Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today, it adjourn to meet at 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to continue sort of a theme that we have been working on, and it is fairly simple, yet the solutions are really complex.

First is trying to get a reality on what is going on with the math. I am a broken record. I absolutely am, but we are going to walk through this again.

Doing this a week ago, we actually did a whole bunch of technology disruptions that would crash the price of healthcare, that would clean the environment, that would make bureaucracy much smaller, make us much more productive and wealthy as a society, help the poor, help the working poor, help the working middle class.

It is fascinating. Sometimes we all make the mistake of reading the responses, trying to understand, saying are we getting the message through. A number of our brothers and sisters out there are kind enough to comment, kind enough to help us, but also kind enough to say: ``Hey, I didn't understand this. I don't understand what this number really means.''

We are going to delve into a couple of those because the crisis is here, and it is not Democrat or Republican. I am going to argue it is much more difficult. It is demographics.

There is a whole bunch of mess that I believe our Republican majority next year is going to have to clean up, and God willing, we will have the fortitude to do it. But the fact of the matter is, over the next 30 years, there are some really ugly numbers, and it has to do

with the fact that we got old as a society.

Our baby boomers are retiring, and almost no one is comfortable telling the truth. So, we are going to rapidly go through a number of these.

Look, this is a board I show over and over just to try to help people get their heads around it. See this red here? We are not even going to talk about 1965. We are going to stick with 2022, so last year's budget cycle.

Remember, we are running on continuing resolutions, so there is all sorts of other budgetary malfeasance going on around here, but here is where we are at.

Do you see this red here? That is for last year's budget cycle, 71 percent of all the spending, and it is on autopilot because this is: Hey, I turned 65. I get a health benefit. I worked so many quarters, and I turned 65 or 70, wherever you choose, and you get Medicare or Social Security, or you served in the military.

You have to understand. The vast majority of your government is on autopilot.

This blue here, that is defense. So, 13 percent of the 2022 budget was defense.

The other 16 percent was what we call nondefense discretionary. That is the EPA. That is the FBI. That is the Park Service. That is everything you actually think of as government. It is functionally only 16 percent of the spending.

There are a number of us who keep looking at different ideas and different numbers, and we keep trying to say: What would happen if we actually took all the outlays and rolled them back to 2019 before the pandemic?

But some of the math--forgive me, but we were working on this as we were walking over here to the floor--you have a math problem. First off, the discretionary has shrunk from--let's see, it is $52 billion bigger in 2022 than it was in 2019. So that is real money.

But what has exploded are two things, the mandatory Social Security, Medicare and all these other things that are formula and interest. In 2019 we spent basically $376 billion in interest. We are functionally heading towards doubling that in the coming budget cycle.

So we have got to decide, if I could adopt the 2019 budget, we would actually, with the really substantial increases we have had in tax receipts, tax revenues, tax collections, whatever you want to call it, if we adopted the full 2019 budget then we would be even.

How many Members of Congress are ready to get up here and say we are going to cut Medicare, we are going to cut Social Security, we are going to cut veterans benefits, and we are going to actually somehow pay less interest on our debt?

The point I am trying to make is the vast majority of what is government is autopilot. And what we actually debate, the theater around here--so in 2019, 50 percent was what we will call discretionary, 50 percent was defense, the other 50 percent of that $1 trillion 33 billion, half of it was true discretionary. I'm trying to make the point, if you are going to save us, it has got to be an actual discussion, mostly about healthcare costs.

I am going to show you some boards here. This is another one I bring back and forth. I am shocked how many of my brothers and sisters actually--hopefully, watching parts of this, or their staff are watching parts of this on their televisions, there are a few hundred televisions around this campus--will digest--and for some of my brothers and sisters on the left, they actually get really upset with me on this, you can't tell people that.

But it is the math.

Over the next 30 years, so starting today, 30 years from now--I am getting tired of hearing myself say this, but I can't seem to get my brothers and sisters around here to digest the number--we are functionally going to borrow $114 trillion in today's dollars, and $38 trillion of that is the shortfall in Social Security.

When we add up here is our shortfall and here are our financing costs, $80.5 trillion is the shortfall in Medicare, so about 75/25.

How many politicians do you hear, Mr. Speaker, how many accountants, how many smart people do you see talking on financial television saying, Hey, we are heading toward a debt crisis, and it is healthcare costs.

Oh, by the way, the rest of the Federal budget actually has about $1 trillion, a $1.9 trillion positive balance. You have to understand, Mr. Speaker, it is autopilot.

These are earned benefits. Your society, your government, and your country made a deal with you, if you work this many quarters and you reach this certain age, if you are part of a certain Tribal group or other things, then you get these certain benefits. Fine.

Do you think back 20 years ago if we had taken a little sliver of Social Security and allowed the individual to put it in private accounts, the accounts would have been so much more robust?

The Democrats absolutely demagogued that, oh, it is the end of the world.

And now here we are 20 years later, and we are a decade away from the Social Security trust fund being gone.

How many Members here get behind these microphones and are willing to tell their constituents the truth, that you are headed toward a 25 to 27 percent cut in Social Security unless we come up with some big, bold solution?

The problem is the Congress says, Oh, let's just raise taxes.

Except the problem is that that is just the Social Security portion. Medicare is three-quarters of all the coming debt, and the amount of taxes you have to raise--are you prepared for the amount that that actually starts to slow down the economy?

