Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, there is a certain irony to having the message from the Senate come in just as I am about to actually walk through some of the absolutely fraudulent math in their document, but we will get to that.

Let's see. I have been in Congress now 16 years. I believe I am almost to a record, at least over the last decade, of coming here to the floor doing math, doing budget presentations, talking about the demographics, talking about what is going on, and realizing, is there anyone listening?

You know, we will do shiny objects all day long: I am enraged about the President doing this or I am mad about Biden doing this. You hear something, and at the same time, Mr. Speaker, I believe today we will borrow $87,000, $88,000 every second. Every second.

In 6 years--I think my math is 6 years, 4 months. If you are on Social Security, the way the law is as of today, you get a 24 percent cut in your check in 6 years, 4 months. How many people have you heard come behind these microphones the last 6 months, other than myself, and say we have a moral obligation to deal with this?

In 6 years, what, 3 months, the Medicare trust fund is gone, and if you are a hospital, you are getting a 12 percent cut. Do you think you are going to get to see your doctor? How many people have come behind these microphones and said: Here is a path to reform the price of healthcare? We are not supposed to talk about these things, particularly because it is always an election year.

I have a 3-year-old we have adopted. He is the greatest gift God has ever given someone. If you use a 6 percent generational discount rate-- that is reasonable, it might be slightly high--you need 104 percent of his lifetime earnings just to pay the pensions of the Federal Government.

Is there any understanding out there of what we have done to your retirement, what we have done to our kids? Does anyone actually care about the math?

We are going to walk through it one more time, and this time I am going to try to make an impassioned plea.

We just had a reconciliation. Remember, the 1974 Budget Control Act built this reconciliation process where you could get around the filibuster in the Senate. The reason we do it is to get around the filibuster in the Senate.

Instead, we are going to do the skinny one, as it is being talked about because it is a way to get the DHS funding because the Democrats won't work with us on the budget. However, when we do it, we are giving up an opportunity to maybe actually tell the truth about where the finances are of this country.

The hallways this week have been full of tens and tens of thousands of lobbyists, people lobbying and saying: I just need more money for my thing. Then you go and point out, saying--one of the best examples I have is DOGE, okay?

Remember when DOGE started, we are going to save $2 trillion. Then it was $1 trillion. Then by the time it was done, if you go to the DOGE.gov website, it is a couple hundred billion, maybe 250. The actual executed portion in this fiscal year is 7. I think that is Congress' fault because there were a lot of ideas we haven't executed because we would have to go tell the truth to people.

However, Mr. Speaker, we will borrow more money today, borrow more money today than every dime that DOGE saved us that we put into law. Think about the theater. Think about the speeches. Think about the angry people on cable television talking about it.

This is a math-free zone.

All right. This is our traditional pie chart. You see the blue portion? That is what I, as a Member of Congress, what every Member of Congress, that is all we get to vote on unless it is a budget reconciliation, and therefore we are allowed to talk about mandatory spending.

Understand, this blue area, every dime is borrowed and about $500 billion of Medicare and other things.

We had actually--I think it was a year ago because that is the date I had. I think we had multiple months where we had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing. Now, it will change because we just had our month of tax collection we are in, but if you do the first 6 months of this fiscal year, for every dollar that came into this government, we spent $1.47.

Yet, the philosophy around here is, no one ever got unelected by spending too much money, and it is true.

I am running for Governor in Arizona. I have given up on trying to save Congress. I will meet incredible people that are stressed out of their mind. They are poorer today than they were in past years because of inflation and wages haven't closed that gap.

Then you talk to them about why was there inflation, and I would argue it is the scale of the spending. It is the

scale of the borrowing and the lack of fixation on things that raise productivity because wages go up.

Remember your high school economics class. What are the two things that raise wages? Inflation--which that doesn't get you anything. It raises wages, but your purchasing power gets eaten away--and productivity.

We are starting to see the productivity curve. I would argue that much of that is because of some of the things we have done in the tax legislation over the last year, but we still haven't closed the gap from the Biden inflation years.

My brothers and sisters in Arizona, if you are in the working class, you are poorer today when we do your purchasing power than you were 5 years ago, and yet we have another problem.

Here is the demographics update from the Census Bureau of the United States. If you dig through it, it basically will tell you a prediction that sometime in the next 5 years, the United States almost goes to negative population growth. It will tell you at this moment we are pretty much at zero or flat population growth. I will get some people that say: Oh, that is wonderful. Great. You tell me how to finance your Social Security and your Medicare because those are designed as Pay-As- You-Go programs.

Today's workers pay for today's recipients. You earned it. I have got to figure out a way to finance it. Then my Democrat colleagues say: Oh, we will just raise taxes.

Think of this: 2032, 6 years from now, Social Security-Medicare trust fund is gone. Seven years from now, 2033, just to cover that shortfall, our rough estimate is $638 billion of tax hikes for that 1 year. The next year is more and the next year is more.

If you run for United States Senate, in your first term in the Senate, the trust funds are gone. During the next Presidential term, the trust funds are gone.

The math is so much easier if we step up and deal with it today because we actually get a few more years of actuarial math. I would argue the fact we don't deal with it is absolutely immoral. The fact that when I walk into the political meetings and almost get booed because you got to stop telling people the truth about the math.

Let's go talk about more shiny objects, more things to enrage you, and more things that basically are tabloid television to distract you from the fact that, I think, during this speech, we are going to borrow another $250 million, $300 million. Because if we are borrowing about $88,000 a second, that is $270 million an hour. It is insane.

Let's actually walk some more through this. Last week was tax day. If you as just a regular middle of the road American, middle income, those things, the day after tax day was your tax freedom day.

If you add up the Federal income tax, the State income tax, property taxes, those things, that is where we are at. How do you build an argument that we have a spending problem when in less than 3 years the majority of our spending goes to our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up.

It is a demographic problem, back to what the census was telling us. We got a math problem, and it turns out it is not Democrat. It is not Republican. It is demographics.

Now, I believe the Democrats absolutely refuse to tell the truth. We will tax rich people. Then I come here and show the math saying, you can take every dime from every ultrarich person in America and you can only pay for 9 months of operating this government.

You can actually do every tax that has been offered by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and it actually produces about 2 percent of GDP. So far this fiscal year, we are borrowing almost 8 percent of GDP. Anyone see a math problem? Rage is a political tactic.

Welcome to what the political class lives on. If you take a look at net receipts--the reason I show this chart is, we are going to have to do something that is also really difficult. The majority of income to your Federal Government comes from income taxes, but if you look at our economic growth, much of our growth right now is because of building datacenters and capital projects.

This dark purple here, that is individual income taxes. This lighter blue here, that is what we call payroll taxes. That is your Social Security contribution, that is your Medicare contribution, and that is your unemployment contributions.

This over here, when you start to actually look at these much smaller pieces, that is corporate income taxes. That is customs duties. We got a tax problem because this is fairly stagnant. Why is it stagnant? It is because labor force participation, our brothers and sisters, are getting older. They have saved up their money and are able to retire. The growth in the economy is essentially because of capital expenditures, not of wage growth.

We have to cap what we call an income tax stat, income to government's problem in the formula, but yet look at our outlays. I know this is sort of crazy to look at. This is Social Security. That is obligated.

Remember, every month we have to borrow. Social Security holds--think of them as Treasury bills. They hand them over to the Treasury. Treasury cashes them in, and gives Social Security money. We pay interest--actually, it is a fairly decent interest rate back to the trust fund, back to Social Security. That is what runs out in a little over 6 years.

You see this black line here. This is the spending that absolutely just lives on the credit card. How do I get people to actually read?

Go look at the CBO report from February. It basically says in 9 budget years, we will have a $3.1 trillion running deficit. $1 trillion is structural, meaning we are overspending by a trillion, but another $2.1 trillion is just interest, and that was assuming the interest rates from the end of last year.

You are heading toward a time where interest--it is a decade-plus out, but interest will be the single biggest cost in this government. I will get people saying: Well, foreigners.

The vast majority of debt is held by us. I used to be Maricopa County Treasurer years ago. We would actually take the tax collections from our school districts, from the 3,300 taxing districts I had--Maricopa County is a huge, huge, huge county and we would invest in T-bills and full faith and credits and those things to keep the money safe, but also get a little bit of interest.

China, other governments have been slowly getting rid of U.S. debt because they need it just to cover their own spending and my fear is the extraordinary privilege that we have as a country is really two things, Mr. Speaker.

We are the reserve currency of the world. Meaning, the world trades in our currency. It is one of the reasons there is such an appetite for U.S. debt because they need that debt.

You are actually seeing some of the discussions right now as the war is going on of some countries not having enough U.S. currency for their pledges and the opportunity to offer swaps and those things. That is just the plumbing of money around the world.

What happens if we lose full faith and credit, or we stop being the reserve currency, or just become it less, where you need much fewer dollars because there is other baskets that are commodity-backed? That is a real problem because our interest rates go up.

The second extraordinary privilege that we have, which we are going to have to have an honest conversation on the way to exploit it, is smart people, productive people, and entrepreneurial people want to do business here. They want to live here. This is an amazing country.

President Trump talks about this repeatedly. We are insane often. We educate people at our institutions. ``You have an engineering degree. Go home. We are sending you out of the country to compete with us.''

Did I mention that we are basically at zero population growth? I did a presentation a couple of weeks ago showing the abstract, a really interesting--I think it was the Manhattan Institute that did this report saying that populations that Biden allowed to come across the border, if we do the means of calculations, that cost us about $100,000 per person in additional actual loss, spending.

Yet, some who we keep here, who we just educated, who have an engineering degree, master's degree, or a graduate

degree, we make $3 million in taxes off of them.

You cannot make the unified theory of stabilizing U.S. borrowing unless you adopt technology and unless you do a massive reform of our healthcare spending.

Legalized competition, this concept of creative destruction that used to drive the next generation of innovation, think about it. I think this Congress, if Blockbuster Video had come in here, handed out enough checks and hired enough lobbyists, we would have slowed down the internet to stop Netflix. We live the destruction all the time, and we have almost stopped it.

Remember the lobbyists I was just complaining about running in? Many of them are wonderful people. They are nice. They are hired to do their job. It is part of the First Amendment. You have the right to actually petition your government, tell a story, those things. Yet, often it is money or block my competition.

We need to deal with the reality. The rest of the world is stealing our smart people, many of the ones who we educate. We need them here because we need their productive capacity. We have to start growing.

Remember the whole wage thing? Wages go up by productivity. We need them, and then, we need to convince the debt markets that we are going to do something on debt because, Mr. Speaker, another fun point you will like: Today, Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States can.

According to the world debt markets today, Greece and about a dozen other countries have a better credit rating on a 10-year bond-- actually, it was a 10-year paper--than the United States.

Doesn't that tell anyone anything? Is anyone listening?

It is an election year, so maybe it is just another year of avoiding the truth, not saving the future, basically doing and saying whatever is necessary to win the next election.

Look, I am in a 50-50 district. I campaign on fiscal sanity. It turns out that if you tell people the truth, the voters are often so much smarter than the elected class. They get it. They don't like it, but wouldn't it be amazing if our campaigns were run on: Here is my idea to save Social Security. Here is my idea to save Medicare. Here is my idea to grow the economy. Here is my idea to save the future for our kids and your retirement.

Instead, we are going to run our campaigns beating the ever-living you know what out of each other, just like you have seen some of the other presentations here on the floor already today, where it is personality wars because that is what will get you onto cable news tonight.

Just to make the point one more time, all around the country, we are closing schools. It is not some sinister plot. We have far too many school buses. We have far too many school districts. We have far too many school buildings. Why? Because we don't have enough kids.

Next year, there will be fewer 18-year-olds in America than there were 20 years ago. Next year, there will be double those of us--I just turned 64, so next year, I am 65--who are 65 and up.

It is math. I remember sitting with a statistics professor at Arizona State University in 1982, I think, and she was making the point: Hey, you guys have a problem. There is this like 76 million, those within this baby boomer quartile. How are you going to finance it? Apparently, we knew there were baby boomers coming 65 years ago. I am really glad we planned for it.

Now, we have to deal with telling the truth, and this is why this is the stuff that gets most politicians unelected, because you are not prepared for all the groups out there that are paid to lie to you as voters.

Remember--what the hell. Tell the truth. We had the insurance executives in front of the Ways and Means Committee about 1 month ago, groups like AARP, that will do one--actually, I will tell you that the group in Arizona is fairly impressive. They do some good things.

Yet, the CEO of one of the biggest insurance companies in America said: ``Oh, yeah. Last year, we gave them $9 billion to basically advocate for our Medicare Advantage program.''

What happens when everything has become about the money? You start to look at this, and this is sort of the running debt and unfunded liabilities. This isn't mine. This isn't from my Joint Economic Committee team. This is from the CBO: $88.4 trillion is the 75-year unfunded liability. If you actually look at the 30-year, it is actually pretty much the same because the calculation of the population is going to the reward. You start to look at these. You don't think the bond market is going to say: ``Hey, I am not buying a 30-year U.S. bond''?

It is just math. It is not my opinion. It is just math. We start to actually look--okay, so this one will drive people insane, but it turns out that I have to give the Trump administration and Treasury some credit. They put out the fiscal report of the United States Government about 2 weeks ago.

It is really well written. For anyone who is geeky, it is not that hard to read. Give up 2 hours of not watching Netflix and just skim through it.

In this report, I had to actually pull out my calculator because they don't actually say it, but it is in the charts. Congressional Budget Office says, 30 years from now, so my little boy, who is 3 years old, when he is 33 years old--hopefully, just getting his family and his career and those things going--CBO says we will be about a 175-percent debt-to-GDP ratio. Okay. That may not mean a lot to you, but that is big. This number looks like it is more like 250 percent, coming from the Treasury 2 weeks ago.

Why this is a stressor, I will get the brain trust around here who says: ``Oh, we have lots of assets.'' We do, but here are the assets, as calculated by the Treasury, basically saying that, total assets, we have about $6 trillion held by the Federal Government, but we have $47.8 trillion of liabilities--$47.8 trillion. This isn't my opinion. It is from our own Treasury Department 2 weeks ago. Does anyone see a math problem?

How many people did you see come behind these microphones or on cable news in the last week, saying that even the Trump administration's Treasury, which has some really smart people over there, put out a report?

Since we all are Members of Congress, we are the management board of the biggest entity in the world economy-wise. We all read this, right?

Then, we wonder why Congress' credibility is getting pretty close to zero. We don't do the actual job.

I have just two or three things here, and then we are going to talk about what the Senate just sent us, debt financing costs over the next 10 years.

Mr. Speaker, a while back, we did a budget resolution. That budget resolution says we are going to all agree that we are going to actually only borrow 3 percent of GDP. Actually, you would make the world debt markets and those things much more happy.

We have a little technical problem. So far, as of last month, our financing costs, just the interest, is 3.3 percent of GDP. First 6, 7 months of this fiscal year, we are borrowing almost 8 percent of GDP. We do these things that are absolute theatrical fraud.

