Interest costs had gone up $130 billion and now continually, because we are at even higher interest rates than that previous calculation, and tax receipts had fallen like 10 percent, substantially because of capital gains taxes.

Who is going to sell an asset when most of your gain is inflation? There are historic precedents that during times of high inflation, people stop selling things because you are going to get taxed on not gain but inflation.

We were calculating that this year's borrowing was going to be about $1.8 trillion. Now, with the Supreme Court ruling on student debt, take away $200 billion or $300 billion from that. That is the good news. The terrifying news, once again, still, is almost all of discretionary spending is on borrowed money.

Let's have some more fun with math. It doesn't really change some of the outside economists' calculations from about 3 weeks ago. CBO basically said: Hey, guys, when you did the debt ceiling deal, you probably pulled down debt-to-GDP by about 4 points. Remember, we were seeing things, we were going to be at the end of the 10-year window, 9 budget years from now, at about 119 percent of debt to GDP. Remember, that is publicly held debt.

Let's make this point. When you see the number, it says there is $32.5 trillion of debt, a few trillion of that is actually money we borrow from ourselves. This is the money that is in the healthcare trust fund. This is the money that is set aside for future benefits for veterans. We internally borrow that.

Now, we still pay interest on it. When the Treasury borrows money from the Social Security trust fund, we pay interest. As a matter of fact, for years it was actually a spiff. They actually got a little higher than market interest rates. So there is $2 trillion-plus in the Social Security trust fund, and we are going to burn through that in about 8-and-a-half or 9 years.

For that remaining $25 trillion, $26 trillion of borrowing, that is where we are at today, CBO now updates the number saying: Hey, you made the debt ceiling deal. You are basically going to remove about $100 billion of spending for the next few years on discretionary. Instead of spending $700 billion, you are going to spend $600 billion. That brought us down to 115 percent of debt to GDP.

Then Moody's did their calculation and said with higher interest rates and higher healthcare costs and we believe flat GDP growth, we think at the end of the 10 years we are going to be at 120 percent of debt to GDP. Why that is a big deal is that is higher than during World War II.

The one that terrified me was Bloomberg Intelligence. They actually have a fairly sophisticated data model, like Tax Foundation, like Joint Tax, and others here. CBO has one. The Bloomberg model said, no, you are going to about $52 trillion of borrowed money, 130 percent of debt to GDP at the end of the 10-year window.

If this is true--please, I desperately hope Bloomberg Intelligence really isn't true, but if you read their notes, it makes sense. There are a couple of things I want to throw out as to why their notes make sense. In 10 years, we are spending about $2 trillion a year in interest.

Remember, CBO last week put out their long-term estimates. I know we all grabbed it and read it last week when it came out. Remember the little booklet, percentages of GDP to debt? In there are some line items. What is the borrowing? What is the interest cost next year?

CBO, which has been far too conservative on some of these numbers for the last decade, what did CBO say we are going to spend in interest next year? Three-quarters of a trillion dollars next year. My math for this year was about 620, 630. We have one economist with us that says it could be 680, depending on the cost of this recent financing.

What was fascinating is something those of us who care about the honest math don't talk about. In the notes from Bloomberg Intelligence, they said: Hey, guys, you really, really, really need to cut spending. Okay. But do understand, it is not a free option anymore. When Bloomberg came back and said you are going to be at $51 trillion-plus of borrowed money after 10 years, 130 percent of debt to GDP, think of this: Just the removal of that $100 billion of spending, got to do--got to pay interest on it and those things--but that is going to lower GDP next year by half a point.

One of the things that goes on here is: We are going to cut this. Fine. We need to reduce spending, but don't think it is a free option that the GDP continues to grow because you have just removed $100 billion of spending from the economy. Now, you have got to do it. But when you do it, you also have got to adopt other policies that grow.

This is the thing that frustrates me so much around here. We are incapable of thinking about complex answers for complex problems. It is not just cut. You have got to have policies over here to grow, promote investment, promote risk-taking. You don't just get to do one without the other.

It is just sort of like when the left, a couple of years ago, said: Hey, we are going to spend $1.9 trillion, and then they didn't think it through, and we are going to pay people not to have to work, the economists--even Democrat economists were losing their minds. If you are going to put out that sort of stimulus, you have got to be actually making stuff to sop it up. Then they wonder why you set off inflation.

Let's actually walk through a little bit more of this. This is new board for us. I am just trying to point out a very simple concept. I have done entire presentations on this.

Look at the last 50 years of history. When we have had very high marginal tax rates, we get about 18-and-a-half, 19 percent of the economy in taxes. When we have had very low marginal tax rates, we get about 18-and-a-half, 19 percent of the economy in taxes. You see something? The tax receipts actually are not sympathetic to the tax rate. They sort of fall into this mean.

The concept is, grow the economy as much as possible, and you actually--the bigger the economy, that percentage represents more dollars

When you start to look at the chart, this black line is revenues. The proper term is receipts. You will notice, if you can run a line, it is always right there about that 18-and-a-half, 19 percent. You see the colored lines here? This green here is just borrowing.

Why is this a big deal? Remember a moment ago, I was starting to show you that Bloomberg and some of the others--CBO is saying, hey, you may get as high as 7, 7.5 percent of the entire economy in borrowing. Bloomberg comes and says, no, it could be as high as 13 percent of the economy in borrowing at the end of the 10 years.

Okay. Let's say CBO is right at 7, and your economy is now growing at 1.7, 1.8. The difference between 1.8 and that 7 or 7.5--and God forbid it is not Bloomberg's 13--that difference is what buries you. Yet, we have lots and lots and lots and lots of history of when we have raised taxes, you get a little pop on receipts, and then it fades back down, because as a percentage of the economy, the economy doesn't grow.

Let's walk through a couple more things. Interest spending is now a key thing in driving parts of the debt. I am going to show a couple boards here showing it is spending and interest. When we say spending, let's be honest. It is mostly healthcare, one of the things we aren't supposed to say out loud, but it is.

This is a complex board. We should actually put it up, but here is where we are. Actually, one of the things that is fascinating with this is you are about to see interest, in just a couple years, exceed defense. The interest payment next year is three-quarters of a trillion dollars. A couple years after that, the interest expenditure for this government will be more than defense. Then you keep looking a couple years after that, it exceeds nondefense discretionary. It will be more money than

that in a couple more years after that. You start to get into 20 years from now, interest is more than Medicare, yet Medicare is the primary driver of U.S. debt. Then at a certain point, it starts to exceed 6.5, 6.7 percent of the entire economy--of the entire economy--just the debt payment of the United States.

This isn't conjecture. This is functionally built in. This is Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, their math, and I think their interest calculation is too low, but that is actually the chart we have. Understand, you are not at the death spiral yet, but you are getting pretty darn close where healthcare costs go up substantially because we have got 67 million baby boomers.

Inflation has made all the bad, ugly predictions that weren't supposed to happen for years move forward. Now, because of inflation, you have much higher interest rates, because inflation is the devaluation of the dollar, so you have got to have a higher interest rate and then the Federal Reserve trying to have higher interest rates to slow the economy down, particularly now wage inflation.

Healthcare, inflation, interest rates, if we don't get in front of this, if we don't somehow get productivity up, if we somehow don't actually get investment capital to things that are productive--there were some fascinating articles last week about how it is amazing how many factories are being built around the United States with government money. Then the second paragraph is, of course, there is a problem: There are no consumers for the products they are about to make and there are no workers for them.

I will make you a prediction today, and I will buy someone a fancy coffee if they remember this a couple of years from now. We are going to have a whole bunch of government-financed factories--remember the soft nationalization that happened in the previous couple years with Democrat control here. We are going to have factories that basically run at a fraction of their capacity because they can't find labor and there are functionally no consumers for their products.

Remember, right now, the world has a glut of computer chips. It was funny, as this place was passing the CHIPS Act a couple years ago, that same week, or the week after that, The Economist magazine ran a major article that basically said, hey, you do understand the economy is actually awash in chips; they are just having a supply chain issue problem of delivery. Our brothers and sisters on the other side believe in a soft nationalization of major industry, and that is what happened.

Let's actually walk through part of the rest of the crisis. This isn't Republican or Democrat. It is demographics. We got old. We got old. It is not Republican; it is not Democratic. It is just the way God made us.

Here is what is happening to the Social Security trust fund. This is, I think, using the number from the Medicare Social Security actuaries. The CBO functionally has the trust fund gone in about 9 years, with grandma having to take a 25 percent cut.

This one is Social Security. You realize this right here, 2028, the highway trust fund is gone. This one here, the Medicare trust fund-- remember, Medicare, about 40 percent of Medicare spending comes from the trust fund. The rest comes right out of the general fund.

That part is mostly the hospital portion, and it is gone in about 8 years. This is our reality. What are we going to do? How much taxes are we going to raise here? And how much taxes are you going to do to backfill the Medicare trust fund and the highway trust fund?

If you start to stack all of these requirements and then just the baseline deficit, the amount of the economy you would have to now start collecting in taxes you almost have to double. I don't think there is an understanding of how bad and how fast the numbers are moving away from us.

This is just one of my fragility charts. It basically says that if interest rates continue to stay uncomfortably high--there are some models out there that basically say within the 30-year window--you hit points here. One of the best parts here is if you had a 2 percent increase--and, yes, you have got to calculate it from this--if you had a 2 percent increase from interest rates that we had a year or two ago and you held that for the 30 years, at about 25 years 100 percent of all tax receipts just go to interest.

That is the concept of fragility, how on the edge we are living. And now we are starting to deal with it when inflation starts to shoot up healthcare costs and interest rates start to shoot up. Did I mention three-quarters of a trillion dollars next year in interest, and that is CBO's number before the recent additional spike in interest rates.

I brought this one just because I get this question. Oh, but China owns our debt. No. Actually, Japan is the number one holder of our debt; they hold about a $1.1 trillion. China has pared theirs back to $850 billion. They continue to sell off U.S. Treasuries or let them roll off. This is the reality.

The United Kingdom--now, understand, the United Kingdom holding U.S. Treasuries are often acting as the domicile for investors from other places in the world, so that number is often distorted, but that is 668. The reality is that much of the world has been slowly paring back their purchases of U.S. sovereigns. Think about that.

This means much of this debt we will have to finance internally. It is the savings. It is your pension. It is the capital that we build up to grow the economy to pay for your retirement and pay for your kids' college. Much of that now is being ultimately borrowed by the U.S. Government.

What happens at the end of the decade when they have to turn on the printing presses because they don't have enough buyers at an auction? Is it the rest of the world? Yes. The rest of the world would probably go into recession or depression. We would get wiped out.

I am not one of those that believes there is a crash coming; it is more the rot that comes. You inflate the dollar, inflate the dollar, and people don't understand inflation. Inflating the dollar is a type of tax.

We devalue your savings and then the value of the debt actually gets paid back with inflated dollars. It becomes a transfer of your wealth. It becomes a transfer of your wealth to government. That is the really sneaky evil of inflation. It is actually a wealth transfer. It is a tax. In the last couple years has been one of the biggest taxes in modern history. People don't know it.

We have made America poorer. If you want to know why the working middle-class, the working poor are really cranky, it is because they are poorer today than they were a couple years ago. It is inflation. Their wages haven't gone up as fast.

I do this chart just to basically beat up my own side and sort of make a point. If you do a baseline number--and here is one of the great scams going on right now in budgeting. We are ticking along, economy is growing phenomenally well, the poor are getting less poor. There are really good things--income inequality is shrinking. There is some of the greatest shrinkage of food insecurity.

The 2017 tax reform happens and we have this remarkable growth with no inflation. The pandemic hits and spending goes way up. And now we are actually starting to rebuild our budget, but we are often using the inflated base from the pandemic.

The way you actually look at honest math is pick a benchmark here, go back a decade, go back two decades, go back three decades. It doesn't matter, just pick a date. Then say, here is the budget, and we are going to inflation adjust it. How much would the 2022 budget be if we just inflation adjust it? How much higher would this be than the baseline?

Simple.

Nondefense discretionary is up 154 percent and defense is up 35 percent. When someone tells you, you say, well, discretionary spending is pretty flat. It is flat from the last couple of years, which were dramatically higher. But if you see the charts--I know this is uncomfortable, and I am not making a lot of friends by sharing this-- but the reality is nondefense discretionary is up dramatically from its inflation-adjusted trend line. It is math. It is the truth.

Let's have a little more fun here. This is my one shot at inflation-- actually, two shots at inflation--I have another board. I do need to update from the unemployment number from the end of last week that actually had some pretty good wage growth in it. This number may shrink a fraction of a fraction, but that was actually positive to see.

If you want to understand why much of the population is cranky right now, it is because they are poorer. Under President Obama, real wage-- let's phrase it the right way--percentage change in real average weekly earnings. This is for production-type workers. This is for our brothers and sisters, the classic middle class, and BLS gives us a great dataset here.

Under Obama, over that time, he had about a 4 percent growth in real wages adjusted for inflation. Under President Trump it was 9.8. It was a remarkable growth in real wages adjusted for inflation. So far, at this moment under this administration, you are 3\1/2\ percent poorer. It is just math. Much of this is that wages are up but inflation is up more. It just is what it is.

