Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, we are going to do a couple different things tonight. I am going to spend some time talking about growth. I am one of those who believes growth is moral. If you listen to my brothers and sisters on the left or many of us on the right, we are talking about how much poorer America is today.

The fact of the matter is, working men and women in this country today are poorer than they were 2 years ago. From the day Joe Biden was elected to today, if you are in my district--I have one of the highest, if not the highest, inflation in America. I have the Phoenix-Scottsdale area--you are about 6 percent poorer because inflation has been this high, your wage growth is here.

It is always amusing to me when our brothers and sisters on the left talk about income inequality, working men and women, and then the very policies that are advocated basically make us poorer.

Another thing I have to say is--and I have to say this over and over and over--in 2011, Standard and Poor's put out a paper and they downgraded the United States' debt, and their downgrade was a tick. We were AAA, and we went to AA+, but if anyone would bother to read it-- because if I hear one more person from the press go, well, in 2011 when they had the debt ceiling fight, they got downgraded. That isn't what S&P said. Read the damn thing.

It is very simple: We got downgraded as a country because we were not doing anything about debt. It makes it very clear. I went over this a couple of weeks ago here on the floor, I read part of it. It basically says the United States Congress is not taking the debt seriously. It was not about the debt fight. It was about the solution that came to negotiate to raise the debt ceiling, didn't actually have enough teeth and mechanisms.

Mr. Speaker, I must tell you, the demographics are dramatically worse today than they were in 2011. I have been here multiple times to the floor with different economic boards, but the Democrats' Orwellian- named Inflation Reduction Act, if you actually look at the spending, there were $271 billion of functionally grant handouts to clean energy companies.

Even the latest CBO score that we just got because of the negotiations, the mechanisms, the piece of legislation put together to raise the debt ceiling and cut out many of these things, actually came back and said, well, we may have missed the number by about $300 billion. In other words, our own Congressional Budget Office basically missed it by 100 percent.

Now, Goldman Sachs said it was 1.2 trillion in spending, but CBO, at least, now has updated their numbers. This is the sort of thing that if you think about those levels of spending and then you call something the Inflation Reduction Act and then you wonder why inflation continues and one of the really disturbing things even on last month's numbers is the core number. The core inflation in the United States is staying pretty solid.

The danger in that is, everyone gets a little bit giddy, fuel prices, food prices go down, but they also go up. Those are actually numbers that move up and down an awful lot, but the problem is the core gets built into everything and the effect that it is going to have on your pension, on your family's ability to ever buy a house, on the Social Security pension system.

You do realize we lost an entire year of actuarial soundness. Now, the Social Security Trust Fund is functionally gone in about 9 years, 8\1/2\ years. At that moment, if you are on Social Security, you will be taking a 23 percent reduction if we do not find a way to fix it.

Almost every bit of that loss of a whole year from the previous actuary report was the inflation COLA. We must understand how devastating the policies of this place were when the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, the White House what they have done to you and your family.

I don't care if you don't love Republicans, but do understand that your country is poorer today than it was a couple of years ago.

One of the other things we need to talk about is the Congressional Budget Office--they did this about 3 weeks ago--basically has been updating economic growth projections.

For 2024, we were at 1.6. That was our projection. That is what we were building the budget on. That is what we were projecting for future revenues. This will make sense here in a moment.

They came back and said, no, we don't even think we are going to hit 1.6. Now, understand, there was a time 1.6 would have been embarrassing. Long-run GDP growth in the United States in the last 50 years--about 3 percent. So, we have halved that, and now, we have actually got it down to 1.2.

Do understand, when you have this level of anemic growth, how much it hurts, how much it hurts you, how much it hurts tax receipts, how much it hurts your ability to retire, for your kids to have a future.

This is the world we have been handed. This is substantially because of losses of productivity, the amounts of debt. Remember, the United States is consuming so much of the capital of the world just to finance our debt. This is a real problem.

What would you do if I came to you and said, ``Growth is moral''? We saw through the 2017 tax reform the economic growth. Income inequality shrank more than it had at any time in modern history. Food insecurity shrank more than at any time in modern history.

The populations that had just years of brutality and trying to get some economic momentum shot up, and then COVID hit--actually, thank heaven we had that economic vitality going into COVID. Could you imagine if we had this sort of GDP when COVID happened? How miserable.

Remember, the United States still came out of it much faster, much stronger than almost any other place in the industrialized world.

As we start to talk about what we do, what is moral but what also produces some growth--I have spent the last few months coming here every week and walking through how devastatingly ugly the demographics and the debt. Last week, I did demographics. I don't know if anyone was crazy enough to watch it, but it is important.

In 18 years, the United States has more deaths than births. Half the States in America today have more deaths than births. That is not Republican. That is not Democrat. That is just fertility.

You have to understand, if you are going to have a vital country, if there is going to be another American century, you need growth.

What policies are we getting from the left? Just piling on dramatically more debt and then saying to just keep raising the limit on the credit card.

Let's walk through a couple of things we could do immediately. I have been complaining about the debt, demographics, and some of the bad decisions, so let's just do some of the things we know that have worked.

If I came to you right now--and part of this is going to get me in trouble because I am going to say things that don't really fit the pop culture of this place.

The fourth quarter of 2017, tax reform--there was this thing called expensing, this concept of you are a business and you buy a piece of capital equipment so you can make more stuff, make it better, faster, cheaper.

Remember your high school economics class? There are functionally two things that drive up wages. Inflation--but when your wages go up because of inflation, do you really get anything? Your purchasing power, you are often behind. It is not just getting back up to even.

The second thing that raises wages is productivity. You get wealthier. The country gets wealthier. Society gets healthier when we get more productive.

It turns out that in the 2017 tax reform--and you can actually sort of see some of it because most people don't realize the tax reform kicked in in 2018, but we actually had a backward looking for anyone that made those capital expenditures in that fourth quarter of 2017.

You can see it right on the chart. All of a sudden, these capital expenditures--businesses, organizations going out and saying they are going to buy that new piece of equipment. They are going to buy those new trucks so they have more capacity.

You can actually see it, and that did this remarkable thing--growing the economy.

Now, here is where I am going to get myself in trouble, but the math is the math, and the math always wins.

If you actually look at the 100 percent bonus depreciation that we did and compare it to the individual tax cuts--we all love our individual tax cuts.

Remember, the tax reform for 2017, something I over and over tried to share with my friends on the left because they have this crazy folklore that it was a giveaway to the rich--except the 2017 tax reform was more progressive, meaning the wealthier were paying a higher percentage of the Federal income tax burden than the previous one.

Remember, under the tax reform, half of society doesn't pay Federal income taxes. They pay FICA, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, but income taxes, half of society doesn't pay.

The tax reform became more progressive but with lower rates and the ability for businesses to become productive. A crazy thing we found in the data set--and this is just a chart trying to say for every billion in your immediate lost revenues and the tax reform, if you do it on individuals, you get about 0.1 percent, a little over that, in GDP growth.

When you do it in expensing--and there is a punch line coming here-- you actually get over 0.6 percent growth, which in an economy our size is massive.

It turns out that if you actually really think about this--and this is one that is going to be a little hard, and so this is the moment, anyone watching, if you don't like accounting, please, you may want to go find something on Netflix.

If you buy that piece of capital equipment so you can be more productive, and because you have gotten more productive and your efficiencies, you can pay your workers more, and your workers actually are doing better in life.

You have this thing called depreciation. I am going to take that over 7 years, and each year I get to take a little bit of it.

If you actually read how the tax code works--I am going to show you some slides--you end up paying taxes on revenues you haven't produced yet because of the way depreciation works.

If you get to take it all at one time, you speed up the capital cycle, meaning I bought this piece of equipment, and we got this much more productive. It is 3 years later, and I can buy the next one and expense it then and get that much more productive. You could actually see what they call the productivity cycle.

The tax receipts are a timing effect, so you get this depreciation-- well, it actually would look more like a curve going this way, over 7 years, or you take it in 1 year. The basic depreciation you get is the same. It is a timing effect.

The reason you will see the CBO score says that this costs money is because we are always doing things in a 10-year window. Then, you often don't get the dynamic score. What happens when you have that productivity step up, and what does that produce in tax receipts, and then the new one and the new one.

This is always very hard, particularly for those of us who get elected. Everybody loves their individual tax cuts, but if you want to grow the economy, ideas like expensing, that immediate depreciation to make society more productive, that is where you get your bang for your buck.

This was my attempt--and we sort of stole this from--I am not even sure where we got this slide, but this is sort of walking through the depreciation cycle. If you had $100, you get to depreciate $88 of it. There is $11 of that piece of capital equipment that you don't get to depreciate.

By the time it is done, you actually are paying more taxes because of the timing effect and that portion of it you didn't get to depreciate. You don't actually get the full value of the depreciation the way the tax code is written.

So, the basic argument I am making here is, as we are starting to think about what things we could do, where I am hoping the White House, the folks down the Hall we call the Senate, and maybe even the Democrats on this side, what are the things they could do if they actually really cared about the fact that Americans are poorer today?

What I need is wage growth going up faster than inflation. We know, over and over, permanent 100 percent bonus depreciation, which that is expensing, is the fastest way to step up that productivity because it is instant. It is particularly important during a time of inflation.

I am going to bear with everyone because I have never actually tried explaining this behind a microphone. It has always been in my head, but I am going to try to explain this.

A piece of equipment costs $100 today. You go, and it is a piece of equipment that you have to depreciate because the tax code now says you have to depreciate it over time. You get ready to buy it, and tomorrow it is no longer $100. It is $120.

The fact matter of is, as it goes up, the value of that depreciation over time, compared to the productivity you get from it, is lost. In expensing, if inflation goes up, if it is $100, $120, you get to take 100 percent of it immediately.

The argument is, what is happening right now, in this year, because in part of the tax reform from 2017, today, you no longer get to take 100 percent. You get to take 80 percent of it and expense it. Next year, it will be 60 percent and expense it.

You see what is happening. As you can only take less and less of the cost of that piece of equipment, the price is moving up, the gap expands, and all of a sudden now, I have to cover that bigger gap because of inflation.

If I have to depreciate it, it is much harder to get your value back. If it is expensing, even with inflation, you at least get the value back immediately.

There is an argument from a bunch of the tax experts that basically says if you want growth in the economy without inflation, if you want wage growth in the economy without inflation, going back to 100 percent expensing is the most powerful tool we have.

I know that may be a little geeky, but it is worth thinking about because the fact of the matter is, things like expensing, you go, oh, that is a Republican thing. I think Barack Obama was one of the biggest advocates for it.

Understand, it is just good economics. Look, I have all sorts of charts that actually talk about the baseline effect, what happens when you have inflation. The fact of the matter is, in a time of inflation, it is one of the most efficient things you can do to get growth without inflation.

The fact of the matter is, if you had 4 percent baseline inflation and you went back and had 100 percent expensing, it is like 94,000 additional jobs in this society, which is actually part of the wage pressure, raising wages.

Part of my argument here is, if you wanted something that is very simple, that Congress could do almost immediately, we would fix the fact that, under current tax law, that ability to take that bonus depreciation is fading away. We would fix that right now.

We know full expensing, in the long run, has a substantial effect on longer run economic growth, a thing we call capital stock.

In a country where, functionally, we borrow $45,000 a second, and it is going to double, functionally, in 10 years, you need policies that grow in a way where the capital stock, when the available capital to basically be loaned for businesses, for people to start ventures, to take risk--we actually also see just the expensing, the immediate depreciation. Even in the basic scores we get from CBO and the Tax Foundation, it grows wages.

Now, if I have got 1.2 percent growth in wages from this--I am going to show a couple boards here that you get about a point-and-a-half from R&D expensing and what it does in the economy. You can almost start to make up, with just the clean-up of a couple of the tax provisions, the amount of lost wages Americans have because inflation has been higher than wage growth. We can fix much of the damage that the left has done to this economy by just cleaning up some things in the tax code.

I know this is thick, but it is important. This is just good economics, and it is simple. I often come here and talk about things, like if we would adopt certain policies and bring in new technologies. This is stuff we could do in an afternoon. This is just cleaning up some of the tax code.

If I come to you right now, did you realize that in 2022, last year, if your business is a drug company, an engineering company, a biotech company, a chip manufacturer, whatever it is, and you have been spending money on research and development, now you have to amortize that research and development. That cost you cannot take immediately; you have to amortize it out. This is a real problem.

Last week, I came and walked some folks through this. Part of it was from an article from The Economist last week, if anyone wants to geek out. It talks about the United States is still the most dynamic, big economy in the world. We have almost double the wages of people in Western Europe. I think we are like 20 or 25 percent higher than Japan. A lot of that was because of this velocity in the economy, the risk- taking, research and development, and bringing in new products.

What happens when that research and development really slows up because it doesn't make sense to make those capital expenditures because now you have spent all this money, now you have got to depreciate it out?

All of a sudden you are functionally paying taxes today on money you don't have. That is what is happening.

Well, you start to take a look at the stuff, and you start to realize that in the United States now, it is not like it was back in the 1970s where government was the primary funder of research and development. It hasn't been that way in like 40 years.

You look where we are today. This orange line is business, and you start to see the cycle over here. We were doing amazing things with the breakthroughs that were coming.

We are actually starting to track now that this is starting flatline because the tax code has changed. Fix it. Research and development, make it 100 percent expensing instead of what has fallen back. We have gone back to the old, old tax code. We have lost the expensing.

Research and development. You say you want a dynamic economy. To my friends on the left who keep wanting to talk about clean energy, bless you. How would you like to actually keep having the research that actually creates the next breakthrough, the next super battery, or for those of us who have an absolute fixation that one of most moral things we can do in society is curing diseases?

I am going to circle back. Yes, I am going to talk a little bit about diabetes and research and development expensing. They do tie together. The single most expensive thing in our society right now is diabetes. Thirty-three percent of all healthcare is diabetes. Thirty-one percent of all Medicare is diabetes.

What would happen if you could actually disrupt prediabetic populations?

Heaven forbid, in the future--because we know it is in phase 1 right now--we have an actual cure.

Those are things that good tax policy brings venture capital in to help finance. It is moral. It would be one of the most powerful things you could do to close income inequality and crash the debt. But we seem to not be able to think out of a paper bag.

You look at the gain. If you actually look, business R&D grew faster after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act because you turned it substantially into 100 percent expensing. You take a look at these huge step-ups where the United States was the innovator in the world, bringing on new products faster, better, and you could actually see this in wage growth.

There are certain things you and I can do in the tax code that in many ways are minimally expensive and incredibly productive in wages and growing the size of the economy.

Remember the first slide? We are living in a country where the CBO is telling us next year we are down to 1.2 percent economic growth. We have got to find a way to grow.

If you actually look at what is happening right now, the private R&D investment was growing and growing and

growing, and now it has begun to flatline out. This is a real problem.

If you want to live in a country that is dynamic, that is providing opportunity, that is curing the disease a family member has, the new piece of technology that changes our lives, that makes our living so much better and healthier, believe it or not, the path to that is fixing parts of the tax code.

Mr. Speaker, the only argument I am trying to make here is, I often come behind this microphone with absolutely dour, nightmarish discussions. The one I have gotten the most complaints about is I have been bringing the charts the last couple of months showing in 9 budget years, in 9 years, you can get rid of every dime of defense and all of what we call discretionary spending--no FBI, no Park Service, no FDA, no Congress, no White House, no Supreme Court--it is all gone, and you still have to borrow a couple hundred billion dollars. It may actually be worse than that because I haven't bothered to calculate in the fact that the Social Security trust fund is gone a year earlier. But we know if you backfill the Social Security trust fund, it is not a couple hundred billion; it is like $700 billion and there is no government.

We are functionally an insurance company with an Army. I say that over and over because that seems to click in some people's heads. If I get one more individual who has functionally been lied to over the decades by the political class: We can get rid of waste and fraud or by taxing the rich people more or if we got rid of foreign aid, we will be fine.

I have one woman who insists on texting me that if we should just get rid of Members of Congress' pensions and salaries. I did the math for her while she was on the phone with me. I took an entire year of borrowing and added up every dime that goes into Members of Congress and the Senate, their salaries and pensions, and I think we came up with 18 minutes' worth of borrowing for an entire year.

Come on, people. Buy a calculator. Stop living in a fantasy world. There are solutions here. We just need to embrace them and move forward.

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 7 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, April 26, 2023, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Mrs. McClain).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Michigan.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to actually try something, and these are always those moments where, if you don't like something that is fairly thick--we are going to do lots of demographics. If you don't enjoy that sort of stuff, don't watch this.

I am going to try to lay out a bit of an argument of the headwinds we are facing as a country and a society. I am also going to point out that we are still dramatically better off than all of the industrialized world, and we have done it better over the last couple of decades than the rest of the industrialized world. You have to understand what is coming.

There are a couple of examples where we can take a look and see what is happening in Japan. Is that a foreshadowing of some of our demographics?

Once again, it is a chip on my shoulder as I listen to my brothers and sisters from the left. I just need them to step up and admit that in the last 2 years Americans are poorer. They get up behind the microphone and attack Republicans for trying to grow the economy and for trying to provide opportunities. As a matter of fact, a couple minutes ago in the 1 minute speeches we had a Member of the left get up and talk about supply-side economics.

I am going, huh, where have you been the last couple of years of my life? You are now actually stealing our language.

If you are a working man or woman in this country, the purchasing power of your paycheck--you are poorer today than the day Joe Biden was elected. It is math. If you want to understand why so many Americans are cranky or dour or in some ways just very dark on what the future looks like, it is because every day they go into a grocery store or to work, this and that, and they realize they are poorer today than they were a couple of years ago.

Where is the empathy?

Also, where is the goal to grow where we can actually make up for the wages not keeping up anything close to what inflation is?

We are going to actually start to walk through--I have a lot of boards and I am going to do some of these very, very fast. If there is a staffer or someone out there watching--I try to explain to people that the room is substantially empty, and it is supposed to be. The House is done with its legislative work.

There are thousands of people on this campus and around Washington, D.C., and around the country who are working for Members of Congress who may have this idiot, me, on their television trying to talk to them about economics and how we make America prosperous again.

Let's do some of the positives. Something we don't tell each other enough. If you actually look at the economic conditions per capita, and you actually look at it from 1980 until today, you do realize the United States has done dramatically better than the rest of the industrialized world. If you actually sort of adjust all of the currencies to the same purchasing power, per capita income for the United States is around $70,000 per worker in this country. If you take a look at our competitors, you know, the next best one is all of Western Europe, they are around $46,000.

Do understand the brain trust around here that often says that we should be more like Western Europe?

Do they want us to give up that much of our economic prosperity?

We are better. We are more prosperous. We are actually more innovative, and we are losing it.

It is this prosperity that many of us are behind these mikes trying to defend. This is what we are trying to defend in our policy sets.

I have another way to try to explain this. The average income in the United States continues to be significantly higher than other countries. I think on this one I used Japan and Western Europe. Our per capita income--if you look over here--in 1990, we were about 24 percent per capita income higher than Western Europe. Today, we are about 30 percent. We still outgrew them.

I want you to take a look at Japan. This is one of the examples I am going to use here when you have that demographic headwind when you are running out of workers.

In 1980, we had about 17 percent to the plus side of healthier incomes than Japan in 1980. Today, it is 54 percent. Japan didn't actually shrink in their income, we grew so much more than Japan, and obviously, Western Europe. Let's pat ourselves on the back and then get back to work because we are going to lose this marginal prosperity with many of the policies I am seeing happening from this administration and from what the Democrats did to us over the last couple of years.

Now we have to walk through the headwinds of what is really going on in America.

A couple points of reference--and we went back and vetted the number--in about 18 years the United States will have more deaths than births. That is actually with current immigration models.

If you walk through this, you are not a dying society, but you are fading. There are ways you make that up. Country after country after country have tried to change their fertility rates. We are going to do geeky stuff here.

I think there is one country, I think it may be Hungary, that if you have a third child they give you a house. It barely adjusted the country's fertility rates. You need to accept this is across the industrialized world.

Prosperity actually is sort of the opposite of the Malthusians, opposite of the idiots that wrote things like ``The Population Bomb'' back in the late 1960s. They were wrong. The only thing Ehrlich got right was the spelling of his name on his book in 1968, but the left still worships him.

Prosperity actually leads to delayed marriages and less fertility. We are going to talk about that, but we are also going to touch on some other things that we could affect by policy. I am going to step out on a limb and talk about some things that a politician gets himself in trouble for, but it is math, and it is the truth.

We have got a real problem with young males. It is blowing off the pages in the statistics. Let's go see how uncomfortable we can make each other, but it is math and the math always wins.

Mr. Speaker, I hope--I am trying not to curse--but I don't give a darn if it hurts your feelings. We have got to embrace and deal with the facts. So let's do some facts.

Mr. Speaker, the percentage of people 65 and over, relative to the number of people we have 25 to 64--so 25 to 64 is what we mean when we say prime working age populations, those are actually our productive populations.

I actually believe in today's world--I intend never to retire because I am also crazy. I am 61 and I have a 9-month-old child, and, yes, my wife is exactly my age. I am pathologically optimistic. People like me are never retiring.

The reality of it is that what we see in our society is the prime working age population is shrinking and the over 65 population is exploding. We call them baby boomers. It is like Congress completely forgot there were baby boomers. You look at this chart, we are here in the inflection years where the growth of our population that is 65 and older is just growing incredibly.

Understand that in a couple of decades, if you use my ratio of prime- age workers compared to my population of 65 and older, we get as high as 46 percent. That means 46 percent will be 65 and older compared to prime age.

Grow your economy when almost half of your population is 65 and older compared to your working population. Yes, that number skews out under 18 for a couple other reasons, and some of that is because of fertility and some other things trying to calculate it.

That type of ratio you need to think through. How do you design economic incentives for productivity?

What are you willing to automate?

Are you going to run around and be terrified of chat AIs and other things that may add a huge productivity spike, or allow an individual worker to be much more productive?

This place has to stop being terrified of technology because without it we are going to be buried.

Here is another slide, basically in some ways saying the same thing. By

2042--how many years is that? It is 19 years--population growth will be driven entirely by net immigration. It is basically saying that in about 18 years--remember, we are going to have more deaths than births--any population change we will have at the time will be from immigration.

Are we ever going to update our immigration codes saying that we want immigration that maximizes vitality for the country?

You are going to go fixate more on a talent-based immigration system than a--I don't have a more polite way to say this. When you have an open border like Arizona--and come down to the border some time with me--you have migration of poverty. These are wonderful people. I am sure they are God's children.

The fact of the matter is we have got to figure out a way to pay for Medicare and Social Security. We need highly productive populations to have the multiplier effect on the economy. The math will win.

I know this chart is a little hard to read. The only adult population group expected to decrease past 2045 will be my prime working age. Our working productive population from economic terms is shrinking. We get about a decade out and we begin to shrink.

This is a little easier to understand. The prime working age population is the only age group expected to decline in the long run. You start to see this--and I am going to show you some slides of what this means to economic growth.

Part of the argument I am making here is we are fighting over the debt ceiling and what the budget looks like and what the long-term projections are. Remember, I have been to this floor, heaven knows, how many times over the last few years saying between today and 30 years from now that 100 percent of the borrowing--we are expecting to have about $128 trillion of borrowing in those 30 years.

Mr. Speaker, 100 percent of that borrowing is the shortfall of Medicare. Remember, three-quarters of Medicare comes from the general fund and the Medicare part A trust fund is going to be empty in about 6 years. The other 25 percent of that $128 trillion of borrowing will be if we backfill Social Security.