A couple of weeks ago, we did a balanced budget amendment, which did fail, but there was absolutely no discussion of the fact that if you were to balance the budget today, which I can do, you have to cut half of Federal spending to make it work with the economic effects.

Do we ever tell people that, go to our townhalls and say: ``I am for a balanced budget, and if we do it next year, I have to cut half of Federal spending to make it work.'' People don't understand the scale.

Remember, a year ago, for every dollar in, we spent $1.43. So far this fiscal year, every dollar in, we are spending $1.47. Here is what is terrifying. We think this number has just gone up because now the long-run projected interest rates are higher. In 9 budget years, 4.6 percent of the entire economy will just be interest.

Functionally, in 9 budget years, interest will be almost the same as all of Social Security spending. Look, today, Social Security is like $1.6, $1.7 trillion this year. Interest will be 1.2, if you do also the interest that we have to pay back to the trust funds. Welcome to our world.

I think one of the debt research groups put out a paper yesterday or the

day before just talking about a 1-percent rise in interest rate, $3.4 trillion additional spending.

Yet, every single day, we seem to do things that just scare the crap out of our bankers because we have to turn to our brothers and sisters, whether the county treasurers, other governments, other people, other investors, a little family in the Midwest who saves up their money and buys government debt, and they are starting to worry if we are ever going to take this seriously.

Let's actually have some fun on this. This is the Senate budget resolution that just got delivered. As I started this presentation, it just got delivered. There is a small problem. Let's start with the thing that enrages me the most. We passed an agreement that we were going to move to 3 percent of the economy size in borrowing. Using this Senate resolution's own math, you would actually have to cut $9.74 trillion in spending--they don't say how--in actual spending. Remember, you would also have to reduce net interest by another $1.5 trillion. See that little chart on the bottom, that is actually what the Senate resolution pretends we are going to do.

You start looking at these things--let's see if I have it. So this is the big boy chart. See that? So they sent us this resolution today. We are going to combine those two. We are going to pretend there is $10 trillion that is going to disappear over the next 10 years.

Do we have a moral obligation to tell each other, tell the public, tell the bond markets, tell our bankers how we are going to do that? Remember the beginning pie chart. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed, plus another almost half a trillion dollars comes out of mandatory spending that is borrowed. We are going to accept a budget resolution that says: Hey, don't worry. There is going to be like $10 trillion that is just magically going to disappear.

This is us. Maybe the philosophy that no one ever gets unelected by spending too much money is telling the truth about the math. I will throw everything I have at this, and eventually, you guys will vote over the top of me. I will go home just mad as hell, and my wife will look at me and say: ``Why the hell are you still there?'' Then, I will hug my kids, and I will apologize to my kids for what we have done to them. Then, I will go to my next set of meetings at my office, and there will be groups of people demanding more money.

Look, this chart is almost a bit hard to understand. This is basically the budget resolution that just came from the Senate, saying, magically, we are going to be down here. This is 3 percent, but here is actually the CBO projection. Now, understand we are running hotter than the CBO projection of debt to GDP, but we are going to pretend that somehow this gap is just going to disappear.

Then, when you start to look at the reality, Senate budget resolution functional changes are $1.4 trillion higher than baseline.

Remember, this is something that should have happened in regular appropriations. We are having to use a budget reconciliation because our brothers and sisters on the left side, the Democrats, basically are terrified of their base. They can't vote for DHS funding because there is immigration enforcement, but it gives me a chance to sort of show, when discretionary money spending is all borrowed, it has debt effects.

Are we going to squander a budget reconciliation where we only need 50 votes, plus the Vice President, or 51 votes in the Senate? Are we going to walk away from a chance to just pay for it? Are we going to walk away from the chance to do some budgetary reforms?

We talk about waste and fraud all the time. How many times have I come on this floor and talked about things like I love Medicare Advantage? I love the concept of a program where you make a profit by helping seniors be healthier.

Look, some people might be doctors around here and actually understand how this works. Instead, we have report after report and Wall Street Journal articles that talk about, hey, we are going to make our money by scoring people sicker and get the spiff, even though often these people don't actually have that disease or the ailments that we are paying premiums on. It's called risk scoring. Get rid of the risk scoring, pay more upfront, and then incentivize, saying you are going to make a profit by helping our brothers and sisters be healthier. Fifty-five percent of the population is on Medicare part C, Medicare Advantage.

For anyone who is listening, particularly if you are one of the lobbyists, I want to save Medicare Advantage. You are going to run it into a brick wall if we don't do some of the reforms because, at some point, the left is going to take over here, and they will crush this. Help me do the honorable thing of making a system that works because the MedPAC reports themselves say it is potentially as high as $2 trillion we can save over 10 years.

It is live for today, spend for today, grab every dime you can for today, get your bonus today, and burn down the future.

These numbers--what is the joke one of our Members says? The math ain't mathing.

This is more just to help understand, when every dime of discretionary spending is borrowed, this is just--not just. The $70 billion baseline, understand the Senate resolution is not for $70 billion. It is actually $70 billion in this committee and $70 billion in this committee. I think if I can add that up, that is $140 billion, but we are going to pretend they are only going to authorize to the $70 billion, even though each committee has the $70 billion, but I respect it because we know our Senate colleagues won't pork it up, right?

This is 70, but you start to look at the chart and understand this is if it was an even spending. That isn't the resolution. I am going to show you another chart where it is all front-loaded. You start to see this purple here, the light purple, that is just the financing cost of DHS spending. That could have gone through regular appropriations just because we borrow all this money. We don't pay for it.

What happens if--what the real request is that we front-load it. So when you do this, you spend it today and pay additional interest because you have loaded up the debt. The scale of that debt, when you start to get out to 2035, the interest is more than the DHS spending from just that program.

There is this term called ``interest fragility.'' It basically says the greatest threat to this country anymore is the fact that we are about to hand the bond market control of the government. They are going to decide what we can do, what we can't do, what we can pay for, what we can't pay for. You think I am making it up. Wait until the first day we have a failed bond or just a stressed bond auction, and you watch this place pucker up and realize the sky is falling.

You have a budget reconciliation that just came to us. Mr. Speaker, how do we get this body to do a single thing that is honorable? Let's cut some spending. Let's do the reforms. Let's change some of the program designs that we all promised we were going to do, that the Speaker actually promised me we were going to do, and convince the bond markets that we are not a bunch of children who don't tell the truth to our voters. Maybe we will be rewarded by those lower interest rates that the President talks about that we need for housing and for everything else in our economy. We are not getting that lower interest rate until we convince the bond markets that we are not out of our minds.

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 12 o'clock and 32 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, April 27, 2026, at noon for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, wouldn't it be fun if we actually did these sorts of discussions and debates sort of like we do term papers where you actually have to give the footnote of where the numbers come from. That is because I hear numbers from my brothers and sisters on the left, and I say: Where did that come from?

So the first number I am going to give you today, Mr. Speaker, from the Joint Economic Committee, tomorrow is the first day that you actually work for yourself, meaning the first 3\1/2\ months you have been working to pay taxes, whether it be your property taxes, State income taxes, or Federal taxes, Mr. Speaker. This is for the middle income of our brothers and sisters.

Welcome to Tax Freedom Day, which technically might be actually tomorrow.

The rest of the numbers I will give you, Mr. Speaker--if you want to go on to the Senate Finance Committee's website, you will actually find the facts and the numbers. I would love

someone who is actually a researcher and likes to look at them, look and then compare them to what the Democrats say and what we say.

For Arizona, we were one of the epicenters of inflation. Our brothers and sisters in our State, after the Biden years of inflation, their wages are just now starting to catch up. Our brothers and sisters were poorer.

One of the things we did in the tax bill last summer is we actually found a way to use the tax system to raise wages, whether it be because of paying less taxes or some of the economic growth.

So let's actually walk through some of the numbers. For a couple, there is a $6,800 real wage increase. You can find that on the Senate's website, Mr. Speaker, $7,400 to $10,600 real take-home pay increase for the average Arizona family. Remember, Mr. Speaker, this is a State that was crushed. I think when the Biden inflation years were over, we came in number two in the country.

Our brothers and sisters in that hardworking middle class are still poorer today because we are just now starting to catch up.

I am actually taking a look at small business. I have 514,000 small businesses that now have the 20 percent deduction locked in. Mr. Speaker, tell me that isn't stability, when you start to walk through things like the $6,000 bonus deduction for seniors in that middle realm of income.

These things are remarkably important to growth, stability, and actually having to deal with the fact that inflation is the biggest tax in the last 40 years, those years of the Biden inflation. Inflation is a tax.

In many ways what we did here in tax reform, we are just trying to make things a little more even for those working brothers and sisters.

I have 822,000 families in Arizona who got an increase in the child deduction of $2,200. I thought that was something the left actually liked.

When you start to walk through our work, Mr. Speaker, to try to make life better for my brothers and sisters in Arizona, that is why this was so important.

Mr. Speaker, I have a number of things to go over.

Mr. Speaker, do you remember over the last few years the number of discussions we would have at home, saying drain the swamp? What was the term, swamp critters?

We have been collecting a number of articles and trying to figure out why it is so hard to actually do policy that makes our brothers' and sisters' lives easier, better, healthier, and more prosperous.

I am starting to come to the conclusion that for so many of our brothers and sisters who are at home who are watching Members of Congress, and they somehow think this is the swamp, it is part of it.

We came across a number of stories that looked like they had been properly vetted, where the lobbyist community is handing out money to people. This was more on the conservative side, particularly some of our conservative publications, handing them cash to write stories to promote whatever that lobbyist wanted.

I have been behind this microphone before, and I have actually shown repeatedly, here are influencers on the internet, more from my side, here are some MAGA influencers that were taking money. Maybe we should have caught it more quickly when it was the 23-year-old attractive person talking about Medicare Advantage and saying: I am sure she is an expert on Medicare Advantage.

It turns out we had a series of I guess it was the broker community and those things in Medicare part C paying them to warp the information for the American people to try to understand for those who of us to get up here and try to reform this place, reform how we are trying to spend our money, to try to take on the U.S. debt, that the swamp is now on your information that is coming through this device.

You have to understand, Mr. Speaker, I actually have some articles from 1 year ago. It turns out, some of the biggest snack food producers were trying to stop Congress through social media influencers. They were paying social media influencers to stop having a conversation about GLP-1 semaglutides like Ozempic. That is how perverse this place has become.

I have learned, and I truly believe this, that almost everything in Washington, D.C., is actually about the money.

What happens when the armies of folks are walking up and down our Halls here? Are they here because they want a freer society? Is it because they are fixated on the morality of the prosperity of growth and of opportunity for all people? Are they here to try to get us to put up pieces of legislation that stop their competition and that stop creative destruction in the economy, even though that is how you get better, faster, and cheaper? Is it how they want us to hand them cash?

Mr. Speaker, I am going to show some boards from the Treasury's detailed balance sheet. The level of financial trouble our Republic is in is remarkable.

If anyone is watching C-SPAN over the last day or 2, how many people have you actually seen coming behind these microphones that actually care?

This is the chart I have typically started with, and the reason I do this is to say: Hey, you see this blue portion of this board? That is what we get to vote on as Members of Congress. Everything else in the red is on autopilot. We only vote on about 25 percent of the spending here in Congress. The rest is formula. It is mandatory spending.

However, it is worse than that. A couple days ago, the Treasury, as they are required by statute, did the sort of here is the balance sheet of America, here is where we are financially.

Did anyone see the stories--you have got to read some of the geeky sort of financial press--that America actually had negative? Functionally, here is what was on the Treasury's balance sheets, saying, hey, America, currently--these are current liabilities. These aren't the unfunded liabilities for the future. These are current obligations. We owe $47.8 trillion in current liabilities, and we have $6 trillion in assets. This is from the Treasury statement.

Doesn't this terrify anyone? Is it still just a calculator/math-free zone or is it more important that when the paid influencers, the paid person on conservative media by a lobbyist is saying: Oh, they might actually look at making us reform our program. We are going to hand some money to one of these authors so they will say: Oh, reform is bad, it's not Republican.

Of course, it is Republican. We believe in markets. At least we used to.

Let's actually talk about how bad this math is. I am going to go straight to the punch line. If you actually just do the 75-year Social Security and Medicare obligations, you are at $88.4 trillion of unfunded liabilities, and these numbers probably aren't dystopian enough.

Look, a week ago, I did a whole presentation here, and we partially talked about the unified theory of how we stabilize the debt. I have seen the applause in some of the financial articles on CNBC, Bloomberg saying: Well, there are some Members of Congress trying to do a piece of legislation to get us to 3 percent of debt to GDP. Wonderful idea.

At this moment, just interest is well above 3 percent of GDP. So far this year--so we are 6 months into the fiscal year--over 7.3 percent of the entire economy is being borrowed by the Federal Government. But don't worry, we

are going to do that 3 percent thing even though the latest GDP numbers are below that.

If I had told you a decade, two decades ago that just the interest being paid by the Federal Government on our debt is bigger than the growth of the country, you would have thrown up your hands and said: Well, it is all over then.

Yet, we look the other way because we are too busy doing the damn shiny objects around here that will get us on cable news tonight or on social media. We can do the shiny object, get some dopamine hits, maybe get some people giving us money on text message fundraising.

We are heading to well over $88 trillion in liabilities. What do we do?

I came here a month ago and showed part of the report that said a child born today, if you use a 6 percent generational discount rate-- that might be a little bit high, it is a little geeky, but it is within the margin--this country needs 104 percent of that child's lifetime earnings just to pay the Federal Government pensions.

I have a 3-year-old. Our obligations right now require taking every dime my little Matthew will ever earn just to pay the Federal Government pensions.

Part of this, Mr. Speaker, is the math of demographics. We don't have enough people. We don't have enough children. We are functionally at zero population growth. There is a math set--I had some of the Heritage demographers in my office today. They have a model that says in the next few years we could actually go negative in population as a country.

For some people, oh, yay, that is great, less traffic. Okay. You tell me how I am going to finance Social Security. You tell me how I am going to finance Medicare. In now less than 6\1/2\ years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. In less than 6\1/2\ years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. At that time, we double the poverty of seniors, we will double the number of baby boomers who live on the street. That is the morality now of this place.

Why am I the only idiot who comes behind the microphone and does this every week?

Okay. God gave me a gift. I am pretty good at math. I will have Members of Congress who see me in the hallway and turn around and walk away from me because I am going to pitch them an idea of here is how we save Medicare Advantage, here is how we save Social Security, here is how we do this. I have pieces of legislation to do some of these things.

Oh, David, you don't understand, we have been told by our political-- and this is Democrats, too--we have been told by our political consultants we are not allowed to use those words because we might actually have to explain what the hell is actually going on.

You have the same number of 18-year-olds today as we had 20 years ago. We have double the number of 65 and up. I turned 64 a couple weeks ago. Maybe I am pathologically optimistic. We have adopted a 3-year- old, and I have a 10-year-old. Do they deserve to live better?

Every math set right now says our kids will be the first American generation to be poorer than their parents. A child born today, my 3- year-old, let's use my 3-year-old as an example. When my 3-year-old is, I think it is 22, 21, 23, right in there, every tax, every one, every single tax in America needs to be doubled just to maintain baseline services.