There is another way to calculate it that if you actually look at it and you go back to the BLS numbers, if you look at the change in real disposable personal income per capita, you adjust it per person, today, the average working American is 4\1/2\ percent poorer.

You feel that.

I also argue it is immoral. Transfer payments aren't a fix. It is a Band-Aid that ends up making the wound worse, but that has actually been the solution that keeps being offered around here.

Back to something that is really uncomfortable to talk about. There is a reason for pulling this chart right now. This chart now is almost 2 years old and the numbers are much worse. Over the next 30 years, we no longer expect about $116 trillion of borrowing. We now expect it to be closer to $130 trillion.

And if you want to tell the truth about it, three-quarters of the borrowing is Medicare and one-quarter is Social Security. And that is if we choose to backfill Social Security, which you already know the moral dilemma we are walking into--a 25 percent cut.

We had a President stand behind that podium and made it almost toxic for my brothers on my left and folks on our side to have an actual honest conversation about the math because it is a great campaign issue because the public doesn't understand it. The math basically said the rest of the budget is in balance because this is where all the demographic growth is.

Remember how many times you have heard people say that 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day?

In 2024, it is 12,000 Americans that will turn 65 every day. For those of you with a calculator, take that 12,000 and multiple it by 365. That is just the new additions to the Medicare rolls. You start to understand the math.

Let's have a little more fun there. I often end up with discussions when I do certain group things at home, and say, well, you know, tax rich people more. Okay. Fine. A point of reference--our brothers and sisters on the left and the President have said that people that make $400,000 and below will not be touched. Okay.

Mr. Speaker, $400,000 and up is 2 percent of the population and most of them live in Democrat districts. Maybe as Republicans we should stop caring. They live on the coasts and most of that population lives in Democrat districts. Fine, it is your voters, but it is only 2 percent of the population.

Do you actually believe when we are projected to have a $2.5 or $2.6 trillion-a-year borrowing at the end of the 10-year window--nine budget years from now the annual borrowing will be over $2.5 trillion a year. That is CBO's number from last week, and I think it underestimates interest costs. You are going to finance that on 2 percent of the population. Okay.

Let's walk through why that mathematically doesn't work. Why this board is important is because it is a distribution, a share of individual income versus a share of Federal income tax.

What is fascinating is upper income--if you start to look here, take the populations at $100,000 and up, they pay the vast majority of income tax. They have very high percentages of their share of income until you get to the really wealthy--functionally here. If you can see this blue line here, that is the percentage of total income. This is the amount of taxes they are paying.

If you are one of the people who makes a million dollars--which I would like to meet a few of them and I would like to become their friends--functionally the percentage of the total Federal income tax they pay compared to others is like 2\1/2\ times more.

A bit of trivia--and I dare anyone to walk up to someone from the left and ask them this question. After the 2017 tax reform, was the U.S. Federal income tax more or less progressive?

The trivia answer: The tax model got more progressive, meaning the wealthier were paying a higher percentage of Federal income taxes after tax reform than before it, and half the population was removed from the tax rolls.

How often do we have anyone actually tell the truth about that?

Let's walk through just a couple more of these boards.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time I have remaining?

Mr. Speaker, to my friends who have the next time slot, I promise I will talk faster.

Mr. Speaker, I have a series of boards, and I may save these for another week, but it just sort of talks about some of the spending that happened last year.

Do you remember when we were getting the Inflation Reduction Act, which, come on, let's be honest, was a completely Orwellian name for something that actually boosted inflation.

Remember, we were first told it is going to be a couple hundred billion, maybe $280 billion of handouts to Big Green Energy for energy companies that do things we want. Then we saw Goldman Sachs say, no, it could be as high as $1.2 trillion. This one actually has the latest data at about $659 billion.

Mr. Speaker, do you want to understand why inflation is continuing and why there are factories being built that are going to be empty?

It is the ultimate Keynesian economics without actually demand on the other side. So build the factory but then don't build the mechanisms to actually have supply. This is what happens with the arrogance of us who sit in this body thinking we can manage the economy.

Let's have a little fun here. I am going to be a little caustic on some of these. I know I am going to be slightly mean, but I am just trying to get it through. Let's actually walk through a couple of these proposals.

Let's repeal all the 2017 tax reform cuts, including what we did for low-income folks, the doubling of the deductions and those things. Remember, Mr. Speaker, 10 years from now, we are borrowing about $2.5 trillion a year. Over the whole 10 years, we get about $455 billion in over 10 years.

Mr. Speaker, the next time you have a Democrat behind the microphone saying it is the tax reform, then, okay, just repeal it, and when you take away the growth effects, Mr. Speaker, the wage growth effects, look at the number. You get $455 billion of receipts over an entire 10 years.

Let's actually walk through a couple of other things going on. Proposal: a 30 percent minimum Buffett tax. How many of us have ever heard of the Buffett tax? Remember, Mr. Speaker, we tax income differently from passive income, capital gains, and those things.

How many people have gotten behind the microphone on that side and said it is not fair? Maybe it isn't. Rewrite the 16th Amendment, but go to a 30 percent under that Buffett rule where everyone is paying, and it produces $66 billion over 10 years, or 0.03 percent of GDP.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, we are heading toward borrowing 7\1/2\ percent, or something much more, of the entire economy. This would take care of 0.03.

This is theater. It is not real math. Those are the types of proposals this place likes because they politically poll well, but it is crap math.

Let's do a little more of some of the proposals the other side gives. Eliminate all itemized tax deductions. Okay, $1.7 billion over the 10. Excuse me. Sorry. I knew I was getting that wrong. $1.718 trillion over the 10 years. That is real money.

Except we saw some of the boards that if we are borrowing $2.5 trillion a year, and I get $1.7 trillion over 10, so it is about $170 billion of tax receipts by getting rid of all deductions. This is a Democrat proposal. It is real money, but it is nothing. It is just still almost nothing compared to the scale of the borrowing. Remember, Mr. Speaker, we borrowed $2 trillion in the last 12 months.

Let's take another proposal here. Raise the FICA cap. Just get rid of the cap. Maybe this is the part of this that we should have a debate over, but don't think it solves all the problems. It is more complicated.

What breaks my heart is I actually think letting the Social Security trust fund run out of money is immoral on all of our parts, but we are terrified to talk about it, Mr. Speaker, because you will lose your election if you do. I am an idiot. I talk about it.

Mr. Speaker, if you get rid of the FICA cap, then, over the 10 years, it produces $2.18 trillion. It doesn't get you there. I think if you remove the caps and you can keep the current benefit formula, Mr. Speaker, then it takes care of only 19 percent of the shortfall.

We have to decide. We are going to be taxed on every dime with the 15.3 percent FICA tax, and if we are going to give people the same formula of benefits, then we are only covering about 19 percent of the shortfall, but that is one of the big talking points on the left, to raise the cap. Okay, but don't pretend it actually takes care of the problem of saving Social Security.

In 2022, tax revenues were $1 trillion of prepandemic levels. Now, understand, Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of pandemic spending in this and those things, but do understand, it is $1 trillion. We went from $3.7 trillion to $4.8 trillion, a trillion-dollar growth. It is like 20 percent, 25 percent growth in tax receipts prepandemic to postpandemic, yet somehow we are still burning through it.

Go back to a couple of the other proposals, Mr. Speaker.

How about a 50 percent income tax rate on everyone earning $200,000 and up? Take everyone $200,000 and up, and we get a 50 percent Federal income tax. Now, on top of that, put on FICA and put on State and local taxes. We are basically $1.59 trillion, or 0.45 percent of the economy, in additional taxes.

We are heading toward a time when we are going to be borrowing 7\1/2\ percent. That is CBO's number. That is the most conservative number, 7, let's call it 7\1/2\ percent, and this does less than half a percent going to 50 percent income tax rate on everyone over $200,000.

We can't pretend that raising these taxes gets us close to the numbers that are necessary.

I have a couple of more boards, and then I will shut up.

Taxing 100 percent of all income over $500,000 would balance the budget over the decade. I can show you a dozen Members who have said those things behind these microphones, that we just need to take those rich people making $500,000 and up and just tax everything additional. It would raise about 5.1 percent of the economy, assuming we don't slow the economy down.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, these are static scores. They are not dynamic. If we take everyone who makes over one-half a million dollars, fine, take every dime of income, and then pretend the economy does not crash on us and does not slow down. The economy stays the same, and then we get about 5.1 percent of the economy in taxes. We are borrowing 7\1/2\, so you closed a bunch of the gap.

It is also fantasy that we didn't just blow up the economy.

Let's do a couple of the other fantasies. Raise corporate income tax from 21 percent to 35 percent. Okay, we get $1.39 trillion over 10, so we get about another $130 billion a year.

Did I mention we borrowed $2 trillion in the last 12 months?

However, we could go to a 35 percent corporate income tax and make us not competitive in the world. Remember, Mr. Speaker, corporate income taxes are just passed to you as the consumer, but it makes us feel better.

We have lists of the different proposals our brothers and sisters on the left have given, and maybe there is a need for fixing parts of the tax code. I believe tax codes are living documents because we have to compete with the rest of the world, which is also always changing, but living in the fantasy world that just raising a handful of these taxes gets us anywhere is just not true.

Just as we have some people on our side say that if we get rid of foreign aid, then we can balance the budget. That is 12 days of borrowing.

We have to have our brothers and sisters on the other side stop pretending that if we just tax rich people more, then we will balance the budget.

It is not true. We all know it is not true.

Do we care so much more about not telling our voters the truth because they might not love us anymore? Guess what, Mr. Speaker? They don't love us anyway.

The math is the math. We have a demographic problem in this country. Take a look at where we are at, Mr. Speaker. Think of that. The Social Security trust fund at the end of last year, the very end of last year, held $2.7 trillion, and that is gone in, functionally, 9 years. This helps us understand the burn rate.

Seventy-five percent of what goes out in Social Security is functionally what comes in on the FICA tax. The 25 percent is what goes out from the trust fund, and that 25 percent is going to chew up $2.7 trillion over the next 9 years.

Most of these trust funds are gone by the end of this decade. What do we plan to do?

Mr. Speaker, typically, when I do these, I try to come to the end and talk about what we can do with diabetes and obesity and making our society healthier and the effects that would have on balancing the budget, but I have just grown so weary of doing these presentations to show the crashing of our window of opportunity, the scale of the growth of debt.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, we borrowed $63,000 per second in the last 12 months, and then we get these idiots who say we can just raise this guy's taxes, and we will be fine.

It may make you feel better, Mr. Speaker. You may not like people to earn money. You are allowed to do that but don't pretend it actually solves the problems.

Complex problems require complex solutions, Mr. Speaker, and I worry this place isn't capable of complexity anymore.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I have a lot of boards. I am going to try to get through them as fast as possible. I wish there was some way you could set off an alarm if I start speaking too fast because I always feel guilty when I do that. Once again, I have had far too much caffeine.

I actually want to walk through a couple of things. I meant today to be a day where I was going to come with things that were happy and hopeful and look at these great disruptions and that we can crash the price of healthcare. I am going to have some of that, but once again, I think I need to actually reset some of the math, so we are going to walk through a few of these just because I am sort of enraged when I hear the White House put out materials and my brothers and sisters on the left put out materials that talk about this wonderful economy, the Biden economy, the Biden economics.

Let's actually deal with some real live math.

Amortized change in real disposable personal income per capita, under President Trump, it was amazing. It went up 5.1 percent. Under President Obama, it went up 1.2 percent. Under President Biden so far-- and this is annualized per capita--your income, if you are an average American, is down 4\1/2\ percent. You are poorer today. You are poorer today than the day President Biden took office.

That is the left's idea of a wonderful economy? Come on, these are people. You think actually there would be this passion behind these microphones, particularly on the other side, saying something is wrong out there. There is inflation. Salaries haven't kept up to the inflation. Our spending and some of the things the Fed did set this off. We care. Instead, they just lie, cover it up, and say things that just aren't true.

Let's go into this a little more.

There is just another way to calculate when you start to do change in real average wages for baseline middle-class workers. We have actually done adjustments on this for raises of income.

Let's say, you know, you are that truck driver. Your wages have gone up, but inflation has gone up more. You are 3\1/2\ percent poorer now. You are poorer today than the day before Biden took office.

Now, the fascinating thing is those 4 years of Trump--whether you loved the guy or don't love him, I don't care. The math is still the math. Your real purchasing power, you are up 9.8 percent.

Do you see the delta here? Yet, how often do you hear this from the talking heads on cable television or in the print press here in Washington, D.C., that Americans, the working population in this country, you wonder why they are angry. They are poorer today than they were a couple years ago. As I often decry at this microphone: Is that moral?

Now, you can make excuses for why it is, but we have these debates here, and it is like our friends on the other side won't admit America is poorer today because of what they did.

Now, we have to start dealing with the other side of this equation. Think of this: Because of inflation, America is poorer, something that is really hard for many people to process in their head.

You do realize you and I have lived through probably the largest tax hike in modern history over the last 2 years. You are going, what? What do you think inflation does?

Do you remember your high school economics class? Who does inflation help?

Borrowers. Who is the biggest borrower in the world? The United States.

Who does it hurt? Workers and savers.