You all saw--because I know this place ran out and got a copy of the Medicare/Social Security actuary report that came out 3 weeks ago, it basically said we lost another year. It is not 10 years; it is now like 9 years and the Social Security trust fund is gone. At that moment, if we do not fix Social Security, we double senior poverty.

What did the President do on that podium when we had the state of the Union?

He basically made talking about fixing Social Security toxic because it was a better campaign issue than a moral one.

A little bit more fun with math. An increasingly large share of births are happening to women 30 and over.

Why would I show this slide?

Basically when we are doing fertility curves and when your population--you have older parents--they have fewer children. I am one of these.

I have two kids, and I am in my early sixties with my wife. We are an outlier. We have other health issues and other things. It is actually becoming much more common that as we wait for prosperity, it is so hard to start a family; it is so hard to find a spouse; and it is so hard in the economics, particularly with what has happened in the last 2 years where, Mr. Speaker, if you are that working person and you want to get married but you are poorer today.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, family formation is a derivative of a couple of things. It is who graduates school and your ability to find stable employment to have economic growth. Most people will not enter into family formation until you start to have that level of stability, Mr. Speaker.

In the last couple years with policies here we are willing to give out stunning amounts of money to green energy, to this, to that, and to whatever favored groups to subsidize really rich people to go buy battery walls, and we functionally subsidize people not to actually participate in the labor force.

This is where it gets uncomfortable, but the math is the math is the math. If we don't start to think about it, we are avoiding a really uncomfortable subject.

Men, male participation, has fallen 19 percent.

Now, I know this is like over the last 70 years, but something is going on in our society. We had brought in an expert a couple years ago, and the conversation was fascinating. It was a professor from one of the Ivy Leagues.

She was saying: Look, we don't know if some of it is drugs, though we expect that. We don't know if some of it is video games.

There were questions of how many young men, particularly, are put on hyperactive drugs during their adolescent years and other things. We just don't know. However, we do know that we have a crisis of young males coming back into society, and we need them. We need their participation for more than just their tax revenues from their labor.

A healthy society is one that has the vitality where everyone is sort of loved and participates in the economy and has opportunity. With that comes sort of the American Dream of family formation and other things.

The number has gotten ugly. A total of 13 percent of prime age males are not working.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, I just walked you through some of the prime age male calculations of what that demographic was. Thirteen percent of the males in that group are not participating in the economy.

If you want an economic pop, Mr. Speaker, then I can fix things in the Tax Code. I can do some incredible things here with the Ways and Means Committee and the Members here who actually care about economics to incentivize investments. However, I also have a moral issue of I have a huge portion of my society that has dropped out.

We need to understand why, and we need to bring them back if not for economic reasons, then just for basic humanity.

We have been trying to dive into this to understand, okay, here is functionally we are getting right up against the pandemic, but the new baseline of male labor force participation is dramatically below where we were before, and it just continues to steadily decline. This is a problem.

I can't make much of the math work in the out years, so I get Members here who say: David, give me a plan to balance in 10 years.

Mr. Speaker, do understand: I can balance. We could build a plan. We could all come together and balance in 10 years. Of course, the next day we would be out of balance.

In 9 budget years--and I have said this, and this seems to be the single thing I say that upsets more people around here than anything, so let's do it slow.

In 9 budget years, according to CBO's report from 6 weeks ago, we can get rid of every dime of the military; we can get rid of every dime of the rest of what we call discretionary; and that is the FBI, the military, the Park Service, the State Department, the White House, and the Supreme Court.

Everything we think is discretionary is all gone.

In 9 budget years, it is all gone. There is no discretionary. We still have to borrow a couple of hundred billion dollars to have enough cash flow to cover Medicare and enough cash flow to cover veterans' benefits, and we haven't actually calculated in the fact that the actuaries from Social Security and Medicare just removed a year of actuarial life.

So it may be much worse because our math before was the very next year so that in 10 budget years it is not a couple of hundred billion dollars we have to borrow, it may be several hundred billion dollars we have to borrow if we were to backfill Social Security.

These are demographics.

Is that Republican or Democrat?

It is a bit of both.

The fact of the matter is the primary driver of our debt is demographics. We got old as a society, and this place needs to be maniacally fixated on growth, on efficiency, and on adopting the technologies that make healthcare less expensive but more accessible.

If we don't do this, then this math gets really ugly really fast. We are not talking about something 20 years from now.

Mr. Speaker, how many of us expect to still be us in 9 years?

That is what we are talking about.

So this is actually one of the things that is going on, and the number is actually worse. This is just the only chart that we have that we vetted.

The number of males and females who are entering sort of our university world pretty much enter it about the same, except graduation rates: only about 40 percent of males are graduating. I think the number now is in the high thirties. It rolled over again over the last couple of years.

Females, God bless them. We are seeing about 60 percent of those are graduating. It is wonderful.

However, this number between there is actually a really uncomfortable conversation. It is called functional family formation gap.

Of the many who have succeeded--they have their bachelor's degree, they have their master's degree, they went through the university process, and they graduated--what is the population of prospective spouses?

Something is going on in our society where we are trying to understand why are there so few family formations.

Some of the demographers who responded to our question said: You have a problem. You have lots of success in females making it through college systems and university systems, and we have some universities where females are graduating at twice the rate as males.

That differential, how much of this population is comfortable marrying someone who also did not graduate?

That is a tough thing. We don't talk about things like that here, but it is such a sizeable number now that we are actually seeing it in our economic data.

So let's see, what else can we produce that actually makes us uncomfortable?

This is basically the same thing we just talked about actually broken up by genders. This chart ends in 2020. It has actually gotten worse in the last couple of years. This is not a new trend. This has been going on, and we have been tracking this for about the last 15 years.

We actually have been also trying to understand what happens because of some of these societal factors, the fact of the economics of the government has pumped in lots of money and done all these things. People are poorer because they set off inflation with much of the economic policies and what the Fed did but also the Inflation Reduction Act and all these other things where we just dumped money back into society and won't take responsibility for setting off inflation--to my brothers and sisters on the left--but with those economic headwinds, we are actually seeing other data of the delays in marriage formation or household formation.

With that, we are recalculating how many children we expect to have in America.

Understand, Mr. Speaker, half the States in the United States today have more deaths than births. Half the States today have more deaths than births, and the country in total in 18 years will have more deaths than births.

By 2042, deaths are projected to exceed births in CBO's population growth model, and this one is already out of date. So even the CBO has been putting this out.

Now, the reason I keep showing these demographic slides is do you all remember your high school economics class, Mr. Speaker?

Stable populations or growing populations have the ability to have economic expansion.

It is what we call--I don't want to geek out too much. It is hard to have that domestic gross product expanding and expanding unless we have populations to take the jobs or we are willing to do tax and regulatory code changes like a number of the countries that we compete against. I am going to show you some of those slides in a moment, Mr. Speaker, where they said: We can't get labor. We are going to incentivize robots. We are going to incentivize automation.

We are going to get people who say: What about the jobs?

We don't have people. We have school districts all over America where the incoming kindergartners' and first graders' population is falling. The schools are going to have fewer kids. They are going to be closing schools.

Then they look at me like: That makes me upset.

We have been talking about the falling fertility rates for one- quarter of a century.

Here is the punch line. We have worked really hard on this math. The Joint Economic Committee, some of the economists, and some of the others spent weeks because this is sort of one of those things we don't really find in the literature: If I have a 1 percent decrease in my labor population and in my labor growth, then I lose 0.6 percent of GDP growth. If we had 2 percent, then you lose a point, 1.2. If you had a 5 percent decrease--and that is what some of these charts are talking about--in our labor force populations in the out years then we are losing 3 percent of our GDP growth.

Why is this important?

How many of us just saw that the Congressional Budget Office just said: Hey, we expect that in the next year or maybe the next couple of years the United States is only going to grow 1, 1.2 percent.

We are already seeing it in the math.

Yet how many idiots--excuse me--how many of us have gotten up behind these microphones and tried to explain that we have got to fix tax policy, we have got to fix regulatory policy, we have got to fix trade policy, and we have got to fix immigration policy?

We are not sure how to fix demographics.

This one is really uncomfortable because almost no one understands it.

Back to mandatory spending, an oldie but a goodie.

Why is this so important?

This slide here is maybe 3 years old. It gets dramatically worse through the end of this decade.

However, once again, our government is an insurance company with an army.

This is from the 2022 budget cycle. Seventy-one percent of all of our spending is what we call mandatory. Some of that is earned. Mr. Speaker, you earned your Social Security, you earned your Medicare, and you earned your veterans' benefits.

Some things you get because you fell below a certain economic income, Mr. Speaker. You get Medicaid or you are part of a certain tribal population and the United States has a treaty obligation to meet. There are things out there. However, the vast majority of this is what we would call earned benefits.

So when we hear someone here say: Oh, it is mandatory spending. We are not being disrespectful. You earned these. Is part of the societal contract.

Mr. Speaker, do you see this wedge over here, the defense, nondefense, and discretionary?

That is what we all think of government. In 9 budget years, every dime of this and part of the mandatory live on borrowed money.

Now, Mr. Speaker, walk in my door and say: David, I demand you balance in 10.

I can balance in 10.

How much of the mandatory do you want us to cut, because we can wipe out everything else?

Also, are we prepared to live in a country without a defense?

That is a violation of the U.S. Constitution, but a lot of these folks don't seem to give a damn--excuse me--care about what the U.S. Constitution says anymore as long as it doesn't inconvenience them.

Here is the one I get the most nasty emails about: What is the primary driver between today and 30 years from now?

It is not the primary driver; it is 100 percent.

One hundred percent of the U.S. sovereign borrowing between today and 30 years from now, 75 percent of it is basically Medicare, 25 percent will be if we backfill Social Security in now, what, 8 or 9 years because the trust fund is all empty, but what we allocate to the rest of the budget actually has cash in the bank.

It is demographics. That is why we just spent the last half hour going over what is happening demographically to our country. Getting old is not Republican or Democrat. How we react to it may be.

Just one more time, to understand, 30 years--and this slide is already out of date. On hard dollars, without the financing costs, if we backfill it, Social Security is $21 trillion short.

Medicare, the part that comes out of the general fund, 75 percent of all Medicare spending comes out of the general

fund. Then there is what we call the Medicare trust fund, which the President talked about taxing, but his new taxes only produce like $660 billion over 10 years, which is just a fraction of the spend, believe it or not, and that trust fund is functionally gone. The Medicare shortfall is $48 trillion.

The financing cost of those two is $47 trillion. Add it up. The newest number, when we add it up, is closer to $128 trillion.

Is anyone getting the punch line here?

We can fix Social Security. Of course, it would have been really helpful if the President wouldn't have made it toxic. If he had gone behind that microphone and said: ``I need our brothers and sisters on the right and left to do the moral thing. We care about our seniors. We are not going to allow, at the end of this decade, a doubling of senior poverty. We are going to work together.'' Instead, he made it toxic. For Medicare, we need a revolution in the cost of healthcare.

Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

If the Lord has mercy on us, I won't use all of that time.

Federal spending, this is one I have never used on the floor. It has been several years ago that I remember reading--I think it might have been in The Economist magazine. It was talking about, in the 1970s, for every dollar spent on seniors, we spent $5 on young people, and that, today, for every $5 we spend on seniors, we only spend $1 on young people. It is completely reversed.

This is basically what we are trying to say: Today, for folks 65 and older--and this is a 2015 number because it is the newest number I could find in the literature--we will spend $35,000 a year on seniors and $5,000 on young people. Just understand that is what happens when your demographic curve changes.

We have updated this, and we have vetted it. This is conservative. We were careful on this number. In 1960, we had 5.1 workers for every 1 person on Social Security. In 2035, where we are heading, we believe the math to be 2.3, and that number is assuming a stabilization of labor force participation.

We have some other articles that say this falls down to only 2 people, so you and your partner or you and your spouse will have 1 person in retirement. However, we are going to use 2.3, but understand those differentials. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system.

When you get the folks who say ``the lockbox,'' for years, we had more workers than retirees consuming, and the trust fund built up. No one stole your money. The cash came in, and they would loan it to Treasury. Treasury would give them special Treasury bills, just like you might take your own retirement account and say, ``I have some cash. I am going to buy a Treasury bond.'' That is functionally what Social Security did.

For the last couple of years, they have been cashing in those Treasury bonds. That cashing goes faster and faster as the baby boomers are moving in. That is what gets used up--now, what is it?--in about 8, 9 years.

At that moment, Social Security lives on its cash flow, so it will be the cash flow from these workers. Whatever FICA taxes they pay in, that is what will go out the door.

That is why, right now, the best math is we expect a 23 percent cut in that first year that the Social Security trust fund is expired. Then, the next year gets bigger and the next year it gets bigger.

It breaks my heart because I think this is a moral obligation to fix this, except, once again, the left is going to use it as a political item for an election instead of a moral item of we are all going to come together to fix it.

I was surprised by the numbers on this board. I have used it for years now. For anyone who says, ``Just give me the money I put in,'' the United States Government should grab that and run. However, once again, it is not Social Security.

With Social Security, you get back every dime you put in, plus a little SPIF. You would have made so much more, have been so much more prosperous, if the left and these other groups hadn't stopped, 20-plus years ago, the discussion of allowing younger workers to take a tiny sliver of that FICA tax and put it into the markets as a private account. We wouldn't be facing much of this crisis today, but the control freaks didn't want you to have any of your own money in the economy.

This slide is now a couple of years old. Social Security for a couple, you will pay about $625,000 in a lifetime, your 40 quarters as you qualify, but you are going to get back about $698,000. That is about a $72,000 SPIF.

It is Medicare that is my mathematical problem. In Medicare, that couple will put in about $161,000 because the Medicare-only FICA tax you are paying is the Medicare part A trust fund. We just talked about that. Depending on the mix, it can be up to about a 40 percent Medicare spend because it is really sort of the hospital portion. However, the vast majority of Medicare spend comes out of the general fund. You, as a couple, are going to put about $161,000 of your lifetime taxes into Medicare. You are going to get out $522,000.

This is based on math from a couple of years ago. We are told this is substantially different today because if all of you have looked at medical inflation numbers, medical inflation has been running about double mean U.S. inflation, so there is a whole bunch of ugly recalculations that are going to be happening around this place as we try to figure out what we have done to ourselves in this inflation fight.

Spending on mandatory programs is expected to increase as a larger share of the population is in retirement age. Duh. We still thought we would make a nice slide out of it, though.

Right now, functionally, a little over 5 percent of the entire economy is Social Security. The entire economy goes out; 5 percent of it is in Social Security. In a couple of decades, that goes to 6.4. So, Social Security, okay, it is fixable.

Now, this is Medicare, not Medicaid, not Indian Health Services, not veterans, just Medicare itself. Today, the spend on that is about 5.7 percent of the entire economy. In the next couple of decades, it goes well over 8 percent.

When we get into the large numbers, we actually often use percentages of the entire economy. If anyone is paying attention here, when we were talking about those earlier slides that if we can maximize growth-- because if we are doing percentages of the size of the economy, and you don't want to be putting out 8-plus percent just in senior healthcare in the economy, grow the economy, so this number goes down.

Change the price of healthcare by adopting technology, curing things. The number of times I have come to this floor and talked about what we could do, the number one cost in society today is what? It is diabetes. Thirty-three percent of all healthcare spending is diabetes. Thirty-one percent of all Medicare is diabetes.

If I came to you and said: What is the single thing you could do to maximize an impact on the budget, the debt, the borrowing, and also be one of the most moral things you could do in society, if you cared about income inequality for my Tribal populations, it is not income. My Tribal populations, I represent the second highest per capita population in the world with diabetes. However, urban poor, rural poor, it turns out if you cared about income inequality, it is health. The economics, the math, is really complex because there is so much noise in the numbers or, as we say, noise in the data.

Many of my brothers and sisters on the left come in and say it is racism, that it is education. Well, it turns out, the data may say it is actually health.

As a moral society, why wouldn't we say: Okay, there are things we can do. We know we could actually, tomorrow, revolutionize the farm bill to say we are going to take on obesity in our society because we are killing ourselves. We are not going to hand you an EBT card that you can go get onion rings with.

Yes, there are lobbyists everywhere who are now upset that I am not selling their onion rings. Welcome to the world. Every time you tell the truth about this math, you have an army of lobbyists in the hallway who are mad at you because you may have taken away dollars from who they are representing. I care so much more about the survival and prosperity of this country.

How about the next thing? Have you seen the over-the-skin--as a matter of fact, I saw the article that a future Apple Watch is going to have a blood glucose meter in it. What would happen if our prediabetic population could watch what is happening to their body without pricking themselves, if they could see it right there on their phone? Would that change society if you could stabilize the prediabetic population? Remember, diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spending.

How about these GLP-1s? I have an article from the University of Southern California, which I am still upset they are moving to the Big Ten instead of the Pac-12, but that is a whole different discussion. The article basically says just the use of GLP-1s in the Medicare population, not Medicaid, would be a trillion bucks, a trillion-dollar impact to the positive. We need to study that. Is that Republican or Democrat, or is it just giving a darn?

I came here a couple of weeks ago about the company that has this incredible stem cell that they have tagged with CRISPR so the body doesn't reject it, so you don't have to have antirejection drugs. It is in phase one that actually gets a body producing islet cells again, meaning your body produces insulin again. That may be at the end of the decade, but because of the way they are doing it, you can do it in a biofoundry fashion, which means you could have a production line. It doesn't have to be designed to you.

Why wouldn't we, as we are doing the budget discussion and all these other things, set a decade vision saying we are going to stabilize prediabetic populations, that we are going to help our brothers and sisters get healthy again? Dear heavens, if it works, at the end of the decade, we could actually have people who rep parts of their body system to start producing insulin again. It would be worth trillions and trillions of dollars of less borrowing.

That is a vision, and this place is incapable, almost incapable, of processing vision, but the reality is upon us.

Annual spend for Medicare and Medicaid, this number is already not enough. By the end of the decade, it is functionally a trillion dollars more annually, and the majority of that money will be borrowed.

In a weird way, I wanted to close on this. We are still the shiny object in the industrialized world. We are still better off than people we compete with. We need to embrace that but not lay on our laurels. We need to stop the stupid types of conversations we have here on the floor where we talk about the shiny object instead of the things that take us down as a republic, which is debt, which is actually our economics.

Understand, this is what is called a dependency ratio, and it is not a derogatory term. It is an economic term of: Here is what I have in the labor market in a country, and here is how many people I have not in the labor market. It is not complex math.

We hear the conversations about China, China, China. China is a problem, but China is on the verge of a collapse demographically. I am one of those who believes much of what we see China doing is they are running around the world trying to build annuities because with their one-child policy and all the other things they did, they are collapsing demographically. They start to roll over in the next couple of years, where, boom, their working population is collapsing.

Is that why you go out and buy ports and farmland, because you are trying to turn the world into an annuity so you have cash flow? It is worth thinking about.

Here is Japan. Japan is already way down here, and they actually sort of flatlined, but Japan has done incredibly creative things, incentives for seniors. If you are healthy and you want to, we are going to make it advantageous if you want to stay in the labor force. Adoption of technology--they have incredibly high savings rates. They are able to finance much of their own debt. We don't. We have a society where the majority of our population is living paycheck to paycheck, substantially because of inflation.

We fall, but we don't fall nearly as hard. Our demographic curve is ugly, but it is so much less ugly than Western Europe, Japan, and China. The reason we did these three countries, these are the number one, number two, and number three size economies in the world.

If we get the most basic tax, regulatory, immigration, adoption of technology policies right here, this can be a hell of a great decade. It can be a hell of a great century. This could once again be another American century.

I will argue it will be the decisions made in this timeframe, in this year and next year, because we are at the inflection.

You see it demographically in the chart. We are at the time of inflection. Do we actually step up and use an IQ around here, or do we still sound like it is the 1990s politically?

For everyone who is terrified of a chat AI, grow up. It could actually be one of the next generations of economic growth, if do you it right. Embrace it, learn it, get it right, and run with it.

The new stem cell therapies; the fact we might cure diabetes, the fact that there are things we can do. Understand it, learn it, run with it.

Fix this stupid immigration system. Close up our borders. Stop importing poverty. Bring in talent. There are just simple things.

The Tax Code. Get it so it incentivizes risk taking and investment to grow. You don't need a Ph.D. in this stuff. You may be required to be literate. Maybe that is a problem.

Our running joke here is I work in a place that is a math-free zone. That was meant to be funny, but it is sort of sarcastic and cruel.

I believe really, really good things can happen. We have to get the policies right. My rage that I feel is I don't believe this place has even come close to actually having those pro-growth, those sort of growth is moral, what are we going to do-type conversations, and then to turn it into policy.

I am exhausted. I just don't know how to drag this place over the line so they actually think.

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

Madam Speaker, this evening, we are going to actually do a handful of things. Some of this is just sort of responding to some of the absurd conversations I have had this week.

This is my moment when I apologize to the stenographer and clerk. Much of this you will have already heard, but it bears repeating because I actually sat down with a group of congressional staff, and it was one of those sort of passing conversations where you sit down and the Republican and Democrat staff is there, and they didn't understand some of the most basic numbers of what is going on around us.

The first thing we are going to start with here--how many of you picked up a newspaper and heard anyone talk about the debt ceiling? Apparently, it is a really big deal. Fine.

Then, you hear them say things like it is default if we don't just raise it. No, that is not how it works. Default is when you do not pay back your bonds.

It is still really important. We are going to ultimately have to raise the debt ceiling.

Can we do something that is also going to be very important? Can we do it in a fashion where we message to the world debt markets that we are taking our debt seriously, that we understand the curve is unsustainable?

We are going to walk through a bunch of boards that basically show the scale of the debt that is coming. Once again, default is when you do not pay back your bonds.

We actually had a Treasury Secretary under President Obama. He and I, I remember, had this wonderful conversation when I kept correcting him, saying that is not default. He said, okay, we are going to create a new term. It is now called a ``technical default,'' and that is when the 30 percent of government spending that is functionally borrowed every single day, we are not able to pay for that.

Fine. Call it technical default. Let's just be accurate.

The other thing that is really important, if there is anyone in Republican leadership listening out there, please hear this: 2011, the United States actually got a downgrade. Standard & Poor's lowered the United States from its AAA rating. They took us down a notch.

They did not lower our credit rating because of the debt ceiling. They lowered our credit rating because we didn't provide a credible path on managing the scale of the debt. This is 2011.

The numbers today are devastatingly more ugly, if you can sort of mix that in language.

Seriously, to 2011, we moved down to AA-plus. Fine. But it was because we were doing nothing about budget deficits.

I talked about this last week. Once again, I think it was yesterday, a Member of the left going: Well, they are going to get us downgraded if we just don't raise the debt ceiling.

That isn't why we were downgraded in 2011. It is because we did not demonstrate to the world markets that we want to buy--remember, we borrowed, last year, I think it was $48,000 a second. Every second of every day, we borrowed $48,000. Someone has to buy that debt to finance the 30 percent of our spending that we don't cover with our tax receipts.

Wouldn't the people that buy those bonds like to know we intend to pay them back?

Does just raising the borrowing limit, which is, functionally, just like you call your credit card and raise the borrowing limit, does that tell them we are going to pay them back?

What tells them we are going to pay them back is we are building a plan, saying here is how we are going to basically deal with the debt over the coming decades.

People say that we are just going to balance. Fine, I can get you to balance, but I don't think most folks have any concept of how bloody that would be.

So maybe the better way to think about it is, the size of the economy, we are going to maximize the economic growth of the economy and try to minimize the growth of debt so we stabilize what we refer to as debt-to-GDP. Great concept.

But this one, I don't know why it grates on me so much. We have people who think they are geniuses around here saying: They are going to ruin the credit rating of the United States.

The threat of the credit rating is we do not communicate to debt markets here and around the world that we are taking our debt seriously.