Why am I the jerk that gets up and does math and people look at him and say, oh, David, we are not allowed to talk about that. We will deal with that after the next election.

Have you noticed there is always another election?

I have been getting that same answer for 15 years here: David, we can't talk about that. It is mandatory spending. We can't go around and tell the truth.

It is fixable. There are things you can do. We have presented over and over and over and over ways you could crash the price of healthcare using technology, the morality of cures, the morality of helping our brothers and sisters get healthier, convincing the bond markets that we are creditworthy.

Right now we pay more--so, Greece, today Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. That is what the world debt markets think of us.

I could geek out and walk through what happened a couple days ago in the 2-year auction we had and how badly subscribed it was. Maybe it is the war, maybe it is other things. This isn't a game, and this is somewhat unique.

Look, I have some books. I collect economic books. One of my books talks about 5,000 years of economic history. There are lots and lots and lots of stories of societies that built up lots of debt and collapsed. Okay.

I could not find a story in there that walked through the economics of a society that built up lots of debt and started to have fewer people, zero population growth. Tell me how that math works.

We have a unified theory. I have been behind this microphone dozens and dozens and dozens of times. I am saying, the adoption of technology, synthetic biology, deregulation, smart regulation, a talent-based immigration system--we basically have a dozen things that have to go into this just to stabilize where we are in debt.

Mr. Speaker, do you think this place is intellectually prepared to do anything that is difficult? We are going to go home and stand in front of our constituents and talk about shiny objects.

Mr. Speaker, as of today, we are borrowing $88,000 a second. Mr. Speaker, as of today, we borrowed, I think, $7.5 billion today, yesterday, tomorrow.

Maybe we just shouldn't give a damn about math, but it is going to win. The math always wins.

Look, my staff wanted me to use this board to try to put it in perspective of if it was your household. In your household you basically earn $52,000 a year. This is the Federal budget right now, but you spend $73,000 this year. If you do the accumulation beyond the fact that you went 20 grand into debt this year, if you add up all the years of debt for your household, and this would be your household as divided by the Federal debt, it is $1.3 million upside down.

Next year, these numbers get worse and the year after that it gets worse. Part of the reason is--help me grow the economy, help me find how we balance our tax base.

I am a free market economist. I believe in as low taxes as possible. But is borrowing a tax? This is a really interesting, intellectual question that the left has to have and we on the right have to have. Is borrowing a tax?

The family budget this year, you made $52,000. We are going to spend $73,000, so we borrowed $20,000 this year. I am going to argue it is a tax. It is just a tax with interest.

Are you and I going to pay it? Because the philosophy around here is it is going to be our kids that are going to pay it and our grandkids that are going to pay it, and I am going to argue the numbers are eroding so fast.

Remember, 6.5 years from now, the Social Security trust fund is gone. Mr. Speaker, 6.5 years from now, the Medicare trust fund is gone.

Just to cover that shortfall for the first year is $638 billion. You run for United States Senate, this happens in your first term. This is not way off in the future. It is here. Yet, when some of us have tried to do the debt and deficit commission, we get these people coming in, lobbying, beating the crap out of us on social media, on conservative press, and now we find out they are being paid.

It is absolutely immoral what we are doing, and it is your retirement, and it is my kids and every child out there. How is accepting a society that says: Oh, screw it. We are just going to make sure our kids are poorer, but at least we are going to get stuff until the bond market decides they are actually in charge of this country. It is almost there.

Let's actually do some more math. We have some new ways to try to describe the scale of the problem. I know this is hard to read, but I am going to do my best to make this understandable.

You actually see net receipts by category.

Do you see this dark blue here? That is individual income taxes. That is one of the crazy things those of us on Ways and Means need to actually start having a conversation on how we are going to deal with, because we are seeing right now in the GDP growth we are

getting in the country, more of it is coming from capital than workers.

We are building big datacenters, automation, the technology, but it is not necessarily from wage growth, which actually is a whole other speech and freaks me out because we have got to raise wage growth to make up for the years of the Biden inflation.

Then take a look over here. This is payroll taxes. This is the taxes you pay for your Social Security, for your Medicare, for unemployment. Part of the deep secret here, please don't tell anyone on Social Security, an average couple retiring today gets about a $76,000 spiff.

Here is what we paid in, you get an extra $76,000. Horrible, horrible rate of return. However, Democrats made sure that 20 years ago, 25 years ago when there was a temp saying: Could we build a little, tiny 15 percent sidecar, you can invest in the market. That would mean you would have been dramatically wealthier today. They killed that. They should be responsible for much of the poverty that is going to exist in our senior population. It was Democrats that chose to do that.

The dirty secret on this portion here is that same couple for every dollar they put into Medicare tax, they are getting $6 to $7 back. That is one of the primary drivers of U.S. sovereign debt, that and interest, healthcare and interest.

We got older, and we owe $39 trillion. $30 trillion is functionally sold to the markets, but that other $9 trillion that we borrow internally, we still pay interest on it. It is still a liability. We still have to pay it back. These little slivers over here are customs and corporate taxes. That is our receipts.

Here is our net outlays. You notice this little black box here? This is all borrowed. This is what the taxes cover. A week ago, we had a balance budget amendment, which I voted for, but folks had no understanding that the economic literature basically says: If you want to balance the budget today, you have to cut almost half of U.S. spending. Understand that.

Last year, for every dollar that came in, we spent a $1.43. With the economic effects, if you said tomorrow, David, I demand you balance the budget. I can do it. Tell me which half of the spending you want me to cut. Because right now--this is Social Security right here.

Actually, I think Medicare is here. Other mandatory, this is your VA pension. Those things that are built-in that we are obligated to formula.

You start to look over here, this is net interest. Remember, net interest--actually, it should be gross interest. Total interest right now is the second biggest expenditure in your Federal Government. Defense is actually number 5. The thing that is in the Constitution is number 5 on our stack: Social Security, interest, Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare subsidies and defense.

If you came in here right now and said: David, balance the budget. I can do it. You tell me how much defense, nondefense, Medicaid, they all have to go away, and because of the economic effects, this black line moves in and you would actually have to start cutting Medicare.

It is math. It is not personal. It is just something that comes off of a calculator and someone who is literate enough to actually look at the numbers. David, it is really bad politics telling people the truth.

I am in a 50/50 district. Now, I am in one of the best educated districts in America. It turns out you can get elected in a real tough district. You can even get--don't tell anyone, but you can get smart, educated Independents and Democrats to vote for you. They may not like you, but they, at least, know you are intellectually credible. When was the last time we actually gave a damn about being intellectually credible around this place?

Net outlays for interest over 10 years. Right now, remember, I mentioned just interest--and actually the number is higher than this-- my math is coming in at $1.2 trillion of interest this year. You are well over 3 percent.

We are going to go down to 3 percent. That is actually what the Treasury Secretary and others say. I agree, but we are borrowing 7.3 percent of the economy at this moment. You tell me what part you want me to cut.

CBO's report, what was it, 2 weeks ago, basically says that in 9 years we are going to be borrowing $3.1 trillion a year. That is before the war. That is before the request for supplementals. That is before these new healthcare calculations. We are going to be borrowing $3.1 trillion. This is couple weeks ago, CBO report. $2.1 trillion of that will just be interest, one will actually be structural deficit.

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

Mr. Speaker, I apologize. I am going to talk faster. No, I won't do that to you. As some of you know, I have a coffee problem, and I have only had like nine cups today. I am not shaking, and I am trying not to talk like a machine gun.

Mr. Speaker, I have this chart. You can find this chart if you really care about it. It basically talks about interest fragility. What is interest fragility? It is when interest goes up, interest rates go up, and what that means to the debt.

When you start looking at a chart like this--so, think about this. For 1 year, a 10-percent increase, so essentially 10 basis points, it is about $4.1 billion. You start to see when you actually go out 10 years and start looking at, hey, if we had 1 point of interest--now, this is on the base debt right now, publicly sold debt, not the full debt, but the publicly sold debt. That comes out to $3.1 trillion, a single point for 10 years.

What happens when the bond market has more influence and changes our spending patterns more than this place does? I had people say--as we were trying to do the big, beautiful bill, and then we were supposed to do the second reconciliation to pay for a big chunk of it--but that would be too difficult. We might have to talk about fixing Medicare and Medicare Advantage.

Look, go read the reports that are stacked up on my desk that say you have a couple of trillion dollars of waste, fraud, and misalignment. The Wall Street Journal does article after article after article, full- page things on it, saying, hey, the high grading, that is $100 billion a year. We are going to do what about it, Mr. Speaker? Oh, but we would have to explain it. What is wrong with us?

Unless we convince the world debt markets--remember, we are the biggest debtor in the world. You want lower mortgage rates? Convince the debt markets because the Federal Reserve only affects the short end of the curve. Your mortgage is based off the 10-year. The 10-year is a market rate, not a Federal Reserve rate. How many politicians around here: We have to beat up the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. That is on the 2-year, the short end of the curve, maybe even less. Convince the debt markets that we are actually going to stabilize our debt.

We have a 40-year cycle. Those of us who are baby boomers, to move on to our reward before we get back to the more normal demographics--those normal demographics may never come because the fertility rate in the Western world continues to fall.

Look, there are things we can do. This is the type of improper payments. I have been working on this for years. Stop the waste and fraud in government. It is billions and billions of dollars. If you are borrowing $220 billion to $230 billion every single month, we can get rid of every improper payment. We don't even cover a month's worth of borrowing. We still have to do this.

It turns out that the most powerful way to fix something like this, Mr. Speaker, is not a whole bunch of new laws, not buildings full of auditors, buildings full of lawyers. It is data scientists.

Look, I chair the Oversight Subcommittee of Ways and Means. We have investigations going on into Medicare part C, hospice care, and organ procurement. How are we finding these things? We hired a data scientist.

Mr. Speaker, there is hope. There is a way to do this. We just need to step up our game and become more intellectually curious and robust. With that, maybe we can stabilize the future for your retirement and our kids.

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

Mr. Speaker, we are going to actually do something with a little meat on the bones today. I have to walk through the math.

Repeatedly, I have come behind this microphone over the last decade, trying to walk through our Joint Economic Committee's, my office's, and my personal unified theory. The unified theory is a fairly simple concept: We have an incredibly complex problem.

Last year, for every dollar this country took in, we spent $1.43. Yesterday, we hit over $39 trillion in borrowing. We have been borrowing, so far this year, about--actually, if you do this fiscal year, it is over eight, but over the last 12 months, it is like $7 billion a day.

You realize that yesterday we hit $87,400 per second in borrowing. Our unified theory is, you can't just pretend and say, oh, we are going to pass a balanced budget amendment, so everything will be fine. I am going to show you in the charts where the math, where the money, and where the demographics actually go, but you are going to have to do lots of things. You are going to have to adopt technology. You will have to adopt smart regulations. You will have to legalize competition, which, remember, this place constantly uses legislation, rules, and other things to basically stop competition.

Creative destruction is actually a basic economic principle of free markets, except here in Congress. We are

also going to talk about--and this is the tough thing--we are going to talk about moving to a talent-based immigration system because I cannot make any of the rest of these numbers actually work in a society right now where the United States is basically at zero population growth.

Last year, the preliminary number is that we grew maybe 400,000. There is a chance this year we are even closer to zero population growth. You have to embrace it. It is math. It is not Republican and Democrat. It is not my feelings. It is math.

We functionally have the same number of 18-year-olds as we had 20 years ago, and double the number who are 65 and up. It is demographics, yet we lie our heinies off about it.

Remember, yesterday--and I voted yes--we had a ``we are going to balance the budget'' bill. Okay, great. Love it.

Do you understand, with the economic impacts, if you told me to balance the budget tomorrow, I can, but you just have to tell me what half of Federal spending we are ending. It would require cutting Federal spending by 50 percent when you do the economic effects.

That is the reality, so we don't tell the truth around here. We use these platitudes. It is great on campaign brochures, but it is crap math. Let's actually start walking through reality.

Then, I am going to actually try to tell the truth about what the Biden-era years of immigration cost us--millions and millions and millions of low-skilled. The fact of the matter is--I am going to show you the math, but I am also going to show you the math of what high- skill, talent-based immigration does for the finances of this country.

First off, we have an updated chart here, and it still needs another update because of interest rates being higher.

Today, only 25.2 percent of spending is voted on by Members of Congress. Mr. Speaker, you and I only get to vote on this blue portion. Everything in red is on autopilot.

Right now, we have net interest at $1.39 trillion. We actually believe that is actually going to come in closer to $1.112 because of higher interest rates and some of the refinancing demands, but this is based on the CBO report from 2 weeks ago.

If you use our math right now, Medicare is coming in at $1.666 trillion. Social Security is number one. We actually believe interest is number two. Medicare will be number three, but I need you to look at my chart right now. Do you see this Medicare number of $1.63 trillion? In 6\1/2\ years, we go from $1 trillion on Medicare to $2 trillion.

In 6\1/2\ years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. If you are a hospital getting Medicare part A--remember, there is A, B, C is Medicare Advantage, and D is drugs. If you get your resources from Medicare part A, you are getting a 12-percent cut. That is the new updated number from CBO.

Mr. Speaker, in 6\1/2\ years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. In 6\1/2\ years, you get a 24 percent cut in your Social Security check. We will double the poverty of seniors in 6\1/2\ years.

For my Democratic colleagues who keep saying: Well, just raise taxes. Okay, great. This happens in 2032. By 2033, to cover the Medicare shortfall and the Social Security trust fund fall with the trust funds empty, you have got to give us $638 billion, I think is the first year of the shortfall. If defense is $1 trillion, start thinking about that. It is like 60 percent of the entire defense budget is your shortfall.

How often are the conversations behind these microphones absolutely vacuous because this place doesn't own calculators or doesn't have the moral aptitude to tell the truth about the math and the misery we are going to put on our brothers and sisters in this country if we don't step up and fix it.

I am in a 50-50 district. For years and years, I come behind this microphone. I introduce bills to fix the--MedPAC tells us there is almost $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion in misalignment in Medicare Advantage. Who is the idiot who lays out a bill to fix it and then can't get a single other Member of Congress to sponsor it with him?

The fact of the matter is there is a way--you are not going to pay off the debt. You are just trying to stabilize it. We have got a lot of wonderful articles saying: Well, there is a group in Congress that talk about holding the deficit to 3 percent of GDP. Our interest is over 3 percent of GDP this year.

The CBO report from 2 weeks ago says: In 9 years the structural deficit of this country is $3.1 trillion; and $2.1 trillion of that is just interest. So, yay, we have gotten the deficit down to $1 trillion; but our interest load is so big.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is interest and our healthcare costs. Are we willing to have that revolution in how we provide healthcare? Legalize technology. Push for the cures.

Diabetes is 33 percent of U.S. healthcare spending. Maybe helping our brothers and sisters be healthier turns out to be one of the greatest economic benefits of society when 47 percent of U.S. healthcare is associated with obesity. Maybe we should change the farm bill. Maybe we should change nutrition support. Maybe we should actually think about helping people be healthier. It is great economics, and it is good for our brothers and sisters.