So if you are that saver, you have been saving for your retirement, for your kid's education, or you are out there busting your backside, the fact of the matter is inflation devalued that savings.

Who benefited? Who got that value? The borrowers. Who is the biggest borrower in the world? We are. This government.

You have been taxed and that wealth was transferred to basically, where we will pay down the future debt now with inflated dollars. If we don't take on the U.S. sovereign debt, that is how you do it.

It is not a crash. This isn't new. This has happened for thousands of years. Governments spend and spend and spend and borrow, borrow, borrow, and then when it is time to pay it back, you just inflate the currency. Just turn on the printing presses.

So let's talk about this year. You do realize the wheels are falling off? So May 2022, functionally, a year ago, the 2023 budget, which is what we are all in right now, we were supposed to borrow about $980 billion. That was the math a year ago. Today, we are closing in on $1.18 trillion.

We functionally doubled the projected borrowing for this year, this fiscal year, over the last 12 months. What has gone wrong?

This type of movement--CBO is often not 100 percent perfect, but they rarely, rarely, rarely, miss a number by 100 percent.

What happened? Well, a handful of things happened. Healthcare costs have skyrocketed. I was here a couple of weeks ago and I was showing this chart that basically said Medicare costs--Medicare, just Medicare--were up 16 percent in the first 7 months. There are a couple of inputs on that, there are delayed surgeries, procedures, medical inflation--2, 2\1/2\ times, depending on your market--financing costs of the debt.

You have got to understand, it is not just the, functionally, $1.8 trillion. The number printed on here is 1.79. We think it is going to be a little over $1.8 trillion is borrowed. That is going to be new issued debt.

But what about the several trillion dollars of debt this fiscal year that has to be refinanced? People forget that.

So you get the higher interest rate on the new debt, and then the-- off the top of my head I don't know the exact number. Let's pretend it is $5 trillion, $7 trillion of bonds, instruments, other things that come due that have to be refinanced now at the higher interest rate.

We know in the first 7 months--so, 2 months ago--we had already spent well over an additional $100 billion in interest. Meaning, by the end of the fiscal year you are probably another quarter trillion dollars in financing costs.

The third thing that has happened is some of the tax receipts have fallen fairly dramatically. One of the numbers from a month ago was tax receipts were down about 10 percent. A lot of that was capital gains taxes. Because are you going to go sell the thing you have a gain on, whether it be your house, a building, your stock, whatever it is, where you would be paying capital gains if most of that gain is inflation?

So are you going to go sell this and buy something over here to replace it?

If most of this is inflation, your gain, you are going to pay a bunch of taxes on inflation and then you are going to go buy another asset that has also been inflated because of inflation. So people do the economically logical thing; they don't sell. We don't have incentives in our tax code right now to have that velocity in the economy. So you have got the triple whammy.

That is how you functionally go from $980 billion protected for this fiscal year, to--let's call it 1.8, it is an easier number. So, $1 trillion 800 billion will be borrowed this year.

Well, what does that mean? Well, here is one of the punch lines, and I am going to do this board a little backwards.

We were projected to only spend $1 trillion 823 billion on all discretionary this year. All defense and all of what you think is government, you know, the White House, Congress, the EPA, the State Department, all that is discretionary. That is what we vote on here.

The vast majority of our spending, as you know, is on autopilot. We call it mandatory spending, earned entitlements, unearned entitlements.

You realize, I just showed you a board that this year we are going to borrow $1 trillion 800 billion. And the total projected spending of all discretionary, we are functionally going to be $1 trillion 800 billion. Think about what that means.

Please, someone out there, do you get the joke? Do you get the pitch? Do you realize how terrifying this is?

Every dime of what you think of as government, the military, all discretionary, looks like it will live on borrowed money this year. That wasn't supposed to happen for 8 more years. This is a big deal, and I am enraged that no one seems to be talking about it.

The wheels have come off. Borrowing has doubled from what we projected it would be a year ago. The borrowing is so big now, all of government, other than the mandatories, the Social Security, the Medicare, the Medicaid, the Indian Health Service, the things that are in mandatory--actually Indian Health Service isn't in mandatory. It is in the discretionary. Sorry about that--those are on autopilot.

But everything you think of as government is functionally being borrowed this year, and it happened about 8 years earlier than it should have. This is what crappy economic policy has brought us.

So as the Democrats here wander around parading how happy they are they have saved, functionally, self-nationalized parts of the economy-- it is working really well, isn't it?

Tax receipts are way down. Spending is way up. Borrowing costs are really way up. Look what you have accomplished.

The other reason we also put together this board, and we stole this from Manhattan Institute, Brian Riedl over there, and it is just to set something in our head. We are going to start negotiating the appropriations bills for discretionary spending. Okay. It is important.

On most charts you look at, discretionary is much, much flatter than what we call mandatory spending. Mandatory spending is primarily driven by--come on, we have done this a dozen times here--demographics. We got old as a country. Getting old is not Republican or Democrat; it is just the math.

A couple of weeks ago I did a whole demographic presentation here of what was going on, and it is a big deal. But this is all of our discretionary spending.

And here is something for my brothers and sisters, the staffers who are in your office, if I am on your television, God bless you. Go get a life.

But my fellow Members, annual growth since 2018--so this is a number before the pandemic. I need you to annualize the growth and spending on discretionary spending. It is 5.1 percent every year. Okay.

If you go back to 2018--and this is inflation adjusted. Okay. So when the screaming and yelling here begins--because it is the most fascinating thing I have dealt with. All the groups have come in saying, David, we are so happy you guys were able to cut some spending during the debt ceiling, but we need you to spend more money on our program.

The hallways around this place are still filled with people at our doorsteps. They are wonderful people, but they see the world with this tunnel vision that they have an idea, a program that they need money for. They are not looking at the rest of these charts, realizing the wheels are coming off on us.

So just to make this a little bit clearer, there is this concept of go back, pick a base year, so we picked 1990 as our base year here. Plug in all inflation. How much did spending really grow from that base year?

Well, discretionary grew 154 percent, defense grew 35 percent over inflation. It is math. So be a little careful here when we start to talk about these things. This is uncomfortable. This makes people really mad. It makes lots of folks who are walking in our offices demanding more spending, but helping them understand-- Okay. When you are doing the nondefense discretionary, you are talking ultimately about 11 percent or so of the budget. That is at least what we get to vote on.

How dangerous is the economic environment? So we have lots of smart people out there. CBO is coming to us and saying, hey, you do realize-- okay, let me explain this first.

There are two pools of debt. Some people say oh, you just caused $32 trillion of debt. Okay. That is all Federal Government debt. Actually, it is not all of it, but it is what the Treasury is managing. A big portion of that is financed by borrowing from trust funds. So there is this concept of publicly held debt. Publicly held debt today, off the top of my head, I am going to say it is $25 trillion, $26 trillion.

So the orange bar here is the publicly held debt. The blue is basically all--I just did that backwards. So right now, this is what we were projecting the publicly held debt to be.

The reason I put up this board, and I did this last week, there is this thing called Bloomberg--I think it is called Bloomberg Intelligence. Two of their lead economists actually sort of laid out a formula saying, hey, we are not as optimistic as the Congressional Budget Office. We think within the 10-year window, at the end of the 10 years, if interest rates stay higher longer, as they expect, if healthcare costs keep going up higher longer, as they expect, if those things slow down the economy, as they expect, you may be approaching $51 trillion of borrowing, 130 percent of the economy being borrowed. That is in the 10-year window.

That is functionally 9 budget years from now.

Do the math with me. If there is $51 trillion of borrowed money, it is on bonds that average 5 years--because that makes the math easy--and you are at today's interest rates, you are closing in on a couple trillion dollars a year just in interest. That is more than double what we spend today on defense. The wheels are coming off.

Or you can go to something much more optimistic. Moody's Analytics had a much more optimistic number. They were only at 121 percent of debt to GDP. Where CBO came back to us and said hey, after the debt ceiling deal, you guys did okay. You reduced a few points so maybe now you will be 113, 114 percent of debt to GDP. But they haven't given us the numbers for the new interest costs. Because, as you saw the Federal Reserve Chairman yesterday tell us, there will be higher interest rates for a longer time.

We are not at the death spiral yet. We should do everything we can to discipline ourselves on discretionary spending. At some point we are going to have this brutally honest conversation here of: How do we bend healthcare costs? So we are going to get to that.

Madam Speaker, may I ask you how much time I have left.

All right. I am going to go a little faster then. No one cares about percentages of debt to GDP.

One of the reasons we do debt to GDP is when we talk trillions, often that is a distorted number because trillions in a time of high inflation--the most elegant way to do math like that is it is a percentage of the economy because that is stable, because lots of inflation, low inflation, lots of economic growth, low economic growth. That actually gives you an idea what the real impact is on our borrowing on the economy.

So what is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt? Come on. Come on. It is we got old.

This board is now 2 years out of date. New calculation--and we haven't gotten the update on it, and it is going to be even higher than this. Our new calculation is about $128 trillion to $130 trillion of borrowing over the next 30 years; 75 percent of that being Medicare, 25 percent being if we backfill Social Security. Remember, the Social Security Trust Fund is gone in 8\1/2\ years, meaning we are going to double senior poverty in 8\1/2\ years if we don't fix it.

The average Social Security recipients across the board, at least as it looks right now, will take a 25 percent cut.

If you are on Social Security, what is your life like if we cut your benefit by 25 percent?

That is where we are heading. Because we had a President get behind that podium right over there and tell us we weren't allowed to talk about it. That is a great campaign tactic. It is horrible morality. It is unethical. And its crappy economics.

The fact of the matter is healthcare is the primary driver of borrowing.

Here is a bit of trivia: Diabetes is what percentage of the total spend on healthcare? Madam Speaker, 33 percent, but it is 31 percent of Medicare.

If you were to add to Medicare and Alzheimer's--though, we are really close to major revolution in being able to take on diabetes. Alzheimer's is much more difficult--put those together, it is like 60 percent of all Medicare spending.

It turns out that fixating on disruption of prediabetics--of those who have it--of obesity, which I know we are not allowed to talk about. Play with kerosene and matches.

Here is one of the concepts we have got to sell. We can take on the debt and deficits or, at least, stabilize it, but we have got to be willing to fixate on things that we don't talk about. Madam Speaker, 5 percent of the population is over half of all healthcare in America. Five percent of our brothers and sisters, who have chronic conditions, multiple chronic conditions, are over half of our healthcare spending.

What happens in a world when you go to our brothers and sisters and say: You have diabetes. You are also now having kidney failure. What happens if we actually took an approach where we start to cure diseases and not do what the left often does, which is build more diabetic clinics so Americans can maintain their misery. How about the morality of ending the misery?

We can do it. Madam Speaker, 5 percent is more than 50 percent of all healthcare spend. Here is some of these people's misery.

This is now already in phase 1 trial. Actually, it is a second phase. The first one required antirejection drugs. I know all of you pay attention to synthetic biology because it is an incredible thing that is going to do so much good. The phase 1 trial worked with CRISPR. They figured out how to tag stem cells.

So you take a skin cell, you direct it, you are heading toward being an islet cell, which produces insulin. They learned how to tag it with CRISPR so your body doesn't see it as foreign and you don't need antirejection drugs.

This one company we had here a week ago Monday actually just puts the cells right into your tummy layer and they believe it will start to produce. There is another one out there that is already well into its second version of phase one trials.

What happens at the end of the decade if our brothers and sisters whose bodies don't produce insulin? Again, we can fix that.

There are some concepts I want you to process about disrupting the cost of healthcare, because healthcare is almost all our future borrowing.

Just do simple things. Do you know now there is a number of watches out there that actually have blood glucose meters in them? Do you know there are things you can tape on yourself and it is a blood glucose meter? I am still waiting for my Apple Watch to have one, but apparently that's two generations away. I think Samsung or one of those others now has actually blood glucose in the watch.

The ability to help our brothers and sisters who are prediabetic stabilize is a big deal. It is also hundreds of billions of dollars of future spending if we could get rid of it.

It is also moral, but we also need to be promoting the concept of there are apps. There is technology now that you can strap on your wrist. You can use your phone to help manage your healthcare.

We had a war around this place years ago about telehealth. Telehealth won't be used. People won't know how to work it. This won't happen. Then the pandemic hit, we adopted telehealth, and it turned out grandma knew how to work FaceTime on her phone.

Legalize, promote, reimburse using technology to make people healthier and to crash the price of healthcare. I am just throwing up these boards because I am fascinated with this stuff where there is even something you can put on your phone to do certain types of biopsies.

The technology of personalized medicine. Why this is such a big deal. A couple of moments ago, sitting right here listening to some of the other speakers, I was reading an article about how it is really expensive. Now, it is cheaper than letting someone have the disease--I think it was a drug for cystic fibrosis that the FDA may have approved today.

There are things going on around us that are miracles. How do I get this place to be optimistic when I say: Our debt is a disaster. It is going to basically crush the society.

I have an 11-month-old little boy at home, I have a 7\1/2\-year-old little girl at home. Now it is 23 years, according to CBO, we have to double their taxes. We have to double every businesses taxes. We have to double every import fee and tariff. We have to double everything in government. We have to double receipts just to maintain baseline.