Once again, an oldie but a goodie. It is already out of date, but I wasn't going to kill another board and printer ink. This will hopefully make sense.

I need everyone to understand. Let's not even worry about 1965. This is last year. Seventy-one percent of all of our spending was, functionally, what we call mandatory. Fine. It was Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits, things of that nature.

But the punch line I want you all to understand is actually right here. Defense was 13 percent of our spending. The rest of domestic discretionary was 16 percent. So I have got a 13 and a 16, and I am going to show this on a couple more charts.

In 9 budget years, if you look at the CBO report from a couple weeks ago, it makes it very clear. In 9 budget years, you can get rid of this entire portion of government--all defense, all discretionary, it is gone--and the growth of this will be so big you still have got to borrow a couple hundred billion dollars, and the next year it is dramatically worse.

That is what, 2033, which isn't that long from now. But in 2034, the Social Security trust fund is gone.

Are we going to let seniors take a 23 percent cut?

Are you going to double senior poverty?

Remember, the Democrats have made it almost impossible to have an honest conversation about entitlements. You can't have a conversation about how we are going to save Social Security.

The President got behind that microphone there and made it toxic. A year's worth of our work, where we have been trying to come up with a way to save Social Security, and we have been doing it with the Senate, with Democrats, and he knifed us. That is real immoral.

So he stands there and says: I am going to protect Social Security and Medicare. I promise. We are not going to talk about it, there will be no cuts.

Everyone applauds, yes. Fine. There have never been conversations about cutting it.

For that year I was the senior Republican over Social Security in Ways and Means, not a single person ever spoke to me about cutting it. We were working on how to try to save it.

Now, those very people I had been working with run away from the issue saying, look, the President has made it toxic. The year's worth of work, all the money we spent with actuaries, everything else, it is over.

Democrats aren't serious. They are going to use it as a weapon. Fine. We walk away. Once again, we sit and let the problem fester. Every day we wait, the math gets more difficult.

Then we have the inane: Well, we will just raise taxes.

A few weeks ago, I did a presentation here on the floor where I showed what happens if you raise the caps. So the new tax cap for Social Security, I think, is what, $160,200, you pay your FICA tax, if you are self-employed, or your employer pays half, you pay half.

Just raised it. Every dime of income above that, if you do the incremental benefits--remember, to be honest, Social Security wasn't a welfare retirement plan. It was sort of a forced savings plan. If you gave higher-income

earners the benefit, even though you made a million dollars, you pay your full Social Security tax on that, you only save about 17 percent of the shortfall. If you just pure tax, you only save about 30, 33 percent of the shortfall.

You have been lied to. If you actually dig into what was the Bernie Sanders plan, it is not just tax on all income. It is a tax on all, all income. So over here is the unearned income; over here are the stocks; over here are the businesses. Functionally, everything in society gets taxed. Here is the punch line. It still doesn't take care of everything, but it would take care of most of Social Security's shortfall.

Now, you have got another problem. Three-quarters of the future debt is actually shortfall on Medicare.

One of the frauds in the President's budget is they come back and say: We are taking care of the Medicare part A trust fund with $660 billion over the next 10 years. Except I need you to conceptualize this. Over the next 30 years, the shortfall in Medicare is $80-and-a- half trillion when you do the shortfall and the interest.

$660 billion is a lot of money over 10 years, but it ain't $80 trillion. But this place is basically a fraud; it is virtue signaling.

One more time. I need this to sink in. I don't know why this one has been so hard. Functionally, in 9 budget years, I can wipe out all of government, and you still have to borrow money. So if you get the brain trust that says: Just get rid of foreign aid, we will get rid of waste and fraud, we will get a higher tax on rich people. Fine. Maybe that is the policy. Maybe that is where we go. It doesn't take care of the problem. That is rhetoric you use in campaigns. You stand behind the microphone and pretend you have any idea what the hell is actually going on.

The math is the math, and I feel like I work in a math-free zone.

I have done this presentation before where you say: I can get rid of all defense. I still have to borrow.

But the one that seems to sink through to some people is in 9 budget years, I can get rid of every dime of government, as you know it, and just to maintain the mandatory spending, the earned benefits and some of the unearned benefits, we still have to borrow $200 billion or $300 billion.

Two things I should throw out, we are trying to recalculate. That was working on the previous interest rate calculations from last month, that, turn out, already look wrong. It looks like our financing of U.S. sovereign debt is going to be higher.

I am going to show you a chart here that was also based on a much higher GDP. Understand, when we were getting a 2024 outlook and 1.6 percent economic growth, that is miserable. This is a country that used to run over 3 percent decade after decade. But we have a demographic problem. We have gotten older and we don't have as many children.

The newest economic outlook: We are down to 1.2 percent. You tell me how I make the math work in a society where the policies from this administration have telegraphed to the markets that want to make investments, that want to grow the economy, that want to--the animal spirits of let's invest, let's see if we can grow, they are abandoning us.

The new projected GDP growth as of this month is, we expect over the next year, to be down to 1.2 percent GDP growth.

That may not mean much to anyone here. When you have a $20 trillion economy, a percent or two is like real math, it is real money, and it multiplies on itself. Do you remember in elementary school learning about compound interest? This is like compound economics because today's base is the next year's base is the next year's base.

These differences, if they go a couple years, are just devastating. That is what we are heading for. Back to why this is so important and why I am just almost constantly angry around here. I am working on it. I am working on having a better attitude. I am still very optimistic about the future. We are Americans, and we will work this out. I do this just passionately hoping someone is listening.

This board is a couple years old. The numbers are much worse today. I was just too lazy to print up a new one. We are functionally heading toward borrowing $114 trillion on this board. The new update is closer to $128 trillion over the next 30 years. The reason I brought this out again was basically to say Medicare, Social Security, the shortfalls, and the financing.

This is making an assumption that we backfill Social Security in 9 years. When the trust fund is gone, we are not going to let senior poverty double. Somehow, we are going to backfill it with general funds. The President stood behind the microphone--we functionally have made it toxic to actually work on saving Social Security. It is absolutely immoral what happened, but that is the world we have been given.

Medicare--remember this is the 2-year number, I am still using it, when you add in the interest it is over $80 trillion short. The rest of the budget actually has a positive balance. The model is actually like cash in the bank.

As we work through this you are going to see one of the punch lines. We can come together and fix Social Security. It is a little complicated. Actually, in my world, I think I came up with like 19, 20- plus little levers you would like to adjust. I am a big fan of incentives to people so that if they want to stay in the labor force they can. Things of that nature.

There are no cuts. There may be some formula where you do some redistribution of those who only work 20 quarters, but they are higher income earners compared to those who work 40 quarters and lower income. It is geeky stuff.

If you want to hang out with me and the actuaries, it is actually fascinating. There is a path. I have actually even grown fond of the idea of the sovereign wealth fund, the sidecar. A year's worth of work, hundreds of hours with actuaries and other people is gone.

That is this side. Medicare is about healthcare costs. Are we ready to start having an adult conversation that technology can do miracles?

We can disrupt the price of healthcare and do it in a moral fashion where we make things faster, better, cheaper, and more accessible? Why is that so hard?

I know I have said this dozens of times here, but I am learning in Congress we are all so busy chasing virtue signaling and giving a speech--hopefully I can get my 3 minutes on YouTube.

There is a path--and I will end on a couple of boards. I have done hour-long presentations here of disruptions of curing people. Concept. Five percent of U.S. healthcare--excuse me, 50 percent of U.S. healthcare is 5 percent of the population. These are our brothers and sisters with chronic conditions. Stunning math.

Do you know what happens if you start curing some of the chronic conditions?

If you ever hear someone who says this: Well, the most expensive part of healthcare is those last couple weeks of life. There is a little fraud in that math. Let's see if I can work through that.

It is for the individual. It is not for the system. The system is those with chronic conditions. If you are not one of the people with multiple chronic conditions, the last couple weeks of your life probably are really expensive. You are probably in a hospital or hospice; it is heartbreaking. There are some really ethical questions when we talk about that.

That is actually not the driver of Medicare costs. Thirty-one percent of Medicare is diabetes. How many presentations have I done here saying: What can we do to help our brothers and sisters out there? Whether it be changing food support, nutrition support. Is it the types of monitors where you can track your blood glucose where you don't have to prick your skin.

Is it having an adult conversation of--and forgive me, don't make fun of me if screw this up--GLP-1 appetite inhibitors. I guess there are two or three different types of structures there on the molecules that are used to accomplish that. Many of them are actually off-patent. Could you encourage more entries into the market?

My understanding is the three big ones, there are almost that is half a dozen more entering the market. All the way down to the presentation I did

in the previous couple weeks of the phase one beginning on the stem cell trial that actually looks like a cure for type 1. If it works, you don't need anti-rejection drugs.

It just uses, as an example, because it is so prominent--I represent a Tribal community that has the second highest per capita diabetic population in the world. It is not a poor tribe.

Is it moral to actually say: Hey, it turns out curing certain diseases, taking on the healthcare costs that are the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt, isn't it really neat the fact that I could be doing some good for society?

I had done some presentations in the past showing income inequality may be most affected by health. So my brothers and sisters on the left who are screaming at us all the time: Income inequality, it is an unfair society. Okay.

What happens if I can show you the data that health, not racism, not even education--though education was big--the number one driver is probably health. Why wouldn't they join us to actually do something that is optimistic and visionary.

Let's walk through some of the realities. This is--just one more time--the same exact chart just trying to explain. My net interest on just the shortage here is $47 trillion. This is underestimated because we are now basing it on a higher interest rate model for the future.

If I get one more person who--I want to say this carefully. A lot of the political class, a lot of the people that write about this who actually have no idea what they are saying: You have been robbed of your Social Security. That actually isn't the math.

When you have paid in and it goes into the trust fund, and the trust funds goes over and buys a special T-bill, treasury bond, and it actually in the past had a little spiff on the interest. When the Social Security over the last couple of years has started to run short, they take their little certificate and call the Treasury and say, hey, send me some cash, and the Treasury sends cash. Now, the Treasury, functionally, doesn't have enough money because we are already living on borrowed money. They go and sell another bond to backfill.

But here is a point that is important. I know this is averages, but the averages are important. The average taxpayer--and this board is now probably 2 years old. The average tax taxpayer in America over their lifetime will put in about $625,000 in Social Security taxes. They get back about $698,000. So it is about a $72,000 spiff.

Now, obviously, you would have made a hell of a lot more money if you would have taken any portion of the Social Security taxes and put them in the markets and other places. Remember, we had that conversation in the early 2000s and there was an absolute war, the left, the AARP went nuts. You can't do that. You can't. Fine, we didn't do it.

You are all a lot poorer today because we didn't do it. But, hey, the unions of collectivists basically--stand up, take responsibility if you were on the left side. You fought us. Great. This is what you got.

The average American gets about $72,000 more than they actually put into Social Security. Fine. This over here is what crushes me. I need to make sure you understand. This is a couple, not an individual. The average couple puts in around $161,000 in Medicare taxes when you pay your FICA tax.

Remember, Madam Speaker, the taxes you are paying are only paying for part A, which is up around 38 to 40 percent of Medicare spending. We call it part A. That average couple put in $161,000, and they are going to get back $522,000.

This gap right here multiplied times 76 million of us baby boomers is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt.

How many in the political class are like me and dumb enough to stand up in front of a room and tell the truth?

It is the truth. It is math, and the math will always win. I know I have said this over and over but--I am trying not to curse. I have had a lot of coffee today.

If we are willing to actually just embrace the truth, then we can debate solutions. I am fighting around here just to get people to accept the most basic math. I feel like an idiot week after week coming up here and saying versions of the same thing when we should be having amazing debates about the solutions, but I can't get an agreement on the basic math.

This one I am just throwing out because I did it a couple of weeks ago, and I got all sorts of crap. ``That is not true.'' It turns out the economists now have done it multiple times, and, yes, it was true.

In the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act, the left actually put in all these tax credits for solar panels, cars, and batteries. Goldman Sachs actually modeled it. There is a punch line coming. It is not what CBO said, which is that it might be $300 billion. Goldman Sachs said no. The way they read the language: $1.2 trillion in spending.

You have the left here who complains that you guys did tax reform in 2017, and it grew the economy, shrank income inequality, raised the poor up, and grew the economy, but rich people got some--it was a couple trillion dollars. Well, goddammit--sorry--you just did a bill where you are handing out, potentially, $1.2 trillion to a handful of the green energy supercompanies that write you checks.

Another thing I am trying to get to is the understanding of the fragility we are at.

We have been talking about that 9-year budget window where we think interest rates now have gone, on U.S. sovereign debt, just that small rise in interest rates that we now are seeing structurally. We think the 10-year deficit right now is structurally $3.1 trillion that year. I am just trying to help folks understand, when you are floating that scale of debt, how fragile we have become.

This is just a bit to mock the administration's budget. The current deficit held by the public is about $25 trillion. We should always explain the difference. When you hear us talk about a $32 trillion deficit, there are parts in there where we are actually borrowing from trust funds and those things, and then there is debt that is sold in public bonds. That is the one that gets really dicey because market movements can change those interest rates.

Debt in 10 years is basically $44 trillion.

Do you remember, Madam Speaker, when the excitement in the administration's budget was that they are going to have $3 trillion-- actually, almost $6 trillion in new tax hikes, several trillion in new spending--now, this is where the math got really interesting--and we are going to lower the deficit by $3 trillion?

No. We are heading toward borrowing $20 trillion. They were going to lower that from $20 trillion to take $2 trillion, $3 trillion off that, and the left here says they are lowering the deficit.

Huh? Let's see. In 10 years, I am at $44 trillion of borrowing. Within there, you may have, through tax hikes and a slowed-down economy--we are still working on the model of how much the economy slowed down. Those dozens and dozens of tax hikes I have shown here on the board, if every single one of them passed and every single one of them maxed out and the absolutely unrealistic numbers somehow magically became real, they might get $3 trillion out of it.

I guess what I am saying is that it is insane we are talking about trillions.

If I am heading to a $44 trillion deficit in 10 years, and I have the left giddy that they will have reduced it by $3 trillion with all the tax hikes, that means there is still almost $23 trillion of borrowing in that time.

I am not going to even make a subject for this board.

I need my brothers and sisters on the left to stop making up stories. Just as on my side, if we say, ``I can balance the budget by getting rid of foreign aid and waste and fraud,'' no, you can't. Some of that we should do. All waste and fraud should be gone. We really should review all spending, but we can't keep lying to the American people, saying that it actually does much of anything.

Remember, every dime of foreign aid is about 12 days--actually, in the next budget, it might be only 12 days of borrowing. You have to think that through, Madam Speaker.

This is just amusing because--let's get it right. Confiscating all income over $500,000, so if we take our country and say: ``Hey, you made $500,001, I get

that dollar. The government gets that next dollar.''

Basically, the mantra here is that we don't tax rich people enough. Let's just take all their money, every dollar over $500,000. If we take every dime from you, in the budget we are working today, Madam Speaker, you might get $1.5 trillion in revenue--actually, ``receipts'' is the right term--in receipts by taking every dollar of income over $500,000, but we are borrowing 1.7.

Taking every dollar from people over $500,000 doesn't get you to balance in the single year, and you basically have collapsed all of the economy. There is no more economic growth. It is the rhetoric around here and the virtue signaling around here that has no basis in math. It is theater.

Let's actually do another board. The reason I pulled out these couple of boards is that conversation I had with these young staffers where I had a couple of these young Democrat staffers who really believed that if we just tax rich people a little bit more, then it takes care of everything. Maybe they should pay more, but it doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't get you anywhere close to solving the problem.

Let's take a look at this board. If I functionally took all untaxed personal and small business adjusted gross income annually earned above--so if I take every single dime of business, small businesses and wealthy Americans or higher-income Americans--and this is done in GDP, but that is the way when you start getting into these numbers. I get about 5.1 percent of the GDP in taxes. This addresses all the base taxes we have and then additional here.

My problem is, in 9 budget years, our spending is at 7.2 percent of GDP. Then 10 years after that, we are at 9.3 percent of GDP. The year after that--excuse me--this is projected deficits. Sorry, not spending, deficits. Then, the deficit in 2050 is 12.4.

Let's see. I can take every dime of small businesses and higher- income earners--over $500,000, I can take every dime--and the budget window we are working on right now doesn't give me anything close to paying off the annual deficits, the annual borrowing.

Am I making a point here just understanding the scale and the size of the borrowing? It is mostly healthcare costs.

This is just almost the exact same thing, just in a different chart. Total tax revenues raised combining Federal--this one makes a point.

When my brothers and sisters on the left say, ``Well, we just tax rich people more,'' you have got to understand, there is actually a number of frauds in that number. When we say, well, we should put them at this tax rate. Okay. Did I add in my State and local taxes also on top of that?

We tried to see what actually happens, saying, okay, we are going to respect a State like California that for the high-income earners, what is it, like 13-point something, and if they have a local tax, when you do the adjustment, I can take every dime of those high-income earners-- every dime--and I am still letting States have their part of the tax. I get about 4 percent of GDP. My problem is, my Social Security and Medicare is sitting at 6 percent. It still doesn't get me there.

We have done a presentation on this. There's a couple of left Senators who walk around saying, ``all we have to do is tax rich people.'' They are taking every dime, not just income. They are taking everything from the investments, the holdings. Actually, some of them even do unrealized capital gains, which I am still trying to figure out how you tax that.

All right. Let's actually do a couple of moments of optimism. There are solutions. This one I brought here, and I am bringing again because it is getting close.

You remember the outrage here over insulin prices? They are outrageous.

The brain trust on the other side, basically their idea was, what we are going to do is we are going to take $36 billion and give it to Big Pharma to subsidize them to buy down the price of insulin.

You are going to complain about Big Pharma and their outrageous prices on insulin, and then you are going to hand them billions of dollars?

That is the insanity.

But it is actually great politics. We are going to beat you up, but I am going to hand you billions, and you are going to write me political checks. Yay.

Does anyone else see the scam?

But there are solutions like this. This is a co-op, and I think actually they are in production this year. This is a co-op about 70- some miles from where I am standing right now, and it was insurance companies, State Medicaid systems, it was hospitals that all got together and said, hey, you realize most insulin is actually off patent, the big eight generics out there, they are off patent.

Why the hell aren't we just making it ourselves?

I have done other presentations--I will do some more in the future-- about drug pricing. The solution is not a command-and-control rationing model but actually a market supply model of let's get everyone and their cousin in the manufacturing business.

The elegance of this is this is functionally a co-op. The fact they were coming online has now disrupted the insulin market. You actually see some other companies--forgive me if I got the wrong one, Johnson & Johnson, I think--crashing their price. They were coming to market at $30 per vial, $55 per box.

You do realize the co-op was bringing insulin prices less than the subsidized price that was going to cost taxpayers billions of dollars. That is the absurdity around here.

Instead of doing a market solution that actually works for everyone, the left passes subsidized solutions that only certain people get the benefit from, and Big Pharma got the checks.

Did anyone here show up at their basic economics class?

Simple pitch tonight: Tell the truth about the debt ceiling and how important it is to communicate to debt markets that we are taking our debt serious so we can maintain a stable interest rate.

You saw some of the charts of how ugly the numbers get if we spook the debt markets.

Number two, understand how devastatingly ugly our coming debt is. It is demographics. Turns out it is not Republican or Democrat. We got old. We promised lots of benefits, and we didn't set aside the money for it.

We live in a society of miracles where if we can adopt the technology, whether it be diabetes, the next generation of telehealth, or bringing in lots more competitors into the pharmaceutical markets, it doesn't have to be a dystopian, ugly future.

How do you teach a body to think--and I despise the term--outside the box?

The box needs to be burnt down. You need to think about what is moral, what grows, and what actually changes what is crushing us financially, morally, and ethically as a society.

It turns out the solution actually is almost this unified theory of good. It doesn't have to be an ugly future, if I can just get this place to think and buy a calculator.

Madam Speaker, I am going to let everyone go home, 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 35 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, March 30, 2023, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to go after a handful of things, but we are actually going to try something that is somewhat unique for this body. We are actually going to use math. We are going to use facts. We are actually going to get to the way the system actually works instead of doing what seems to be a moniker around here as we make public policy by virtue signaling, by feelings.

Let's actually go over something that has been just grating on me. I am going to try to minimize being a jerk tonight, but if I get one more Democrat running around here screaming at us, ``We are going to default,'' da, da, da, da. Remember, we got downgraded. That is not what happened.

The language S&P did in 2011 wasn't because of the debt ceiling fight. If you actually read it, ``U.S. loses AAA credit rating after S&P downgrade,'' it was because S&P cut the long-term U.S. rating by one notch to AA-plus with negative outlook, citing concerns about budget deficits.

It wasn't the debt ceiling. It was the failure of this body to take our demographics and our spending seriously.

This was a decade ago. I believe it was today or yesterday that I heard one of my colleagues on the other side walk behind one of these microphones and lie--excuse me; I take that back--forget what actually happened.

It wasn't because of a fight over the debt ceiling. It was because we didn't do enough to demonstrate to the debt markets around the world-- our own pension systems, your own retirement, others around the world-- we didn't communicate to them that we were going to take the debt seriously. This is--what?--a dozen years ago.

The agency said the deficit reduction plan passed by the U.S. Congress on Tuesday did not go far enough. This is from 2011.

We still have Members running around here going: Oh, you are going to default. You are going to do this. Oh, no. Just do a clean debt ceiling.

My argument is very simple. Do you not think the debt markets will punish the United States if we walk in and say we are just going to keep borrowing?

Just raise the damn debt ceiling. Just raise it. Do not take the seriousness of the trouble we are in, the demographic curve we have.

Do you understand? Nine budget years from now, according to the Congressional Budget Office from 3 weeks ago, you can get rid of all of defense; you can get rid of the White House; you can get rid of Congress; you can get rid of the Supreme Court; you can get rid of all of government; the FBI is gone; the Park Service is gone; the Foreign Service is gone; all foreign aid is gone; money to Ukraine is all gone; every dime is gone; there is no discretionary, but you still have to borrow a couple hundred billion dollars. The next year, it is dramatically worse because the Social Security trust fund is gone.

The highway and transportation trust funds are gone. Medicare part A trust fund has long been gone.

This place is an economic fraud. Yet, if you listen to the speeches around here, we do beautiful virtual signaling--my feelings. Screw our feelings. Let's hold out a calculator.

The cruelty that will happen around here if we don't take this seriously--why is this place so terrified to buy a calculator and actually read budget documents?

I want to make sure I get this one right. It was S&P. It wasn't Moody's. I take that back.

S&P downgraded U.S. debt in 2011. The number of times I get from reporters outside: Aren't you fearful you are going to get downgraded like you did a dozen years ago?

That is not what happened. We got downgraded because we didn't take the debt seriously. The numbers today are dramatically worse than in 2011.

Are those the discussions you have around here? Are our brothers and sisters on the left saying: Hey, I care about it.

We have to fix Social Security because, in 9 some years, we are going to double senior poverty if we don't fix it because of that 23, 25 percent cut seniors are going to take.

Do they have a soul? Do they care? If you cared, when the President gave his State of the Union speech, it would not have been you promising not to touch Social Security and Medicare. It would be that we are going to save them.

In the President's budget, a number of my colleagues on the left have been running around saying, oh, they put in all this taxing to raise money for Social Security part A.

Remember, that is only 25 percent of the spending. Three-quarters of Medicare comes out of the general fund. Over 30 years, Medicare is responsible for 75 percent of all the borrowing.

When we get up to close to $130 billion of borrowed money in 10 years, remember 75 percent of that is just the shortfall for Medicare.