Oh, but that will piss off--sorry--yeah, lots of the moneyed interest. That means the hospitals and the others who make money on sick people. This place is absolutely immoral and perverse.

I find myself getting angrier and angrier. I have given up. I am leaving this place. I am going to go run for Governor in Arizona. Maybe I can save Arizona because I can't get my brothers and sisters here to do hard things because it is hard.

I have a 3-year-old that we have adopted. I am 64. My wife is my age. Maybe we are insane. It is the greatest gift God has ever given someone. We need 104 percent of my little boy's lifetime income. We need 104 percent of my little boy's lifetime income just to pay Federal Government pensions.

In 33 months, over half of Federal spending will go to those 65 and up. The math problem is we have gone 40 years and there are not enough children. Mr. Speaker, you heard me a moment ago say we are functionally at zero population growth. There is actually one analyst out there that has us at negative population growth because of the people leaving the country.

They come to me, and our hallways are full of people demanding more money. Many of them are things we agree with and we love. We just have to borrow everything.

Let's walk through just, first off, the reality of the math. Then I am going to make the argument to move, to revolutionize our immigration system to a talent-based immigration system that the rest of the industrialized world has moved to.

Let's take a look. There were 3.6 million babies born last year. Okay. Think of this. For every baby that was born last year, that same year we put $600,000 on their credit card in a single year. That is the ratio of our borrowing because we have so few children.

Our model is we are down to 1.59 fertility rate. France actually has a higher fertility rate than the United States. Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States.

Are we going to tell the truth?

Some of my charts are a little bit geeky. The basic principle of this is here is our available workforce. Here is our labor force participation. We are getting down. We are going to be basically getting close to 61, 60 percent of our population in the labor force. It is just demographics.

We had the baby boom. I remember back in the early 1980s I was sitting in a statistics class. I had a professor back then; she was talking about we need to get ready. We had this population bubble. How did we know 40 years ago that we had a baby boom bubble?

Her model was not dour enough for the fact that starting in the 1980s, fertility rates in the United States--and now it has gotten steeper and steeper and steeper. It is all over the industrialized world. We have got to understand. This isn't just the United States. The United States is just better off.

What is one of the miracles we have as Americans? We are the reserve currency of the world. People want to trade in U.S. dollars.

The second advantage we have over the rest of the world is people want to move here. They want to start businesses here. They want to do their research here. They want to bring their talents here. How do we leverage that to maximize economic growth?

If we are at a zero population growth and we need to make up for the years of Biden inflation, the way we do that, the way we do affordability is not somehow magically make prices go down. It is we raise wages. We raise wages by--remember your high school economics class? There are two ways wages go up.

One is inflation. That doesn't get us anything. It is productivity. Wages go up by productivity. We invest in capital equipment. We build a tax system that encourages investment. We bring in the talent that makes us more productive as a society.

This chart is going to upset people, but it is vetted math. It is vetted math. Take a look. These are the populations that deposit a 30- year impact on the Federal budget. If you get over here, people with STEM, with a master's, with a Ph.D., they functionally add about two-- let's get this right. That individual adds about $2.5 million in taxes they pay.

We always talk about the DACA recipient with the Ph.D., but that is not the mean. They are positive. But they are not positive by very much. This is the abstract. You can actually see detailed methods to look at this on, I think it is the Manhattan Institute. Their immigration study actually has a whole thing where we can put in someone with this education of this age--remember age is very sensitive on these numbers. We can actually see what type of immigration system maximizes the benefit to America.

Remember that if you want our Social Security, if you want our Medicare, it is a moral, societal obligation we have to you. Help me make the finances work. We need this as part of the unified theory to make the math work.

Let's actually do something--this is my favorite chart of the week. This will upset some of my Democrat colleagues, but it is called math.

Here are populations with less than a high school education. We calculate over those 30 years they cost society about $100,000. They cost. What happened at the border during the Biden years, the millions and millions and millions and millions of people that crossed, each one of those, on average, is going to cost us $100,000 over the next three decades.

If we come over here, these are people with graduate degrees. We collect over $3 million from them in taxes.

Does anyone start to see just here on this chart the basic math that if we are going to start to bend our debt curve, yes, we have to adopt technology. We have to add competition in our society. We have to revolutionize the price of healthcare, and we need to move to a talent- based immigration system.

Remember, we are, functionally, the last country in the industrialized world that uses a familial--a family--sponsorship model, and for a lot of my religious groups: David, it is moral. We like being able to sponsor our family. I understand.

Tell me how I deal with the bankruptcy of Medicare. Tell me how I deal with the 24 percent cut in Social Security coming in 6\1/2\ years. That is moral also, and there is a way that I can slow down this hemorrhaging of cash.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, in the last 12 months, we have borrowed $2.77 trillion. We thought this fiscal year, we would come in about $1.7 trillion, $1.8 trillion. Running math right now is we are way off, and are we heading toward a supplemental? Are we heading to other things? Why is telling the truth so hard around here? Why is doing hard things--well, maybe it is because they are hard things, answering my own question.

I actually think that the voters understand that there is something really screwed up out there. They may not understand all of these details. They may not--look, I am blessed. I chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am number four on the Ways and Means Committee. I chair the Oversight Subcommittee. I have six--well, five--one is actually, I think, defending his Ph.D. Let's call it six Ph.D. economists.

Most people in their life don't have a bunch of freaky smart people shoving information into their head all day long, my one great joy in this job.

There are solutions to stabilize the debt. We are still going to borrow. It is demographics. Help me. Help us. Help our brothers and sisters in this country. We have to do these things.

Oh, David, we can't talk about Medicare or Social Security or, Heaven forbid, ever use the word ``immigration.'' The trolls on the internet will say mean things about us.

So we are willing to have grandma live in poverty because we are worried about trolls on Twitter? Is that really what we have become?

Look, tax revenues from a 30-year-old immigrant with a college degree versus someone with just no high school diploma, income tax, we functionally get $80,000. The person without the high school degree, almost nothing. It is just you start to look at the economics. Stop using the word ``immigration'' and only visualize people running across Eagle Pass in Texas.

The fact of the matter is, also, if we can fix our system--and I am going to show you some quotes from President Trump. President Trump has talked about this repeatedly saying that it is insane that this country educates people and then sends them home to compete with us.

How do I get this body to start actually understanding policy is economics, and economics is math? You start to look at--this number is wrong already. We were looking at saying, hey, you know, there is-- okay. I need to explain this. The 2025 deficit, we book as $1.7 trillion.

Now, you understand we played some games with it. We rolled the student loans, pulled them back so we got a credit. There were certain bills we owed. We paid them in October instead of the end of September. So we played some games to lower that number, but I need you to look at what was going on.

Mr. Speaker, 70 percent of our spending just went to net interest, and 16 percent went to defense. Interest was more than defense last year. Think of this: 2025 fiscal year, Social Security, interest, Medicare, Medicaid, and it is Obama subsidies and defense. Defense was number five. The thing that is in the Constitution was number five in our spending stack.

The majority of our spending in 33 months--and I will be one of them--will go to those 65 and up. I will say it again for, like, the fourth or fifth time. It is demographics. We don't have enough young people in our society, and the baby boomers are moving into their earned benefit years.

Can we think we are just going to borrow all of the money? Do we really think the credit markets are going to keep loaning us, like right now, $7 billion today, $87,000 for every second I stand here?

We have debates on this floor that the money borrowed during the debate is more than the entire debate was trying to save because we want shiny objects because it looks good on social media. It gets me on FOX News tonight, as the finances of our country burn down.

Look, estimated share of outlays by group--and this upsets people, but I am trying to make a point. So I am a kid in the 1970s. Yes, disco and bell bottom pants. It was not a pretty time.

At that time, the rough estimate is children, those under 18, got about $7 of Federal resources for every dollar that went to 65 and up. Today, that is reversed. That is just because of our population dynamics, but it is going to get bigger and bigger.

The reason I grabbed this chart is to show that, in 2036, we will be well--and it has actually happened. Our math is 33 months. The majority, more than half of all Federal spending will be to those 65 and up, but take a look down here. For those under 18, we are going to be under 6 percent.

Am I insane for coming to the floor and actually telling people the very math that is in all of our publications? No one seems willing to open up the binders and actually read them.

Look, I want to give President Trump credit. He has repeatedly stood up in front of audiences, stood up in front of crowds, stood up in front of the cameras and talked about the insanity of having a country that is not attracting and keeping talent.

Before I do the President's quotes, I have a professor friend who used to talk about this--and when I say ``used to,'' it is a couple of years ago--the 1980s, the 1990s, the war had conflict over hydrocarbons. We need oil.

Last decade, rare earths.

His model basically says that in this decade, next decade, and probably the one after that, the world is going to compete for smart people, people who are educated, people who have entrepreneurial skills, people who have unique talents because there is going to be so few young people, and those with the degrees that grow economies, that create productivity, therefore raise our wages, we are all going to fight over them.

Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, all of these countries have built talent-based immigration systems. Do you know who hasn't shown up, Mr. Speaker? United States because we are so terrified to have an adult, professional, academic, economic-based discussion of we are falling behind.

Talent is portable. Do you have a graduate degree? Do you have an engineering or STEM degree? What is it--I co-chair the Singapore Caucus. I think in 6 weeks, you can get status to live in Singapore.

Do you know what we do to that person here in the United States? We send them home to compete with us, to another country. Have we lost our minds?

Look, we have a whole bunch of boards from President Trump's quotes talking about this.

Because we are often intellectually vacuous when we are in front of a camera, when we are talking to our folks at home, it is immigration. We immediately grab the hordes coming across the border. I just showed you that is costing us a fortune.

Months ago, we did an entire report that showed what President Biden allowed to happen at the border will suppress wages for the working poor for a decade. What they did made the working poor poorer in this country for a decade. You hang drywall. Now, you are competing against how many other people who hang drywall?

We have the academic research, the economic research, and the economic modelling that make it clear that if we could flip over to what the rest of the industrialized world is now doing, a talent-based immigration system, it gives us a fighting chance. It raises tax receipts. It raises wages when designed correctly.

As part of my last portion here, we have been working for a year with our economists and some of my office staff to rewrite--and we are doing some pretty radical stuff. We have been following the papers that say the H-1B model actually does create certain wage suppression because that visa is owned by an employer. If you want to get lobbied and have people really angry, say that.

The fact of the matter is that a model that allows the talent to get a job sponsorship, but you are portable within the economy, gets rid of that wage suppression.

I believe we can move to an economic model that grows wages and the economy, and helps us stabilize this insane growth of our debt. There is hope, Mr. Speaker. It just requires us to do hard things and stop living behind folklore and start living behind a calculator.

That is my pitch, Mr. Speaker, and 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 12 o'clock and 52 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, March 20, 2026, at 10:30 a.m.

Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I no longer have to speak because he just took care of the speech for me.

The classic problem of--you are a brilliant lawyer. I am sort of a walking accountant or walking calculator. We both serve different--and a lot of people in the public don't understand--we serve different committees and they take over our life. You sit on Judiciary. Are you also on Oversight?

Oh, so your life is hell.

Yeah. Your life is hell. I do Joint Economic Committee and Ways and Means. That is actually one of the elegance the Founding Fathers gave us is, we eventually end up where we are good. In some ways, I always loved the yin and yang thing here where you are doing the legal stuff and then I am going to actually sort of pound on the math.

Mr. Speaker, part of what we are going to do tonight is a little thick. Can you imagine that?

Mr. Speaker, I want to walk through a handful of things. Even as Mr. Roy was just touching on it, I need us to understand what is going on in our math.

Mr. Speaker, guess what. We had sort of a record today for not being in COVID or whatever disasters. Every day, I send out a text message. It is part of our Joint Economic Committee.

I have a few thousand people who subscribe to this. Yes, it is a little geeky. What we are doing is we are capturing the numbers from the Treasury Department. We have built a whole system where we grab those and send those out.

Mr. Speaker, you will be happy to know, over the last 12 months--and this will make sense in a moment--if you divide our borrowing, just our borrowing, we are now borrowing $83,720 per second. That is $83,720 per second. Functionally, when we do the 12-month math, that is a new record. Yet, we have flattened out discretionary spending. The things my colleagues and I get to vote on, that is flat, but we only get to vote on about 25 percent of the spending.

This is why it is so hard to actually have this conversation here. The majority of our debt--I am going to show some of this, and then I am going to show where we have some of the waste and fraud. I have to get to the alignment. Then, I am going to get to something that I think is actually optimistic.

We have to understand that we have a shortage of children. We have functionally the same number of 18-year-olds today as we had 20 years ago and double the number of 65 and up. We have known this was going to happen for a very long time.

It is almost like, is it because we are fearful of getting reelected? The White House gets cranky when we talk about these things?

It is Republicans and Democrats. We come here and talk about shiny objects, but we have a math problem. In 33 months, over half the spending from the government here in Washington, D.C., will go to those 65 and up.

Somewhere here, my 3-year-old is actually running around here. Yes, I am insane. I have a 3-year-old and a 10-year-old. My wife is exactly my age.

We have some math. If you use a 6 percent generational discount rate, you need 104 percent of my 3-year-old's lifetime income just to pay Federal Government pensions. That is Social Security, Medicare, military, and Federal. It is partially because we have so few children and so many baby boomers. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is just math.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to do what? Once more, the two primary drivers of our borrowing today, that $83,000 per second, what are the two drivers? It is interest and healthcare costs.

Interest is a function of: We have $38.7 trillion of borrowing out there, and that has to go to the markets. The market is going to set a price.

When we hear the discussions about the Federal Reserve, that is the short-term portion. When we start getting over 5 years, 7 years, 10 years, or 30 years, that is a market. We look at U.S. sovereign debt. What do we want to pay?

Mr. Speaker, think about this at the moment. Greece can sell a 10- year bond cheaper than the United States today. Does that set off any alarm bells? Is that just annoying because the hallways are full of people who want nothing more than more money spent?

We get two types of folks that come lobby us and walk in our office. Don't always think they are lobbyists. There are often constituents from home who walk in and say, We want more money, or, We want you to control and regulate our competition.

Mr. Speaker, I am hoping somewhere here we can convince our brothers and sisters on the Republican side, the conservative side, that we believe in free markets. We believe creative destruction is a rebirth of an economy, and it should be happening constantly.

I know some of the populists don't like that. The fact of the matter is, if we don't get remarkable productivity improvements, I don't know how we get wage growth.

Remember, unless we can do something crazy in supplies--so, supply- side economics--we are not going to make prices go down. What we do is we make them more affordable by wage growth.

Wage growth happens by two things. The first is by inflation. Well, that is just treading water. It also happens by productivity. We do it better, faster, and cheaper through technology, through other systems, and through redesign. That is how we raise wages.

What happens in a world where the estimated share of outlays that we are going to spend in government--we have an obligation. Society made promises. When we turn 65, we get our Medicare. When we turn 62 to 70 or 72, we can actually take Social Security. We made promises. If a person works for the Federal Government or if a person works for the military, they have pensions.