We basically are heading to the moment where we are passing the inflection. There will be so much debt, and with the higher interest rates now being projected, it is a death spiral. Stabilize, lower as much spending as you can. Adopt the technologies, chase them as hard and as fast as you can.

Do what is the hardest thing right now for many of us which is we will have to start thinking about our brothers and sisters and how to take on obesity in our country. Madam Speaker, 4,000 human diseases, 2,000 of them are associated with obesity; half of all the human misery out there.

We will have to think about how we deliver the farm bill. We will have to think about the technology our brothers and sisters need to manage their blood glucose. We will have to think about GLP-1s and the population out there that we could change their lives.

Then, at the end of the decade, is there a societal contract we could ever make to help people's bodies start to produce insulin? It feels very Big Governmentish. Except healthcare spending is what drives the debt and we have signed up for it. It is the Medicare/Medicaid, Indian Health Service, it is the VA, and so many other things. It is part of the societal contract.

Every American has an interest in this because you are paying for it through your taxes or through your children's future debt. Let's do something that is actually disruptive; that provides a future that works. With these technologies, our math is you don't solve the debt, but you could stabilize it, and that is actually where there is hope.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 24 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, June 23, 2023, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to focus more on discretionary, just so people understand. The vast majority of our spending is on autopilot, but a lot of us have no understanding of how much the wheels have come off just this year, and this is so important to start the process.

I am going to start with a board, and please understand, if this were May 2022--you remember how long ago that was? Like a year. We expected the U.S. deficit for this year to be $980 billion. Okay.

So where are we at today? One year later, we are functionally pushing $1.18 trillion. We functionally have doubled the borrowing this year.

What happened? Healthcare costs went up dramatically. Interest is up dramatically. Tax receipts are down.

What happens if some of the protections we have for the next couple of years are off? Remember, that $1.8 trillion that we are projected to borrow in this fiscal year, we weren't supposed to hit that for almost 8 more years.

The wheels are coming off, and if you are on the left and you care about this program or that program, understand, there is no money. You should help us go at every dollar here.

So we get into this game of saying, oh, but that is discretionary, discretionary is fairly flat. It really is just not true. It is a lot flatter than Medicare, Social Security, all of those. But those are earned benefits that are about our aging population.

We need to walk through a sense of reality, and you are going to get the punch line here in a moment.

This is just sort of the breakdown for this year's borrowing, this year's spending and discretionary and what the 2018 baseline is. You will notice the growth in spending.

Here is the punch line. We were only supposed to have borrowing of about $1.8 trillion this year.

Let me rephrase that. We were supposed to have spending equal to only about $1.8 trillion for both defense and nondefense. Do you remember the borrowing number? It is about $1.8 trillion.

Every dime of defense and what you think of as government is living on borrowed money this year. You got to understand, when you get the folks saying, well, let's just cut this program or that program. You got to cut every dime of defense and what you think of as government, whether that be the FBI, foreign aid, the park service, our salaries, Congress, the White House. It is all on borrowed money now.

Here is the other thing we need to make part of our discussion: We can't play this game of we are going to talk about discretionary and we are only going to use the last 2 years as our baseline. We had a big plus-up, substantially during COVID. So let's actually use a true linear line. Let's go back to 1990, adjust the math for inflation.

Discretionary is up 154 percent. If you go from 1990 and do inflation, all that growth of inflation, but now we are at 154 percent growth. Defense is only up 35 percent since 1990 if you adjust for inflation.

The wheels are coming off, Mr. Speaker. I am terrified because, at this rate, if some of the predictions are true a decade from now, just the interest on U.S. sovereign debt, if we stay at these interest rates, could be approaching $2 trillion a year, more than all discretionary, defense, nondefense included. That is the future we are handing to America right now. It is time for great discipline.

The number has actually been going up fairly dramatically. In the first 7 months just interest carry, just because the increase in interest, went up $108 billion.

Actually, if 400, I think, was the baseline number, with the higher interest rates and the amount of borrowing, you could be approaching 600.

There are also other things going on. People don't realize, it is not just the $2 trillion of excess spending that has to be borrowed, how much of the debt has to be refinanced all the time.

You actually have, let's say, $26 trillion of publicly borrowed debt. There is something called a weighted daily average. Half of that has to be refinanced functionally every 5 years. Basically that means every year you are bringing $2 trillion and plus you are bringing a few trillion additional to market, and now those new issued bonds are at the new much higher interest rates.

Interest is killing us.

Congressman Buck, one of the best ways to think about this--the budget window we are working on in functionally about 9 budget years, interest is going to be more than all of defense. That is already baked into the cake.

Mr. Speaker, I want to do a couple of things, and what I am going to sort of walk through is what we are seeing in the numbers.

There is a sense of theater around here that I am trying to break through, so let's see if we can have some fun with some math.

For those who were complaining about the caps, the spending reductions in the recent debt ceiling, for those who wanted more over here, for some of our brothers and sisters around this place who didn't think any of it was necessary, I need to break through and help this place get its head around the fact that we actually were allowed to negotiate on 11 percent of the spending.

Remember, your government is functionally an insurance company with an army. The vast majority of our spending is on autopilot. It is earned benefits. You earned your Medicare. You earned your Social Security. You worked your 40 quarters. Veterans earned benefits. You get certain things if you fall under a certain income. That is called Medicaid. You get certain things because of treaty agreements, the Tribal populations.

Those aren't formula. We don't vote for them. As a matter of fact, it is almost radioactive around here if we tell the truth, that it is the vast majority of spending. So, I am going to do some of this backward.

A week ago Friday, two of the lead economists at Bloomberg--they call it Bloomberg Intelligence. You have to sort of go to the Bloomberg Terminal to get this. I subscribe to a couple of things, so I got the top line.

Have you ever started to read something and go, oh my God, what are they talking about? That number can't be real. Then you bother someone who has an actual Bloomberg Terminal, and they pull the full printout on it.

Here is the reality, and I don't know how to get folks to actually understand the math. Bloomberg Intelligence, the two economists said their model--Bloomberg has this fairly fancy model, just like we do at the Joint Committee on Taxation, the CBO, the Tax Foundation. Everyone has their models. Theirs is fairly impressive. Their model said, in 10 years, we are at 130 percent of debt to GDP.

Now, understand that the cuts we just did, the rebalancing, the flattening, the slowing down, the debt growth that we just fought through in the debt ceiling, we sort of took ourselves from 119 percent of the size of the economy at the end of the decade, or 10 years from now, to around 114 percent. That is a big deal.

You figure, 10 years from now, you have a $39 trillion economy, so a percent is real money. We pulled it down from 119 to 114 percent. I think I have a board on it.

Then, to read through the analytics from these economists saying: Here is your problem. Interest is dramatically higher than we have been modeling.

They see inflation and, therefore, interest running longer. They also see healthcare costs growing faster and larger.

If you actually think about the reading you have done this last week, because I know all of us around here read the technical aspects of, you know, whether--I am sorry. I was going to get sarcastic, and I am trying to dial that back.

You start to see we are seeing this huge, very substantial spike in Medicare spending. It turns out a lot of our seniors actually had postponed lots and lots of procedures.

You just saw, for one of the major health companies that caters to part D, their stock just cratered yesterday because of utilization.

They had some other interesting things in there. Interest is up. Healthcare costs are up fairly dramatically. The thing I have tried to explain here that no one gets their head around, before the agreement-- and I am going to use rough numbers. The nondefense discretionary spending is $700 billion. We, functionally, just removed $100 billion. So, now it is $600 billion.

Just that reduction of that $100 billion over those 10 years, they actually calculated that, next year, the GDP growth will be down a whole half a percent.

That is huge because we were already starting to see, because of our demographics, we have gotten very old in society and are getting older very fast.

You all know what has happened to fertility since the early nineties. Last year, we were down to 1.67, so in 18 years, the United States has more deaths than births. Half the States today already has more deaths than births.

You start to say, okay, we are going to be at 1.8. There were a couple of projections for next year. We are a little higher than that if we just shaved off another half a percent.

Then, I have folks running around here saying: Look at our pretend budget. We can balance in 10 years.

Absurd.

The borrowing this year, have you seen the numbers? Realize that you don't do budgeting this way. We have a fiscal year. Year to date, so if you do a 12-month cycle, we have now borrowed $2.1 trillion this year. That does not have the backfill of all the extraordinary measures that are getting done right now, as now the debt ceiling has been raised.

$2.1 trillion is more than all defense and all discretionary, meaning everything you think of as government--the FBI, the White House, the Supreme Court, the State Department, all of it--all of government is, functionally, living on borrowed money.

We weren't supposed to hit that for about 9 more years, and we have already hit it this year.

Look, I hope this is wrong. I desperately hope these numbers are wrong, but this was Bloomberg Intelligence. Two of their lead economists said that when you put in these factors of the cuts in spending, which we have to do--you have to deal with the reality that it does slow down the economy, the higher interest rate cost, the dramatic increase in the utilization of healthcare, particularly in Medicare and Medicaid but mostly Medicare, 130 percent debt to GDP. That is 9 budget years from now.

I beg of someone, pull out your calculator, put some batteries in it, and do a little math experiment for me.

If you had 130 percent of debt to GDP, if today publicly held debt is--let's call it $25 trillion, $26 trillion. That is publicly held. That is where you haven't been borrowing from the trust fund. Publicly held--you had to go to market. That is doubling publicly held debt.

Let's say it is $51 trillion. You can almost do that math in your head if you said you had a 5 percent strike rate, which is high. That is well over $2 trillion a year just in financing costs.

Nine years from now, the interest cost is functionally equal to every dime you and I think of as government. We were not supposed to hit that for like 15, 18 years.

With the higher interest rates, the increased costs of healthcare, the fact that the economy does not look like it is going to grow much more than a point if we even hit the consensus number of 1.7, 1.8--9 years, $2 trillion a year in financing costs.

I hope it is absolutely wrong. I hope our projection on interest rates is way off, but this is coming off the Bloomberg model. These aren't slackers. These are some of the best in the world at analytics.

Let's go to something that was more optimistic, Moody's Analytics. We have Bloomberg Intelligence and Moody's Analytics. Their number was much more optimistic. Instead of being at 114 percent of debt-to-GDP functionally in 9 budget years, they had it as 121 percent of debt-to-

Mr. Speaker, I can see some of the faces going, oh, God, they are going to let him speak for an hour. I saw those faces, but there is a lot to share.

First, I tried to cut back on my coffee this evening, so, hopefully, my shared annoyance will be somewhat under control.

First off, to my brothers and sisters on the left, please buy a calculator. It is that simple.

Some basics I want to walk through here. Let's do Democrat math here for a moment. I am sorry. I often try not to be a partisan this brutal, but math is math.

If we have a world where you can't raise taxes on people who earn $400,000 or less--the Democrat mantra, part of their platform, is no tax hikes for $400,000 or less income earners, right? You do realize that is 98 percent of taxpayers, meaning there are only 2 percent left that make income over $400,000. That is how they are going to balance the budget? The math is absurd.

Start to work through how this actually works. You can do a 100 percent tax rate on all of those $400,000 and over, and you get nowhere near--a fraction of a fraction of a fraction--what is required to handle the shortfalls, the requirement for Social Security and Medicare.

That is the plan the left has given us. It is a great political talking point. It gets you cheers at the neighborhood townhall, and you are lying to them. The math will always win.

Let's walk through this a little bit more. Do you understand the scale, the cruelty, and the immortality of this place and its avoidance? In less than 9 years, the Social Security trust fund is gone.

Many of us on the Republican side spent the previous year trying to find a moral way, working with Democrats, to save Social Security. Instead, the Democrat plan, right there from that podium, when President Biden got up during the State of the Union, and said: Promise me you won't talk about or touch Social Security or Medicare. The room all applauded.

You just sentenced American seniors to the doubling of poverty. In 9 years, the United States doubles senior poverty because those seniors take a 25 percent cut in their checks.

That is the plan. Does anyone see the cruelty?

Mr. Speaker, is this what we have become?

It is an idea that is saying, well, this polls really well if we blame Republicans for wanting to talk about it.

This polls really well. This gets us reelected.

In 9 years, we will double senior poverty, but it is okay because most people will never hear that. They will never understand it, and they will never know that.

Then, we will do some sort of a big tax hike in the future and crash the economy, and it will still not come close to what is necessary.

If we don't have a revolution in the cost of healthcare, do understand what is coming. The CBO's own numbers, if we do the inflation adjustment on it, we are scheduled to borrow about $128 trillion over the next 30 years.

Mr. Speaker, 100 percent of that borrowing is the shortfall of Social Security if we choose to backfill it. There is the big tax hike or the incredible debt financing. The other 75 percent, so--what?--$86 trillion, $87 trillion when we add in the financing cost, is the shortfall in Medicare.

This is what goes on around here. It is the lying to the American people about the math.

Let's walk through this. Stabilizing the debt at about 95 to 97 percent, which is always what the economists told us we needed to do, if you did that without spending restraints--remember, the fight right now over the debt ceiling is we basically, as Republicans, are saying that we have to communicate to the world debt markets that we take our debt seriously. It is more than just raising our credit limit. We are going to do something.