We got old, and we haven't taken on healthcare costs. We are going to finish on that, but it just grates me that this place just makes up stories. We misinterpret because it would require reading and owning a calculator.

We are going to have to deal with the debt ceiling in a serious, adult fashion. I also believe if we do not communicate to the debt markets that we are taking our debt seriously, that they are going to get paid back--just raising the debt ceiling. Hey, it is a clean debt ceiling. Just go borrow more money.

Don't you think the markets are going to not punish the United States? We need to communicate. We need to demonstrate that we are adults, that we understand how ugly our demographics are, how ugly the borrowing is.

Remember, last year, I think, we were borrowing $48,000 a second. I get the clown show that says: David, if you just didn't have salaries for Members of Congress, that would balance the budget.

I know that is just stupidity. They know it is stupid, but we calculated it. It was like 28 minutes of borrowing over an entire year. A decade from now, it is like 19 minutes of borrowing. I think all foreign aid is like 14 days of borrowing in an entire year.

Remember, in 9 years, you can wipe out almost everything you know as government, and to have enough cash flow to cover all Medicare, all Social Security, all the veterans' benefits, all the things that we have on autopilot we call mandatory spending, we still have to borrow a couple hundred billion dollars.

Getting the math right is moral.

The avoidance and the theater that has gone on around here, where they are saying: We are going to get reelected because we are going to vilify Republicans for even being willing to take on the discussion of how much trouble we are in. We are going to beat them up because they are talking about these things.

That is absolutely immoral because they are letting it fester, and every single day the math gets harder.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to show some charts.

This isn't what I wanted to talk about tonight but I am finding I am having to react to all the just crazy propaganda out there as my brothers

and sisters on the left do everything they can to avoid the responsibility for what they did with causing inflation and the cascading inflation.

Do you understand the banking difficulties we have today are derivative of inflation?

You go, huh?

Okay. Inflation goes up. What do we have to do to knock down inflation?

Well, we have two things we could do. We could really step up productivity, so we make more goods and services to sop up all the excess cash and spending that is out there.

Or we do what this lazy body has been doing for the last couple years, and that is: We will just let the Federal Reserve raise interest rates and raise rates and roll off their books so we could pull liquidity out of the economy.

Oh, by the way, when you do that--I am going to show some charts here--when you do that, what happens if you buy a bond today at 1 percent and 6 months from now interest rates are at 3 percent?

Do you understand, functionally, you lost two-thirds of the value of that bond?

What do you think happened to Silicon Valley Bank?

The banking crisis is absolutely derivative of crappy Fed policy keeping interest rates to zero and substantially this place spending like crazy in the previous years setting off inflation, forcing the raising of interest rates. Now interest rates, when they go up in inflation, create distortions in the economy.

I think it was last week or the week before that I came here and showed how much poorer Americans are and they don't even know they have been taxed.

I think I brought some charts that said, do you understand if you made $60,000 a year and you are in the mean of the country--not my community. When you are in Phoenix and Scottsdale, I have had substantially higher inflation than the rest of the continental United States. But the mean was what, 8, 9 percent.

Take your $60,000; 1 year. If you are still making that $60,000, you are actually now only making about $52,000 or 52,000-something.

Do you understand you got taxed and you didn't even realize?

You knew you were paying more for your groceries and your rent and your electricity, but you also have to understand, where did that money go? You were taxed.

Inflation goes up. Your income, your savings become worth less.

Who is the biggest debtor in the world? The United States.

Guess what you did? We get to pay back the U.S. sovereign debt with inflated dollars. Meaning, basically, we took your money, put it towards the debt.

Now where we get screwed is, we get to do that for a little while. You actually see that funny calculation where debt-to-GDP moves, and then the fact that we have to constantly roll our debt, roll our debt, this insatiable appetite of keep spending and keep borrowing when you are close to 30 cents on every dollar that is borrowed. Now you have to sell the bonds at the new higher interest rates. That is when it, functionally, eats your lunch.

I have shown over and over and over that not that long from now interest will be the number two expense in the country. It will be more than the defense.

Here is that point once again. So let's just pretend, the inflation caused by reckless monetary policy and spending, so you take a bond. Let's take a long-term bond. It is $100. It is a 30-year bond; you bought it in August 2020.

Today, that same bond is, functionally, worth almost two-thirds less money, and this is just the interest rate differential because on that 30-year bond, it is annuity. Its value is the interest it throws off. The problem is you could take that same money today and get interest three times higher.

You want to know about stresses in financial markets?

This is it. This is a derivative of inflation. This is a derivative of our spending policies. This is a derivative of the Fed's policies.

I will do a much better job in coming weeks sort of walking through some of the policy options out there.

You see this red line here?

This is functionally what the CBO is telling us. And this is the moment where it is not partisan. It is us.

We get gray hair. We have 76 million baby boomers moving into their benefit years. This red line is almost all healthcare costs for our brothers and sisters who move into their benefits. There are proposals where you can at least flatten it out.

I am going to throw out a couple things that are just not often considered. I have done so many presentations here about, if it is healthcare costs, disrupt the price of healthcare. One of the things that you do is you cure people. You also legalize technology. But you have to understand how steep the curve is.

If I get one more person that says: Oh, if we just got rid of waste and fraud, foreign aid, we will be fine. No.

I know it is hard seeing 14 zeros in your head but that is the reality. I know these numbers are crushing. I know so many of us in the political class, we have gone up and given speeches of, ``if we just got rid of this,'' or ``isn't this outrageous spending.''

They are all outrageous spending. Okay, fine. It doesn't actually fix the problem.

So I am going to go over some of this again because I have a new punch line. I did this a week or so ago and got all sorts of crap about it, except I have reconfirmation that my math was good.

So let's actually take a look at the left's Inflation Reduction Act. It is the most Orwellian name in modern history.

The cost estimates for the battery production credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, it was supposed to cost $30.6 billion. That is what they told us. That is what they told the American people.

So we had the economist break it down, looking at the numbers. They are coming back saying, hey, that is not actually what the language in the legislation says. It is not $30.6 billion for the batteries. It is $196.5 billion.

Okay. So maybe one of the first things we need to do around here as a body is say: Brothers and sisters on the left, we are going to help you. We are going to hold you to your own promise. When we do our next budget, we are going to at least make sure these things are frozen where you told the American people they were going to be.

Maybe this explains why so much of the lobbying class was absolutely giddy around here with the design of the Democrats' language in the legislation. Because they knew they were going to get multiple to the multiple to the multiple of actual cash in their clients' pockets.

You want to understand why the American people are so upset with us?

It is scams like this.

Let's actually take it a little further--and there is a punch line coming.

Cost estimates on the wind. Okay, fine. You may love wind. You were told in the Inflation Reduction Act that the budget in there, the spending in there was going to be $11.2 billion.

Economists are coming back saying that is not what the language actually says. If you actually model it, it is $68.4 billion.

Are my brothers and sisters on the left willing to say, ``hey, hold us to the 11.2''? Because if we start having this type of spending-- remember that curve? It continues to just blow off the charts and it will create more inflation and you will be poor.

Now we have Ethers out there that have been scoring. When I did this a week or two ago, I got some lovely, lovely inbound from a number of leftist folks out there that think they are economists.

Well, it turns out Credit Suisse--God bless their souls--actually came back and said, hey, CBO told us the actual total cost was going to be well under $300 billion in total spending on all these clean energy, some of the tax credits--they are actually grants and other things, refundables.

Credit Suisse comes back and says, no, it is actually closer to $700 billion. In the latest update, Goldman did a complete workup, and they are at $1.2 trillion.

You are getting the punch line here.

When the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, we were told this was going to be well under $300 billion over a 10-year cycle of spending on all this green energy.

Great--well, actually not great.

I voted against it. It was absurd the way it was being laid out. You give someone a tax credit for something they are already going to do. That is the way this place works when you hand people cash. Because let's be honest, they are big contributors.

Now we are finding out about the language and what is really going on in the marketplace. You are going from under $300 billion to possibly $1.2 trillion--twelve hundred billion, $1.2 trillion.

Okay. Would the Democrats work with us to keep their own words and their own commitments, saying we need to cap this, we need to put this back to at least what they committed to the brothers and sisters, the Members here, and also the American people?

This sort of stuff, as you wonder why you wake up the next day and the numbers are just running amuck. We get scammed. These just happens to be scams that are now well over a trillion dollars.

This one is a little harder to explain. I will do it fairly quickly.

There is this concept of nominal GDP. Hey, here is where we can be at, we can grow, we don't set off inflation. I tried to explain this multiple times.

Here is where the Democrats went and spent that $1.9 trillion a couple years ago. You can almost see within the next day the actual nominal GDP explodes. This difference isn't economic expansion, it is inflation.

A dollar goes up by 5 percent because of inflation doesn't make a 5- percent dollar more valuable. You have lost 5 percent of your purchasing power.

I have had Members here go: Well, look at how much bigger the economy is.

No, it is not. It is not nominal. You have to adjust it back for how much devastation has happened in the economy called inflation.

Now, think about what you are doing to people at the higher interest rates.

So let's actually talk a little bit more about the Biden budget and some of the baselines we were given by the administration. So even with the tax hikes, remember, there are substantial tax hikes in the Biden budget.

Remember, ``we are going to cut the deficit''?

No, they are not. Even with the tax hikes, Biden's budget would still cause the national debt to skyrocket $44 trillion over their 10-year window. That is their cut, there is no cut.

And now what we are finding out is when you actually dig into the math, there are all sorts of just--what is the best term? Fraud in that math.

This is debt held by the public, and we need to explain this.

You will have many of us come on the mike saying, there is $31 trillion or $32 trillion of debt. There are offsets that economists say, well, it is the trillion dollars that are left in the Social Security Trust Fund. We don't count that as a stressor to the markets and society because we are just taking the trust fund over here and we are buying Treasury bills and then when Social Security needs it, they cash in their Treasury bills. So think of it as internal financing.

These numbers are where you have to go to the market. You have to find people here in this country or around the world who are saving their productivity, saving their cash to buy our debt.

You are heading toward $44 trillion in that 10-year window.

An interesting thing I was sort of working through today, so we made a slide, the Tax Foundation tried to work through the Biden budget on what would it mean, because you had people come here and give speeches about how wonderful they thought the Biden budgets was.

Well, now we have got some scoring. Some of the cruelty in it, long- run GDP, long-run growth of the economy, actually shrinks by like 1.3 percent in the Biden budget. Wages, your salaries go down about a percent, and we lose about 335,000 jobs.

This isn't us. This isn't the Republicans. This isn't the Congressional Budget Office. This is the Tax Foundation, which is nonpartisan, and they have some of the best modeling in the country. Look.

Stop making crap up. This is what their version, their vision of compassion--remember, we used to get the former Speaker, show us your budget and we will see your priorities, your ethics, your values.

Okay, so losing 335,000 jobs and having workers lose 1 percent of their wages, is that the Democrats' compassion?

This is what crappy economics do. President Biden's proposed budget comes nowhere close to solving long-term--remember how they were just so excited. We are going to have $3 trillion. If every dime of the almost $5 trillion of new taxes comes in--and I asked even Janet Yellen this and she was very polite, completely avoided giving me an honest answer.

Did you score what you to do to the economy's growth?

You just saw on the Tax Foundation slide what happens to the economy's growth with all their almost $5 trillion in new taxes. But we are reducing the deficit. No, you are not. They just reduced how much more spending they were going to cause. They still raised the deficit by another $20 trillion.

Once again, it is games with virtue signaling around here. This is their vision.

When does it break? When do we break the back of this economy, the American taxpayers, the working middle class?

How much more debt can we stack up on them?

If we do this, will we have any capacity to follow the Constitution, defend this country, and also keep the commitments to those who are on Medicare and Social Security.

Do you understand--remember the comment before, 9 budget years. You can wipe out all what you consider government. All defense is gone, all discretionary is gone, and you have still got to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars just to cover Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' benefits.

President Biden's tax hikes would place significant burden on the American people. They acted like--and I should have actually labeled this even better.

You remember, in the President's speech, when, hey, here is my budget. Some of the talking heads that were supporting it, total revenues. We are going to get this.

What they forgot to tell you is half those revenues ultimately come in income tax hikes. When you work them out, it is small businesses, it is individuals. It is not the big corporations. Half that revenue is just coming, functionally, from people's incomes, from their salaries. It is income tax hikes.

The Federal Government Reserve's outlook for 2024 growth has worsened significantly. All right. What does that mean?

Okay. Think of this. You remember, way, way back when, last December--so how many months ago, you know, 3, 4 months ago--you remember way back then, Congressional Budget Office, others, we were saying, hey, we are going to have 1.6 percent GDP growth, completely anemic, dramatically lower than the long-term average, which we need to grow.

You will be happy to know, as of this month, it has gone from 1.6 economic growth, when you adjust away inflation, to we are down to 1.2.

To anyone listening, do you understand how screwed we are if we don't get this up dramatically?

I am sorry, my language--I don't mean to potty mouth. I am just frustrated because I don't know how to break through to people mentally because you are going to have this brain trust saying, yes, but if you got rid of this or if you didn't do that-- Look, I understand many of the comments we get are just bots, or people who actually are off their meds, but take this seriously.

A couple of weeks ago I had my 8-month old here and I kept trying to ask the moral question: Do you have the right, as an American, to be securing your retirement?

My 8-month old, my 7-year old, do they have the right to have prosperity in their future?

That 8-month old, wonderful little boy, we are blessed to be able to adopt him. In 24 years, the taxes he pays will have to be 100 percent more, double what you pay, what I pay just to maintain baseline services; not expansion, not all this other crazy spending, just the baseline.

That is every corporate tax, that is every individual tax, that is every--I

had this crazy idea, and I want to see if anyone else out there is willing to discuss this with me because every time I have discussed this, I look up and the room is running toward the exit.

If you are a publicly traded corporation, you must actually, now, according to the SEC and the Democrats, you have to disclose global warming or whatever we call it today--we call it climate change--and the stresses that could put on your book of business.

Okay, fine. Disclose it. Should you have to also disclose the fact that over the next 24 years, your corporate taxes will double?

What does that mean to your investment portfolios? What does that mean to your long-term capital outlook? What does that mean to your corporate risk?

We are talking about, hey, shareholders deserve to have all sorts of disclosures, environmental climate change. Fine. Should there also have to be disclosures that explain what U.S. fiscal policy means to the future investments of that company? Why isn't it fair?

Why does the left get to have climate change forced on corporations' disclosures? Which I think, fine. I am not going to fight that.

Why shouldn't they also have to disclose the actual math that the Congressional Budget Office has put out, that their taxes will double over the next 24 years? Why isn't that a disclosable item?

It is worth thinking about. Fair is fair. If you want investors to know what the risks are of their investments--it is like the brain trust here.

I am going to go buy a 30-year bond. Understand, by the time you get the final day of that bond, your taxes have doubled. What rate of return do you actually need?

This is reality. It is math. Even confiscating--

Now, let's get this one straight because I keep getting leftist-- excuse me--my Democratic colleagues who come and say well, rich people just need to pay more. Okay. Let's just pretend that is the way it works.

Even confiscating all income over $500,000 would fail to eliminate the Fiscal Year 2024 budget deficit. Get the punch line with me right now.

This is the fiscal budget we are working on right now, and remember, in a decade that number is doubled. We are going to go from about a trillion and a half borrowing here to the end of the decade, investment number was like 2.7, $2.8 trillion of borrowing.

Just the budget we are working on right now, if we took--hey, you make $500,001, we get that dollar. We take every single dime of people over $500,000. You don't even get near paying off the deficit. You get it?

Yet, I promise you, tomorrow, I will have Members of the other side who are going to walk behind these microphones and just say, if we just taxed rich people more we would be fine.

It is not the math. I have come here multiple times and showed the entire list if you confiscated every dime of the wealthy, yeah, you would get another year or two paid off on the borrowing, and then boom, it is all back.

It is demographics. Unless we as a nation have a revolution--excuse me. Is ``disruption'' too uncomfortable a word for so many people? How about an alternative way to change the price of delivering healthcare to our brothers and sisters? That is three-quarters of all the debt over the next 30 years.

If we can do that, if we could have a disruption in the cost of healthcare--and it is not tomorrow; it is over the next decade--you are not going to pay off the debt, but what you do is stabilize the size of the economy and the size of the borrowing. The problem right now is the debt grows dramatically faster than the growth of the economy. That is what crushes you.

I am going to end on something I am incredibly optimistic on. I have been mocked for talking about this, but it looks like it is heading toward its phase 1. There is a company out there. They have been chasing this for like 15 years. Stunning amounts of money and efforts have been put into it. They just got permission to start the next phase of a phase 1 trial.

The punch line here is that this is joyful; this is optimistic; and it is moral. It also would do amazing things for U.S. debt and actually for the entire world.

The concept here is a type of stem cell that has been tagged, I guess, with CRISPR. I am not a synthetic biologist. This is not my specialty, but I am fascinated by it. Because of the way they tagged it, you can get a stem cell treatment that gets your body to start producing islet cells, start producing insulin again, and you don't need antirejection drugs. It would be universal.

There is this concept I have been reading about for a decade called a biofoundry. Yes, I am geeking out, but this is important. It turns out ``for every complex problem, there is a simple solution'' is absolutely wrong. It is a complex solution that if we would actually do everything over the next decade to knock down prediabetic populations and then work with our brothers and sisters that have it with the offer that, in the decade, if you improve your healthy lifestyle, we might get your body producing insulin again.

Could you imagine the economic benefit, the crushing of income inequality to poor families that actually have someone who is severely diabetic and who is losing their feet or their eyesight? What is the morality for my Tribal communities in Arizona?

Also, it is the single biggest thing you could do for U.S. sovereign debt.

Yes, this is just the beginning of the next phase of a phase 1 trial. Maybe it doesn't work. There have been so many heartbreaks on this over the last couple of decades, but so far, the early data to get to this point is they have been given the green light about 5 days ago to start.

This is the type of things we as Members of Congress, on the left and the right, should be bringing to people saying: Is this a path? How do we help it? How do we do it safely?

We need to be starting to think through what if it works. What have we done to change the way we deliver nutrition in this country? What have we done technology-wise? That watch, the things you can wear on your body that help you understand your blood glucose, what could we do to actually--I am going to screw up the proper name, but these new pharmaceuticals that help some people suppress their appetite. Apparently, they are safe, and apparently, they come off patent very soon.

What could we do to say if this works, maybe by the end of the decade, we have a societal agreement that this is a deal because it would make the population so much healthier?

Yes, there are dozens of ideas like this, but it is an example. It doesn't all have to be dystopian misery around here. What is the chance we are going to hold a single hearing or have a single conversation around here about something that is actually a potential solution? Or do we just continue to say the debt's going to bury us, so let's just keep spending because that is what gets us reelected, and God forbid that we tell our voters the truth?

Mr. Speaker pro tempore, I am going to yield back because if I keep going, I might hurt someone's feelings, and we wouldn't want to do that.

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 15 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, March 24, 2023, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, just getting ourselves set up. I was going to yield some time to a fellow Member for a moment, but I think that Member has disappeared.

We are going to try something tonight. And for anyone watching and listening, if you don't like lots of geeky conversation and lots of math, this isn't your night to watch.

We are going to try to walk through a handful of concepts. One is one we have been discussing with our economic team.

Look, I am blessed to be on Ways and Means, but I also am the senior Republican for Joint Economic. I have a handful of Ph.D. economists, and we have been sort of trying to understand what the Federal Reserve is doing on inflation and why it is becoming so difficult to crush inflation in our society and in our economy.

Then we are going to walk through some numbers so there is an absolute understanding of what has happened, particularly to the working middle class in this country, demonstrate how much poorer they are today than even a couple years ago in purchasing power and the reality of just how devastating inflation is to people, people that save, people that tend to have a retirement, actually people who are just trying to make a living and survive. We are going to show some charts just demonstrating how much poorer Americans are.

Then we are going to do some walking through Democrat policy, particularly from the last couple of years, and sort of show the fact that their math is not lining up with what we are seeing and their math is not lining up with other economists. The reason for that is, at the same time, we are going to also talk about how much debt has been created in the last couple years, that what was demographics--we are getting older as a society--and actually what was just spending priorities of the left.

Much of this we are running and gunning. We got the President's budget a couple hours ago. We are trying to assemble an understanding. But just a demonstration of here are the tax hikes, here are the spending priorities, and trying to also run ahead of the propaganda mills that often what our modern media is on: ``They are going to cut the deficit.'' No, they are not. They claim $3 billion. Well, there is like $3 trillion over the 10, but it is a time where there is going to be $20 trillion of borrowing. So, okay, that is if every tax hike goes in and it does not slow down the economy.

So, first off, a concept. The Federal Reserve, when they are raising interest rates, when they are rolling off the book of bonds, all of the holdings they have, even mortgaged-backed paper, what are they doing? No, seriously, I need everyone to sort of think this through. What are they doing? They are basically pulling liquidity out of the economy by removing the cash. Because in the previous couple of years, pandemic, whatever excuse you want to give, this body pumped massive amounts of liquidity.

Here are checks; we are not going to ask you to work; you don't have to participate in the economy. All that cash is sitting out there. Then you hit everything from supply chain issues to manufacturing issues to people saying: I get money, I don't have to participate in the economy, so I don't have to work.

You get inflation. Remember our high school economics classes. What is inflation? Simplest definition: Too many dollars chasing too few goods and services.

So why has the interest rate hikes and the pulling of liquidity out-- because, remember, the Federal Reserve is doing more than raising interest rates. They are letting their balance sheets roll off, and by rolling that off, that should also be stripping much liquidity--why isn't it working? There

are certain things we are seeing. Commodity prices seem to be coming down. Wage hikes are not keeping up, though, with current inflation, which is a really bad, bad thing.

But if you look at every model we had from the second quarter of last year, third quarter, and fourth quarter of last year, we should be much further in the progress of knocking down inflation than we are.

I know there was some dodgier economic news today. But yesterday, remember seeing the 2-year treasury bill going over 5 percent? Then it fell. But just the fact that it hit, I think, one of the all-time highs in modern times, unless you understand how much of the market thought inflation is staying with us longer.

Our economists actually came back with a theory. So you have the Federal Reserve trying to pull liquidity out, but on the other side of this equation, you have fiscal policy. This Congress, when it was controlled by the left, our Democrat brothers and sisters put so much cash, so much money into the economy, as we start to walk through some of the things that were happening, the American Rescue Plan, the omnibus bills that actually raised spending. You add everything from even the CHIPS Act and all of these other things where you are pumping in money.

So you understand the point I am trying to make is, if you cannot line up fiscal policy--and fiscal policy is what we do in Congress-- what happens when it is working contrary to monetary policy. Monetary policy is what the Federal Reserve does. And we are starting to actually see a really, really interesting--let's call it an academic debate, except it hurts people.

You know, I am a Congress-idiot standing up here going: You understand this and that? But ultimately, these numbers hurt people, and I am going to show you how much poorer most Americans are today.

So how many times have you heard any Member of Congress get behind these microphones and say: Maybe we should really think about our spending priorities, either stripping some of the spending that happened last year under Democratic control and saying, okay, maybe that is the program the left will fall on their sword for, maybe spread it out over more time so it is not working contrary to what the Federal Reserve is trying to do in knocking down inflation.

It is an interesting thought, but it is worth thinking about, that the financial markets, the old days of inflation is always a monetary issue. Okay. I will make you the argument that the Federal Reserve, in the previous years when they were buying so much U.S. sovereign debt, they were like the uncle who keeps buying the alcoholic son bottles of scotch. They were enablers. They made it so we didn't have a penalty. Except now it is time for us to start going to our AA meetings, and we don't have a driver's license anymore; we are not getting there; it is not happening. And we are having a little trouble getting to the first step. What is the first step? You admit you have a problem.