Right now, my demographics, ``Estimated Share of Outlays by Group,'' what does this government spend on populations? If a person is under 18, right now we spend 7 percent. In 2036, it goes down to 6 percent. Here is the punch line right here. This is my 65-and-up population. In the next few years, over half of our Federal spending will be to those--look, I am only a year away now--65 and up.

Are we supposed to talk about this? Those are obligations. We owe them. Do my colleagues see this down here? In 2036, we are down to 12 percent of Federal spending. Mr. Speaker, 12 percent of Federal spending is defense, and 52 percent will be to pensions and healthcare. Do my colleagues see the scale?

Remember, today, Social Security is the biggest spend. It is $1.6 trillion. What is the number two? What is the number two spend in the Federal Government? It is not defense. It is interest. Then, it is Medicare. Then, it is Medicaid and ObamaCare subsidies, ACA subsidies. Number five is actually defense.

As Chip Roy was just saying, I have been coming behind this microphone for over a decade. I am wondering, where are people's intellect? Is it you need the satiation of being angry instead of thinking through the scale? What takes down a republic? I would argue debt and deficits and this financing are what will take us down. The bond market is now almost in the place where it will run this country.

Let's actually walk through a couple more of these and see if we can sort of make the argument so it makes sense. The second half of this chart is, in my personal opinion, garbage, but it is a projection. I want us just to look right here, from this point here, 2025 to 2036.

This is actually the population of 18-year-olds coming down because we can actually sort of calculate that right now. You have to understand--ignore this stuff. By 2036, we have only 4 million 18-year- olds.

The fact of the matter is: You tell me how I keep growth in an economy when I have shortages of young people entering the workforce, entering the economy?

I have done presentation after presentation. You are going to have to accept technology. You are going to have to accept synthetic biology. You are going to have to accept robots and labor substitution. If you want wages to go up in America and make things more affordable--one of the reasons President Trump has talked about this in many different ways at the White House and others, we had a population problem.

The math right now says that the United States is fairly close to zero population growth.

Do you remember your high school economics class where they taught you that GDP growth is a combination of step-ups in productivity and population growth. What happens when we don't have the population growth?

No, you are not magically going to create an army of new little babies. Bless them, but this is not just the United States. It is all over the industrialized world.

Oddly enough, the United States is still much better off than many, many countries. France actually has a higher fertility rate than the United States, even when you adjust for their immigrant population.

We have been trying to promote what we call a unified theory that says that the adoption of technology, the legalization of healthcare disruptions that will make us healthier, better; move to a truly talent-based immigration system; move away from the family sponsorship system, and President Trump has talked about this. Remember that he says that it is insane that we educate someone and send them home to compete with us.

There are about a dozen things on our unified theory, and you have to do them all at once. It is one of the reasons that I am not running again.

I had an agreement that we were going to do a second reconciliation.

Part of that reconciliation, we were going to do all of these ideas that saved money but didn't take away services. We were going to get rid of the waste and fraud and the misalignment and the way some of the things are scammed, and that became too hard.

You do realize that $83,000 a second is $7.4 billion a day. If you want something that is uncomfortable--maybe I shouldn't talk about this, so that means I am going to--DOGE. I absolutely loved DOGE's mission, but once again, you have to be able to execute it. You need Members of Congress who are tough SOBs to execute it.

When we started DOGE, it was going to be $2 trillion. Excuse me. When the White House started DOGE, it was going to be $2 trillion. Then it fell to $1 trillion. You can go to doge.gov right now. It will be $200 billion-plus of identified savings.

What have we actually executed? What have we helped them actually execute? It was about $7 billion. We borrowed more than that just today. Does anyone see a math problem?

Let's take a look at this one. Contributions by outlays alone to the 2025, 1.75--I also need to--we all fuss about this in our office. Last year's sort of official borrowing was $1.750 trillion. Understand there was a one-time kickback of student loans. If not, it would have been closer to $2 trillion, but, hey, math is math.

I need you to think about this.

Mr. Speaker, 17 percent of our contributions to that debt came from interest and 16 percent were the increases in national defense, the one thing that is in the Constitution here. When you start to actually take a look at the biggest spend, 29 percent was our benefits to those who are age 65 and up. Then you actually get over here, 54 to 64, that is 10 percent.

When you get to our kids, those who are under 18, we spent about 8 percent. When I say ``spent,'' these were things that drove borrowing.

I am trying to create an understanding that, if we don't get our act together, we have really ugly things happening. In 6.5 years from now, the Social Security trust fund is empty. In 6.5 years from now, the Medicare trust fund is empty.

This is a 24 percent cut to your Social Security check, and this is an 11 percent cut to hospital reimbursement. That is 6.5 years from now, and the scale on it is monstrous. When I get idiots who will say to just raise taxes, I think the first year, which will be 2033, it would be, if you add them together, $638 billion. The scale of this is monstrous.

How often do you see us stepping up and saying that we are going to start working on this today because it is going to take us a couple of years to figure out how we are going to finance this? Are we just going to pretend? We double the poverty of seniors in 7 years. We have a math set that says that we will double the number of baby boomers who live on the street 7 years from now.

Does anyone have morality around here and want to just do the right thing?

The idiocy from some of my Democratic colleagues who will say that we will just raise the cap on this and that, if you actually do sort of the cap, the calculations, you get a nice spike for a little while, but it only covers about 38 percent of the shortfall.

This is not easy. Then many of us come up and say that we also have another math problem. Being on the Ways and Means Committee, we are supposed to actually manage the revenues into this Federal Government.

What happens when we have really good GDP growth but a lot of that isn't coming from labor but it is coming from capital expenditures?

Mr. Speaker, as you already know, we have an income tax-based tax system. We tax your capital gains. We tax your wages. We then have FICA taxes, which are your Social Security, your Medicare, your unemployment.

What happens when much of our economic growth is coming from capital expenditures and not the taxes on wages? We are actually sort of seeing we are forced to have a discussion of how do we finance the future of this government? Are we allowed to do that? It is reality.

So here is a question for anyone who is crazy enough to be watching. I always find this interesting. We will get some folks who, tomorrow, when this thing goes up on YouTube, who will fuss and say that the Chamber is empty. It is just the way it is at night, but we are on approximately a thousand televisions around the campus, and, hopefully, there is some poor intern who is stuck having to watch this.

Yet, we are probably on several hundred thousand, maybe a million television screens around the country if people are either freaky smart or have no life and are trying to find a way to fall asleep and are watching C-SPAN right now and some guy trying to do a semi-economics and debt and deficit lecture.

For those of you who do care, you start to walk through this math and say: How do you actually deal with the fact that these trust funds go empty in the next couple of years and our mix is changing and, yet, the groups that make their money trying to--all right.

Let's do the question: Is borrowing a tax? Mr. Speaker, it is a simple question. Is borrowing a tax? It is money we owe, and we have to pay interest on it. It is a tax paid for by a future generation, just as inflation is a tax on your savings. But we can hand out things--so last year, for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.43. Now, this year, it is better with what President Trump did, what we did here. We pushed down some of the spending. We made our first adjustments in Medicaid. Even then, the spending still goes up. It just goes up slower.

Our guess is that this year, for every dollar of taxation we collect, we are going to spend about $1.33 or $1.34. My math is closer to $1.36. But you can't do that very long.

Let's actually walk through some of the things we have been analyzing as the Joint Economic Committee. I also chair the Joint Economic Committee. I have come here and done detailed presentations from the MedPAC report and other things on something called Medicare part C. It is Medicare Advantage. It is now 55 percent of the population. I really want to defend Medicare Advantage. I just want it to be more efficient.

We have a math problem. There is something in there where we have identified--and this is also from the MedPAC reports. We call it excess premiums for Medicare Advantage. This last year, we think it came in at about $13-plus billion. What is funky about this is part of that exposure ends up on Medicare part B and Medicare Advantage, or traditional Medicare. This one is the traditional Medicare, and this one is the MA.

What that means is you are paying it. If you are on Medicare, particularly if you are on traditional Medicare, you are picking up a whole bunch of other costs. The Federal Government is picking up about 9.9 percent, and the States are having to pick up some of the burden also because of dual-eligible populations. Dual-eligible populations where you are poor enough that if you are on traditional Medicare, Medicaid picks up part of your copays.

But this is, once again, a mistake in the design of Medicare Advantage. We are transferring costs to other populations in Medicare.

The punch line here--we had a fight in my office whether I should walk everyone through the whole formula, and I think I would have had no one watching on C-SPAN because it is complicated. You need to understand that over a couple years, if you are on traditional Medicare, you are basically paying $2,589 more because of this misalignment here, where these costs are being shifted to the Medicare part B portion.

We have a way to fix this. We have offered a piece of legislation that basically takes Medicare Advantage and puts it back to its tradition where you don't try to make more money by the risk scores or the star ratings. You put it into the initial bid, and, yes, you are going to have to do longer enrollments and those things so the insurance company invests in making you healthier.

What we see is a healthier Medicare Advantage population uses less, and the companies can make a bigger profit. It is good for society. It is a good win-win, but now you have to make a decision--and I am speaking more to the Medicare Advantage lobbyists right now, if there is anyone out there

watching--functioning zero is the proposal right now coming from the administration. Instead of redesigning the program and getting rid of-- let's just call it--I won't call it waste and fraud. We will call it the misalignment that has been identified in the MedPAC reports, whether they be 20 percent more than fee-for-service or a future one that may come down to 17 percent, but that is still, over 10 years, like $2 trillion of additional spending; or you can actually get crammed down here, which is what is coming; or work with offices like ours that want to take the program back to its original design where these insurers make money by helping their populations be healthier; or you can basically start to just get undercompensated over and over and over.

Once again, let's come back to the basics. If you go back to the MedPAC report, this is just the overpayment portion. This is not some of the other things that are in the MedPAC report that drive us insane. That was $84 billion last year. We will sit here on the floor and fight for hours over a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that because this is hard to talk about. It is complex, and there is an army of lobbyists to stop us from doing it.

Maybe we should learn to do the complex things because, once again, we borrowed $7.4 billion today.

Let's do some happy talk. Last Saturday, in Scottsdale, we actually did a Joint Economic hearing, a field hearing. We brought in some incredibly creative companies in the healthcare space. We had one there that has actually come up with a type of multicancer detection. I am still having a little trouble on their technology. They think they can do it with a handful of drops of your blood that you could actually extract at home, and they put it on a plate, and they are looking for a type of peptide--it is not the ones you do when you are bodybuilding--a type of peptide that would help identify different types of cancer. They think they can get this product down to about $150. You would do a multicancer test multiple times a year.

We had the gentleman sitting over next to me over here, he is from Doctor AI. If anyone is watching and you are interested, go look. Utah has just done a sandbox with them, so the State of Utah where the AI is doing renewals of your prescriptions. Why aren't we all doing that? There are ideas here where you had a revolution to crash the cost of healthcare.

WHOOP was there, and they were talking about some of the things that are coming in the future where you can be basically wearing your medical lab on your body. It can talk to the Doctor AI, and then the healthcare provider there knows whether you need to come in or whether it can be prescribed to you just automatically.

Mr. Speaker, my point is if we could get our act together and start being creative and doing the hard things and stop making the technology disruptions, because they are functioning illegal today, you know, allowing AI to prescribe, allowing the wearables. Remember, the newest version of Apple Watch is an FDA-approved medical device for the heart, just a thought experiment within its scope of what has been approved by the FDA should be allowed to prescribe. Are we ready to start doing things like that?

If we don't start telling the truth about the math, the next few years are going to be hell around here. I won't be here for it, but you will. Is winning the next election that much more important than telling the truth? I am in a 50/50 District. I get up into entire meetings on how to save Social Security, how to save Medicare, how to save these things, and I have been rewarded over and over and over. I think I am one of the most expensive races and losses for the Democrats in all of America.

You can win. Treat your voters with respect. Treat them as having an intellect and treat them that it doesn't have to be a dystopian darkness if you are willing to innovate. But if you are not willing, it gets ugly.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back.

Mr. Speaker, have you ever had a piece of legislation--we all go through this--where you have your friends on the opposite side who say things, and you think, wow, I can't find that in this piece of legislation. I guess we are all sometimes in the pandering business.

About a year ago, in my community, we had a woman who came running out of her house holding a knife. She was having some sort of horrible mental health issue, and she was charging a police officer with a knife. Before this type of technology, she would have lost her life because a traditional firearm would have been used. They used a nonlethal.

The reason it doesn't say ``taser'' in the language is because who knows what next year's innovation is going to be. That is the whole point: Can you have a society where, through the use of technology, people don't die?

Why do the bill? Why do this portion of the bill for those of us on the Committee on Ways and Means? Let's go back about 100 years ago. On excise tax, you have 11 percent on the cartridge, and you have 10 percent on the unit itself. You collect the excise tax. Then you have to go back to the tax-exempt government agency, have them fill out their paperwork, submit it over, and then turn back to refund it. We are just trying to clean up the bureaucracies that are 100 years out of date.

It is not that hard. Make up your mind. Do you want broader adoption of nonlethal technology so our brothers and sisters don't die?

Think of some of the crappy things that have happened in our society over the last 10, 20 years because of the discharge of a firearm in law enforcement. It does not need to be that way.

This is actually the second or third rewrite of this bill as we try to make the anti-firearm groups happy. It turns out we would meet their requests, and then they would change their standard. The problem or the disagreement kept changing.

I don't know what the motivation is for playing games, but we bring this to the floor with honest hearts. We want our brothers and sisters not to die in this moment of violence. I would think there would be this almost giddy optimism that technology is bringing us here. Instead, it continues to be the moving excuse of why to oppose the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record three letters.

Congress of the United States,

House of Representatives,

Washington, DC, December 10, 2025.

Hon. Pam Bondi,

Attorney General, Department of Justice,

Washington, DC.

Hon. Dan Driscoll,

Acting Director, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and

Explosives, Washington, DC.

Hon. Robert Leider,

Chief Counsel, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and

Explosives, Washington, DC.

Hon. Scott Bessent,

Secretary of the Treasury,

Department of the Treasury, Washington, DC.

Hon. Robert Cekada,

Deputy Director, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and

Explosives, Washington, DC.

Hon. Mary G. Ryan,

Administrator, Alcohol, Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau,

Washington, DC.

Dear Attorney General Bondi, Secretary Bessent, Director

Driscoll, Deputy Director Cekada, and Chief Counsel Leider,

and Administrator Ryan: As former law enforcement officers,

we write to share our concerns regarding the outdated federal

classification of modern less-than-lethal technologies and

provide an update on the strong legislative progress of H.R.

2189, the Law Enforcement Innovate to De-Escalate Act, and

H.R. 4242, the Innovate Less Lethal to De-Escalate Tax

Modernization Act. H.R. 2189 has received significant

bipartisan support and was marked up and approved by the

House Judiciary Committee with favorable guidance on November

18, 2025.

H.R. 2189 addresses a serious and growing challenge:

outdated statutory language within the 1968 Gun Control Act

(GCA) that unintentionally classifies certain non-lethal

devices as firearms. As technology has advanced, this

decades-old framework has failed to keep pace, creating

regulatory outcomes that run counter to modern policing needs

and Congress's original intent.