Mr. Speaker, I will show you the words from S&P. In 2011, we were downgraded not because of the debt ceiling fight. We were downgraded because we did not communicate to the world and the debt markets that we were going to take debt seriously.

It is a decade later, and the debt is dramatically worse. The demographic curve now is crushing us, and the proposal from the left is to just spend more money. Don't worry about it. We will tax people over $400,000, even though it is 2 percent of the population. We can take every dime they have, and it doesn't do anything.

One more time, Mr. Speaker, if we are to stabilize U.S. sovereign debt at 95 to 97 percent of GDP, if we don't do anything on the spending side--remember, we are trying to do something on the spending side. So, we do what Democrats have proposed, saying ``don't do anything,'' then you have to go from our current sort of 15 percent payroll tax--that is your FICA tax, paying into Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment--you have to go to 24 percent. That is the Democrat plan.

FICA taxes go up to 24 percent, and you have to do a national value- added tax on top of everything else. So, everything just went up.

Remember a value-added tax is that, every step of production, you add another 20 percent. This is not paying off any debt. This is just stabilizing enough cash flow so that in order to hold that about 95, 97 percent of debt to the size of the economy, you need a 20 percent VAT and a FICA tax that is actually at 24 percent.

That just provides stability. That doesn't pay anything off. That is the plan.

Realize, Mr. Speaker, the absurdity of the speeches that come from behind these microphones. It breaks my heart because there are things going on in our society. We are getting old very fast. There is a horrible article out today about seniors living on the street.

Think about what is going to happen in less than 9 years when those seniors get a 25 percent cut in their Social Security checks.

That is the plan: Avoid it until the last moment, and maybe we will just cut them.

Social Security over the 75 year is $202 trillion underfunded.

There is an unwillingness here to tell the truth to the American people. We got old. We got 67 million baby boomers. The end of the baby boom is calculated to be around 1964 births. So, we have a few more years before they all are 65 and into their earned benefits.

What is this place doing to grow the economy and crash the price of healthcare? Nothing. However, we are going to have theater around here about talking about the debt ceiling, and Republicans will actually want to bend a little bit of the spending, so we are scheduled to borrow--what?--$20 trillion, $21 trillion over the next 10 years.

We are talking about dialing back $4 trillion, and that is the end of the world? It shows you just how perverse this place is, Mr. Speaker.

Some of the other data shows that, between 2020 and 2022, there is some $362 billion still left in the $5 trillion in stimulus.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, we went through that little thing called the pandemic? We basically spent $5 trillion trying to mitigate its damage and keep the economy stable. Fine. There is about $362 billion that is unspent.

Our really difficult proposal in our debt ceiling that the Democrats are screaming, ``Oh, how dare you?'' isn't after the $362 billion. We are after $30 billion of it. Give us back $30 billion of that. It is 8 percent of the money, and it is the end of the world.

Mr. Speaker, have our politics become that perverse here that we are willing to lie to the American people about the math, make up things, and destroy my children's future? Remember, I have a 10-month-old and a 7-year-old. Do my children have the right to live as well as we do?

Right now, CBO's math says that, in 24 years, U.S. taxes double. If any of you plan to be working 24 years from now, Mr. Speaker, at that moment, your taxes will be double today's. Corporate taxes, tariffs, and all types of income tax, everything will be doubled in the United States just to maintain current services.

That is the math. The math will win, or we can just do what we do around here and pretend that we will just tax rich people.

They don't have enough money. You can take every dime from every billionaire in America, and you cover--what?--about 16 months of borrowing, and then it is all gone. These are the ideas of the brain trust here.

So, one more time, let's try to understand the reality. There are actually some solutions that could be bipartisan if we look at the math on what is going on in healthcare costs with our brothers and sisters with diabetes and obesity in America.

Mr. Speaker, if you just took on those two things, you could actually make a major impact on borrowing and spending and economic growth, and just plain morality, for our brothers and sisters out there who are dying at shockingly young ages.

I don't know if I brought the chart--we will see if I have it here-- of what is happening to prime-age working males and the fact that longevity in America is going backward the last couple of years. When you dial into it obesity, drugs, car accidents, suicides, and firearms, we have a sick society.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to show you a board in a little bit that says that in less than 18 years, the United States has more deaths than births. Half the States today have more deaths than births.

It is math. Demographics drive the budget. The budget is on a calculator, yet it is so much easier to lie. I am saying that word over and over, if you have noticed, because we are not telling the truth.

Mr. Speaker, one more time, the math may be uncomfortable, but it is real. If you look at this chart--and I often start with that one. Don't look at 1965. Let's look at 2022. This is our spending pie chart. It is just easy, and it is simple.

Do you see this part here, this green and this blue? This is defense, and this is discretionary. Everything else is on autopilot.

According to CBO from 2 or 3 months ago, we can get rid of every dime of discretionary. There is no more White House, no more EPA, and no more anything, and you can get rid of every dime of defense. This is according to CBO because I know we all sat and read it. In 9 years, we get rid of all discretionary spending and still have to borrow a couple hundred billion dollars, and that is without backfilling a dime into Social Security.

Remember, then, CBO a couple of weeks later did an update on Social Security, saying, oh, in 9 years, it is out. It is gone. A 25 percent cut to our brothers and sisters who are 65 and older, double senior poverty, and we already have to borrow a couple of hundred billion dollars a year just to cover the mandatory in 9 years.

That is where we are going. It is the math. I know we all bathe in the facts because we don't want to mislead our constituents on how much trouble we are in.

One more time regarding the debt ceiling fight: Did anyone go pull up their copy of the 2011 Standard and Poor's report? I have heard multiple folks here refer to it. We got downgraded one tick from AAA to AA+. Read the report. It was not about the debt ceiling fight. It basically clearly says that it is because we provided no vision of what we were going to do about U.S. sovereign debt.

We are a decade later, and the numbers are dramatically worse. Some of that being worse is not Democrat and not Republican. It is COVID, demographics, and the number of missing Americans in the labor force. We have about 3\1/2\ million workers who have just disappeared.

Mr. Speaker, understand there is a number of us who believe that tomorrow we can just say: ``A clean debt ceiling. Just keep borrowing money.'' We get downgraded. It happened in 2011. The rating agency did not believe we were serious.

Understand, Mr. Speaker, if two rating agencies did this exact same rating, then the stress in U.S. sovereign markets is real because, all of a sudden, lots of States, lots of governments, and lots of bond funds can no longer hold U.S.--because we can have one of the three big rating agencies downgrade us, but we can't have two.

Has anyone picked up the damn phone and called S&P, Moody's, and said: Hey, can we just keep borrowing money and provide no vision?

Remember, Mr. Speaker, our brothers and sisters on the left said: ``Hey, we did that Inflation Reduction Act,'' which is an Orwellian name, ``and we had some deficit reduction in there.''

Of course, now that it has been rescored, there is no deficit reduction in there.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to show you the receipts coming in and the additional actual costs of the grants and giveaways on green energy. It doesn't reduce the deficit.

Once again, the only times this place almost--I think 1993 was the last--or, excuse me--'83 was the last time this place actually did some deficit management without being up against a debt ceiling.

Of course, also understand, at that time, Social Security was about to go broke. We had these guys named Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill who got together and said that we were going to do the moral thing, that we were going to save Social Security.

They got together and did something on debt, deficit, and Social Security. The problem was that was supposed to be a solution that took it out for at least another 15, 20 years from now. Something has gone horribly wrong.

We also saw with the COLA that just happened in Social Security, where there is this 8-plus point COLA, we just lost an entire year of actuarial life in Social Security. That is one of the reasons it is now 9 years.

If core inflation stays where it is at right now, then this next COLA won't be 8. Could it be 4? Could it be 5? If it is, then be prepared to lose almost another year of the actuarial life of Social Security.

Let's actually walk through some of the things that have gone on. To my brothers and sisters on the left, does anyone remember way, way back--let's call it 2019.

Democrats controlled this body. You had a Republican in the White House. Democrats would not agree to a clean debt ceiling hike.

2019. I know that is a long distance for us to try to remember, but the requirement of the deal that finally was struck was $324 billion in additional spending and the lifting of caps which also raised about another $300 billion in spending.

Is that the left's version of a clean debt ceiling?

Come on. This was only how many years ago. This is what happened last time. This is where they are.

The absolute disingenuous nature of this place to come behind these microphones and say clean debt ceiling; how dare the Republicans try to bend the spending curve and save the country.

Come on. Live by your own standards. Once again, look at all of the debt ceiling deals.

Do I need to walk through Gramm-Rudman, the balanced budget amendment, the omnibus?

How many of you remember some of the really popular ones: PAYGO and all those things. This is a list. Every single one of these is because of a stressor on the debt ceiling.

Some of these were when Republicans controlled the Congress. Some of these were when Democrats controlled the Congress.

This fantasy here, we should just do a clean debt ceiling because that is what we always do, that is an absolute lie. Look at some of the big things that actually made a difference in this country. Go back to Gramm-Rudman in 1985 and 1987. They were up against debt limits.

The deficit reduction authority. PAYGO. Remember, PAYGO basically got renewed multiple times; in 1990, 1993, 1997, 2010. It basically had multiple ways of managing. If you were going to spend more, it had to end within a certain time, or it had to be offset.

The Budget Control Act, which is the big one from 2011. I am going to show you it was wonderful up until we cheated on it because this place couldn't actually live under its own constraints that it agreed to.

The debt limit increase. We raised it to $14 trillion, 700 billion.

Now public debt is what, $28 trillion?

Total debt, if you take the money we borrow functionally from agencies or trust funds, those things, we are at what, 32? 32,4?

You have a little problem, though. This is the disingenuous thing this place did. We had the Budget Control Act. It was going to be a trillion, 700 billion. This was between 2013 and 2021.

There were discretionary savings under the Budget Control Act, except the desire here--and this was Republicans, too. I would love to blame Democrats only, but this was Republicans, too.

Mr. Speaker, 27 percent of those savings never happened. It never happened because we couldn't live under sequestration.

When you walk down the hallways here in the Capitol, and there are armies of people coming into your office all day long, what do they want? They want more money. Understand, Washington, D.C., is about the money.

January 2020 to present. Nondefense outlays are up 18.8 percent. Defense outlays are basically flat.

What is going on?

Now, most of this is because of Democrat control. This is their desire. They pumped up all sorts of new spending authorizations, but now we have a little problem.

Let's go to right now, last month's number.

How many were paying attention to the CBO monthly updates and saw that entitlement spending in the first 7 months of this year is up 11 percent?

Most of that is actually inflation adjustments and within Medicare. Medicare went up about 16 percent in spending. Most of that is actually driven by inflation calcs.

Did anyone pay attention to the receipts?

If you look into the tables in depth, there is a pretty substantial fall in capital gains.

There is a 10 percent fall in tax receipts. They are not revenues; they are tax receipts. I know we wrote revenues on the board, but receipts is the proper term.

In the first 7 months of this fiscal year, we have an 11 percent increase in the spending of entitlements and a 10 percent decrease in our receipts, our revenues.

What is fascinating is some of the economists are saying that falling receipts are going to continue because most of it is in the capital gains category.

If you have had a big inflationary cycle--we have seen this before in the United States--during times of inflation, most of the capital gains you have are fake.

The value of your asset didn't go up. It just got more expensive. Say you have a building. Oh, wow, it is worth a lot more money today. You are going to go buy the exact same building.

Did your building do something special? Did it really go up in value, or was it just inflation?

We are going to tax people like crazy on inflation.

Now, some things we are starting to index. We don't do it on capital gains.

The other fragility we need to deal with--I have a chart. I did not bring it tonight because I figured I had enough of them.

Go to your annual CBO scoring, and within there, there is a table that basically says if you added 2 points, a 2-point increase in the financing of U.S. sovereign debt, so a 2 percent increase over--I think the number was, like, 25, 28 years from the previous decade--at the end of that 25, 28 years, every single dime of receipts goes to pay interest. There is no more money for anything.

A 2 percent increase in the baseline interest costs over the next three decades consumes every dime of projected tax receipts. That is the world we live in.

How many people come behind these mikes and tell the truth about the math?

Let's take a look at what we have just experienced so far in the first 7 months. You do understand just in the role we have right now, here are our new issues and the portion of the refinance of U.S. sovereign debt so far in the first 7 months, our interest costs are already up 40 percent.

The first 7 months' carrying costs will be over $100 billion more just because of interest. You don't think debt markets, even if we raise the debt ceiling, aren't going to look and say, wow, you guys are borrowing $51,000 every second. In 9 years, we are scheduled to borrow over $90,000 a second.

You don't think debt markets are going to start requiring a premium?

There is some great literature. Actually, I think one was in The Wall Street Journal yesterday or maybe over the weekend talking about long- run interest rates looks like they are setting new baselines.

Be prepared for a future where dramatically more of our spending is this. It is just the financing costs. Revenues, budget surpluses, including adjustments for timing effects, Federal outlays, yada, yada, yada.

Basically, our spending is up $274 billion. This is functionally from baseline at the end of 2022, so functionally from April to April, much of my baseline cost there is up 73 percent.

This board may explain it better. Year-to-date deficits. There were discussions at the end of last fiscal year that the 2023 fiscal year could be $1.4 to $1.5 trillion in borrowing.