This one is important. Let me know--I am sure the AA references work, but that was top of mind.

How much has President Biden added to the deficit in these last couple of years? I want to be a little careful on this. There is this running argument here. The left will say: Your incentives to grow the economy, your tax reforms, this and that, that is all it was that added all of it. We will, in turn, say: Democrats, it is all of your spending.

I am partially pointing this out in reference to: Why haven't we been able to knock down inflation more?

It is this spending. When you start to realize that it is well over $5 trillion of additional spending that the Democrats created over the last couple of years--you may love it. It may be a thing in your priorities. Fine, but then understand how much poorer you are through inflation because this works contrary to trying to slow down inflation.

It is the concept of fiscal policy crashes into monetary policy, and then you start to wonder why the high school math we were all taught and how this is supposed to work isn't working.

Let's walk through what we have done to working men and women in this country. I represent the Scottsdale-Phoenix area. For most of the last 2 years, my neighborhoods have had the highest inflation in America. When America is over here saying, ``We had 8 percent inflation, and it is devastating,'' I am having 13.1 percent. You are that hardworking person in my community, and you have had your teeth kicked in.

This is important. I am heartbroken we don't talk about this more. Inflation has dramatically reduced workers' purchasing power. Let's go all the way to 10 years. You had a 2 percent, 2 percent, 1.8, then 2.3, and then you hit the last 2 years.

Let's say that, in 2013, you are making $60,000 a year, and you haven't had a pay increase. You understand the baseline. You are making $60,000 in 2013 and have kept the same salary. That is 10 years. Dear Lord, I hope you have been paid more, but let's say you are not. That $60,000 today would only buy $46,000 worth of goods. You have gone from $60,000 of purchasing power in the 10 years to $46,000.

In 2021, functionally, that single year, if you are being paid $60,000, by the end of the year, you have lost about $8,000 of purchasing power. That is the mean. In my State and my community, it was substantially more than this.

Do you understand where that money went? I promise you this is going to be a little more geeky, if that is actually a word. Where does the money go? When we devalue your salary, when we devalue your currency, where does that money go? We take it from borrowers and those who--what is the easiest way to say this--we took your salary, your savings, and we devalued it and put it over here to those of us who borrow. Who is the biggest borrower? The United States Government. So, we are going to now pay back the debt with inflated dollars.

It is not a magical, free option. You didn't suddenly say, ``Hey, we got $30 trillion in debt, and we are going to pay it with dollars now that are only worth 90 cents. Isn't this neat? We took 10 cents off of our debt.'' No, we didn't. What we did is we stripped it from you.

We taxed you, and you didn't even know it. Do you understand because we stripped the value of your salary, the value of your savings, it was functionally transferred to the United States Treasury and devaluing the debt when we pay it back?

How many Americans understand that the last 2 years, I think, statistically, may be the largest tax hikes in modern history? We made you poor. There is even some crazy math out there, if you take a look, that will show you debt to GDP, at least for like a month, flattens a bit because the economy continues to grow nominally over inflation or at inflation, and that debt, we are going to pay it back with the inflated dollars. Hey, doesn't this look great? Except the very next day, you need to float the next refinance of your bonds on the new debt. It is at the higher interest rates, and boom. The little pretend value you got is stripped away from you. You may be paying back the U.S. sovereign debt with inflated dollars, but now you are paying a hell of a lot more interest.

That is why I started with the comment, did you watch the debt markets this last week? They are all over the place. We refer to that as fragility. We are carrying so much debt, and it is about to get dramatically worse.

How many times have I been behind this microphone walking through showing you and showing you and showing you that, in 10 years, the wheels come off?

The danger that I was terrified of over the last couple of days of what happens if the debt interest rate cycle--that 2-year yesterday being over 5 percent--what if that lasted for a year, 2 years, 3 years? All the CBO projections we are working on are wrong.

I hope today's retrenchment in the numbers is a good thing, but it also may be a thing because we are hurting people. This is the next part of this moral argument. We have made you poorer.

Do you understand what the Federal Reserve may have to do to you? They may have to take a substantial portion of this society and put you out of work. They may have to put you out of work.

Part of it is because Congress kept spending, making it even harder for the

Federal Reserve to bend the inflation curve. Yes, I understand there are supply issues and demand issues. They pumped in too much liquidity. The Democrats did all this spending. It got ahead of us. Policies here are really hurting people.

Let's take a little bit more of a look at how this math works. I am going to do it again. Your 2021 salary--so in a single year--you are making $60,000, and its purchasing power is $52,000. If you live in my district, it is probably about $47,000. How much did your salary go up? If you live in my community in Arizona, if you didn't get about a 13 percent pay hike in the previous year, you are poorer today.

If you look at it from 2013 to today, once again, your purchasing power when you used to have $60,000--let's say you were a saver, you had $60,000 saved. You do realize today, and this is, functionally, the very beginning of the year, you basically only have $46,000 in the bank. You may think you have $60,000, but the purchasing power has been lost so much.

Let's walk through one of the things I believe is another fraud that is being committed on the American people. That is when our brothers and sisters on the left did all of their legislation last year to functionally subsidize--as I almost prefer to say, they soft- nationalized so much of the economy.

They did all sorts of projections on what certain things were going to cost. I am going to use a couple of things these. There was functionally a tax credit for battery production. The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, put out this score and said it is only going to be about $30 billion--only.

We have outside economists looking at it, reading the statute, saying that it doesn't actually say $30 billion. What it says is anyone doing this, you get these tax credits. Then, they looked at how many people were doing that. We are seeing articles coming in now that it may be as high as $195 billion.

This is one of the great scams around here. They put together a piece of legislation saying that you are going to get the tax credit but then don't put a cap on it, so it just keeps going because, let's be honest, who writes checks to the Democrats?

As we are dealing with budget issues, will our brothers and sisters on the left at least work with us? You promised America that this particular battery tax credit would not exceed $30.6 billion, so will you lock in a cap?

Remember the fragility concept when lots of other--the statute didn't cap the money, so it looks like it is going to cost dramatically more. Will you work with us, and will you cap it? Do you think that is going to happen around here?

Let's take a look at some more of this, the cost estimates on wind production. You may love wind. Once again, the Congressional Budget Office and the piece of legislation that Democrats did last year show an expansion of tax credits on wind. They promised us that it would come in at $11.2 billion. The outside economists are looking at the legislation once again and saying there is a math problem, that they didn't actually cap it, and it may come in as high as $68.4 billion.

Is that a fraud on the American people? Of course, it is, but that is the way the scam here works. Produce a piece of legislation and tell everyone it is only going to cost this much.

The point I am going at is that the Inflation Reduction Act, which is an Orwellian name for a piece of legislation that spent money and actually helped set off inflation, you start to understand why so many of the big spenders, the people that get these, were just giddy. They actually read the language.

My challenge to our friends on the left--okay, this was your promise, $11.2 billion. Will you cap it at that? The modeling now is coming in, and it may be as high as $68 billion. This is why we end up in so much trouble here.

I am not going to try to read all of these to you. If any of you have insomnia, please, go grab the President's budget.

Do you remember that Nancy Pelosi used to stand behind that microphone over there and say budgets are your ethics, your priorities? We are going to look at a lot of the left's priorities here.

This is just one of a couple of boards of tax hikes, tax hike after tax hike after tax hike. I cannot wait until we try to figure out some way to model these tax hike boards and try to understand the level that this actually slows down the economy.

You are going to see some boards here where I am going to make the argument that the duplicity we are seeing in the President's budget just blows off the page with the amount of GDP, the size of our economy, that is going to go to taxes, and then to pretend it is still going to grow.

No, that would be cruel and unusual punishment to read through these. Understand, this is just one board, two boards. These are all the proposed tax hikes that are in the President's budget.

And then they are going to tell you this nice thing saying: We are raising taxes enough to reduce the deficit over the next decade by $3 trillion.

They forget to mention we are borrowing 20.

So I put a little board together saying: If every single one of their tax hikes come in, and every single one of them produces the revenue that they scored it at--and these actually haven't been calculated. They are just baseline scores. There is no actual analytics behind it-- and if it doesn't actually slow down the economy and doesn't actually now create incentives for people to put their resources in other places other than these areas that have all had the tax hikes, then it might produce $3 trillion over the 10 years.

Okay, great.

We are heading toward a projected accumulated deficit from the 2024 budget to the 2033, so functionally 9 budget years of $20 trillion.

Mr. Speaker, if you have someone on the left running around here saying: ``We are doing something for deficit reduction,'' something where you basically go from: Hey, we were going to hit 118 percent of debt to GDP in 2033, then they might bring it in if they got all their taxes and all the revenues came in and they don't slow down the economy, then they might get 110 percent.

So let's walk through what is being proposed here.

Remember, we are just starting. We are digging through this as fast as we can, and we are trying to, once again, understand their priorities.

So just some of the basic taxes, over the next 10 years, in the budget process, an average level of taxation has been about 19.7 percent which is actually higher, I think, than the historic average. But you basically look at higher than any 10 years--let me rephrase that: The 19.7 percent of GDP going into taxes, that is functionally the baseline math of the President's budget.

Mr. Speaker, you do realize that functionally it is higher than any time in modern history. I have been here before over and over and shown the charts that are saying: Here are really high marginal tax rates.

We get about 18 percent of GDP in taxes.

Here are really low marginal tax rates.

We get about 18 percent of GDP.

I am just wondering what magic wand the left is waving that is all of a sudden we are now going to start getting close to 20 percent of the economy in taxes.

Maybe they come up with some magical way to do it.

The problem here: This is the President's own budget. So you just saw 19.7 percent of the economy coming in in taxes. The new spending is at 24.8 percent of the economy. And then we are going to have people running around here, particularly on the left, saying: Look what we did for deficit reduction.

Huh?

Trust me, there are no saints here. The hardest thing I say over and over and over--and I probably get more hate from this, but it is absolutely mathematically true--from today through the next 30 years, 100 percent of future U.S. sovereign debt--100 percent of future sovereign debt--is demographics. Baby boomers. We got old.

If you are someone who is screaming at the television or whenever you watch things like this, Mr. Speaker--which if you are watching things like this then I worry about you--``it is foreign aid,'' we have shown over and over

and over and over the calculations that foreign aid last year would only be like 12 days of borrowing. At the end of the decade, it is only like 6, 7 days of borrowing.

Congressional salaries. It was 28 minutes of borrowing for a whole year, and in 10 years from now it is like 19 minutes of borrowing.

The fact of the matter is, Mr. Speaker, you have got to stop pretending. The scale of the debt, once again--and I did this last week and the week before, the Congressional Budget Office's model said that in 9 budget years, you are can to wipe out the entire defense of the United States, which is our constitutional obligation.

You can wipe out all of Congress. You can wipe out the White House, and you can wipe out the Supreme Court. You can wipe out every dime of spending. There is no FBI, there is no Park Service, there is nothing, no discretionary dollars at all, and you still have to borrow a couple hundred billion dollars just to maintain the baseline services of Social Security and Medicare.

And the very next year--the punch line here is that the very next year it gets much uglier because that is also the year the trust funds are empty. The Medicare part A trust fund is gone. That is also one of the other frauds we are seeing in the President's budget: We are going to shore up Medicare.

You do understand the Medicare trust fund is only the part A. Three- quarters of the other spending of Medicare is already coming out of the general fund.

So, once again, that previous sentence--you have to let that one sink in--you can get rid of all discretionary spending. No more of this crap of: Let's just get rid of foreign aid or waste and fraud. It is all gone. You just get rid of all of it, and in 9 years--9 budget years-- you have to borrow a couple of hundred billion dollars. And that is being optimistic that there is no recession, that all the revenues come in in projection, there is no war, there is no other pandemic, and everything is fine.

Mr. Speaker, do you understand how fragile--and then the Democrat spending is approaching 25 percent of the economy.

Deficits. Now, this is with all the tax hikes and assuming that every dime comes in and that this place is willing to vote for every one of Biden's tax hikes, you are still borrowing an average of $1.5 trillion a year, and at that 9th budget year I think it is like still like $2.3 trillion that year because it keeps going up.

Interest payments. This is right out of the President's budget. We are going to basically average over the next 10 years the interest payments on the debt will reach $1.3 trillion a year--just the interest--so you have the interest on the borrowing.

So if we are estimating 2033, so 9 budget years from now, if under the President's budget--forgive me, I am doing this from memory--it is like $2.3 trillion borrowed, 1.3 of that is just interest, the other trillion functionally is the growth in Medicare.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, the very next year the Social Security trust fund is gone, our brothers and sisters are taking about a 23 to 24 percent cut in their check, and you have just doubled senior poverty.

That is one of things that also outrages me is: Where is the conversation of we are going to save Social Security? We are going to work on it together?

Instead of using it for the next campaign piece that the left is putting together.

You are going to see also, Mr. Speaker, the left running around here saying: We are going to raise taxes on wealthy people to save Medicare.

No, they are not.

What they are going to do is actually start to add another 5 points on capital gains, the 3.8 percent special premium that they basically stole and put into the general fund that was originally supposed to go to Medicare.

Okay, let's say they now finally stop stealing it and put it all toward the Medicare trust fund part A and now it goes up to 5 points-- that is only one-quarter of Medicare spending.

The model basically says that according to the President's budget, we are going to go from about $661 billion of interest borrowing to a baseline of $1.3 trillion in 9 budget years.

And now we start getting into the way we try to actually model much of this debt. There are ways. There is hope. The markets around the world that like to buy U.S. debt: your pension plan, your own personal savings, your union pension plan, and the State pension plan.

When I was Maricopa County treasurer, we bought it because it was safe and very liquid. We would buy UST bills, U.S. Treasuries.

One of the key things you always look at is what is the debt of a country to the size of its economy?

So if my Democratic colleagues are running around here saying: If we get all of these taxes, then we are going to lower the deficits.

It is just not true. But just even believing the top line that is written in the President's budget before we have actually had a moment to really dive in and see what the economic analytics are and do they model for how much they are going to slow the economy down and what that does to revenues, are they still just pretending they are still getting the baseline growth, then we functionally go from 98.4 percent of the publicly held debt to the size of the economy to 9 budget years we go to 110 percent.

We are basically right on top of the World War II peak. So we are basically going to line up with the highest debt to the size of the economy in our country's history.

So here is the argument I want make. Other things you should do to maybe bring in more receipts and more revenues, okay, fine, walk us through this. I can find you some things in the Tax Code where I believe some people are cheating or are using it in ways that is not how we meant to draft it, fine, we will work with you.

But walk me through all the things you are going to do to grow the economy and not try to control it and manage it because so much of the legislation, particularly last year, was almost a soft nationalization of much of the economy.

You can't get this grant--and actually I should probably explain this--this grant unless you actually go kiss up to the White House and you actually do their bidding, their sort of woke agenda. Fine.

Another bit of the con you need to understand, Mr. Speaker, is this administration has advocated for what they call a global minimum tax. Go around the industrialized world and say: Hey, we want this 15 percent global minimum tax.

If you are a country and if you give a refundable tax receipt because you did certain activities or tax credit, those things, that goes into the 15 percent calculation another country can tax you and tax your operations because this country did this.

So, Mr. Speaker, do you actually understand why a bunch of the Democrats' spending last year they made it grants?

They basically played our European allies for fools: Hey, sign up for this global 15 percent minimum, wink wink, nod nod. But grants don't count as subsidization for businesses, and the beauty of the grants actually make the bureaucracy and whoever holds the White House dramatically more powerful.

It is a soft nationalization and a way to escape their own tax extortion.

So if I came to you tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, and said that one of our most moral obligations is we have got to find a way to stabilize this national debt to the size of our economy, okay, then you have to do functionally two things. I have to bend the spending here, and I have to grow. We have to grow.

Last week, when I was behind this microphone, I had my 8-month-old little boy with me. The Parliamentarian wouldn't let me hold him. It broke my heart, but the rules are the rules.

What is our moral obligation to him?

When he turns--actually it is 24 now. It is a whole year later. When he turns 24, if we were going to maintain baseline services, then we have to double U.S. taxes. It is demographics. We got old, and lots and lots of our population, what is it, 67 million of our brothers and sisters--I am one of them--will have moved into their earned benefit years.

Okay. So you need a revolution in the cost of healthcare. I have already been behind this microphone repeatedly talking about the fact that we are on the cusp of not only curing but also

stabilizing diabetes--diabetes being 33 percent of all healthcare spending--but lots of other great things are happening.

Go look at last week's speech if you are curious, Mr. Speaker. I spent the last half of it walking through things that are actually hopeful and optimistic.

I don't particularly like this pillars of growth board because it is missing a number of things. But we are going to have to deal with the reality of our population.

In 19 years, the United States has more deaths than births.

Do you remember your high school economics class?

How do you grow an economy when your population is flatlining or is sinking?

You can do it through high-scale immigration. You could also do it through automation.

Should we incentivize robots just like they are doing in China and other places we compete with?

You have got to have a tax code that is all about growth. How do you say expensing?

Remember, when we had the 100 percent expensing that we did in the 2017 tax reform, the economists said that may have been the number one thing that helped us grow the economy, and you don't lose revenues from it. You actually gain revenues. It is a timing effect.

If I say, hey, you get to do expensing but you have got to do it over 7 years, or you can do it all today, it is still the same deduction. It is about the time. Because you let them do it today, it puts you in a cycle where, hey, I am going to buy the next piece of efficiency on the equipment sooner.

The model said, if you look at a longer horizon, you actually get more revenues by making it so you can have 100 percent expensing today because it forces you into a cycle where you are constantly trying to get to the next level of productivity with your capital investments.

Ideas like that in the tax code are elegant because it raises wages. It grows the economy. Remember, we are trying to actually stabilize our debt to GDP.

The last one--and I probably should come back in the next couple weeks and demonstrate--I believe we could have a revolution in regulation. I am going to try to visualize this one, so everyone work with me. If you get bored, I think I have a YouTube video from years ago I put together, a little cartoon that basically says--I think it is under Schweikert environmental crowdsourcing.

It is a simple concept. Say you want to open a motorcycle paint shop or a bakery or whatever it is, and you need your air quality permit. Let's do it this way.

Air quality permit: You fill out lots of paperwork, you hire a consultant, you design your scrubbers, and then you walk into your county air quality office and you file paperwork.

Does a file cabinet full of paperwork make the air quality in your community better? Huh?

No. It is basically documentation so the trial lawyer can sue you.

How about if you and your community had a little sensor, had a few thousand people driving around your community--I am from a huge county--with a sensor, and if there are idiots over here painting motorcycles in the back of their yard and not doing it in a booth, okay, fine, you catch them immediately.

You crowdsource the data. You don't need an army of bureaucrats watching the file cabinets and then hiring armies of consultants.

You can crowdsource. You basically put the sensors on, give it to the Uber drivers, give it to the UPS drivers, and say, hey, we really care more about where we have a problem--and if there is a problem, we will go and fix it--than punishing everyone in our marketplace.

The people who are following the rules, the elegance of this, they get left alone. You don't have to deal with government. You get left alone. If you screw up, you get caught. That is the use of technology. That is just one very simple idea, but there are dozens and dozens like that so you could drop the size of the bureaucracy.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the tolerance. May I request how much time I have remaining?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

For everyone who has been willing to give me part of their time, I am just trying to make a couple simple points. We have a fiscal responsibility and blame for inflation.

We could do policies on pieces of legislation that say we are going to actually help. How about a piece of legislation--actually, guess what, I already have this one--that basically says: How do I pull liquidity out of the marketplace without hurting people?

How about actually give every American a SPIF for taking some cash out of their checking account?

Instead of running out and buying a new color television--even though the televisions are beautiful--put it in their retirement account. You actually slow down consumption over here, you shore up their retirement security, and it is almost the exact same thing the Federal Reserve is doing.

There are things we can do policy wise that would help knock down inflation. We have a handful of bills like that.

The other thing is the reality of we have been lied to on the scoring of the Democrats' spending from last year, and we are starting to see it now.

The third thing I want to point out are the dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of tax hikes, and then the White House is pretending it is not going to change the economic velocity, they are going to get all these revenues, and they are still going to spend like crazy.

Within their morality of are they going to step up and help us save Social Security, the morality of it, are they going to actually help us grow the economy?

It is unacceptable that their big accomplishment will still be over 110 percent debt to GDP in 9 years. It is unacceptable.

I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Honoring the Life of Commander John Davis

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

Mr. Speaker, tonight, we are going to try to do sort of the continuation on the theme, but we are going to actually end it up with a dozen or so solutions.

I know the Parliamentarian said I can't hold my 8-month-old, but I wanted to prove the 8-month-old was real.

Look, there are some realities I keep coming behind these microphones to try to explain, and I continue to be just enraged, particularly to my brothers and sisters on the left, by the avoidance of the math.

My little boy, who is 8 months old, in 25 years, according to CBO, his taxes will have to be doubled. Corporate taxes will have to be doubled. Tariffs will have to be doubled. Everything has to double just to maintain baseline services. That is the math.

How many discussions have you heard here even today, over the last month, the reality of the math? The math will always win.

Once again, I am going to walk through some of what is really going on. For everyone here who says, ``We are going to balance in 10 years,'' okay, I can do it, but you have to understand the amount of bloodletting that is required to actually make that math work.

The actual structural problem is actually not on the left, not on the right; it is demographics, something we are terrified of.

What the President did in his State of the Union speech was just unconscionable when he basically used Social Security and Medicare as props for his reelection instead of telling the truth. In a decade, the Medicare trust fund is gone. In a decade, the Social Security trust fund is gone.

Does the left plan to help us fix it? If they don't, they get to be responsible for doubling senior poverty in this country. It is the math.

I have started with this board now for multiple years. The new numbers are coming out, and they are actually worse. The United States functionally has $114 trillion of borrowing, and it is all, every dime of it, Social Security and Medicare. The rest of the budget actually has a positive balance.

We got old. Look, I am a gray hair with a child. Maybe I am pathologically optimistic, but it is hard to fix a problem when you work in a place where your brothers and sisters will not look you in the eye and say: I understand the driver of our debt is our demographics.

For those of you with this up on YouTube, read the comments. About half the folks get it. About half the folks, the absurdities are just heartbreaking. ``Tax rich people. That takes care of it.'' ``Get rid of congressional salaries.'' We actually did the math. The funny thing is, if you get rid of all the Senate salaries and House salaries, it is 28 minutes of borrowing. That was last year's number. In 10 years, it is like 12 minutes of borrowing.

People have no concept. You can get every dime of foreign aid, and it is about 12 days of the borrowing.

Let's actually start to walk through to understand structurally how much trouble we are actually in.

Reducing the discretionary spending to zero--remember, the point I am trying to make here is you just got rid of all the military; you just got rid of the White House; you just got rid of Congress; you just got rid of the Supreme Court; you got rid of the EPA; you got rid of the IRS; you got rid of everything, all discretionary money. The only thing you are paying is Medicare, Social Security, the earned benefits, some of the Medicaid, veterans benefits, what we call mandatory around here.

When you get to about 10 years--remember, you have just wiped out the government; all you are doing is paying the benefits. When you actually remove all the mandatory, you are still having to borrow a couple hundred billion dollars.

When the clown show comes and says, ``If we just got rid of this or that, we would be fine,'' it is not true. Your government functionally is an insurance company with an army, an insurance company that technically is broke.

Let's walk through some of the math. I am going to do this over and over, and maybe one of these slides will actually help it sink in.

I have to throw something out that is just annoying. The room is empty. That is okay. People are in their offices working. We are on thousands of televisions around this place. I have given up on so many of my fellow Members, but maybe the staff, maybe the staff that is sitting there trying to figure out the math and the policy and what is going to go on, maybe they are listening.