A clear example is the TASER T10. Although engineered

expressly for less-than-lethal use, it has been classified as

a firearm solely because its propulsion system uses a small

primer charge to expel its non-lethal projectiles. Older

TASER models also contain a primer, but because those devices

utilize compressed air released from a punctured gas cylinder

to expel the projectile, they fall outside the GCA

definition. The T10's updated, gas-less propulsion system

triggers firearm classification under the statute, even

though the device is no more dangerous and, in many respects,

safer than previous models that remain unregulated under the

Mr. Speaker, 90 seconds is the shortest I have ever spoken.

Mr. Speaker, if someone is actually listening to our discussion, the Democrats have made it clear: Hey, lots of law enforcement have this product.

Wonderful. We are trying to explain that this is a segment of the tax code we are trying to make easier and more efficient. Once again, just read the bill. It is remarkably simple.

Mr. Speaker, you have an excise tax. You have to go through all these steps to collect it then to refund it.

So my friend from California--he is a good guy. We have done a number of bills together over the years--made my argument. This is actually in wide distribution across the country, and there is another generation of technology, hopefully, coming and another one coming.

It is more than just the taser in the hand. It may be the thing on the wall that protects my synagogue or my school or those things. There is a revolution of nonlethal coming so that people don't have to die.

I thank the gentleman for explaining that it is in wide distribution. Now let's deal with the things in the tax code that add bureaucracy and costs. If we both support the fact that these should be in the hands of people protecting our public, then let's remove some of the bureaucracy that makes it more expensive.

Mr. Speaker, give me a moment here to get set up. Sometimes, we are just scrambling because we had a whole speech lined up. We were going to do something just simple and pleasant for everyone. We were going to walk through Medicare financing for a while, and they wouldn't give me 3 hours or 4 hours to do it, so you are stuck with me for a half an hour.

Then, earlier today, CBO actually did their update. Okay. Let's see if I can make this make sense.

When I come behind these microphones, I am trying to explain sort of a unified theory that, so often, the political class behind these microphones say: We can do this.

Okay. That may be wonderful, but you have to understand that it all works together: our demographics, our tax system, the fact of the matter is this incentive for this to grow, this incentive here, and the adoption of technology. I need people to start thinking about the interaction that there is not a simple solution to a country that, right now, is functionally borrowing about $74,000 every second so far this fiscal year.

Sorry. Let me rephrase. Over the last 12 months. If you do just fiscal year, it is higher.

A few hours ago, the CBO put out a report. Look, the report is actually like this. I just cheated. I just grabbed the executive summary because I didn't need the whole binder out here.

It is going to take me 3 days or 4 days to read through everything, but I have some of the highlights for you--this is important--and then it is going to tie into what we are spending.

Your country is an insurance company with an army. That is both funny and it happens to be mathematically true. In about 33 months, over half of the Federal spending will go to those who are 65 and up. Actually, in 33 months, I will be one of them.

It is demographics. We have gone about 30 years or 40 years with dramatically fewer children than we expected. I have done a series of presentations here on the floor where I have shown that we actually have the same number of 18-year-olds as we had 20 years ago, but double the number of those who are 65 and up.

Is that Republican or Democrat? Look, there is policies that have been engaged in by Democrats that helped to create this, but the fact of the matter is that these are people. It is our reality. We have our obligations on Medicare, on Social Security, and some that will be dual eligible because they are poor and retired, and we have some things that are terrifying.

In 6\1/2\ years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. Your hospital will take an 11 percent cut. Medicare Advantage programs will actually take something much larger. It is just the way the Medicare part A trust fund works.

In 6\1/2\ years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. No one stole your money. We just don't have enough workers. It was a Pay-As- You-Go system. It is math. The fact of the matter is that, yes, the money has been loaned to the Treasury. Treasury actually pays interest on that money, so that twice a year, there is actually a fairly large dividend given to the trust fund. It is demographics. We had the baby boomers.

In 6\1/2\ years, if we followed the law, there is a 24 percent cut coming to Social Security recipients, which will double the poverty of seniors in America. Our math is that it will double the number of baby boomers who are homeless. It is absolutely immoral, but we are not allowed to talk about it except for idiots like me who get up and say week after week: Please, my brothers and sisters here, there are things that we can do.

The Democrats say that we will just tax rich people. Then you show that the math is nothing like that. It doesn't work.

Here is the CBO report. In here, it makes it absolutely clear, and I have been telling you for 1 year, but the scorekeepers have finally caught up with my Joint Economic Committee economists. Remember, I chair the Joint Economic Committee. I chair Oversight Subcommittee in the Ways and Means Committee, so I am blessed. I have a freaky smart staff.

In 2032, the trust funds are empty. In 2033, the first year where they are completely empty, if you said that we are just going to pay for everything out of the general fund, okay, we can do that.

My estimates come in at about $638 billion in 2033 just to make up the shortfall of the Social Security trust fund being gone and the Medicare trust fund being gone. That is, what, 60 percent of today's defense budget.

Why is math such an anathema to this place?

Let's walk through a couple of other things here. I have only had time to produce a couple of boards from the new CBO report, and then we will try to tie these into what else is going on.

This year, we are basically going to spend 3.3 percent of the entire economy on interest--interest. Once again, this interest number is just the interest to publicly sold debt.

Remember how I was just talking about the debt? That we borrow the Social Security money, and then the trust fund gets IOUs from the Treasury, and we pay it interest? Then when the Social Security needs money--which they do every month--because the tax receipts come in from your FICA taxes and there is a shortfall, so they cash that in every month?

If you add up all of the money and interest paid from the trust funds, I think this year is going to look more like $1.2 trillion in interest. Why that is important: What is the number one spend in America? The number one spend of your Federal Government is Social Security. It is going to come in at about $1.6 trillion this year.

Interest is your number two. It is going to come in at about $1.2 trillion.

Medicare is going to come in at about $1.1 trillion this year, maybe a little more.

Medicaid and ACA, ObamaCare subsidies, are going to come in at $900 billion.

Those are your top four.

Number five is the defense. The thing that is actually in the United States Constitution is actually number five in hierarchy of spending.

One of the things that CBO was trying to point out is that their estimate is for 9 budget years--so 9 budget years is 2036 from now-- that we will go from $1 trillion of interest to $2.1 trillion of interest. In 2036, so 9 budget years from now, the annual deficit will be about $3.1 trillion. Structural deficit is $1 trillion, and $2.1 trillion will just be interest. The majority of future deficits are actually interest.

Interest and healthcare are the primary drivers of U.S. sovereign debt. Will the bond market continue to finance this?

What happens when one of your greatest solutions is: Can we actually have honest conversations about healthcare costs? Are we willing to legalize the very technologies and the methodologies of helping our brothers and sisters stay healthier and, therefore, use dramatically less healthcare?

I have been coming behind this mike for over a decade with presentation after presentation of technologies, new pharmaceuticals, and new methodologies to crash the price of healthcare. I get the crap kicked out of me because armies of lobbyists don't like it when we talk about changing their business model.

Remember, several months ago, I came here to the floor and showed that we came up with a math experiment of, in America, how many duplicative MRI scans, ultrasounds, X-rays, and CTs are there? The top end was looking like $36 billion in a single year.

Why wouldn't you do something crazy? You get an MRI, attach it to this crazy supercomputer that you put in your pocket, and then when you go to your next doctor, you put it up, and it is up on their screens, and you don't get another one.

Now it turns out that you get some folks who make money on the duplicative scans. They get very angry, but $35 billion over 10 years, $350 billion, and that is just one of dozens of things. Why is it so hard? Are we that afraid of the lobbyists? Are we that afraid of trying to explain to the folks at home that we don't have a choice?

In 6\1/2\ years--let's say it again--the Medicare trust fund is empty. If you want to extend the life of the trust fund, let's have a revolution on the actual cost of delivering healthcare.

There are a couple of other things that are highlights in the CBO report. They estimate that in 10 years, we will have 5.3 million fewer people in America. That is mostly from reduction in immigration and the fact that our fertility rates continue to fall, but think of this.

That missing 5.3 million people is $500 billion over that timeframe in lost tax receipts. When I use the term ``demographics'' on our debt, it is a function. Our debt is a function of the fact that our society has gotten older. We have substantially fewer children. We are going to have fewer workers, and there are actually whole charts I have here that actually talk about it.

Look, they are hard charts. This one is absolutely inappropriately designed to use on the floor, but it is trying to explain what happens in a society when we have substantially fewer young

workers in our society and substantially more of those who are now 65 and older.

It is just life, but we have to be prepared for what it means when the majority of Federal spending will be going to those 65 and up in just a couple of years.

Are we prepared for this? Of course, we are not. So many folks still have a mind frame that is decades out of date with what we are demographically. This is happening over the entire industrialized world, but in our society here, if I can raise wages and productivity of those who are in the workforce, I have resources to cover the promised benefits, because we made a deal. We have a societal deal that we are going to cover Medicare and Social Security.

Something I want to touch on--and I didn't bring the chart on this. There are a lot of folks who think that Medicare itself is paid for by your payroll tax. It is actually about 38 percent of that. As a medical enrollee, you pay--the total cost, depending if you are in Medicare Advantage, which is--what?--55 percent of the population. The others are maybe in part A, part A and part B.

Fifteen percent is sort of paid by the enrollee. Thirty-eight-some percent is paid by the FICA tax, so today's workers paying for today's retirees. The rest is borrowed out of the general fund.

You have to understand that a huge portion of our debt is actually paying for the healthcare.

Sorry. My 3-year-old is trying to call me. Yes, I have a 3-year-old and a 10-year-old, so you know I am optimistic.

When we talk about Medicare financing, most folks don't understand it is one of the key drivers of our debt.

Let's actually walk through something. Several months ago, we gathered all the MedPAC reports, all the other reports on Medicare Advantage. It is Medicare part C. I love a capitated model. A properly designed capitated model, which is Medicare Advantage, is designed so you have sort of a gatekeeper. That may be the insurance company or that may be the group of doctors. Their mission needs to be helping you be healthier.

We do this in my State's Medicaid system. We call it AHCCCS in Arizona. I actually, at one point, did the budgets for that.

The concept behind this is to align the incentives. The incentives aren't to keep trying to find the highest reimbursement to charge things to the healthcare system. It is the incentive that we are going to help our brothers and sisters be healthier.

If you are the insurer, you make a profit because you lower utilization because you had your enrollees, your patients, your members, get healthier. That is not what has been happening in Medicare Advantage if you read the actual auditing reports.

We actually did a piece of legislation several months ago that said instead of having this world where there is the risk scoring and--if you see, there are actually now criminal investigations going on at the Department of Justice because of people being scored as being much sicker, needing much more, and they are actually not sick. There are multiple criminal investigations going on at the Department of Justice.

I keep approaching the Medicare Advantage companies, saying to work with us. Could we get rid of the way we do risk scoring, the way we do these star ratings, where you use those things to pump up your compensation, and actually do it from enrolling? Let's get the actual models right. We will build a shock absorber if someone gets really sick. We will share the risk.

Then, the incentive is to help the population get healthier and healthier because we have technology. We have wearables. We have GLP-1. We have other things you can do to help our brothers and sisters get healthier.

We have lots of data right now, when we are starting to see math showing, in 2025, almost $84 billion of new risk model implementation basically saying this is excess spending. If you look at the MedPAC report, it is almost coming in at a couple of hundred billion dollars a year.

We run around here saying waste and fraud, but this technically might not be fraud because it is the design of the system.

When ObamaCare was passed 18 years ago, it actually had a series of things in there that created many of these incentives to game the system.

Now, the administration is talking about saying we are just going to do a cap. I want to try to sell this concept, saying why don't we align the incentives, both the government incentives as the payer and the patient incentives to the doctor, so we are all doing the same thing. We are lowering the expense by creating a healthier population.

The fact of the matter is, if you look at the MedPAC reports--and I know they get mocked, but no one else seems to produce the actual data--it is almost $2 trillion a year. Remember, the MedPAC report comes in and says, Medicare Advantage, when you do the risk adjustment, it comes in at 120 percent of fee-for-service. That is a 25 percent gap. In the original design, in 2005, the Medicare part C was supposed to come in at 95 percent.

I know it is geeky, but this is a stunning amount of money. We will spend hours here arguing about millions of dollars. These are billions and billions, and over 10 years, it is in the trillions.

Why is it so hard for this place to want to take on the things that actually would affect the crushing debt that CBO just told you is coming screaming at you?

Remember, the CBO report here basically says in this 9-year budget window, 10-year budget window, your country goes over 120 percent debt to GDP, surpassing World War II.

Are we going to fix it by little incremental things, or are we going to do it by a major reconciliation bill that actually takes on big issues, complex issues, real math? Or will we just continue to pander and not tell the truth about the scale of what is coming at us?

Medicare Advantage overpayments, we believe, this last year, just the overpayment portion, was $84 billion. You start to see a chart like this. Add it up, I actually have a trillion dollars here for you. Align the incentives, and I can get you another few hundred billion dollars of alignment incentives by changing utilization, by helping our brothers and sisters be healthier. Turns out that is real money.

I have lots of charts here, but I want to actually go--I am going to skip around a little bit--to contributions to the proposed Medicare Advantage payment update. If there happens to be a lobbyist out there representing Medicare Advantage, come talk to me. This is what I think CMS is actually proposing to you, saying we are going to change the compensation. We are going to change your risk scoring. You are basically getting zero movement.

This is what you get by not working with us in aligning the incentives, where you can make a profit by fixing the incentives within the system or you can basically get a cramdown. Which one do you want to do? Do you want to prove that you are a free market manager, that a free market system actually can deliver healthcare and do it better, faster, more efficiently, and more morally because you give a darn about your patients?

Or we can basically say we are just going to pay you less, and then you figure out how you are going to put that through the system. This is the proposal coming at you. You didn't want to talk to me about trying to fix the incentives in Medicare Advantage, so now you are going to get this.

I will argue, come talk to us about our piece of legislation. It has been out there for several months. You have had chances. We have had multiple Ph.D. economists score it. We have a preliminary score from CBO, saying it is probably about $1.84 trillion in savings over 10 years, making it the single largest savings bill in U.S. history.

I am in a 50/50 district, and I am doing bills like this because I can do math.

Mr. Speaker, instead of me walking through all this, did you see the job growth numbers today? They are actually pretty good. Did you see the punch line in the job growth numbers?

The U.S. economy added approximately 140,000 jobs; the market added 181,000. It is absolutely terrific. A dominance of the new jobs that were created are in healthcare. The majority of spending in healthcare comes

through government. Does anyone see the circular problem of what we are talking about? If my growth in the employment base is healthcare, and over here those jobs are financed through government spending, and that government spending is substantially borrowed, that is not a virtuous cycle.

We have a structural problem. Remember, today your government is going to borrow 6 to $7 billion. This was supposed to be a year with the tariff receipts and with everything else we were supposed to really start to pay down the deficit. The problem is interest, healthcare costs have exceeded our models. We are still probably heading to a 1.9, $2 trillion borrow.