A couple people were predicting, hey, when you kick in inflation, it might get to 1.6. Right now, that board from April, if you take that and line that out to the end of the fiscal year, you are going to get close. You may not cross it, but you are going to get close to a $2 trillion borrow this year.

Think about some of the things we are fussing with each other about, and yet, the wheels are coming off immediately around us.

How many people are paying attention to what is coming into the Treasury right now and going out of the Treasury?

Does anyone care?

Are we so basically intent on I have got to push money out the door to get my votes because that is how I buy my election?

You have to understand how fast the numbers are falling from us. Year-to-date deficits look like they will be 236 percent more from the baseline of 2022.

Here is the chart I ran ahead of, but sort of working out the math, if I continue what happened in the April receipts and my April spending, if you carry it out, you are getting close to $2 trillion borrowed this year.

I wanted to do a bit of this. Government spending binges, not tax reform, have been the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt to GDP.

There is a concept out there--for anyone that geeks out on this stuff, if you have an idiot who basically says it is tax reform, okay, look at the long range.

Since the 16th Amendment, you start to look at what is sort of the modern tax era after World War II, when we have had very high marginal tax rates, very low marginal tax rates, combinations where we raise corporate taxes, lower, all the combinations out there. We almost always get within a band of about 18 to 20; 19, 20 percent revenue receipts to the size of the economy. It is a magic number, but we always--we have these charts when we have had these high margin rates, low margin rates.

For some reason, the tax receipts that come in stay within that band. If you want more money, grow the economy. That seems to be the only way you get more tax receipts in the long run. You get a spike, and then boom, it goes back to that mean.

That comes from liberal economists, conservative economists. There just seems to be this nature that the economy comes back to: this is what society, the nature of our economy is willing to send in Federal tax receipts.

Here is part of the coming crisis. Just this decade--and remember, this board is already a year or so out of date--in functionally nine budget years, our spending will be over 24 percent of the size of the economy; 24.3. Actually, I think that number may be light because this board is about a year old. We are projecting our tax receipts to come in--and I should explain this--about 18 or a little over 18 percent.

When you start talking these big numbers, particularly in a time of inflation, the dollar amount is often distorted.

Really, as economists, if you are talking with them, they are going to do percentage of the GDP, of the economy.

The reason you do that, you can have high inflation, low inflation, so a percentage makes more sense. What happens in a world just like this board says, this is what we are projected to do in 9 years.

Our spending will be--24.3 percent of the entire economy will be being spent by the Federal Government, but we are only going to be taking in 18.2.

You already have the other boards that talk about well, you can raise taxes, but the amount of receipts you are going to get are going to fall back into this mean.

That delta, that gap, is what will take down this Republic if you carry that out for another 20 or 30 years.

Now, for the most uncomfortable board I am going to show tonight, and this one--it is not Democrats, it is not Republicans, it is demographics. It is what we are.

If I were to walk around the Capitol and knock on everyone's door, from the most liberal Member to the most conservative to the most libertarian to rural or urban and said: For the next 30 years, what is the primary driver of U.S. debt?

How many would look you in the eye and say the debt for the next 30 years? 100 percent of borrowing. The new calculation is about $128 trillion over the next 30 years. 100 percent of that is borrowing, 75 percent is Medicare, 25 percent is if we backfill Social Security. The rest of the budget actually has a positive balance.

This board upsets people because how many of us are willing to get in front of our community townhall and say: If we don't have a revolution in healthcare costs, we could consume--and understand, when you start talking about the total numbers here, you are talking about approaching 200 percent of debt to GDP.

How many of you think the world continues to want to buy U.S. bonds? We are not Japan; we don't save every other dollar we earn. We can't internally finance our own debt when we get to those levels, but that is what is coming. It is not Democrat. It is not Republican. It is demographics. We got old.

There are solutions here. There is a solution that we could have that was moral to try to save Social Security, but as I started with, Democrats decided it was a better campaign issue than a morality issue. Fine, let's be a country that is heading toward doubling poverty for seniors because that is the plan right now, ``I am not going to talk about it.''

However, you can't make this go away. As healthcare inflation continues to be more than double baseline inflation, this number is running away from us.

Could we maybe have an attempt to have an honest sit-down with the most liberal Members and the most conservative Members, and saying, do you know that 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending is diabetes?

Would we be willing to have an honest conversation about obesity in

America and how we now have six States where over 40 percent of the population now is obese, and it is killing young people?

The heart disease, the other cascaded diseases, 5 percent of the population is over 50 percent of all healthcare spending.

Do we love and care for people? Why don't we understand the morality of helping, doing the right thing and building a bunch of clinics to help people manage their misery is not a solution.

Curing the damn disease is, and there are ways to do it.

We are doing a math project right now with some of the Joint Economic Committee economists, trying to say what would happen if I took my Medicare, Medicaid, Indian Health Service, my VA populations, took those who are morbidly obese and said we are going to give you GLP-1's. We have got to talk about it. It is real.

There was a time in this place it was uncomfortable to talk about smoking. There was a time when they actually smoked here. Within three decades, we had a cultural revolution of sorts that is much healthier. It saved and extended lives, up until the last couple years now where we see U.S. mortality going the wrong way.

This number is burying us. It is not Democrat. It is not Republican. It is demographics. The solution also doesn't need to be Democrat or Republican. It is moral. It is just hard to talk about because it doesn't fit our typical rhetoric.

You will get people who will say: Well, I just want every dime I put into Social Security and Medicare. All right, great, that would be a great deal.

Do understand, the average couple in America, and this board is about a year out of date, will have put in about $625,000 over a lifetime into Social Security. They are going to get back $698,000. That is about a $72,000 SPIF.

You would have done much better if you had been allowed to put a small portion of that in the market. You would have done much better. We all have our TSP here, our thrift savings account. Could you imagine if Americans had been allowed to put just a portion of their Social Security into that?

Do you remember the wars around here 20 years ago? ``You are talking about privatizing Social Security.'' Instead, you made America poor. Great. However, you won the politics. America is much poorer today. Great. Good job.

Here is the primary driver, here is the punchline. This is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt and almost no one is willing to talk about it. That average couple will have put about $161,000 into the Medicare trust fund. The Medicare trust fund, as everyone here knows, only covers about 38 to 40 percent of Medicare spend. The rest comes out of the general fund.

You put in $161,000, and you get out $522,000. We are recalculating this number. We think this number may have now jumped all the way close to $600,000. That delta, from this $522,000, from you putting in $161,000, multiply that by just the baby boom population of--what?--67 million, you just found where most of the debt for the next 30 years comes from.

It is not that hard. A couple batteries in a calculator, you would be amazed what you can figure out.

The brain trust out there. I am sorry, I take that back. So many people have been misled for so long with complete folklore about the debt, so I have this one woman in Phoenix area that literally every other day says: ``You know if we just got rid of your salaries and your pension, we could balance the budget.'' I always say, ``We are probably already overpaid for what we do or at least what we accomplish.''

However, you see the little sliver here? I tried to build a calendar, what would happen on a calendar if I could say here are my days of borrowing. Remember, we are borrowing $51,000 a second. If you got rid of all of Congress' salaries and pensions, it is about 18 to 19 minutes of borrowing for an entire year. That is all it is. If you get rid of every dime of foreign aid, it is about 12 days of borrowing.

We need to stop misleading the public.

I have things on here where if you doubled the corporate tax, you would get about 6 weeks of borrowing covered.

The scale that is here today and the scale in a decade is almost double. Do we understand the scale that is coming? It is demographics. We got old. It is just really hard to stand in front of an audience and say that, but it is math.

Look, I can belabor this, but I have some of the charts to walk through, and I am going to do another presentation when we get back on the 2017 tax reform of here is what it is scored to have cost and here is what we found in additional receipts and revenues. Even if you do the baseline scoring from a few years ago, it is just a fraction compared to even--the Inflation Reduction Act, the green spending in there is now being scored by Goldman Sachs and those to be $1.2 trillion, and the reconciliation on tax reform was--what?--1.6? Do you start to understand the scales? We make up numbers around here.

Look at the 2017, you see the little green slice here? That is using the baseline score of $2.74 trillion without the offsetting dynamic score added to it, and that is just saying, hey, if my brothers and sisters on the left want to say: ``It was the tax reform.'' Huh? You don't understand, just the green energy grants, giveaways, credits, whatever the pop culture term is, it is functionally half of everything that was in the tax reform if you use the base score without the dynamic effects.

Back to demographics. End of the decade. How many of us have used this chart? It basically says, 1960 we had 5.1 workers for everyone who was 65 and older, basically receiving Social Security benefits. End of the decade, you functionally have two workers. So you and your partner have your own retiree.

Is anyone seeing the math problem?

There is something called a dependency ratio. This one is really fascinating because if you want to even think globally, the United States is actually in tough shape. We are much better off than much of the rest of the world, though.

Let's take the world's three biggest economies. I only put this one on because it interests me. You see this line here? The dependency ratio is worker compared to those out of the economy, right? Do you see this line crashing down? That is China. China is about to just roll over. The numbers, there has never been a major society, anything like this. It is going to be fascinating over the next couple decades what happens. There is an economic argument that many of the bad acts that you and I see that China engages in are the investments or those things that they are desperate to build annuities because their available worker population is crashing. Even more interesting, do you know that youth unemployment in China is almost 20 percent? They are graduating universities, and they don't want factory jobs. They want white-collar jobs.

We should really understand what is going on with those who we consider our competitors. The United States, we start to roll over here. It is upon us. This is our future. We need to not be scared of the things that bring disruption but productivity to our society.

If you are scared of AI, okay. Maybe read an article or two about it but understand the potential productivity that brings to society. Get used to the concept that you go to your favorite fast-food place and there is a robot behind there flipping the burgers. We don't have the available populations, and importing poverty doesn't work because the way we do entitlements in the United States. The offset cost doesn't work.

Remember, if I ask the room, what is U.S. fertility this last year? We are down to 1.7, and that is actually a tick back up from the pandemic. You remember how many people thought during the pandemic we were going to have this baby boom? Just the opposite happened. We are at a 1.7 fertility rate. You need--what?--2.1 just to stabilize population.

Understand, today forward, the school districts in your neighborhood will have fewer children. Are you prepared to understand that is our future? Remember the data point before, in 18 years, more deaths than births in the United States. Now sit down and fix Social Security with me, and you understand the problem of the math.

This chart makes people upset, and it is math. If you take prime age populations, 25 to 64, functionally in--that

looks like it is about 8 years, so functionally the end of the retirement of baby boomers hitting 65, this chart basically says if you take the prime age working population, 25 to 64, 40 percent of our society will be over 64, they will be 65 and up.

There is a chart that basically says in a decade or so, if you do from birth to the top end of the age scale, about 22 percent of the population in total will be 65 and over. If you do prime age, it is 40 percent.

Is that Republican or Democrat? It is demographics. How much time do we spend around here talking about that?

One or two more boards, Mr. Speaker, and we are done. Yes, I am waiting for applause on that.

Median age of first marriage. Why would you put up median age of first marriage? Remember how we just talked about fertility rates, we are getting old as a society, more deaths than births? We actually have some really interesting things going on in society, and no one here really seems comfortable talking about it because you get attacked, but there is something wrong going on in society. We have some charts I did not bring today that talk about the number of males and females entering university life, and we have some major universities where males are graduating, not exactly but almost, half as much.

Okay, do you understand what that basically means, the marriageability gap and those things? There is something horribly wrong in our society. We need to have a conversation about it. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is going on around us. We may not be able to change it, but we need to understand what it means.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how many minutes I have remaining?

Mr. Speaker, my last board, and then I intend to yield to my friend.

Look, this is the chart I was going to end with. Remember how we have been talking about what is happening when we start to have more deaths than births? Understand, that 18-year number, it doesn't just stop there. You basically have a society, as you get into 2041, 2043, we continue to fall more and more. We will have a population decline in the United States.

Understand the responsibility for someone like me on Ways and Means, the responsibility of all of us here, we have promises to keep. We made promises about Medicare. We made promises about Social Security. If you understand the demographics are ahead of us, you understand the difficulty, and it is why so many of the proposals--``If we just raise this tax''--and when we finally get the actual scoring on it, it doesn't actually work. It doesn't stop us from hearing it quoted all the time, but when you actually read the actuarial reports, the math doesn't work.

This is us. This is our country. It is continuing. It doesn't have to be dystopian. I come back, what is the single biggest thing you could do that is both moral and incredibly great economics and a major bend on the debt? All of us get together and decide we are going to take on diabetes, we are going to have an honest conversation of disrupting obesity, we are going to maybe look into should GLP-1's be available, should we actually take on some issues within the farm bill, which is always so difficult to talk about, of helping our brothers and sisters manage because there is some amazing math out there that says if you look at much of urban income inequality, is it racism? Is it education? You actually dig into the datasets, it is health. The number of our brothers and sisters who are sick or are taking care of grandma because she has gone blind because of diabetes, is that Republican or Democrat to be willing to dive into an issue like that? I will argue it is just moral.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Austin Scott).

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, we are going to actually sort of walk through a couple things we did last week. We are going to do it again because I got the feeling no one was listening.