This is where we are at. Remember, this was just done last week. The Congressional Budget Office updated a bunch of the math.

Our shortfall over the next 30 years is $21 trillion on Social Security. Remember, Social Security still has a trust fund, but in 10 years, the trust fund is gone.

I don't think I brought the charts, but I have done it over and over. The average American who works their 40 quarters and those things, you get every dime you put in plus a SPIF.

You would have made a lot more money if you put it in the market or other places, but remember, there were discussions to try to do that 25 years ago. The left went nuts, so it didn't happen. It is mathematically impossible to do today.

But Medicare functionally has $48 trillion of shortfall because the trust fund on Medicare, which is only the part A, the hospital, part of the doctor portion, is empty in 10 years.

So when you are seeing us talk about a 10-year budget, one of the great little lies around here is we are not telling you that on the 11th year it gets a hell of a lot worse.

Because are you going to backfill Medicare? Backfill Social Security?

Transportation Trust Fund, Highway Trust Fund is also gone at that time, too.

Then you put in these over the 30 years and then add in another $47 trillion of interest. You start to understand when you are seeing the new scoring, looks more like a--if you do a 30-year math on it, on this latest CBO update, you have to do a little bit of imputing of the math, you're probably approaching about $128 trillion, not that $114 trillion on the first slide.

It is actually over the next 9 budget years--I know one says 10--just Medicare goes up another trillion dollars in spend. And then it really starts to take off because the trust fund is gone.

So when the President basically said we are not going to touch Social Security and Medicare, I agree. They are earned. They are earned. But where was the next sentence saying: And I plan to work with Republicans to keep them, to keep them solvent, to keep them here, instead of the clown show

that is going on right now and saying, well, we are not allowed to talk about it.

I had protestors at my office a couple days ago saying don't touch Social Security.

Okay. We don't touch it in, what?

Now it is, what, 9\1/2\ years. Are you ready for your 23 percent cut?

Because that is what the actuaries say is coming. Then the next year it gets bigger, and the cut gets bigger, and the cut gets bigger, and the cut gets bigger. And our back-of-the-napkin math is at that time you functionally double senior poverty.

So the clown show around here goes: You can't talk about Social Security. It has become a political issue. The President actually used it in the State of the Union.

Okay. I am going to show you some of the Democrat solutions and the absurdity of the math.

I need my brothers and sisters all here if you give a damn. Put some batteries in the calculator, hire a couple competent actuaries. Actually, try something even crazier, and for anyone that is watching or listening, go grab--you have to two different documents out there. The one is really an easy read, high school math. You will be fine.

The Congressional Budget Office, about 6 weeks ago, did an update on Social Security. It is an easy read. A little harder read but actually much more impactful. Go actually get the copy of the Social Security Medicare actuary report--or is it Medicare Social Security actuary report? Either way. Dig through that, and you will understand the demographic curve.

I am going to show you some demographic slides. And I promise you, I am going to upset some people, and maybe it is a little too geeky.

My father used to have a saying: For every complex problem, there is a simple solution.

That is absolutely wrong.

We are talking trillions of dollars. We are talking about millions and millions and millions of our brothers and sisters.

Guess what? Solutions are complex.

Is this body capable? I don't know if it is anymore.

Part of the problem is we have politicized everything to the point that we are incapable of telling the truth, because often telling the truth either gets you unelected or screws up the fundraising or other things.

I just continue to be enraged. Does my little boy--do you deserve a retirement? Does he deserve a future?

Because the wheels are coming off.

I just showed you a slide that said 10 years from now I can wipe out everything you think is government, and you still have to borrow money.

And no, China has actually been dialing down its bond holdings for a decade. Japan has been dialing down their bond holdings for decades.

We now finance most of our borrowing ourselves--actually almost all of our borrowing ourselves. Single fail bond auction. You want to talk about hell?

At a future time I will actually walk you through scenarios of what happens when we go to sell U.S. sovereign debt and it is undersubscribed and watch the interest rate go through the ceiling because you have to sell it.

So let's take a quick look, just to understand the baseline structure of what has happened to Social Security. And once again, no one stole your money.

That was a rhetorical thing that politicians did to sound like they cared because they didn't want to tell you the actual math, and the actual math was demographics.

Social Security by the numbers: In 1960, I had 5 workers for every retiree, for every beneficiary.

How far away is 2030? Come on. Seriously, can anyone help me do some math here?

How far away is 2030?

Think of that. At the end of the decade, if you are married, you and your partner, your spouse, you got your own retiree.

Does that help explain part of the math problem? Understand in the early days for a working male on the very first year of Social Security, I have seen it documented that the average life expectancy was 64 years old, and you didn't get the benefit until you were 65.

You see some of the design issues?

Yes, it was a major update in, what, 1983. Tip O'Neill sitting in that chair over there; Ronald Reagan in the White House. They did difficult things. They shored it up. But now we have hit the baby boom curve.

We have divided government again just like we did back in the 1980s. What a magical time for us both to hold hands and save it, because you have a math problem. You got two workers for every beneficiary.

How much did you see the President in the state of the Union show like he gave a damn for anyone that is on Social Security?

I am not going to touch it.

Then what was his next sentence that is going off the cliff?

There are some very creative structural ideas, almost setting up either a sovereign wealth fund, some incentives where you actually get benefited to stay in the labor market and other things. We can save it with no one taking a cut. It is just going to require math and a lot of explaining.

This is pretty much another way of seeing the same slide of how many workers per retiree.

This is for my Democrat brothers and sisters. And I know this is done as a percentage of the economy which, believe it or not, when you actually look at the actuary reports, that is how we actually structurally look at programs like this that require trillions of dollars to finance.

We actually sort of say, here is the percentage of the economy that actually goes to that benefit. Total tax revenues raised in combined Federal, State, and payroll taxes approach 100 percent for wealthy taxpayers as a percentage of GDP.

It is basically saying what would happen if we functionally took 100 percent of the income from the wealthy. Once again, let's try this again, because there are a couple trolls out there saying, well oh, Bernie Sanders had this idea.

Okay. He does. If you can read through it, the amount of all the wealth income is just to shore up Social Security, and then they forget three-quarters of the borrowing is Medicare. You get 4 percent of GDP if you take all the taxes we are already paying and then add in functionally 100 percent tax on the income for the wealthy.

The problem is, the spending on just Social Security and Medicare is 6 percent, so you still got 2 percent of the entire economy as a shortfall.

And how much do you think if we took every dime of the wealthiest income, what do you think the economy would look like?

What would the growth be?

What would the investment be?

You have to understand, I do these things, they are absurd. But the discussion around here is absurd.

``Well, if we just tax the wealthy more.'' Well, maybe we should, but don't think it actually fixes the problem.

And here is where it gets more uncomfortable, but let's do some demographics.

First point: I think our math says in like 19 years or 19\1/2\ years, the United States has more deaths than births. So in less than 20 years, the United States has more deaths than births.

I need you to think through that. Remember, a Social Security actuary is modeled for 75 years. In less than two decades, I have started having more deaths than births in this country.

And you start to understand what they call--it is actually a demographic term--a dependency ratio. And it turns out the three biggest economies in the world--the United States, China, Japan--and this is a little hard to read but it is worth the concept. I also am an outlier in my belief that much of what China does is because this curve collapsing down here is China. It is basically what they call dependency ratio, the number of folks they have that will be dependent on a worker.

Right now, today, they are healthier than the United States. They have more workers than dependents but their curve folds incredibly hard.

This one is the United States. We basically sort of fall and fall and fall and sort of flatline.

Japan is already in just a miserable state.

This is happening all around the industrialized world. We don't have enough kids. It is math. It is demographics.

So are we ready to embrace some pretty radical concepts?

There are some great authors out there that talk about how the 1970s and 1980s, and maybe even through part of the 1990s, the world had competition for what they called hydrocarbons: oil, natural gas.

In the previous decade and right up to today, it may be a world sort of competition for rare-earth elements because of electrification and batteries and those things. The next couple decades it may be an international battle for smart people.

Take a look at how many of the countries we compete with that have changed their immigration codes to actually recruit people who have skill sets. And it is not all just Ph.D.'s or electrical engineering. It is if you are a skilled carpenter, if you are a skilled programmer; if you are this or that. It is actually a really interesting and uncomfortable debate.

But as you are going to see, as we talk about these charts, I can make the numbers work. On one hand of the ledger, we need economic growth, and we need a lot of it.

Well, the way you get there is through fixing the regulatory system. The way you get there is from an economy that starts to become incredibly competitive again instead of the protection racket it has become today. We also have to fix the immigration system where you are not importing poverty, but you are importing talent, so you have economic growth.

Remember, the trick here is over the coming decades I need the debt to not grow faster than the size of the economy. You need that, too. We all need it, and so does my little 8-month-old.

We are going to compete against the world because the rest of the world is also--at least the industrialized world--is facing the same demographic collapse.

And now we get into the stuff that becomes really uncomfortable to talk about, and I have to find a way, but it is math and it is policy.

There is something really crappy going on in our society right now, and it is uncomfortable. I may be the only idiot who is dumb enough to walk up behind these microphones and talk about it, but we have a problem.

We have young males entering universities, almost similar to females, and then not graduate. I didn't bring all the charts, but the number of young males, particularly under 35, who just are functionally not showing up in the economy.

And why this is important?

I am not talking about a few. I am talking about millions and millions and millions. We are actually even looking at some of these charts. And where this gets to be a tricky conversation is when you start to see college enrollment by gender and then the males basically falling off the cliff here, particularly the last few years, where females graduated.

Great. This is wonderful over here. This is a real societal problem.

There is a cultural concept called marriageable populations, and I will see if I can weave this into this unified theory.

If I have a young woman that has worked her heart out, she has graduated, and the pool of available spouses are people that did not graduate, we are actually seeing what we call a marriageability gap. And we see that across the board, across ethnicities, and now it is really starting to show up in our economic data of slowing down our economic growth projections.

When you get someone who says, well, I can do this, I will do a tax cut here, I will do this here, and I get all this economic growth, I got a problem. I got a whole bunch of my society that is not entering either the workforce, they are not forming families, they are not having kids. The basic structure that builds both a society, a healthy community, but also actually builds that economic underpinning of that society. It is worth studying. It is worth digging in to.

We got to understand what is happening with young men, because it is such a large number now. We see it in our economic data as basically stultifying--if that is a word--the economic growth.

You have a world now where my brothers and sisters on the left, my Democrat colleagues run around saying, well, we have this low unemployment. And then you look at the available populations that should be in the labor force, but they don't show up in the data because they are not even looking.

Remember, we have fewer people today in the labor force than we did before the pandemic, by millions. Then I stand up here just pissed off trying to say, does anyone care about the math? Because at the end of the decade, the wheels are coming off and they don't need to.

This is just more of the same, just sort of showing that the participation of prime age males, basically, continues to decline, decline, decline. The other chart actually may have done a better job of showing the cliff.

What have I tried to argue here? I have debt that is exploding and it is substantially healthcare costs. It is substantially our demographics. We got old.

I have a seesaw here that if we could get both sides in balance, there is a way it works, but you have got to over here have growth. I got to have labor force participation. I have to have encouragement for people, whether you are older and we incentivize you, saying, hey, we are not going to take your side of the FICA tax if you stay in the labor force and you are 70 but you feel that you want to work. Great. We love you. Please. Thank you.

How do I get young males back into the labor force, to get them to actually graduate college? This is important. If you are a university, please pay attention to these numbers. There is something that is almost crisis level going on out there.

The adoption of technology in regulation. Do you need buildings full of file cabinets and paper to regulate the environment, or could you actually do it through technology? We are all walking around with a supercomputer in your pocket. Stick the little sensor on it and you could do air quality monitoring. I no longer need a building to file paperwork. I always know what is going on. You can crowdsource it.

There are ideas like this that both disrupt, shrink the size of government. Government is just far too massive, and you can replace much of it with technology. The battles I have in Ways and Means over the IRS. Do you hire an army of unionized workers or do you use technology? If you believe there is a bunch of tax cheats out there, use technology to find them, or do you think an army of unionized workers is a much better way to do it? That is absurd.

Growth ledger. What I am going to talk about now is some of the disruptive ideas. Maybe a number of these won't work. Maybe they are just techno utopianism, but it is the thought process. It is the mental discipline to start thinking through the basic idea of, if I had a vibrant, competitive, disruptive economy that is actually crashing the price of healthcare over here and growing over here, I can do the math on that. I can show you that we can flatten out this debt bomb that is about to wipe out your retirement and my kids' future.

I want to give just a simple thought experiment, except it is real. Do you remember a half an hour ago, the Democrats touting in the Inflation Reduction Act, we are going to spend billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars subsidizing insulin? We are going to give the very companies that they used to come to the floor here and scream about that they were pillaging people with the cost of insulin.

We are going to give that Big Pharma money. That is how the brain trust on my left here works. Right over here in Virginia, there is a co-op. Remember, most of the insulin formulas are off-patent.

This group over here--and it is insurance companies, it is hospitals. I think a couple State Medicaid systems got together and said, screw it. We don't like the price the market is giving us. We are going to build a co-op and do it ourselves. We are going to make eight types of generic insulin. Oh, by the way, they are doing it less than the government subsidized price the Democrats pushed through where they are handing out billions of dollars.

Why didn't they turn around and say, let's bring this to market much faster? No taxpayer money. Cheaper prices. Competition. Instead the Democrats'

version was, let's just subsidize Big Pharma. How dare they act like they did something? They basically almost screwed up competition because they started subsidizing the very organizations they used to complain about and then made it so competition actually had to now compete with subsidized companies.

Does anyone else see the absurdity around here? If you want competition in the pharmaceutical world, get more people making them. The majority of the pharmaceuticals we all consume are off-patent. There are some crazy articles out there that I saw this summer of super high-speed 3D printers that you no longer need a couple hundred million dollar clean facility to make your generic drug. There are alternative ways to produce it.

What could we do regulatorywise, tax incentivewise, other things here to actually say, we want everyone and their cousin making safe, affordable, competitive pharmaceuticals if that is part of the fight that we have here saying these drug prices are too high?

What are you going to do? The Democrats actually decided they are going to regulate price cap, subsidize. As a supply side conservative, I come back and say, screw that. Let's grab today's technology and get the competition flowing.

I do not know all the details on this. I only saw part of the article this weekend, but this is the thought experiment I need from you.

How many of you saw the article this weekend that Apple basically believes they have broken the code for a glucose monitor in the watch?

Think about that, if you are a thinking person. If I came to you tomorrow and said, you can put something on your wrist--maybe it is not, because they are expensive, but it is the concept of the technology.

I can have something on my wrist that knows my oxygen, knows my blood pressure, knows my heart rate, knows my temperature, and now knows my glucose.

If you had all those datapoints, what could you run as an algorithm and also your ability to take my data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?

Could you keep me much healthier? Could you keep our brothers and sisters healthier? Remember; diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spending. It is 31 percent of all Medicare spending.

If it is true this technology may be coming, just a thought experiment. You are all smart people. Think about it.

What would happen if I could take my prediabetic population, even some of my diabetic population that may not now be on insulin and said, we are going to work with you so you understand what is going on?

I represent probably the second highest per capita population in the world with diabetes; one of my Tribal communities in Arizona.

Incredible people, and they are not poor. They are a gaming tribe alongside Scottsdale. They are very entrepreneurial. They have done great.

The data may be the disruption in the price of healthcare. Why am I the first idiot to walk up to the floor and say, I saw this. We should actually investigate it. We should understand what this could mean.

If we invited the scientists in to talk to us and say, what does the future look like? What would happen if it is true?

I am going to show another thing about a stem cell treatment that is going on from a San Diego company that believes they may have found a way--I think they have cured, like, six people of type 1 diabetes, but it is less than a year, so you don't know the efficacy.

The concept is there and the ability to stop someone from ever screwing up their islet cells.

The reason I show this stuff is instead of saying we are just going to walk in, and we are going to have to cut Medicare by trillions of dollars, how about the crazy thing of curing people and making the healthcare prices dramatically lower through technology, through disruption?

You have got a choice. This is not just a blunt, troglodyte approach. This is actually something where the society gets healthy and more prosperous.

I am just going to go through some of these because for some of these, I have done whole presentations on the floor.

When you start to actually read some of the literature, that we may be on the cusp of--I think, actually, there is a paper being presented in this coming week on the first data sets for a cancer vaccine, some of the drugs that are having just incredible success in curing people.

You have the ability to actually have that supercomputer you carry around in your pocket basically actually help you manage your personal health.

I have hypertension. I have to take a calcium inhibitor. I came here a couple weeks ago and showed, once again, another thought experiment.

Mr. Speaker, 16 percent of all healthcare spending is? Sixteen percent of all healthcare spending is? This is $550 billion a year, so over a half a trillion dollars a year. It is calculated to be people not taking their pharmaceuticals.

So you have hypertension like me. I take my calcium inhibitor. I take one pill every day, and I don't stroke out.

They say 16 percent of healthcare spending is people choosing not to; darn it, I forgot. I didn't take the pill.

Now, I know some people are going to say, well, you should eat healthy. You should exercise. Trust me; I do. I haven't touched ice cream in a couple years. I really miss it.

But walk through just the concept with me, instead of your preconceived conceptions or notions. So 16 percent of healthcare spending is people not taking their pharmaceuticals appropriately so they stay on their rhythm.

Grandma forgets to take her pill. You need a statin. You forget to take it. How about a $0.99 pill cap that beeps at you when you forgot to open it up that morning?

Is that $0.99 worth what it would mean to go at $550 billion? What if you could just shave off a couple points of it? $200 billion; is that worth it?

These are just trying to be creative instead of the folks who want to run around here with a chainsaw hacking apart things. Start saying maybe the idea is using technology so we are healthier.

There is another article I picked up a couple days ago just to show the revolution that is about to be here. This now has FDA approval.

Functionally, you can blow into it from your home medicine cabinet, and guess what? It is a flu test. It is a COVID test. There is another version coming that is actually going to be two or three other things.

You can have it in your home medicine cabinet, and you can blow in it. You don't have to go to the urgent care center. You don't have to go to the doctor's office. You don't have to go to the emergency room. You don't have to go to the hospital.

The technology is the disruption. The disruption actually crashes the price.

These are uncomfortable. I had this really neat article. It is a bit geeky, but it basically talks about the ability to use an X-ray. Now, with some of the predictive AI looking at it, it can actually do amazing--amazingly accurate, cheaply--diagnostics on whether you are going to have a risk of heart disease or other things.

It is here, and it has gone through the efficacy trials. Do we set up the policy where we make these things reimbursable? Do we make these things so we take down the barriers because, remember, Washington often is more like a protection racket.

I have done whole presentations on this from a couple of years ago. Yes, it has actually moved forward to some of the immunotherapies for some of the types of cancers. These are coming about.

Now, the one that I talked about a couple of weeks ago was that possibility in regard to diabetes. We are actually bringing a couple of their researchers here, I think sometime next month, to talk about the mechanisms.

The reason I walked through all of these, the first part of this presentation, is to understand how devastating the debt is. It is not pretend. You can't just say, ``Well, we will just pretend. We will print a $1 trillion coin and walk away from it.'' You have to stop the clown show.

Yes, there is a whole bunch of government that we can do without, but you saw the very first couple of boards that basically said, 10 years from now, you can get rid of all of what you think is government, and you still have to

borrow money. You got rid of all of defense; you got rid of all the discretionary; and you still have to borrow money to be able to cover Medicare. The punch line there was it is the next year. That was all a 2033 number.

The next year, 2034, the Social Security trust fund is gone--23 percent cut. Is that going to be allowed to happen, or do we have to take it out of the general fund?

Next year, 2034, the Medicare trust fund is gone. The next year, the transportation highway trust fund is gone.

The second half of this was hope. I know some of this stuff is hard to process. It is hard sometimes to think, ``Oh, I am going to disrupt. I am going to functionally legalize disruption.''

I have used this before, but it is the easiest. How many of you went to Blockbuster Video last week? Come on, work with me here. How many of you went and got that little silver disk last weekend? Of course not. ``Schweikert, that is absurd.''

The fact of the matter is that technology came along. We started streaming. Now, you have how many choices? You sit there saying you have too many choices, that you can't make up my mind, instead of standing in line for the disk that wasn't there that you really wanted that you promised your family, so you come home with some crappy one, and they are all mad at you. That is not that long ago.

We have these types of disruptions in our society all the time. Stop being afraid of it.

Congress, damn it, stop acting like a protection racket where you protect incumbency--not incumbent elected, incumbent bureaucracies, incumbent business models.

Design the tax code. Design the regulatory code. If the Democrats continue insisting that they subsidize everything, fine. Design it so there is competition, not the chosen favorites that they want to hand a grant out to. That competition, I think, actually becomes the disruption that saves us.

If you have a better idea, one that makes Americans healthier, more prosperous, fixes your future retirement, fixes my little kid's future, I want to hear it. Right now, this is some of the best I have, and we have a whole portfolio of these things.

I beg of this place, please buy a calculator. Work through the math. Understand how devastating it is. Then, just try to think of a future. Try to think of a future that actually is incredibly hopeful, incredibly optimistic.

You can't have the sort of dystopian State of the Union speech we had, if you actually break it down, where they know these programs are going off the cliff, and the left cares so much more about winning the next election, they are not telling the truth to their own voters, let alone the people who are really dependent.

It is a level of cruelty. It is a cruelty that might work through the next election, but it is coming. The math always wins.

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 7 o'clock and 51 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, March 1, 2023, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, when I first got here, there was sort of a joke that there were two ways to get in trouble around here. One was to say something stupid, and one was to tell everyone the truth they don't want to hear. I am going to see if I can get myself in trouble tonight.

I have come behind this microphone repeatedly over the last few years trying to do the math. If you are one of the people around this campus, because we are probably right now on a thousand televisions around this campus, and you care about the math, please give me a little bit of your time.

I have never done a set of presentations that has made my stomach turn more than this. We have spent the last couple of weeks with my Joint Economic Committee economists. I am blessed to be on the Ways and Means Committee. I chair the Oversight Subcommittee. I also am the senior Republican on the Joint Economic Committee, meaning I have some freaky smart people who work for me, and we have been trying to figure out what the math looks like for this Nation a decade from now.

Remember, we have lots of people who ran this last election cycle saying we are going to balance the budget in 10 years. Wonderful. Do you understand the math?

We sat down and broke apart every document we could find, every projection from CBO, and I care a lot about this. I accept that I am an older dad. My wife and I spent years trying to adopt. We were able to adopt an amazing little girl. She is 7, and we are in the process of finishing up adopting her brother, who is 7 months old.

So, my wife and I are 60 years old, and we have a 7-month-old. We are pathologically optimistic about this country, but please look at the math I am about to show you and then tell me what you are willing to advocate to save my little boy's and my daughter's future, your kids' future, your own retirement.

CBO baseline, Congressional Budget Office baseline, if we just keep doing what we are doing and there is no recession, no war, no more pandemic, in 2034, that is 10 budget cycles from right now, the baseline number is we will be borrowing $2.6 trillion that single year. It gets worse from there because the next year, the Social Security trust fund is gone.

We always made the assumption that when it blows up, you are not going to double senior poverty in this country. This is not a non sequitur. I was just so angry at the President's speech last night on the comments about promising him we are not going to cut Social Security or Medicare. We are not going to cut Social Security and Medicare, but are you promising you are going to work with us to save it?

Where was the discussion saying all the data says that, in 10 years, the trust fund is gone, and there is a 23 percent cut out there? I am going to show you at the end of this slide deck that the pandering from my brothers and sisters on the left just raises the taxes. It doesn't fix the problem. It doesn't even come close.