It turns out now CBO is catching up with the numbers I have been bringing behind this microphone for the last year. If we do not start to take this seriously, Mr. Speaker, we will have made the decision that the bond market, not as in Congress, not the White House, will run this country.

Remember, we have to bring about 10 to $11 trillion of debt to market this year for refinancing, and we are going to issue probably $2 trillion of new debt.

When the United States sells a 10-year bond and Greece sells a 10- year bond today, Greece has a lower interest rate than the United States. When the debt markets think Greece is more creditworthy than the United States--I don't know how to make it more simple. Why is it so hard to tell the truth about the math?

Mr. Speaker, there is a way to stabilize this. We are not going to pay it off. The demographic headwinds make that almost impossible, but you can stabilize the debt. You just have to do complex big boy things to do it.

One of the reasons I am leaving Congress is I am tired of smashing my head over and over here on blunt objects as people just stare back at you and say, David, I would have to try to explain that. David, you are not allowed to use the words ``Social Security'' and ``Medicare.'' It will upset people. What will upset people is when these trust funds run out and they are seeing their benefits cut because we were too intellectually vacuous to step up and tell the truth even though we have known this for decades.

Mr. Speaker, I am actually going to drink more coffee and do more reading.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 14 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, February 12, 2026, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to consolidate some of this for some efficiency.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy), and then we will finish up.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is an incredible leader and passionate on this, and it is absurd that something that America desperately wants has been this difficult for the Democrats, particularly in the Senate.

How many Democrats, when we passed it out of the House before, voted with us?

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) for the purpose of a colloquy.

Let's save America. Let's protect our elections.

I will give you one last concept, being someone from Arizona. How do you protect a republic if your citizens don't trust the institutions and don't trust elections? So even if you are uncomfortable with the legislation, which I have no idea why you would be, defend the institution by passing a piece of legislation that actually raises the level of faith and trust in our elections. How can it not be amazingly good for this Republic?

Thanks, Chip. I know you have to get out of here.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to do this somewhat quickly because they are a couple of fairly simple concepts.

Almost every week when we are in session, for a decade, I have come behind this microphone and tried to help people understand the fiscal situation in the United States.

Some of the math is both hopeful and incredibly frustrating. So think about this: Our tax collections are up almost 10 percent--almost 10 percent. Tax collections are up in the last 12 months. Yet, over the last 12 months, we have borrowed $2.34 trillion. We are borrowing right now, if you take over the last 12 months, $74,000 every second.

You go: But how can that possibly be? Tax receipts are up.

Our problem is fairly simple. Refinancing the debt, we have to bring about $10 trillion to $11 trillion to market over this 12-month period, and much of that is debt that was sold a few years ago, when interest rates were very, very low. So it is getting refinanced at today's rates.

The other thing that I talk about constantly, because it is my intense frustration around here, is the Democrats and--I am sorry--many of my Republican colleagues have turned healthcare into financial engineering instead of: What does it cost to provide services? What does it cost to help our brothers and sisters be healthy? We are actually seeing that we had some projections from CBO and others of about a 5 percent growth in spending on healthcare. I am going to show you some of this.

We are seeing some numbers coming in that are closer to 8 percent or 9 percent growth in that spending, so interest and healthcare.

Mr. Speaker, much of it is demographics. Remember, in less than approximately 3 years, over half of the Federal spending will go to those who are 65 and up. It is substantial because of a couple of things.

We got older as a population. We have gone 30 to 40 years with falling fertility rates. Remember, we are well below replacement rates in the number of children we have. There is math that, last year and this year, there was pretty much flat population growth.

Then there is this. I'm trying to help folks understand the reality of what your Federal Government is.

Do you see the blue area? This is defense and nondefense. In a couple of days, we are actually going to get an update, and my team actually thinks that this number will go from 26 percent of being, what we call, discretionary to maybe down to 25 percent. That is one quarter.

Every dime of this is borrowed, and that is all Members of Congress actually vote on. The rest of this, whether it be interest, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or other mandatory spending, all of that red is on autopilot. It is a formula.

If you add this up, basically it is under $2 trillion. I just told you we have borrowed over $2.3 trillion in the last 12 months, meaning every dime of this is borrowed, and a chunk of mandatory is borrowed.

That is our reality. Your government is basically an insurance company with an army paying out a lot of annuities. It is demographics. Yet much of the craziness you hear behind these microphones is anything they can say to keep you from focusing on the fiscal reality of what is going on in our country.

We have been trying to figure out how to express some of this, so I am going to do it in a couple of different ways.

Over the last 12 months, receipts have grown 10 percent. Spending is up 4 percent. You say: Shouldn't we be closing the gap? Except the problem is the spending last year was over $7 trillion, where tax receipts were $5 trillion. Do the 4 percent growth over here on spending, the 10 percent growth on taxes, you still have--closing the gap--maybe $250 billion. That is wonderful. If you are heading toward $7.4 trillion spending, that is less than 1 month of borrowing.

You have got to understand. We just finished the fourth month of this new fiscal year, and we have already borrowed--we have borrowed since October 1 $926,724,000. Meaning in the next couple of weeks, depending on how much cash the Treasury decides to keep on the balance sheets, we are going to hit a trillion dollars. This was supposed to be a year where we would start seeing the debt starting to go down.

I blessed. I chair the Joint Economic Committee, I am number four on Ways and Means, and I chair the Oversight there. My job is to get the math right.

We always said we thought this would be a $2 trillion borrow year. Tax receipts are up, but spending is up substantially, once again, because of the financing of $38.5 trillion of U.S. sovereigns, $10 trillion of it having to be refinanced this year, $2 trillion virgin, meaning it is new borrowing, and healthcare costs.

When we bring these charts in, it is one of the classic problems of when you do this thing, look at this. Tax receipts are way up; but the tax receipts and spending are upside down. One is based on $7-plus trillion, the other is based on $5 trillion, meaning that gap is not nearly as tight as you think it is.

I am going to pass through some of these.

Part of the great battle is--and Chip was basically teasing for the 14 people that watch C-SPAN. Sometimes I am worried there is not even 14--if you ever have a curiosity, if you really care about saving the Republic, I would argue what takes us down is potentially the bond market. If we keep borrowing like this, the bond market is going to start running this country.

Go to the Joint Economic Committee Republicans' website. We put out some amazing data, and we are trying to make it easier to absorb. We are doing better with charts and graphs, but another thing we do is every workday we send out a text message. We call it the Daily Debt, Schweikert's Daily Debt, and it basically does this math for you. It tells you here is what we borrowed over the last 12 months, and here is what we have borrowed this fiscal year.

The beauty of this is you can say: Over the last 12 months, we are borrowing $74,400 every second. So far this fiscal year, so 4 months in, we are borrowing $85,000 every second.

Start telling the truth about the math and understand so often the theatrics you see here in Congress are so we can give you a dopamine hit, but we don't have to deal with these numbers because these numbers are difficult, complex, and really hard to explain. The armies of lobbyists and people in our hallways here, Mr. Speaker, what do they do when they get to our office? They don't walk in the door and say: We really want you to save the future generation. Spend less money. Everyone is at our door either wanting money or wanting us to regulate their competition. That is bureaucracies. That is businesses. That is private groups, charities. Give us more money, or create a barrier to entry so I don't have to compete with someone else with better, faster, cheaper technology. That is particularly true in healthcare.

We have done presentation after presentation here showing how you could crash the price of healthcare legalizing technology. Even today, I had a little bit of a verbal kerfuffle--love that word--with a Member who is a doctor, and he is my friend. He despised the concept, but I was showing him part of the paper that says if you have this sort of data coming off your body, whether this be the Oura ring, whether the WHOOP, the Apple Watch, the things you can wear, the data from it using the latest AI packages is statistically more accurate than a human. Why wouldn't you legalize that to help people keep healthy?

Well, it turns out when you tell a medical professional that, they get a little cranky at you because it is always about the money here.

This chart you can find on the Joint Economic Committee website, but I am trying to actually show what is happening. As we are refinancing our debt, we are having to spend a lot more money. We calculate that just interest this year, Mr. Speaker, will be probably about $1.2 trillion.

Think about this hierarchy. Let's do this together: Social Security, $1.5 trillion; interest, $1.2 trillion; Medicare, maybe $1.1 trillion; Medicaid and

Obama subsidies, almost another $900 billion. Defense is actually the fifth in our hierarchy of spending. The thing that is actually in the Constitution now is number five.

When you get these folks that walk in the door saying: Just stop spending money, balance the budget tomorrow. I can do it, except you would have to get rid of every bit of government, every bit of defense, and then you tell me about the $600 billion you want me to remove from Medicare, Social Security, military pensions. What do you want to do?

That is the reality. Just interest this year will be 3 percent, maybe even higher, of GDP. When you see us talk about we want to get the debt down to just 3 percent of GDP, that just covers our interest carry.

I have a couple of these other charts I sort of want to walk through.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time I have remaining.

Excellent. If I do this quickly--and I apologize for talking so fast. I have had a lot of coffee today. I am trying to detox.

Something almost no one around here pays attention to, but it is my job on Ways and Means and my job with the Joint Economic Committee to talk about the financing. How do you have a country that if we are going to burn $2-plus trillion this year, that means you are bringing at least a quarter trillion dollars to market every month. Yesterday and the day before that and the day before that, we had to borrow about $7.3 billion that day; $7 billion a day, that is so far this fiscal year. If you do it over the last 12 months, it is almost $6.5 billion a day is what we borrow.

You don't need to actually pay real detailed attention to this, but what I am trying to show is the average maturities on our bonds and that they have to be refinanced. Every quarter, this is what is coming to market and the fact that we are moving away from much lower interest rates to much higher interest rates, but there are other things going on.

Do you remember how often--and, Mr. Speaker, you have probably had this experience. You are at a townhall, and someone says: How much do foreigners own of our debt?

And now you try to explain that China is actually, I think, down from $1.2 trillion down to $700 billion and is maybe now third. Japan is number one, but there were certain things that happened. When Central Banks were buying U.S. debt, there was a level of stability that came with it. This is an interesting concept, and some of the bond market folks are starting to write about this. They held it because they needed an offset for the currency. They needed it for trade. They wanted just stability.

As foreign governments and foreign central banks are getting rid of U.S. debt, bond markets, hedge funds, and others are the ones buying it. Okay. Wonderful. We have people buying our debt.

But do you see the problem? These are traders. If there is a carry trade, if there is an opportunity to make a spread, if there is an arbitrage, they sell it. You are starting to see, if you actually look--there is actually a thing called a bond VIX, a volatility index. We are starting to see much more volatility in U.S. debt. That actually scares me.

You want stability. You want the markets to believe in us. You want the markets to understand we are going to get our act together, that we are creditworthy. Yet Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. I can think of 12, 13 countries that today, if they offer a 10-year bond, that 10-year bond goes at a lower interest rates than the United States. Does that bother anyone? Does that tell anyone anything? Is anyone listening?

Look, I have chart after chart after chart.

There are ways we can communicate to the bond markets that we are taking our debt seriously. There are ways we can protect Medicare and Social Security, but we have got to tell the truth about them.

Right now, the Social Security trust fund is empty in 6.5 years. That means 7 years from now, if you are on Social Security, if we follow the law as it is today and Congress continues to fail to act, you get a 24 percent cut. Our model says we double senior poverty in 7 years. We will double the number of baby boomers who live on the street.

In 6.5 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty, and your hospital, others, get an 11 percent cut. That is our model right now.

You start to say: How do we preserve these programs?

Well, maybe we can actually take on the things we know are going on.

Next week, Mr. Speaker, I am going to try something that is probably politically crazy, but we are going to walk through the financing of Medicare next week. I am going to walk through how it actually works, because some people think the magic trust fund pays for everything. The general fund, which is all borrowed here, pays for about 40 percent of it.

In conversations, even with my brothers and sisters here, and even with some of the staff, they are not understanding the complexity.

Once again, the Social Security trust fund is empty in 6.5 years, and the Medicare trust fund is empty in 6.5 years. We go from $1 trillion last year in Medicare spending to $2 trillion in 7 years.

It is demographics. It is baby boomers. Hell, I am one of them. I am just on the younger side.

Look, I am crazy. I am 63, my wife is 63, and we have a 3-year-old and a 10-year-old we have adopted. That is being optimistic about the future.

We need a society to get this to work. We have a paper in our office that was written by a bunch of freaky smart economists out of Cambridge and Boston saying if you use a 6 percent generational discount rate-- and I said this last week, but I am trying to get it to burn into people's psyches--for a baby born today, you need 104 percent of that child's lifetime income just to pay government pensions--Federal Government, not State, just Federal Government.

Does anyone see the immorality, the craziness that is going on? We are all terrified to tell the truth about this because we make our voters mad because partially the political class has lied to the voters for so many years about our finances.

We are going to come back and start to walk through the math of--you have seen of some of the proposals on Medicare Advantage. The White House is coming back and saying they are going to just cap the growth. You saw many of these Medicare Advantage companies' stocks just crater.

We believe we have a much more elegant solution, and actually may come in at a much bigger savings, is to realign the incentives. I love the Medicare Advantage. Mr. Speaker, 55 percent of our brothers and sisters who are on Medicare use Medicare Advantage.

But the incentive for the insurance company that is managing it should be not trying to constantly build risk models to raise the cost to get in more cash. How about we do this: Get rid of the risk adjustment, get rid of the star rating, and just do something very simple: Give us a bid, and you make money by helping those you are insuring be healthier.

It is a crazy concept, but the basic concept of a capitated model was, hey, these insurers will profit by doing their job well. You have got to put in protections so it is not denial of services and not denial of access to pharmaceuticals. But if you fix those things, there are models around the country that have worked amazingly well.

Sometimes you have to have discussions that--it may have to be more than 1 year; you may have to have 3 years with opt-outs if you don't like your insurer--so they will invest in you to be healthier, maybe even buy you the technology, buy you the things to do that, and make a profit.

We are right now going to have to make a decision as a body. Are we going into the command and control and try to starve the beast, or are we going to build a model that incentivizes doing it better, faster, cheaper, and in this case, much, much healthier.

We are looking at right now over $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years of just Medicare being financed with debt, just debt. Now, add in what is left in the trust fund, add in what is coming out of your payroll taxes--I know it is political suicide around here to tell the

truth about programs like this. But if you want it to survive, we just get the math right. I can make it work. It is not going to make some people completely happy. We can make the math work, but you first have to accept the fact that there is a problem. We have got a big problem.

Next week, Mr. Speaker, I am going to come back, and we are just going to walk through the opportunity of how we preserve these programs using a calculator. I know Congress is often a math-free zone, but let's give it a try.

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 6 o'clock and 57 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, February 5, 2026, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, shall we have some fun with math and economics? It is something we just don't hear a lot of here on the floor of the House. Remember, this is my therapy because I often sit in the back of the room and stew when I hear people say things when it is obvious they didn't pull their calculator out.