We had a joint economic hearing today, which, you know, I am blessed to be called the vice chair. We rotate the chairmanship back and forth between the House and the Senate. Have you ever had the occasion where in the hearing everyone knows the truth, but no one is allowed to actually say it out loud, and those of us who go and say it out loud sort of get fussed at? Well, as my father used to say to me: ``Screw them.'' We are going to actually have something unique around here. We are going to tell the truth.

First off, I had my heart broken. A Bloomberg reporter this morning broke my heart. I was listening to one of the news readers, and they go, well, the U.S. is going to default maybe in the beginning of June. Okay. Once again, someone go get your financial dictionary. Default is when you do not pay the interest on your bonds. Thirty percent of our spending is borrowed. That basically means 70 percent we have receipts, income, tax revenues. We have plenty of cash to cover the interest on our bonds.

Now, that doesn't mean there is not disharmony or unhappiness for that 30 percent that wants a check. If I hear one more idiot around here say we are going to have a default--that is not the definition of ``default.''

As a matter of fact, there used to be a Treasury Secretary under Lew, and he and I went around and around on this, and we finally came to an agreement that we would clean up our language. This would actually be default, not paying interest on your bonds, and we created this magic term called a technical default. That is when we don't send the check out to the worker for the agency or that goes out late. That isn't default.

The financial markets care about U.S. sovereigns having their consistent cash flow because the fact of the matter is that is the basis of much of the world economy.

We will never default even if you pass the debt ceiling. You have got to stop making things up around here.

I was going to bring in the charts of the cash flow and showing what happens in mid-June tax receipts and how there is a quarterly spike and may produce another 30 days and what other extraordinary measures have capacity, but I realize that no one is actually listening to the facts anymore.

So I thought we would try something else. If I get another person from the left who basically comes up and goes, we should have a clean debt ceiling. Really? Okay. Walk us through when you have controlled this body or you controlled the votes in the Senate, is that what you asked for? Well, the fact of the matter is, if we go back to 2017 when they didn't actually control the body but they had enough votes to extort things in the Senate, they required about $15 billion of additional spending, and they still voted against it.

How about 2019? Do you remember way back in 2019--although that was only a couple years ago--Speaker Pelosi said, I won't give President Trump that increase on the debt ceiling without raising the spending caps and a cash spend. So the cash spend was $324 billion plus functionally another $300 billion on that by raising spending caps. That is a clean debt ceiling?

Now, understand, what the Democrats wanted was more spending. They always want more spending. We are trying to bring some fiscal sanity, but come on. If there are any reporters out there, if there is anyone that wants to just sort of tell the basic story of how this place actually works, stop running around these hallways saying are you supporting default? Come on.

You know, you may be a hard-core leftist, but at least the public deserves some of the basic facts. We are in real trouble. We are in such real trouble.

Let's actually walk through this. Washington, D.C., Congress is almost incapable of adult conversation. I used to joke here that no one owns a calculator. When I speak to my little girl, who I want to be a math major, I tell her: ``Daddy works in a math-free zone.'' And she used to think that was funny until she started to realize it is probably true.

We are only willing to do hard things when there is a stressor. You have ended up here. You finished your budget appropriations. You are at the end of the year. You are trying to see, oh, we are just going to do a continuing resolution, which means we are going to spend tomorrow what we spent yesterday, but you have got to get a vote for that new authorization or we are up against the debt ceiling.

Remember, almost the only time this place has ever done something adult-like on policy in regard to spending debt deficits is when we have been up against debt limits.

How many times do we have to show these boards? How many of you remember Gramm-Rudman and then the next Gramm-Rudman and the Bush tax increases? Remember, those tax increases were part of a deal with the Democrats. In fact, when was that? Oh, 1991, 1992--actually, 1990. I can just read my board.

You look at these things. When there were major policy sets, they came because of a stressor, and that stressor was the debt ceiling. Yet maybe that is why the left is so terrified of an honest conversation here.

My latest calculation, if I go from the day President Biden was sworn in until now, my best calculation is we are borrowing about $51,000 a second during that time--$51,000 a second. Understand, in 9 years we are borrowing over $90,000 a second.

Do you understand the wheels are coming off? For some reason, my brothers and sisters on the left don't want to have an honest conversation about it. I don't know if they get votes or that is how they find love; they hand out trillions of dollars and they say crazy things like, well, the tax reform you all did in 2017. Even though by the fourth quarter of the next year tax receipts were higher than they were before the tax reform.

Yet, the bill they passed, their Orwellian named Inflation Reduction Act, you have seen the new scoring. They told the American people, oh, well, it

will be under $300 billion of handouts to green energy. Fine. Okay. Lock that in. Instead, we now have, what is it, Goldman Sachs and others saying, nope, it looks like the number could be $1.2 trillion. Think about that. $1.2 trillion in direct sort of grants compared to tax reform in someone almost the same bracket of spending that was about growing the economy, bringing repatriation of businesses back. It was the fastest movement of economic growth during that economic period, closing of income inequality, food insecurity. We just have completely different visions of the world.

So one more time, some of us care so much about telegraphing to the markets. Remember, the world debt markets, we are borrowing so much money. That $51,000 a second, you know that adds up to like $4.5 billion a day every single day. We are consuming much of the borrowable lendable capital from the entire world.

We are chewing up so much of the world's capital that other parts of the world are slowing down because they don't have investment capital to build a new bridge or start a new business.

Do understand the scale of what the United States is doing. If we do not telegraph to those debt markets that are choosing to collect capital from your retirement to people from all over the world, if we do not telegraph to them that we are taking our debt seriously, do you expect someone to go buy a 30-year U.S. bond at what today is about 3.869 or something like that? I was looking at one of the postings earlier. You are going to buy a U.S. bond under 4 percent and believe you are going to get value for 30 years when the debt explodes? At the end of 30 years, U.S. sovereign debt is going to be close to $130 trillion.

What will inflation be like when you have borrowed that much money? The only way we would survive is you have to inflate like crazy, wipe out the value of all your savings, wipe out the value of that bond.

Let's go in the way-back-machine. In 2011, U.S. sovereign debt got a one-tick downgrade. Standard & Poor's came in and said, no, you guys are AA+. I remember the Biden administration just being enraged. How dare you do this?

A bunch of the folks, liars--excuse me--a number of the folks who wrote about it ran around saying, well, this is because of the debt ceiling. No, it wasn't.

If anyone reads--now, it is not just a letter. It is an entire report from Standard & Poor's. Some of the takeaways from it--because we did not provide a credible path that we were serious about taking on our debt.

The funny thing is, there is a paragraph in the report--remember, this is 2011. ``The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking become less stable.'' This is 2011.

Do you think we are better off today? Do you think we are taking our debt more seriously today because, do understand, I think at that time we were at like $9 trillion, $9.5 trillion of borrowing. Today, we are $31 trillion. Are you telling me things are better today?

This is Standard & Poor's report from 2011. They downgraded United States debt because we did not take our debt seriously. We did not take seriously how we were going to manage it into the future.

Here we are, a decade-plus later, and things are dramatically worse. We have now hit the inflection period of baby boomers moving into their benefit cycle, and we have no way to pay for it.

We lie constantly because we are terrified to tell the truth. I will argue, and this is--I just wish I could get more of my brothers and sisters around here to make this argument.

It is not about the stressor of the debt ceiling. The ultimate stressor here is if we get downgraded. If the world starts to look askance at U.S. debt, saying, ``Well, we want a premium for buying their bonds because they are not taking it seriously,'' they are going to have to set off a huge inflationary cycle to devalue their dollar so, in the future, they are paying back that debt with devalued dollars.

You don't think we are going to walk into a downgrade? And do understand the law. There are lots and lots of laws around this country that this State pension system, this retirement system, you get two downgrades out of the three or four big rating agencies, and you get two of them, they can't even buy U.S. sovereigns. This is 2011. Things are dramatically worse.

You don't think that we are getting looked at on how unserious we are about--yet, once again, debt ceiling fights, stressors, however you want to politely phrase it, are the only time we have done something rational around here.

I don't know if I just need to buy the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal or a Bloomberg subscription or something for my brothers and sisters on the left to read what is going on and understand that we are going to be punished unless we take this seriously.

Let's go back to some of the very basics. Why do we care so much about the debt and what is going on?

I have been using this same board, and I need to get an updated one. I just hate to spend the ink printing another one.

Ignore 1965. I need you look at--this is 2022. Take a look at this pie. Do you see right here the green? That is domestic spending. Do you see over here the blue? That is all of defense.

Understand, in 9 years, if you came to me and said: ``David, I need you to balance the budget in the 10-year window,'' in 9 years, you can get rid of every dime of defense, every dime of discretionary--let me define ``discretionary.'' ``Discretionary'' is functionally everything you think of government. It is the Park Service, the FBI, the White House, the Supreme Court, Congress. Maybe applaud for that. But all government is gone.

The only thing that is left is what we call mandatory. It is the benefits, your Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. It is veterans' benefits.

Nine years, all government is gone as you know it. You still have to borrow a couple of hundred billion dollars, and in that same year, the Social Security trust fund is gone. In that same year, seniors take a 25 percent cut to their Social Security check. The immorality of this government--we just doubled senior poverty.

Yet, I had a President get behind that podium at the beginning of this year and basically say: Promise you won't talk about Social Security and Medicare.

He basically sentenced seniors in this country to doubling senior poverty because we are not--we are all running around here terrified to talk about it, yet it happened.

Go look at the CBO report, which is now functionally 8\1/2\ years, less than 9 years, that the Social Security trust fund is gone. If this inflationary cycle kicks up, and the COLA keeps as high it is, it could be gone in 8 years. At that moment, you double senior poverty.

That is the immorality the left is handing us, and they walk around here and pretend like they care. Care by your actions, not by your words.

It is almost a cultural difference we have between the right and left. We want to be judged by what we do, not by our virtue signaling, because you can't turn virtue signaling into policy.

Let's actually walk through it. I did this chart. It is really hard to read, but I will try to walk through it.

I do these floor speeches every week. I know I almost sound like an accountant on excessive caffeine, but at some point, the math always wins.

Let's actually walk through some of the inbound we get from people who will watch the video or talk about this. There is one woman who over and over says: If we just didn't have your wages, got rid of all the wages of Congress and your pension, we could balance the budget. You read it and you wonder, is it just an insane thought or someone who is off their meds?

Let's walk through some of these brilliant suggestions we get. We put it on this chart.

Get rid of all of the U.S. Congress and the Senate, too, plus the pensions and salaries. It is gone. You have basically covered 18 to 19 minutes of borrowing for an entire year--18 to 19 minutes of borrowing.

Let's look at a couple of the other favorites. Let's just get rid of every dime of foreign aid. Every dime of foreign aid is about 17 days of borrowing. That is in this last year.

Understand, by the end of this decade, it is no longer 17 days. It is basically, like, 9 days because the debt is

going up so much because it is almost all healthcare, the growth of debt.

Last year, if we got rid of every dime of foreign aid, it would have gotten rid of 17 days of borrowing.

You may say, fine, if that is your policy--but you got rid of only 17 days of borrowing in an entire year.

What if we just got rid of all the 2017 tax reform and pretend it didn't change all the growth effects and all the companies that moved their book of business back to us and their IP and all of those things? This is one of the Democrats' favorite points: You should get rid of the 2017 tax reform.

Okay, look here. It takes care of 12 days of borrowing. Getting rid of the entire 2017 tax reform got rid of 12 days of borrowing. That is what this brain trust around here right now proposes to the American people.

You are lied to because we are terrified for you to understand how bad the math is. This goes on and on. We can actually do a 50 percent income tax. If you are in California, basically your State tax, if you are a higher income earner, you are in the 70s. Great. Love California.

A 50 percent income tax basically takes care of 5 to 5\1/2\ weeks of borrowing. It shows you how absurd many of these suggestions are.

One of my favorite ones is to go to a 70 percent income tax for people who make $10 million or more. It takes care of 5 days of borrowing.

Are you starting to get the point here that suggestions keep being thrown out and people pretend these are real? They are not. They are not.

The primary driver of our debt between today and 30 years from now-- you are approaching almost $120 trillion of debt 30 years from now. Seventy-five percent of that debt is the shortfall of Medicare. Twenty- five percent is if we take Social Security and backfill it.

It is demographics. We have 67 million of us who are baby boomers. Every day we wait, it gets dramatically more difficult to fix. I have an entire side here that cares so much more about winning the next election because we have lied to our voters for so long that if we get rid of waste and fraud and foreign aid, we will be fine.

Come on, look at the math. It is not hard math. Download the CBO reports. Download one of the Social Security actuary reports. They are not that hard to read. Stop making things up.

Here is the primary driver. I know this makes people upset when I show it, but it is the reality. I want to make sure people understand this board, the percentage of people age 65 or over relative to the prime working age. There is this whole body of economics that basically says, people between 25 and 65, those are their prime working years. That is their productivity years. When they pay taxes, new family formations--and I have done presentations on the collapse of family formation, which is just making a mess of our future economically.

How many are 65 and older as a ratio compared to those who are in their prime working age? You have to understand, we are already basically here. We are already crossing over to 40 percent of the population.