Instead of having a moral discussion from this podium over here saying we are going to not let doubling of senior poverty happen in this country, that we are going to work together--it was used for a campaign kickoff.

This number here is the baseline. For all of us running around saying we are going to balance it in 10 years, great. You have a structural $2.6 trillion in 2034. That is 10 budget years from now. Where are you going to get it?

Let's walk through the math even more. To understand where we are at in the fragility, let's say, over the next 10 years, there is 1 percent more interest on what CBO was projecting last year. What would 1 percent do to us? It basically means on that 2034, that 10-year budget from now, you are sitting at a $3.1 trillion structural deficit. That is every year. That is the baseline deficit with just 1 point change in interest rates.

You are going to balance in 10 years. I want to balance in 10 years. Find me $3.1 trillion that will be gone in 10 years. Do you understand how bad the math is?

We are going to talk about the shiny objects around here. There is a balloon. The balloon is a problem. There is this; it is a problem.

This is what will take down the Republic, and it is hard to talk about. It is math, and I don't know how to make math necessarily interesting, but it always wins.

We produced this chart, and I know this one is geeky. We basically took all the CBO projections and partially stole this from others. Our economic team can't take all the credit for it.

What it is basically telling you is that most of the projections, almost all the projections, from CBO have been far too optimistic. When I am showing you numbers, I am basing them on the CBO numbers, and by the way, historically, they have been far too optimistic.

Do you get the punch line?

Now, the only other caveat I need to give you on the math is, because it is going to take 10 days or so to calculate it, we haven't done the interest adjustment. So I am going to show you in some of these what happens if we get rid of this portion of discretionary, get rid of all the discretionary, get rid of defense, and did this, you have interest savings. I have not done that calculation yet.

There is a whole other concept I talked about here that if we could convince the debt markets here and around the world that buy all this U.S. sovereign debt that we might get lower interest rates because they realize we are starting to be serious about what the future looks like and that we are really serious that we are going to have the capacity to manage our future debt and that we are going to suppress it and over time the growth.

Remember, there are two sides to this ledger. We need to find a way to grow like crazy, and we are going to have to discuss things that are uncomfortable. We are going to have to discuss how to fix the immigration system, how to fix the cost of healthcare, how to do a tax system that is all about growth, a trade system that is about growth, and blowing up the bureaucracy in this country using technology. Much of the regulatory state could be done through technology instead of armies of unionized employees. But we need to almost just be fixated on economic growth. Then we have to tell the truth about our demographics and what drives this debt.

So, Mr. Speaker, remember my two things, my two caveats here. It is still going to take me a couple of weeks to do all the interest calculations, but these numbers are pretty darn accurate.

So let's sort of walk through it. Let's do some of the budget discussions we are all having.

What would happen if I came to you tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, and said: Hey, right now we are doing the 2024 budget, but we adopted the 2021 baseline. So this means for all discretionary spending, the FBI, the Park Service, and the Defense Department--everything that is government, other than the earned entitlements, the entitlements, and the mandatory spending--we adopt a 2021 baseline, and we go from there and held constant--constant--the 2021 level.

That basically means no inflation.

So, Mr. Speaker, if you had two to three percent inflation, then at the end of a decade the purchasing power of that is 25, 28, 30 percent less.

But if you held a constant, Mr. Speaker, there is no growth, you adopt a 2021 budget in this 2024 we are building on right now and saying that we are holding the discretionary, no defense increased spending, nothing, in 10 budget years you still have $1.9 trillion of borrowing.

How many Members understand how ugly this is?

Mr. Speaker, I will get people who will start emailing, texting me, and calling into our website: I don't like what he says.

It is math. If you don't believe me, then go online. All of the congressional

CBO reports are there, the OMB reports are there, and the Social Security actuarial report is there. That one is a little harder to read, but the CBO just did one a few days ago that is a really easy read.

But, Mr. Speaker, you don't get to just look at the executive summary. You have to read the whole damn thing, not just the executive summary. Take out your highlighter, go through it, and then tell me what your ideas are.

I came here from the last couple of weeks and said: Let's walk through some of the suggestions.

Hey, we will get rid of all foreign aid.

This coming year it takes care of a couple of weeks of borrowing.

Get rid of congressional salaries.

That took care of 28 minutes of borrowing for a whole year.

The numbers actually get worse.

So let's have a little fun here. So let's say that instead of using the 2021 baseline budget for discretionary--that is defense and that is everything that is not a mandatory spend--so we are only going to use 2019, and we are not going to let it grow a dime. So every year due to inflation that purchasing power goes down. But we are not going to do it. We are going to hold defense, so the purchasing power of defense a decade from now is 28 to 30 percent less because of inflation.

Mr. Speaker, you still have a $1.6 trillion borrow 10 years from now.

How many Members are ready to vote for that because you promised, oh, we are going to balance in 10 years?

But it is the math. I am going to say it over and over, Mr. Speaker. Unless you have a revolution in the costs of healthcare, we won't do it by cutting. We do it by cures, by innovation, and by competition. We have got to have a revolution, and then we will have that type of competition and disruption all through government. Unless there is a revolution in growth, then this is our future. This is my children's future.

So let's go to the flip side.

How bad is the number really?

So 10 budget years from now, which is 2034, no discretionary. No discretionary spending on defense. We basically say, hey, we trust everyone. We cuddle everyone in the world. We are all buddies.

Mr. Speaker, we just wiped out the Defense Department. We still have almost $1 trillion of borrowing in the 2034 budget.

So let's do the opposite. If you actually look at the numbers where you had no discretionary at all, Mr. Speaker, no discretionary, government as you know it is gone. There is no defense, so all the constitutional obligations we have to provide for are just gone. We walk away from the Constitution.

Now, my caveat again is that we still haven't done the interest savings calculation on the savings and would the bond markets treat us more kindly because we are taking debt more seriously because they will know we will have plenty of money to pay our obligations, but if you just do the straight-line number a decade from now you are still borrowing $300 billion.

That is how big the mandatory spending is.

Understand that most of the debt, three-quarters of it, comes from the growth in Medicare.

We had President Biden in that podium last night, did he talk about the morality of us keeping our promises and the fact we are going to have to work together and do really hard things to make this economy grow and to actually add competitions in these things so we crash the price because we are going to keep our promises?

Instead, it almost sounded like pandering for the next election.

Does this place have a soul?

You start to look at the reality of different scenarios. So, once again, Mr. Speaker, what we just did, CBO baseline, $2.6 trillion of borrowing in 10 years. If we have discretionary, we used the 2019 discretionary and just held it. No growth. No growth. You are still borrowing $1.6 trillion in 10 years.

If you come and say, oh, let's use the 2021 budget, and we will just take that discretionary budget on defense and everything else and we freeze it, then we are still borrowing $1.9 trillion in 10 years.

How about we do this: there is no defense. We are still borrowing 0.9, so almost $1 trillion.

What if we had no defense so we do this and say, we will pay for defense, but we will get rid of all of the rest of government? Then we are still borrowing $1.4 trillion in 10 years.

Mr. Speaker, if you get rid of all discretionary, with my caveat we haven't done the interest calculations, all the interest savings calculations, but if you do it in a straight line, we are still borrowing $300 billion.

I have come here dozens and dozens of different times and have shown the little pie charts saying: Understand that 71 percent of all spending was mandatory, and much of these are earned benefits, da, da, da, da, and look at the shrinking part that is discretionary.

Maybe doing it in reverse is how people will understand.

If you are heading toward retirement, Mr. Speaker, do you understand what this means to you?

If you are crazy like I am, Mr. Speaker--and I have a 7-month-old-- this is the moral question of our time.

Instead, how many speeches were given behind any of these microphones today giving a damn about the country's future?

Yes, but we were looking for a good political edge that will look good on my next campaign thing.

To the people who keep trolling our attempts to find a way to save the Social Security Trust Fund, so we don't have Grandma having to have a 23 percent cut in 10 years, I have one that keeps--maybe it is a bot--sending in things to our office saying: Just increase the taxes.

So take all income and make it subject to the Social Security tax.

Okay, fine. Guess what, Mr. Speaker?

We found it in the Social Security actuarial report. Go read the damn thing. If we take every dime of income in the country and do the original Social Security formula, so I am taking 90 percent of all income--and what is it? Forgive me. I am going to get this wrong. Last year it was $142,000 was subject to the Social Security 12.4 percent, and I know that is going up and it is taking a good pop because of inflation. But if we basically take every dime--every dime--of earnings, if you make $1 million a year, every dime of your earnings is subject to the 12.4 percent Social Security tax, then I only cover 31 percent of the shortfall.

For my brothers and sisters on the left, read the actuarial reports, not the political highlight talking points. If we are going to save it, then you have to actually buy a calculator, put batteries in it, and start sitting down with people like me who are passionate about protecting seniors. We are going to protect our promise, but I can't do it without you.

I have a divided government here. I have a President who got up there and said things that were mathematically absurd.

The family motto is: The Math Will Always Win.

And it always does.

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

Mr. Speaker, I have done this chart. There is an update on this chart coming in a couple of weeks, and I am told it is going to look substantially uglier. But this is the reality.

Remember, this chart was built 2 years ago. Every dime of the $114 trillion of borrowing in today's dollars that we expect to have 30 years from now, 75 percent of it is functionally Medicare, 25 percent is if we actually reach into the general fund and backfill the collapse of the Social Security Trust Fund which happens in 10 years, oh, and the rest of the budget is actually calculated to be about $1.9 positive.

We got old. I am a baby boomer. I am a crazy baby boomer. I have a 7- month-old. He is the greatest little boy you ever met, Mr. Speaker. I wanted to bring a big picture of him. He is so cute. I will do whatever is necessary to protect my kids.

This is the truth: unless this is part of every conversation around here we are not telling the truth because this is going to drive every discussion on policy.

I want to spend more on defense.

Have you figured out this?

I want to spend more on the environment.

Have you figured out this?

I want to help other countries.

Have you figured out this?

Mr. Speaker, unless you are willing to work on the reality of here is what is about to happen to us because these are our demographics, are you going to adopt policies from immigration to the Tax Code to technology, everything that grows like crazy in this Nation and then are you going to take on the cartels that cost us so much money?

Are you going to actually build a world where we crash the price of healthcare because we use technology and we cured diseases?

Some of that maybe you tell him that we don't have a choice.

For everyone else who says: I just want my money back, if you are someone out there who will say to Social Security and Medicare: Just give me my money back, then we will take that deal in a second.

Now, people forget Social Security is progressive. If you are a lower-income worker and you work your 40 quarters, then you get actually quite a spiff on the taxes you paid.

If you are a higher-income worker on Social Security and you had your 40 quarters, then you actually get less than what you actually paid in.

If you do the mean of the average couple on Social Security, you will have paid in about $625,000 in taxes over your 40 quarters, and you are going to get back $698,000.

Mr. Speaker, you would have made a hell of a lot more money if you had been allowed to take a portion of that and put it in the markets. President Bush tried doing that. He got the crap kicked out of him by the left.

So fine. You are poorer today, but for the average American you get your money back. You get a little spiff on Social Security.

The primary driver of those debt numbers is this right here. That average couple would have put $161,000 over that lifetime of work into Medicare.

Understand, the Medicare taxes you pay, Mr. Speaker, the Medicare Trust Fund is the part A. Three-quarters of Medicare actually comes right out of the general fund. We expect that number to go up fairly dramatically in the next set of calculations. It is this gap right here that is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt.

Mr. Speaker, at some point here we find out that just telling the truth actually gets you in trouble because I can tell you, my brothers and sisters here are really smart. They are truly experts in different things. And I swear they run away from me in the hallway when they see me carrying my charts saying, David, I don't want to know, because if I tell my constituents that, then they get mad at me for telling them the truth.

Every day we wait, these numbers get worse; and yet, at the State of the Union they were saying, oh, everything is fine, we are doing great. At one level, that is immoral because this is coming. Remember, 10 years from now is not long. These are lifetime charts. It is fixable.

For people to say, well, just get rid of all that other stuff of mandatory spending except for my earned benefits. Okay, maybe we should. But the chart, this is Social Security, this is the other mandatory, this is mostly healthcare, parts of this is actually Medicaid.

You start looking at, this is nutrition support, EITC, Social Security supplemental income, but you start to see everything else that is in mandatory is pretty darn small. Now, it doesn't mean some of these shouldn't be looked at and reformed or be put back on budget, but you see, it is these two programs. It is Social Security and healthcare that are almost everything.

I am absolutely committed. I am going to keep my promises. I am going to have this country keep its promises; but the only way we will do that is this body, this campus, every smart staffer around here, every lobbyist who walks in our doors who has a soul, bathe in the math. Let's get creative, let's promote economic growth in every lever we can. Let's legalize technology, let's legalize disruption and disrupt the price of delivering healthcare. It can be done.

Dear God, I have a 7-month-old. Doesn't he deserve a future?

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

Mr. Speaker, I hope that my friend from Georgia is enjoying the experience. In the old days when you were bad, we used to put you in the chair to have to cover Special Orders.

Would you believe I had to cover a lot of Special Orders as a freshman?

We are going to spend a couple of minutes tonight doing all sorts of things, Mr. Speaker, but one of the first things I want to walk through is: How many understand we are all poorer today than we were just a couple of years ago?

We have to stop this White House, my brothers and sisters on the left, and even others, talking about how wonderful the economy is and how well things are going. The fact of the matter is that for the vast majority of the population, you are poorer today than you were in 2019, except for a little bit of a quirk for some population in L.A.

To give you a sense, Jason Furman--you know that rightwing economist. That was sarcasm. Real wages are lower today than they were in December 2019 for every industry except retail trade and some leisure and hospitality. That is Jason Furman putting it out on social media because we have some updates today. This is off the Bloomberg Terminal from about 20 minutes ago.

One of the reasons I am also here is I represent Scottsdale-Phoenix, one of the greatest spots on Earth, particularly during the winter. Please come visit us.

My folks in the Scottsdale-Phoenix area, if you look at the index that has come out from BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, their wages, they are 4.5 percent poorer today than they were just 1 year ago.

Don't tell me things are wonderful if you are a family struggling just to figure out how you cover your gas and groceries.

``Well, David, gas is down.'' The data is the data.

If you have had this type of wage growth but inflation in your area is dramatically higher than that, that gap is cruelty. That gap means you are poorer. That gap means your savings for your retirement is harder. That gap means taking care of your kids is more difficult.

When you go to the grocery store and are just trying to buy stuff for your family, somehow you seem to have a lot more--what is that old saying?--month than you do paycheck.

I am sure I just screwed up the colloquialism, but you know what I am saying, Mr. Speaker. This is our brothers and sisters out there.

Please, will this body start to give a damn about people trying to survive?

We chase shiny objects here all the time that get us on television and that make us look popular, or we can look outraged.

These are families in our neighborhood. I accept it is pages of math, but behind this math are people who are out there trying to survive.

Mr. Speaker, have you gone out and tried to buy eggs lately? I accept that is an outlier. But for the majority of our brothers and sisters in this country, you are poorer today than you were at the end of 2019, and in this, you are poorer today than you were 1 year ago.

I say to my brothers and sisters on the left that we have gone through this multiple times. We know you are not going to take responsibility, step up, and accept the responsibility for the crazy spending you pumped into the economy. Then, you created incentives not to participate in the labor force, detaching work from the morality of being there, and just also the good economics. Then, we wake up and people are poorer. Then you look at us saying: Well, we need to subsidize more.

We are looking at data on the Joint Economic Committee and Ways and Means Committee that some of this will cascade through us as a society for decades.

Mr. Speaker, we all grew up understanding the concept of the elegance of compounding interest. I get a little bit today, but then I build on that and build on that. It is the same thing in your life. You build a skill, you get paid a little bit more, and then you build a skill.

What happens when you basically create a barrier to your participation in the labor market? You have lost that compounding of life. Now, we are seeing in some of the economic literature that our brothers and sisters are going to be poorer for the rest of their lives because of economic policies that set off inflation and then crushed other things such as productivity.

I am going to get to productivity in a moment.

This chart is very recent. We were just looking at some of the cost- of-living indexes, and you do this whole deflator calculation. I am trying harder to make the charts readable. Apparently, one of the complaints I get on YouTube all the time is: ``Schweikert, I can't read your charts.'' I am trying.

Here is 2019. We were hitting this amazing spike in basically your wealth. The pandemic hit. This is where we spent a fortune subsidizing. This collapse here is your ability to buy things because your wages may have gone up, but they didn't go up as fast as inflation, meaning you are poorer. The dollars you have are less valuable.

Who is the beneficiary of this? Who benefited by you getting poorer? Here is the dirty little secret here in Washington, D.C. Borrowers. Borrowers benefit when your dollars become worth less.

Who is the biggest borrower? Seriously. Play with me for a moment. Who is the biggest borrower? Have you seen this thing called the debt clock? The United States Government is sitting around $31.5 trillion.

Here is the great scam, and you are all party to it: The dollars we are going to pay back the national debt are less valuable. We stripped it from you. We stripped it from your savings. We stripped it from things you are going to have to buy in the future. We devalued you and your life and your savings, and we are going to pay back the debt in deflated dollars. Biggest wealth transfer in human history.

How many people have come behind this microphone and at least attempted to apologize for what we did to working people in this country?

That is why you are going to see some crazy calculations come out over the next few months of debt to GDP. It is because we devalued the dollars we are going to pay back the debt.

Now, you and I are going to--it is a technical economic term--get screwed. I am sorry for the folks who have to keep track of what I say.

The reality of it is, as in interest rates now, we pay higher interest rates because we have devalued the U.S. dollar functionally through inflation. You are devaluing your savings.

As interest rates go up, we are now looking at some data that says in 25 years, if interest rates stay where functionally they are going right now, 100 percent of U.S. tax revenues go just to cover interest. There is no more military, no more Social Security, no more Medicare, there is nothing left because we are just covering interest. In 10 years, the United States functionally has a structural $2 trillion a year deficit.

When our brain trust comes in here and--sorry, I have got to stop being so mean. Let's back up a little.

When we come in here and we talk about our desires, we are going to balance the budget in 10 years, incredibly noble. Absolutely necessary. But $1 trillion of that shortfall is interest. We have got to pay our debts. We have got to pay the interest on our borrowing.

$1 trillion is mostly--it is a tiny bit of Medicaid, but mostly it is Medicare.

What are you going to do, not pay for medical expenses?

I am going to walk you through some solutions, and then I am going to spend the next few weeks coming behind this microphone every week we are here and trying to give solutions. There are solutions. I have got to get us all to think differently.

You need an economy that is growing at a breakneck speed. You have got to grow the size of the economy because that grows tax receipts, it grows participation in the economy, it grows Social Security. And then we need to change the single biggest component in debt--healthcare costs. That is the punch line I am going to show over and over and over and over and over.

The shortfall in Medicare is 75 percent of the next 30 years' shortfall. And it is $114 trillion. It is going to be reset. We are going to get new CBO numbers in a couple weeks, and I would bet you it is closer to $120 trillion, $130 trillion in today's valuation, so constant dollars. We are going to add 75 percent of that which is just the shortfall in Medicare.

The brain trust here keeps saying: Well, let's do ObamaCare. ObamaCare was a financing deal. It is to subsidize this group, make this group pay. We are sinners, too, on my side. Those of us on the conservative side, we tried coming up--now, it was a much more efficient and much better distribution, but it still was a financing solution: Make this side pay and this side will be subsidized. Medicare for All is just a financing bill. None of those things change what we pay. If we don't change the structural costs, the future is pretty dark.

So, look, you are poorer today than you were a year ago, even according to Jason Furman. You are poorer than you were 2 years ago, 3 years ago.

How do we fix it?

First, I am going to give you a little bit more of how deep the problem is. I would have done this chart differently, but we were doing this in a rush because we were trying to do updated numbers. Why this is important is productivity growth is crashing.

You all remember your high school economics class?

What are the two things that functionally are your paycheck? The rise in your paycheck is functionally two things: It is inflation--well, that doesn't get you anything. When you get a bigger paycheck for inflation, you are just trying to keep up. The second thing is productivity. You get paid more because you got better, faster, more efficient, more expert at what you do, or the capital equipment you are making something on, or you are using made you more productive.

We saw after the 2017 tax reform, and one of the dirty little secrets is much of that economic boom we got and those tax revenues that came with it was from expensing. It wasn't the individual tax cuts, though we loved that, but it was because businesses, organizations were incentivized to buy the best, fastest, most efficient piece of equipment because you needed to do that to be able to compete.

Expensing is a timing effect. This may be a little geeky, but let's say you go out and buy a piece of equipment, and you make widgets. Remember, we all talked about widgets. You get to depreciate it over 7 years. We changed the tax law so now you get to depreciate it this year. It is still depreciation, it is just a timing effect, whether you depreciate it over 7 years off your taxes or you take it off in this year. It is a timing effect on when we get the taxes.

The elegance of the expensing side was I bought the capital equipment, and I got more productive. Two years later, my competitors are doing the same thing. I need to buy the next piece of capital equipment. Now I need to buy the next piece of capital equipment. If you look at it on a horizon of time, it makes the entire economy, the entire society healthier, wealthier, more productive. By doing that, you actually get tax revenue growth.

Think of that, you get tax revenue growth over the horizon because you let businesses say, I made a capital investment to become more effective, more productive, and over the horizon we end up with a bigger economy, meaning we have more tax receipts.

Why wouldn't we stop the reductions that are happening right now in expensing?

Because when you look at this chart, you realize, we have got a productivity crisis. We have flatlined.

A few years ago, you know, we were running a point and a half productivity growth, meaning every year we basically got about 1.8 percent more productive than the year before. Then we hit the 1980s and through the mid-2000s, and we were less than 1 percent productivity growth. Real problem.

We are falling below 0.6 percent productivity growth since 2010. The only spike we had is that time after the December 2017 tax reform where suddenly, for that little time before COVID, we saw that investment in capital goods. If we could have just kept it going. But we went through the pandemic, and now this year there is no more 100 percent expensing. Now, I think you get to expense 80 percent, next year it is 60 percent. It goes down. We are going to lose that tool that incentivized that capital equipment.

Why that is important, I will do this in the coming weeks. The demographics of the United States is the primary driver of future debt.

Remember, I was talking healthcare?

It is also one of our greatest headwinds in productivity.

If we are getting older as a society, we have got to figure out how to encourage our older populations, would you be willing to stay in the labor force? What incentives can we do?

We have this freakish thing that I can't figure out, males under 35 aren't entering the labor force as they should, and we can see it in our productivity numbers. We have got to deal with the reality, and a lot of this makes people unhappy when I do these presentations, but it is the math.

So once again, let's go back to why this is important. This chart now is almost 2 years old. We are going to get an update in a couple weeks; and I promise you, it will be uglier. This is a combination of CBO numbers, and I think this one even--yeah, this one is CBO and I think it even had some OMB, and others on it. Punch line, we are functionally going to borrow $114 trillion from today through the next 30 years.

If you are a young person, we are about to destroy your economic future. Look at the gray hair. I have a 7-month-old boy we are adopting. When my 7-month-old boy is 25 years old, his tax rate will have to be double--double--what I pay, just to maintain baseline, and that is because of this.

Medicare has an $80.5 trillion deficit over the next 30 years, shortfall.

We do Social Security over here. Just assuming that 10 years from now, if anyone bothers to look at even the CBO update from just a few days ago, in 10 years, because they moved up the date because the COLA actually took away a year of actuarial life, you have got a 23 percent cut. If you read it, every year the cut gets a little bigger because the demographic mismatch because Social Security exists on today's receipts.

So is this place also ready to allow senior poverty to double in the country? That is what this is talking about.