I am going to try two things tonight, and if you are actually interested in budgets and economics, have fun with me. If you are not, go watch Netflix. We are going to actually try a couple concepts, where the money is going and within that, the scale of our debt and deficits. The fact of the matter is, we are at what is called interest fragility that--think about what happened over the last couple days in the discussions coming from the White House, from us. The bond market actually bounced up about 30 basis points. We were just playing on the back of napkins, the math, and if that had held for an entire year, just those 30 basis points would have been $33 billion of additional interest.

I will try to actually explain that and then actually talk about something that is really interesting. The economy from a GDP calculation standpoint, and this is just the economists looking at the vitality in the economy, is remarkably good. We are running over a 5 percent GDP, which if you go back and look at the economic projections, it is double what many of our smartest economists in the country thought we would be at a year ago, but our spending--because of interest and healthcare and the reality that we are going to have to deal with is debt, deficits, and demographics.

Once again, remember, we functionally have the same number of 18 year olds today as we had 20 years ago, but we have double the number of 65 and up. It is just what we are. Don't get mad. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is just demographics and understanding when our brothers and sisters move into their earned benefit years, what it costs.

The fact of the matter is, this Congress refuses to do the hard things because in 6\1/2\ years, the Social Security trust fund is empty and you get a 24 percent cut in your check and we double senior poverty. We double the number of baby boomers who will live on the street.

In 6\1/2\, 7 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty and your hospital gets an 11 percent cut and much of the financing things like Medicare Advantage and those actually just become, let's just say, difficult.

Let's walk through some of this. I pulled up this chart because I haven't used it in a few months and I am realizing there are not enough folks, particularly the staff--remember, I often do these because I am talking to a thousand televisions around the campus. The room looks empty, but we are on televisions. Hopefully, there are some staffers who are working on policy who will understand how important these numbers are.

Do you see the blue portion of that chart, Mr. Speaker? That is discretionary. That is all you and I get to vote on. As Members of Congress, we only vote on the discretionary portion, and this was a 2025 chart. Today, it is

probably only 25 percent, not 26 percent, of the total spending. Every dime of that is borrowed.

Mr. Speaker, the math for last year, for every dollar we took in, in tax receipts, we spent $1.43.

We were just in the back. I was talking with one of my Joint Economic economists. We think it is lower this year but we are still not-- because we are having to make the adjustments on the student loans and those sorts of things, it could be down to $1.37 or $1.40 this year. Think about that. Last year, for every dollar that came in, we spent $1.43.

Realize all this in the red is on autopilot, and a portion of it is actually on borrowed money. If you just do the hierarchy, every dime of defense is borrowed. Every dime of nondefense discretionary is borrowed. That is only about $2 trillion. A wedge of the mandatory also ends up being borrowed.

There is one other thing I want to point out in the chart. If you actually take a look at the hierarchy of spending, Social Security is number one. It is $1.5 trillion.

Guess what is number two if you do the total interest paid. It is interest. Here is interest to the public who bought our bonds, whether it be your pension plan as an individual or another country, or the interest we have to pay back to the trust funds when we reach into the Social Security trust fund, the Medicare trust fund, the railroad retirement trust fund, and those things. We borrow the money. We owe them interest.

Total interest last year was about $1.2 trillion, making interest the second biggest expenditure in this government. Medicare is number three. Medicaid and healthcare subsidies are number four. Defense is actually number five.

I always love it--I often have these conversations back home when I have a Democrat who says: Well, if you cut defense.

Then they look at me in horror when I ask them if they realize that in the hierarchy of spending, defense is actually the fifth biggest expenditure in Government.

This one is actually good news of some of what is happening. This is actually one of my favorite charts because it actually demonstrates here is our tax receipts as a percentage of the economy.

We were basically getting about 17.1 percent of the economy. We have some new math right now. It says we are probably peaking over 18 percent, maybe even higher, of the economy coming in, in tax receipts. That is wonderful except for one really yucky thing.

Remember last year, when we were up, getting 17.1 percent of the economy in taxes, we functionally were spending 23.4 percent. That delta is the deficit. What happens when your tax receipts are going up as a percentage of the size of the economy and the economy is growing but healthcare and interest are going up faster? Are we going to tell the truth about that?

Here are basic factoids. I did this last week, but I want to say it again because it doesn't seem to be sinking in. In about 33 or 36 months, half of every dime that the Federal Government spends, 50 percent of all of our spending will go to those 65 and up. Moody's Analytics has in 2035--what is that--8 or 9 budget years from now--30 percent of all tax receipts going just to interest.

There was an interesting economic paper. It was actually an economic paper demonstrating that Italy actually was more fiscally sound in the long term than the United States.

When you see that headline, you sit down and read it, within there was a factoid. If you use a 6 percent generational discount rate, which is reasonable--it could be slightly high--for a child born today, you need 104 percent of their lifetime earnings just to pay Federal pension obligations. Those are Social Security, Medicare, military, and Federal requirement.

Mr. Speaker, think of that. For a child born today, you need every dime they will ever make in their entire life, plus another 4 percent, to pay pension obligations. Does anyone see the immorality going on? But we can't talk about that because that would be hard.

I believe the American people are a hell of a lot smarter than we are. They are ready for us to tell them the truth about math. One of the first things we as the political class have to do is stop lying about math.

Let's actually walk through some of this, and I will blast through these because I am trying to make a point.

Also, before I go much further, if someone actually wants to bathe in the truth in math and what the future looks like and how we can fix it, go to the Joint Economic Committee Republicans. We publish some amazing things.

Every weekday, we do a text message to a few thousand people we call the Daily Debt. It shows how much came in and how much we spent. We give you a 12-month window so it fixes ups and downs. We will also give you the fiscal year as it sits.

Mr. Speaker, I just got my Daily Debt text message. We are borrowing over $71,000 every second. That is the 12-month calculation. It makes up all the highs and lows and averages out. You have got to understand that this ain't a game because that $71,000 a second, we need to have buyers of our bonds. We make our buyers of our bonds cranky. It gets really expensive.

This chart here is just trying to make a point of what is going on in our debt and deficits. Remember that discretionary spending, the blue on the pie chart I just showed you, is flat. It is not growing. Yes, there is waste and fraud in it. We need to eliminate that. We actually believe technology would eliminate that, except I can't believe how the bureaucracies are terrified of the technology that can find the waste and fraud.

Our growth is in the mandatory spending. It is the promises we have made that we have got to keep but we have got to figure out a way to finance it.

What this chart is showing is we see this slightly darker color here. That is the primary deficit. That is actually programs that we are spending more money than we have coming in. All of this lighter purple is the interest we owe.

The point we are making is this. If we have a $2 trillion deficit this year but interest is $1.2 trillion, interest now is the primary driver. Number two is healthcare costs. We just have this problem of telling the truth about healthcare costs are out of control. In many States, the government is the primary--is the majority of money spent in healthcare.

Let's have some fun here. I know we are all interested in bonds and how they refinance. Remember, if you have $38.5 trillion of debt out there, over $30 trillion of that is sold. That is what they call publicly held debt. About one-third of that--and I was going to show the charts of all the papers and the notes and the bonds. I realized no one cares.

About one-third of that--let's call it $10 billion--has to be refinanced this year. Much of that is coming off of lower bond prices from a couple of years ago.

On average, we are picking up one point of interest, 1.5 points, some 2. There is your problem. The chart here--I am just trying to show you--is we have to constantly refinance. We are refinancing at higher interest rates because we are making the markets cranky. We are not telling the bond markets that we are serious about taking on our debt and deficit.

Mr. Speaker, have you ever heard the term ``bond vigilantes''? It happened to the United States in the 1990s where, suddenly, we were making the bond markets cranky. They were starting to demand premiums. Our debt was a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what it is today.

We are on the cusp of putting the bond market in charge of this country, not us. It is a really dangerous game we are playing. One of the ways we mitigate that is we tell the bond market: We are adults. We are being serious. We understand we have a demographic. We have a healthcare spending problem. We are going to take it on. We are going to adopt technologies. We are going to adopt other ways to make our brothers and sisters healthy. We are going to telegraph to the markets we are stable. We are America. We are the incredible investment.

If you think I am engaging in hyperbole, look at the price of gold. If the

price of gold isn't telegraphing something to you, go back to your basic economics class. There is something really wrong out there. We are making markets nervous.

It is estimated that, from fiscal year 2025 to fiscal year 2026, we are going to have to borrow--this is what we call virgin borrowing; it is new issuances--about $470 billion a quarter. That is less than $2 trillion, but it is pretty darn close.

That is on top of what we have to refinance. When you start to get a sense of what we are bringing to the bond markets, it is more than just the borrowing. It is the refinance. We are subject to the interest rates.

We need to be understanding. Convince the people who are loaning us money, whether it be your personal pension, your savings account, Japan, whoever is buying our debt, that we are stable, that we are adults, and that we understand. We have a demographic problem, but we are going to engage in adult-like technology and borrowing policy, things to manage our debt, and minimize it.

Mr. Speaker, this chart is substantially unreadable, but I wanted to actually just show it for the fun of it. This is one of the things that we use in our economic shop, where we try to actually say: Okay, here is 1 year. If it went up \1/2\ percent, that 1 year costs $206 billion over 10 years. It is basically a table that says that if interest rates pop up this much, and it only lasts for 1 year or 2 years, here is what it will cost us over the 10-year window.

The whole point of this chart is to start to demonstrate so many of the things we talked about here. We are going to save $1 billion. That is a lot of money. We believe, annualized, we are going to borrow over $6 billion a day. In the first quarter of the fiscal year, we are borrowing over $8 billion a day.

The arguments here and the debates we will have here, often to save money, which are wonderful, we will have borrowed more money during the debate than whatever the item being debated would have ever saved, because: How do you talk about the drivers of debt?

The other thing we also have to deal with is when we get our policies wrong, when we make the bond markets nervous, when they don't see that we are fixated on debt management, fiscal reality, and interest rates go up on U.S. sovereigns. They raise everything. It is more than just the money we spend.

Mr. Speaker, we had months last year when we had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing. That is partially because the tax collection cycle goes up and down, but we raise your credit card. We raise your car. We raise everything. When we screw up U.S. sovereigns, we make bond markets nervous. They go up 30 basis points. You have to understand that just raised every cost for borrowing up and down through the economy.

It is more than just when I sit here and spout about saying that we are going to pay this much in interest. Think about what we did to the American families, businesses, small businesses, and farmers. We somehow seem detached from the reality of the math.

Let's actually talk about where some of the money is going and why we have to do such borrowing. CBO, 2025, Medicare accuracy, they actually did okay, but okay when talking $1 trillion is, hey, they only missed it by around 7 percent. That turns out to be around $70 billion of spending.

Medicare, 2025 outlays increased by $77 billion, 8 percent. CBO was projecting only $51 billion. From this scale of accounting, it is pretty accurate, but you have to understand that we are looking at an environment right now where we expect Medicare spending to double, to go from $1 trillion to $2 trillion over the next 7 years.

So far, every healthcare chart I have where we are looking at what the closing numbers for the 2025 fiscal year, they are all in excess of what we projected. If you start to have a world where you are sitting at 7 percent medical inflation, even if you have tax receipts going up 3 percent or 4 percent, we are borrowing more money.

Let's actually take another look at one of these. Major healthcare programs were up $150 billion over the previous year, and the major healthcare programs came in at a 9-percent increase from the previous years.

Does anyone see a math problem? You have an economy right now that is growing at 5 percent. It is amazing. Yet, our spending, when you tack in the interest rates, the healthcare spending--if healthcare spending is over 9 percent, you have a math problem.

Then, the argument we have from our Democrats is: But we need to subsidize more.

We have turned healthcare into financial engineering instead of helping our brothers and sisters be healthier. Legalize the technology. Legalize the processes.

Do you realize that so many things where you could crash the price of healthcare, this body actually keeps illegal?

We are going to do a number of healthcare bills. Every single one of them is wonderful, except for one small problem: There are rounding errors.

I love, love, love price transparency. I don't believe you can have functioning markets without price transparency. Every academic paper I have in my office says it is only about \1/2\ percent of price improvement. Yet, major healthcare programs, there is a 9-percent increase in spending. You get \1/2\ percent, and in a single year, I have 9-percent growth in spending.

Does anyone see a mismatch? Great policy, great rhetoric, sounds great on the campaign trail, and it doesn't save us.

Now, for those folks who know--how do I say this nicely? I like Medicare Advantage. It is called Medicare part C if you are geeky. The majority of our brothers and sisters on Medicare actually are on Medicare Advantage. It is functionally supposed to be a managed care optionality for your healthcare. So, you get a network. You know what your benefits are.

We have a problem. We have these things called MedPAC reports. I have a stack of them on my desk. On my desk, if you open them up, which I am sure every Member of Congress opens them up and goes through them, it will tell you that Medicare Advantage right now is costing 120 percent of fee-for-service.

Medicare Advantage, which came into effect in 2005, is supposed to come in at 95 percent of fee-for-service. That is a 25 percent delta. We have been looking at charts and data and trying to say: Hey, we want to protect Medicare Advantage. That is what seniors have chosen. They like it. Can we actually get rid of the risk scoring and some of the games being played with the star ratings, where they are milking the system, because think of that?

MedPAC reports basically say that there is almost $2 trillion of misalignment and fraud over 10 years. That is actually the biggest in government. I know some people have problems with the difference between millions, billions, and trillions. A trillion is really big.

Look at this chart here: Overpayment Per MA Beneficiary. This is done by the MedPAC report, so this wasn't even done by my economists. This is done by a room full of people who just specialize in Medicare Advantage.

Mr. Speaker, in 2025, 14--actually, I think that comes out to $1.25 trillion, but this also comes to $200 billion, I believe, of misspending. Am I reading that correctly? Yes.

When you see $1.4 trillion, and over $200 billion is in the MedPAC report as being bad payments, misalignments, abuse, taking advantage of the system, waste and fraud, Mr. Speaker, if we are going to do a second reconciliation, I would propose that one of the most moral and rational economic things that we can do is let's just fix Medicare Advantage and put it back to how it is supposed to work.

I know we have armies of lobbyists in our hallways here trying to stop us. Can you imagine why? If there is a couple of hundred billion dollars in play, they are going to absolutely knife us to stop us from doing the reforms.

Are we tough enough to do what is right for the American people for the next generation?

Think of this, Mr. Speaker: I have a 3-year-old. Yes, my wife is my age. We adopted a little boy--same birth mom as our little girl. When my 3-year-old is about 23 years old, every tax in the United States has to be doubled just to maintain baseline spending.

Is that moral? Mr. Speaker, you have kids. Is this the America where the

next generation always gets to prosper more? That is not the model now. The next generation is going to be poorer, and it doesn't have to be.

We are on the cusp of amazing technologies--synthetic biology, cures for diseases, things we can do that can make this another American century. We just need to tell the truth about the math and policy instead of the theatrics that go on in this place.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the six or seven people who have been willing to listen to me.

There is a way to make this work. It just turns out that it is really hard. Are we ready to do hard things for the country and then go home to try to explain it to our voters that we are doing the right thing for them?

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 6 o'clock and 51 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, January 22, 2026, at 9 a.m.