So, 40 percent will be 65 and older compared to the number of the population that is in the prime working age. That is the math. That population has earned benefits. We made a societal promise. We promised Medicare. We promised Social Security. Now, we have to figure out how to pay for it.

Understand, we are right here. In 2023, we are right now 38 percent. Looks like in 2028, in just a couple of years, we cross 40 percent. Then, as you start to get another 25 years, you are up to 46 percent of the population is 65 and older compared to how many you have in the prime working age.

This is a combination of baby boomers and the fact that fertility rates functionally started collapsing in the early 1990s, and we didn't want to talk about it.

Now, I am going to show the couple of boards that enrage people, yet the math has been vetted and vetted.

Board 1, this board now is already a couple of years old. I am just too cheap to print another board. It is not $116 trillion of borrowing. It is $128 million, almost $130 million. Seventy-five percent of the borrowing over the next 30 years, Medicare. Twenty-five percent of the borrowing is if we backfill Social Security, plus their interest costs.

The rest of the budget is calculated to have a positive balance, meaning if we hold discretionary for that 30 years, basically, in the formula that is already in law today--this is the law as it is today-- just the shortfall in Medicare is somewhere between $80 trillion to $90 trillion during that 30 years. Yet, I have had townhalls where I have asked, ``How many of you would raise your hand if I would just give you back every dime you put into Social Security and the dimes you put into the Medicare trust fund? Would you take that?'' A bunch of people raised their hands.

We should take that deal as a society because most people don't realize what the actual underlying math is. This is for a couple. Social Security, you would have made so much more if you had been allowed to put some of that money in the market. Let's be honest, AARP, the Democrats, and others back when George W. Bush proposed it went to war. They crushed the idea. Now, we are 20-some years later and look back and go: We were idiots for not actually doing it.

Your life would be dramatically more secure. Your retirement would be dramatically more secure if you hadn't given it to the trolls who fought it.

The basic math on Social Security, this couple will have paid $625,000. That is the mean over a 40-plus quarter work life. You are going to get back $698,000. What is that? A $72,000 SPIF you get.

You functionally get your money back from Social Security. It is not a great rate of return, but you get it back. However, what people don't understand is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is Medicare. That couple will have put in about $161,000 into Medicare taxes.

The Medicare trust fund only pays 38, 40 percent of the Medicare bills. The rest comes right out of the general fund. You put in $161,000 in your work life--this is for the average couple--and you get back $522,000. This number has gone up dramatically because of medical inflation. We just haven't had the time to recalculate it. It is this differential right here that is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt.

I have done this in groups, and I get booed for the math. You get booed and go: But it is a calculator. It is math. Are we that terrified of the truth?

Understand, the wheels are coming off already. In the first 7 months of this fiscal year, entitlement spending is already up 11 percent. That is particularly driven because Medicare costs in the first 7 months of this year look like they have gone up about 16 percent because healthcare inflation really almost doubled the base inflation from all the spending the Democrats did when they were in charge. But last month's receipts, revenues, started to collapse. Capital gains taxes have crashed.

Now, understand, when we did the calculations last month, 7 months into this fiscal year, our costs on entitlements are up 11 percent, and our tax revenues are down 10 percent. That is why if you actually pull out the Treasury tables and read them and do the math and add them together, you are today heading toward a $1.7 trillion borrow. Assuming that the rest of the fiscal year is normalized, if it stays on that particular path, that number may be a few trillion dollars higher.

The reason I am talking about this is that we are hitting numbers of borrowing we weren't supposed to hit for another decade, decade and a half. There is this concept called fragility. Everything is fine and wonderful in life and our bonds, and everyone is willing to buy our debt until they are not. At that moment, you have that failed bond auction, the moment you actually have this starting to happen, where receipts are crashing and your costs are going up, the rest of the world sees that and says maybe we don't buy U.S. bonds this time.

The moment you hit that inflection, if U.S. rates for the next 25 years are 2 points higher than we had over the previous decade, at the end of that 25 years, every dime of tax receipts goes just to pay interest.

Do you want to know what default looks like? That is what default looks like. It is not the clown show we have around this place where people run around pretending their hair is on fire.

Madam Speaker, I am sorry. I know I was a little agitated. I have had far too

much caffeine. This is important. We need to understand the math.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, as we get ourselves sort of set up here--the hazard when you use boards--I actually want to walk through a couple of things. If I don't make some folks mad, particularly on the other side tonight, I am not doing my job.

How many of you have been basically hearing, even the President today talking about this debt ceiling and how outrageous it is that Republicans are trying to actually use it for some policy.

If there are any of the scribes that we call reporters, please listen for one moment. When we talk about the debt ceiling, how many of you remember 2017, how Democrats rolled Trump on the deficit ceiling?

The Democrats and the press were giddy that when we were up against the debt ceiling in 2017, that Schumer and

the gang basically required another $15 billion in spending, and that was the cost of their participation in the debt ceiling. Oh, but that would be outrageous to try to do policy as part of the debt ceiling, but you did it.

Then how about this? 2019, does anyone remember someone called Speaker Pelosi? In that case, the extortion was additional spending of $324 billion.

Now, the difference for Republicans is we are trying to save the country from the debt crisis, where the left was trying to spend more money. But this is in the last couple of years.

You basically have the press, a whole bunch of the Washington, D.C., chattering class, obviously, our Democratic colleagues, oh, we can't believe the Republicans are actually asking for some fiscal constraints. Okay.

But it was just 2019 that Pelosi--no debt increase until spending limits are raised. That is policy. So how come it was wonderful just a couple of years ago, a few years ago when we were up against the debt ceiling when Democrats asked for policy changes, and now they are enraged that we are asking for it.

Does anyone understand how absolutely duplicitous this place is and the short memories around here?

It took us a good, oh, 20, 30 seconds on a search engine to find this.

If you are going to hold us to a standard, hold us to the very ones you on the left live by. In 2017 you demanded changes. In 2019 you demanded $324 billion of additional spending, and that was your price of playing with the debt ceiling.

What we, as conservatives and Republicans are basically asking is help us save the country. You have got to understand some of the things going on.

But this is a real point, and I know this makes some folks uncomfortable. The only way this place seems to work is when we are up against what is called a stressor. It is a budget; it is a deadline; it is a debt ceiling.

Yet, if you look at the last couple of decades, actually, going back to the 1980s, almost any time we have actually accomplished any fiscal constraint, we were up against a debt ceiling.

Look, go back to Gramm-Rudman, all the way through, policy agreement after policy agreement. There is what, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 in functionally the last 40 years. Every single one of these came from a debt ceiling.

Yet, if you read particularly the Washington, D.C., press--and these are supposed to be people that know what the hell is going on. Oh, we can't believe Speaker McCarthy and those Republicans are actually asking for some fiscal constraint tied to the debt ceiling. Huh?

Now, when the left had it, they demanded more spending, but all these are ones that actually gave us some policy. It is just the duplicity around here.

Does anyone pay attention to the numbers coming out of Treasury, the numbers coming out of CBO, the numbers coming out of Joint Tax? Are you following what is actually going on?

I am sorry. I am trying not to get too angry. If I have any of my Members here, or your staff, I know literacy sometimes isn't our greatest accomplishment around here. This is this week's Economist magazine. Please, someone, just read the cover, `` . . . fiscal fantasyland.'' When will politicians wake up.

When The Economist magazine is warning us how much danger we are in, and that the numbers are coming off the rails, you need to understand what the hell is going on.

``Governments are living in a fiscal fantasyland.'' And this is from The Economist magazine talking about the green tax credit that we were all promised--remember, the left got up in front of these microphones and said, they will not be more than $391 billion over the 10 years.

Then all of a sudden, we come back and find out the actual scoring is turning into $1.2 trillion. Yes, CBO re-scored it and they basically doubled it. But the outside world is calculating it, Goldman and others are basically saying, no, it is $1.2 trillion.

Remember how proud the left was: We are going to cut the deficit because we raised these taxes and then we are going to do these green credits. Have you noticed they don't talk about that any longer because the new scoring it spends money, it doesn't save a dime.

Yet, at the same time, do you understand what is happening in the first 7 months of this year? Entitlement spending is already up 11 percent in the first 7 months of this year. That is stunning amounts of money.

But receipts--we put revenues on here because most people know it, but for Ways and Means, tax revenues are the receipts. We are down 10 percent.

Do you understand what I am saying? Spending on entitlements is up 11 percent but revenues are down 10. Do you understand what the hell is going on?

There is a reason--you remember a few days ago, or 2 weeks ago, all of a sudden, the Treasury Secretary goes, oh God. The cutoff date when they have used up all the extraordinary measures is moving up. What was it a month, 6 weeks? That was because the tax revenues weren't coming in nearly as high as we expected.

When you start to understand some of what is going on, just this year we will spend 40 percent more on interest. We are going to spend over $100 billion--so far, I think the first 7 months, over $100 billion more just on interest because we were living in this artificial fantasyland for the last decade with suppressed interest rates.

Now, remember, it is not just the $2 trillion we are going to borrow this year. Yes, it is approaching $2 trillion. It is the fact that we have what is called the weighted daily average--I think we are about what, 60, 70 months--and that basically means within that time you have to refinance half of all U.S. sovereign debt.

That new sovereign debt, when it is refinanced, or the new $2 trillion that has to be refinanced, is at today's interest rates, not the artificially low interest rates we had 2 years ago before the Biden inflation took off. Actually, that is not fair. Democrat inflation took off.

We are going to spend dramatically more on interest. Be aware, if those people who are getting today's inflation number didn't pay enough attention to what the core calculation was. That core calculation was sitting at about 4.9. If you read the notes, it was so sticky. We may have higher interest rates in this country for years, not this magic thing where we are going to fall back down to 2 percent inflation at the end of the year and everything is going to be hunky-dory again. That is not what the data is saying.

You have got to understand. Federal spending soars; revenues fall. This is from The Wall Street Journal just this last week. Budget surpluses, including adjustments for timing effects. The outlays already--this was just this last month. April is supposed to be our big month where we take in all of these tax revenues. We were functionally $274 billion upside down. That is a 74 percent change from last year. Do you understand what is going on?

I am sorry that I am going through these pretty fast, because I have a cutoff time in 10 minutes.

Federal spending. This is also from The Wall Street Journal. April, we fell by $135 billion from what we expected.

Year-to-date spending is up $400 billion, 12 percent. Do this with me. Federal spending is up 12 percent from last year.

Year-to-date deficits. Now, this one you are going to love. Year-to- date deficits, we are doing the calculation, it is not done yet, and we don't know yet. We are 7 months in, so we are doing some guessing. Maybe there will be some late tax receipts. Maybe all of a sudden, bunches of people will start working and start paying additional taxes. We may have $2 trillion this year. Right now, year-to-date deficits, we are functionally, for last month, $928 billion, up 236 percent from this time last year.

If you want to know why many of us are so emphatic on actually getting some fiscal constraints, this is the punch line here. Please hear this. Why do we need some fiscal constraints as part of this debt ceiling? If we do not communicate to the world debt markets that we are going to start to take our debt seriously, we will be punished as a Nation.

Now, that punishment may mean our bonds are just at a little bit higher interest rate. You already saw one of the previous boards, just this year, interest

is costing us 40 percent more. Just a couple ticks on interest rates when you are floating a publicly held debt--I am actually not even sure where we are at. Are we at maybe $24 trillion, $25 trillion of publicly held debt? This stuff here should scare you to death if you own a calculator.

Yeah, we really are heading toward borrowing $2 trillion this year. We weren't supposed to be anywhere near this. This is where we are heading. This is just assuming that the numbers are going to come in as they have.

The problem is, if you have been following what CBO has been publishing, they keep ticking down the gross domestic product calculation, the GDP calculation, for the rest of the year. I think the calculation for 2024 is we expect a year of 1.2. They are basically telegraphing. If we hit recession the second half of this year, I guarantee you we are going to blow through $2 trillion of borrowing just this year.

I know this chart is almost impossible read. We printed it too small.

Individual income taxes. Here is our big hit. Individual income taxes look like they have fallen about 18 percent. Payroll taxes are up about 9 percent. Corporate income tax is up about 4 percent. The total receipts are down 10 percent.

Here are our spending charts. Social Security has gone up. The spend on Social Security is up about 11 percent so far this year.

Medicare, remember, the vast majority of the borrowing in this country, the vast majority, is just Medicare. It is healthcare costs. Medicare this year, the spend in it is already up 15 percent in a single year.

Medicaid is up maybe 7, 8 percent just this year.

Anyone see the math problem?

This is from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, our Federal budget. They are actually almost predicting we are going to cross over 7\1/2\ percent of the entire economy being in borrowed money.

So we are being told the long-run GDP, according to CBO's calculation, is basically going to be sitting at about one-eighth. Yet, borrowing is going to be 7 to 7\1/2\ percent of the economy, but the growth of the economy will be 1.8.

Does anyone see the math problem?

The Federal Reserve now has lowered the outlook down to 1.2 for just this year.

Even The Economist magazine here, their math has us now starting this year and running out, now starting to run deficits that are 7 percent or more.

Mr. Speaker, this math should scare us all half to death. There is a reason. If we do not get some fiscal constraints, whether it be part of this debt ceiling or something else, the markets will punish us.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 57 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, May 11, 2023, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.