But yet I was so angry last week when I came behind the microphone--I am trying not to curse here--because the left and the press were saying: Republicans are talking about cutting Social Security.

No. We are talking about trying to find some way to save it.

Do you understand? You can't pretend the math isn't there because the math will win.

Does anyone care? This is the math.

In 10 years, according to CBO from just a couple days ago, Grandma is going to take a 23 percent cut in her check, and year after year it is going to get bigger unless we do something big.

Now, you look at Social Security, up until last week I was the senior Republican over Social Security, so I am pretty good at the math. We have one actuarial dataset that if you do the 75-year life, which is how you actually look at Social Security, it is like $500 trillion short over the 75-year window. It is more than the wealth of the world.

Every day we don't do something here because it is politically distasteful because you are going to walk out the door and the press is going to run up to you and say, well, Democrats are saying a rumor that you Republicans intend to cut it.

We are trying to find a way to save it. You have weaponized it.

Then you want to know why this place runs away from the issue?

This is one of the things where if we don't hold hands and jump off the cliff together, you have just screwed over grandma and everyone else heading toward retirement.

These numbers aren't fake. This is your future.

Then I got up here last week. And I want to double-check; there was someone very smart. I do look at most of the comments. This one has had 300,000 views on YouTube since last week. Thank you for those who are insane enough to watch this because a year ago I would have like 12 people, and I couldn't even get my family to look at this stuff.

When we look at all--this is for the average, the couple that pays into Social Security, they will pay in over a lifetime--so let's just use, I think it is based on, the 40-quarter formula--about $625,000. You are going to get back about $698,000, and that is in constant dollars, so you get a little spiff.

You would make a hell of a lot more money if 20 or 30 years ago we had allowed workers to take a little sliver of their Social Security and put it in the market, you would have been much wealthier, but that became a political war. Remember, AARP and the Democrats beat the crap out of President Bush for even talking about it.

The question we had on YouTube was, is this both sides? Is this the employer contribution and the worker's contribution?

Yes, it is both sides. When we look at these numbers it is the total in. Social Security, you get back most of your money.

The folks on there who say, well, for Social Security and Medicare, just give me back my money, and I will be happy, we would take that deal as a government in a moment. We will give you back every dime if you promise never to take another dime of Social Security and Medicare.

Here is the punch line: On Medicare, remember three-quarters of Medicare comes out of the general fund. The tax portion of your FICA is just the little portion we call Medicare part A. It is hospital and some doctor there.

So the average couple will only pay about $161,000 in a lifetime. That is someone who is retiring right now; $161,000 in Medicare taxes, and they are going to take out 522. See the 1-to-5 ratio? This right here is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt over the next 30 years. It is healthcare costs.

How many Members of Congress are stupid enough to get behind this microphone and tell the truth? But it is the truth. It is the math. And you can't pretend.

And you read the comments and you want to just reach out and say, I know the political classes lied to you for years but you have got to stop living in the lunacy world.

Well, get rid of salaries for Members of Congress.

Okay. It pays for 28 minutes of an entire years' worth of borrowing.

What would you like to do with the rest of the year?

Well, let's get rid of foreign aid.

Okay. You just got rid of a couple weeks of borrowing for an entire year.

People don't see the scales. It is hard to do 14 zeros in your head, but we have been trying to put this together, even all sorts of the Democrat proposals.

Well, go to a 70 percent tax rate. Great, we took care of another 6 weeks of borrowing.

The political class has been unwilling to tell the truth. Republicans get up: Oh, well, we will get rid of waste and fraud and foreign aid.

The Democrats: Well, rich people don't pay enough taxes.

You lay them all out, you don't get near the borrowing. And understand, the borrowing doubles in 10 years because of the structural deficit driven mostly by what I was showing there. And you start to look at the math. This is all the entitlements. Yes, there is other crap that are mandatory spending. These are earned entitlements. You earned it. You worked a certain amount of quarters. You hit a certain age.

You see the chart. It is everything. These over here, this is Federal retirement. This is veterans benefits. Those are also earned.

We call them mandatory because it is a fixed formula but you can't pretend this isn't real. What scares me also on this--I know this chart is almost unreadable--we mapped out the Congressional Budget Office's modeling. And it would just show you they are almost overly optimistic all the time, that the numbers historically come in much worse than the models we get, because it is hard to predict the next pandemic, the next recession, the next war. So be careful, because often the Congressional budget numbers we get, are the best-case scenario.

Now, I am just going to do this really quickly. If I came to you right now and said, okay, healthcare is the vast majority of all future debt. Change the price of healthcare. Well, the moral thing is legalize technology, legalize the type of technology where you can take care of yourself, but it also cures.

There are amazingly wonderful things happening. And I am going to do more of this over the coming weeks. The optimism that, if we would actually understand, instead of just moving the pieces around on the table, Oh, we will cut this but we will shift it to the State. We will cut this, and we will shift this to the individual. That is not a cut. The spending stays the same as the size of the economy.

There is a reason you didn't go to Blockbuster Video last weekend. There was a technology revolution. You no longer get that silver disk. You hit a button at home.

We are on the edge right now of curing stunning numbers of cancers. What would happen in healthcare when you start to see that, when you actually start to see ideas like this?

Not too far from here, I think it is 60, 70 miles, there is a co-op going up here in Virginia that is going to make eight types of off- patent insulin, and they are going to do it less than the subsidized price than the Democrats passed last year. As a matter of fact, what the Democrats did almost screwed up the co-op's model.

How do we encourage more competition? If you want to crash the price of pharmaceuticals, get everyone and their cousin making pharmaceuticals.

Remember, the vast majority of drugs you and I consume of pharmaceuticals are off-patent. Humira is off-patent; the most expensive drug in our society. We are waiting for that competition to come in to start to crash that price.

The other things that are happening around us, when we start to see early Phase 1's, that there are paths that are having remarkable opportunities to cure our brothers and sisters. I have come here and done entire presentations on the stem cell CRISPR treatment for diabetes. I am going to end on this:

Diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spending. It is 31 percent of all Medicare spending.

I know it is hard. I know it means changing. The six people cured right now are on type 1. Type 2 is difficult. It has some real societal implications and would be the most moral, compassionate thing we could do as brothers and sisters here, to put the resources in. And maybe a decade from now you could crash the deficit by curing our brothers and sisters and changing their lives.

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

Mr. Speaker pro-tem, we are going to do a couple things tonight, but first, just every once in a while, when we get behind these mics, and you have got to get something sort of off your chest because it really annoys you.

If I see one more headline from the scribes who are basically the Democrat propagandas--and I am sorry to be that mean. I have tried to treat the press respectfully over these years, but, you know, the Republicans want to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Okay. Up until a few hours ago, I was the senior Republican over Social Security in Ways and Means Committee. No one has asked me.

I talk about Social Security every single day when I am here. I have never met a Republican Member ever, ever, talk about cutting Social Security.

So yesterday, I grabbed one of the reporters out here who had it in their story but had no names. I walked up and said, okay, tell me who this is because I really need to talk to them.

I can't tell you. It is a reporter thing. I can't explain that to you. No, no. You need to tell me who is telling you to write stories that the Republicans intend to cut Social Security.

I am the ranking Republican--I was up until a few hours ago--over Social Security. I have spent the last year of my life working on it. No, no. I can't tell you who.

If you are going to make crap up, stop doing it in a way that you hurt people.

You know, for my Democrat colleagues, I know power. I know you desperately want to be back in charge, but the fact of the matter is, the math is the math.

You all saw the CBO numbers from a couple days ago. Social Security runs out of money in 10 years.

Do you care?

The fact that CBO is saying there is going to be a 23 percent cut in Social Security recipients' checks in 10 years, we will double senior poverty. Do you care, or is the politics of weaponizing it more important than saving retirement security? This is perverse.

This is called reporting around here? If you want to weaponize something, weaponize something that doesn't crush people.

I feel better getting that off my chest.

All right. I want to do a little something I consider a bit amusing and maybe a little sadistic.

A week ago or so when we were here, I did a presentation on structural deficit. I was trying to talk to the new Members of Congress, you know, my friend from Oklahoma, others. What is actually going on? Where does the debt come from?

The fact that 10 years from now, you have almost a $2 trillion structural deficit. That $2 trillion is functionally interest, a trillion bucks, and the growth in Medicare and a little bit of Medicaid.

I did something I almost never do. I actually read the comments. Look, I am appreciative. Almost 600-some-thousand people watched the YouTube video.

You get these comments like, well, cut foreign aid. That will balance the budget. Just don't pay Members of Congress and Senate, and that will balance the budget.

So we had a conversation in our office. How do I explain the scale?

Look, if you are not used to 12 zeros, or in this case, the current deficit, 14--if we are at 31 trillion, that is 14 zeros.

If you are not comfortable with the math, maybe I can find an easy way to discuss this. If this comes across a bit sarcastic, I mean it to.

So we actually built a little calendar, and we thought this would be sort of fun because we have too many people out there--they hear the political class get behind the microphone and say, we have a spending problem.

Then they come up with stupid--excuse me--ideas that really don't save us. So let's actually walk through these.

Let's start with the one I consider most amusing. A number of the comments were, just don't pay Members of Congress and the Senate. Okay. Great.

So this is a calendar of the year; 12 months, 365 days. If I said this is just the borrowing, so this is a calendar every day we borrow the equal amount, and we are going to base it on last year's borrowing, so it is a real number.

If you didn't pay any Member of Congress--and maybe we shouldn't get paid for the quality of our work; I am not going to argue about that-- how much of the debt deficit would it take care of?

Well, it turns out it is this little, tiny sliver down here. We calculate it is about 28 minutes for an entire year. That is all. You got a whole 28 minutes.

What would you like to do with the other 365 days, you know, 364 days, 23 hours or 23 and a half hours? You get the point.

I know it may make you feel better. I lashed out. I was mad. But you have a country that structurally is going to be buried in a scale of debt where you are starting to flirt with a debt crisis and a failed bond option in a decade or so. This is not a game. This level of debt takes down a republic.

So let's do a couple of the others here just for the fun of it. I will explain with these colors.

So whatever color that is--I guess that is like a turquoise--foreign aid. Every dime of foreign aid, if you removed it, hey, functionally, you just got rid of maybe 17 days, and we threw everything into it.

So you got rid of 17 days of borrowing. What would you like to do with the rest of the year? Well, if we got rid of the 2017 tax reform and played the fake scoring that every dime would come in, and you didn't lose the growth effects that we got from the tax reform and all those other things, you basically get 2 weeks of borrowing. Okay. Well, this obviously isn't working.

So if we went to a marginal 50 percent tax rate, a 50 percent tax rate, which some of the Democrats have actually proposed, you basically take care of 6 weeks of borrowing. Now, you slow down the economy, but let's just pretend the money keeps coming in.

You walk through, hey, how about a 35 percent marginal tax rate on corporations? Well, you got rid of maybe--you maybe could get another month and a half of borrowing, just borrowing coverage. That is assuming that you get all the revenues in, and you haven't slowed down the economy, slowed down GDP, which is pretend.

Okay. Let's do one of my others. You know, you take out itemized deductions. Okay. You got rid of a week.

To understand almost all the ideas that are out there, really, on the scale of it, if you threw them all in, you can't even get rid of half the year's borrowing, and that is for last year.

Understand, this year, we are going to probably borrow a little less than a trillion dollars. In 10 years, we have doubled it.

I beg of our brothers and sisters here. If the Democrats don't want to help, don't want to play, don't want to tell truth about the math-- and the math will always win--I beg my Republican brothers and sisters: Let's be the truth tellers.

Yes, there is waste and fraud. As of a couple hours ago, I just became the chairman of the Oversight Committee in Ways and Means, and there is waste and fraud we are going to grind into.

There is a chance unemployment fraud and some of the pandemic fraud may be the largest fraud in human history. We are going to find out what happened.

But I need you to think of our world and our government. We functionally have become an insurance company with an Army.

So I want to walk through a couple of the other comments you get just so I can get them off my chest.

When you look around the House here, you notice there are no people here. These are what we call the special orders. It is a chance for Members to come to the mic and walk through something, tell a story.

We are on probably a thousand televisions around Capitol Hill. So sometimes when I do this, I am not actually talking to my constituents at home in Arizona.

I am actually talking to the staff. I am talking to the new Members of Congress to help them understand here are the numbers I see.

I am the senior Republican in the House on something called the Joint Economic Committee, so I have a handful of economists who are just freaky smart who are in my office pounding information into my head every single day.

I know it is not the shiny objects. We want to talk about a laptop with secret documents, and a Chinese spy and this and that. Those are shiny objects that you can see on cable television tonight. I will argue, these numbers are what take out the Republic.

So let's actually go over some of the other comments I get over and over and over, particularly when I have talked about Social Security; and this is back to the cruelty the Democrats and the press have been doing this last 2 weeks, trying to light people's hair on fire with basically, what's the proper term, oh, yeah, lies.

For the average American who is going into Social Security today-- remember, I keep seeing these comments: If I could just get all my money back. Okay. If you are willing to make a deal with the Republic saying if I gave you back all your money on Social Security and Medicare, would you sign up for that deal? Because we would take it in a moment because when you see what you get back, you realize this is actually where much of the structural deficit comes from.

When people say, well, the money--there is no lock box. You don't want it in a lock box. You want it in T bills so you get interest back.

Social Security for years ran a surplus. That was building the trust fund because we had this demographic bubble coming called baby boomers. We saved and saved and saved.

Then, a couple of years ago, we started having more people move into retirement than functionally what they were paying, workers were paying. So every month, when the check goes out, you take the FICA income that is associated with the old-age, survivor's system, the Social Security system, send that out. But we needed a little bit more, so Social Security would take its Treasury bill, present it to the Treasury; Treasury would give them cash plus some interest.

For many years the interest rate was actually a spiff over--higher what you would get on the market T bill. The money wasn't stolen. It was put into T bills, just like you might do with your extra savings. Stop making stuff up.

So the average American, the typical retiring couple--let's do it that way because it is easier math, will receive--well, let's not do the Medicare number. Let's first do the Social Security.

That couple, the average, over a lifetime of work--so this is 35-plus quarters, sometimes 40 quarters--will put in $625,000 in FICA on the Social Security portion of that tax, and they are going to get back a little under $700,000. So they make a little bit of money.

Now the reality, if you had put that money in your IRA or something like that, it would have been multiples of this.

If you remember, George Bush tried to have the conversation of taking particularly young people, allowing them to take a sliver and put it in private accounts because it would have a much higher rate of return, and the Democrats and the unions went berserk on that. But now we can look back 25, 30 years and it would have been a hell of a lot better today for Americans if we had done it. But the politics of it is the control freaks wanting control of your money.

This in inflation-adjusted dollars, so it is like for like. You get your money back, plus a small spiff on Social Security. You could have had a lot more if you put it in markets and in other places, but you get your money back, inflation adjusted. Okay.

That is not what drives the debt. Our problem with Social Security is our number of workers. It is Medicare, and this is hard to talk about, but math is math.

I know many people will come up to me, Schweikert you can't talk about that. You are going to get unelected.

I am in one of the most competitive districts in America, but at least I am in one of the best-educated, smarter districts in America, and understand whether you like me or not, I am telling you the truth on the math.

Here is the substantial portion that drives about three-quarters of all U.S. sovereign debt. The average couple, in their lifetime of working, will put in $161,000 into Medicare.

Remember, the Medicare tax you pay as part of your FICA, your payroll tax, is just for the part A, the hospital portion. The rest of the healthcare spending you get when you become 65 and are on Medicare comes out of the general fund.

The average taxpaying couple put in that $161,000, and they are going to get back $522,000. This number is based on sort of before the inflation cycle.

We are working on some math but I wasn't able to vet it; that the amount of money we expect in medical costs for our brothers and sisters on Medicare actually has gone up rather substantially which, that means when you say 161, 500 plus, that gap, now multiply that toward how many; 70 million Americans 65 and up, and the number grows with baby boomers because, what, just the baby boom population is what, 76 million?

You see the driver of U.S. sovereign debt. The solution is not cutting. The solution is having a revolution of the cost.

ObamaCare was a financing bill. It is who had to pay and who got subsidized. Actually, it was mostly about subsidizing. The Republican alternative actually spread out the actual numbers so you got some efficiency but it was still about who had to pay and who got subsidized.

Medicare for all is all about subsidies. But those are financing bills. They don't touch the problem.

The real problem is the cost of delivering healthcare services.

For people who might say, well, he is not giving us a solution; go look at the probably 70 hours I have over the last few years on the floor here. Half those were bringing solutions. Most of my solutions are uncomfortable because they require disruption. It is technology. It is a thing you can blow into that knows you have the flu and allowing it to prescribe. Taking on the big things, curing diseases.

It turns out cures are remarkable at crashing the price of healthcare and just the basic morality of it. If diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spending, and there is a chance out there that there is being some success in curing Type 1 with a CRISPR-altered stem cell treatment, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but the literature right now says there are about six people who have been cured of Type 1. We need to know this. We need to find out over the next decade could it be for Type 2.

What do we do on the farm bill, on nutrition support and everything else. Is that a possibility? Because if you could disrupt that cost--do you realize if you could disrupt half, just half of the diabetics' cost in this country, you would actually wipe out the substantial portion of the next 30 years debt.

These are moral, but they are also financial ideas, and we run away from them. It is almost easier for Members of Congress to talk about cuts than it is competition to disrupt business models.

So understand, the next time you have someone saying well, if I could just get all my money I paid back in FICA taxes, we will make that deal, because you are getting--that couple is getting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they put in.

It is the math. Whether you feel that way or not, it is the math, and that is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt.

Now, we made this deal. This is a societal contract. People worked their hearts out. They paid into FICA. We made a deal as a society.

Our job, as the brain trust here, as Members of Congress, we have got to figure out how to make this work.

You start to look at how fast these numbers are eroding. I have already said this a couple of times; maybe seeing it on a board makes it easier; and I am trying--one of the criticisms was too many of my boards had too many numbers on them. I am trying to make them easier to read. Let me know if I am succeeding, but I am trying.

This is a really simple chart. It basically says, here is where we are today. In a decade, structurally, just functionally, Medicare and Medicaid, and then if I add in interest, then there is another, functionally, just my cost there I am heading toward a trillion-plus dollars just from my Medicare.

Medicaid adds another quarter trillion dollars of borrowing; and then somewhere in there I have almost $1 trillion of interest. That is what I look like a decade from now.

So people run around here and say, I am going to cut and give you a 10-year balanced budget. Okay. Tell me what part of paying our bonds you are going to cut. That is $1 trillion of the deficit 10 years from now. You have got to do that.

All the people--you are going to default if you don't raise the debt ceiling. No, you are not, and I will do another presentation in the coming weeks on, stop making crap up.

The United States has plenty of cash flow to cover our sovereign debts and the majority of our earned entitlements. It is a lot of the discretionary we don't have enough cash for.

These are big, complicated, and then to have, as I started with, the trite Democrats and wanting an edge in the press, making it really hard to do something that has got to happen bipartisan.

Mr. Speaker, I know we are up against time.

The last one I am going to show very quickly. This is your 10-year chart. It is very simple. This is Social Security. This is the healthcare entitlements. This is everything else. This is what we are up against.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the tolerance from everyone. If I hurt your feelings, I am sorry. It may be too much caffeine and just being too damn cranky around here.

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 10 o'clock and 1 minute p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, January 27, 2023, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I don't know if I can top my friend from California's great white shark attack or talking about airline delays, but we are going to do something that is particularly amusing and fun. We are going to talk about why the fiscal house of the United States is collapsing.

For a number of folks who have watched my floor presentations, a lot of this is going to be familiar.

This is a primer, particularly for our new Members. Right now, we have hundreds and hundreds of new staff with the new Members here in the House of Representatives. Hopefully, on the thousand-some televisions around the campus where you have C-SPAN on, please, if you actually are interested, if you really want to understand how much trouble we are in, give me a few minutes of your time. Actually, give me almost an hour of your time.

Let's sort of walk through the reality. I am going to walk through some of the solutions that are absolutely wrong, and then we are going to talk a little bit about the reality of the math; and the punch line we are going to come back to multiple times, is really simple.

The primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is our demographics. Those of us who are baby boomers, we got old. And the political class here, unless we are willing to tell the truth, there is no path to saving us from a failed bond auction, a failed debt crisis, a world where we all live dramatically poorer. And it doesn't have to be that way.

Look, I know I am a broken record, but damn it, somehow, we have got to get this to start to sink in. So let's actually walk through some of the reality.

I always start with this chart because it is just easy to get your head around. This is 2022.

Now, the funny thing is, it looks like 2023, the percentage that is mandatory, that means it is on autopilot. Members here, people like me, we won't vote on it. This is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. These things that are a formula.

This percentage actually went down in this budget year. It is not going down because we are spending less money; it is because we are spending so much more money on discretionary, it actually took several points more of the percentage of spending.

Now, a lot of that was one-time spending. We will fade back down, but you got to get your head around the majority. The vast majority of U.S. spending is what we call mandatory. It is entitlements. It is you get because you work so many quarters. It is because you turned a certain age, because you are a certain Tribal group, because you are a certain level of poverty, you get these benefits, and they are automatic. It is a formula.

And then over here, you see this little green part, that is discretionary. That is what we call nondefense discretionary. This is what everyone thinks of as government. That is your foreign aid, that is your FBI, that is the IRS, that is all of those things.

And here the blue, that is defense. I am going to show you in some charts later, my brothers and sisters on the left, will often throw out rhetoric of cut out defense, get rid it.

Believe it or not, it is not even enough money to keep us in balance. You could get rid of every dime of defense. There needs to be an understanding of reality. Your government is an insurance company with an Army. I know that sounds like trying to be somewhat humorous, but it happens to be the truth.

Think of it that way. So what is the primary drive, if I came to you right now and said, you are a new Member of Congress, you have made a passionate pitch to your voters that you are going take on the deficit.

Did you stand in front of your voters and tell them over the next 30 years, 100 percent of the deficit is Medicare and Social Security? The rest of the budget, according to the Congressional Budget Office, actually has a positive balance.

Over the next 30 years, and this is based on the 2022 numbers, with inflation some of this is actually worse today. And we are not going to get the updated numbers till probably mid-February using the Congressional Budget Office.

Functionally, the shortfall of Medicare is about 75 percent of all of our borrowing. The shortfall of Social Security--and the reason you put that on there, understand, look at the Social Security actuary report. It is not Republican; it is not Democrat. These are people that actually own calculators.

With the COLA that was just given, you lost almost a full year of life. So there is this trust fund. Yes, it is Social Security money that we have paid in over the years. It is in loan to the Treasury. The Treasury gives special Social Security T bills and then when Social Security needs money, they cash them in with Treasury. Fine.

And then, actually, the Treasury goes out and borrows other money. That money runs out in about 10 years. Two years ago, I believe, the Social Security actuary report said, when the trust fund runs out, our brothers and sisters who are 65 and older or who are 62 and older or whoever are just taking a Social Security check will get about a 27 percent cut.

I think last year's actuary report said about 25 percent cut. It is based on--here is our projection of the revenue and FICA taxes we take in today, and then it goes out the door.

There is some data out there that says 10 years from now, unless we fix Social Security, you are going to double poverty among seniors. What is the moral aspect there? How many of this body are ready to actually deal with the political nightmare cascade of the trolls who lie--oh, excuse me--the politicians, trying to tell the truth about a multi-multi-multi-multitrillion-dollar system that is out of money and the negative shortfall. You do understand, I think the model said like in the next 60 years, 65 years, it is like $212 trillion short.

That is just the Social Security trust fund, and it is gone in about 10 years. It lost almost a full year of actuarial life with this year's