So there is another board. I haven't shown this one in about a year. This is actually 2020 data. The numbers are actually much worse today because of healthcare inflation. I live in a place that has about 12 percent inflation, the Phoenix-Scottsdale area is the highest in the continental United States. But base inflation, healthcare inflation, is up around 16 percent. So these numbers are much uglier today.

This is really uncomfortable, and this makes people upset. But it is the math.

A typical couple retiring--so let's say you are retiring right now. You functionally are going to receive 3 bucks for every dollar you put in. It is the math.

Now, on Social Security, basically you get what you put back in. You get a little bit of a spiff, but if you had actually been able to put those dollars into the markets or into some bond, you would be much better. But on Social Security you basically get back what you put in.

The problem is for that couple on Medicare taxes, you will have paid about $161,000 in taxes, and you are going to get about $522,000 in benefits. It is this gap right here that bankrupts our country. It is healthcare costs. It is the math.

I know it upsets people. If you want to read the actuarial reports, Mr. Speaker, we will be happy to send them to you. But it is the truth.

At some point, the political class needs to start treating the public like adults and tell us the truth even when it is not what the political class here has said, It is waste and fraud; we don't tax rich people enough.

All that is a fraud.

And going on right now, you have got to understand, the numbers are rolling on us. All the trillions and trillions of dollars of stimulus that were pumped into the economy has set off inflation that has made almost every American poorer. You have to understand that inflation is higher than wage growth. You are poorer today than you were 1 year ago.

How many of my brothers and sisters on the other side do you see get behind the microphones and show like they give a damn that America's workers and poor people are poorer today?

Well, let's subsidize them more instead of blowing up the economy.

And now you start to look at what is going on. At this moment, we are already at one-quarter trillion dollars in debt. Remember, our fiscal year began October 1, and our spending is still exploding.

The Federal Government spent $500 billion last month, and we are supposed to be out of the COVID spending craze, and we are not.

I bring this chart just as a simple, simple get our heads around the projection. So these two lines here are the 2021 COVID. You see, there just huge amounts of government spending.

But what is important here is, do you see this line right here?

That is just if you go back to normal life, get rid of these 2 years, just a normal life, the debt is going just where everyone has modeled it.

This isn't new. This has been talked about for one-quarter of a century.

Does anyone remember when one of the senior commanders of the U.S. military came here to Congress and testified and said, I believe the greatest threat to the United States in the long run is our debt?

The spenders around here said, no, you can't talk about that.

One of the reasons I believe the public should be just livid with us is our unwillingness to treat them like adults.

The other thing that is going on--back to telling the truth again-- the 1980s, does anyone remember the 1980s?

Apparently, if you did the mean of the interest on U.S. sovereign bonds at that time, we were financing around 10 percent interest rates. But we had this artificially low interest. Now it would have killed you if you were a saver. It killed you if you were trying to save for retirement. It was great if you wanted to go into debt.

I need you to look at something here, Mr. Speaker. During 2020 we had an average of 2.2 percent which was the CBO calculation. They even project that when we go off into the future we are going to double that. And it is already doubled today.

So do we go back to the magic times where we are saying, Hey, we are around 2 percent, 2010, 2 percent for the decade? Or do we double it?

What happens if we double U.S. interest rates?

If we go up 2 percent, 30 years from now we are at 280 percent of debt to GDP.

Do you know, Mr. Speaker, if you go up--I think it was, what was the math long term--I think it is like 25 years of 2 percent increase on here basically consumes every projected dollar of tax receipts?

It is all our money.

How many of us plan to live another 25 years?

How many of us really believe we are going back to the age of 2 percent or less interest on U.S. sovereign debt?

How many of us agree with the Congressional Budget Office that because we are going to be borrowing so much of the world's capital to finance our debt that we are going to push up interest rates for ourselves and the world, and by doing that we drive ourselves into bankruptcy even faster?

Now, you don't actually go bankrupt. What happens is the economy slows down, you live in this flat-lined economy, and there is almost no prosperity. There is no growth, jobs become scarce, and every day you fall further behind. But that is the future. The crap around here is heading there. But we will do some great virtue-signaling bills. Maybe we will ban plastic straws or do something really useful.

And you sit down with our progressive friends and say, okay, let's walk through your math. Your math, not mine, your math. And understand, if I take your wish list, free college, the climate proposal, jobs guarantee, the Medicare for All, and then add them already on in the 15.7 baseline deficit, which is already higher today because of the growth in interest rates, and then I turn around and say, okay, we are going to tax all unearned income over $1 million. So if you own rental houses, we are taking every dollar. If you make more than $1 million, we take every dollar. And we will add into that we are just going to take all the wealth of billionaires; every dime of it.

Hey, why don't we take basically the entire defense budget, and we will just wipe out all defense protecting the country, even though that is constitutional?

It doesn't get you anywhere.

This is the wish list on top of the fact we are already upside down.

Do you understand how loony this place is?

If you go over and over the math, the roster, the tax hikes, if we do all the tax hikes, hey, a 50 percent income rate for anyone making $200,000 or more, then you start to say we will eliminate all deductions. We are going to take payroll tax, so your FICA tax, and we are unlimiting it, so it just goes through the ceiling. Hey, you make $1 million, you pay 15.3 percent on that, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment. You take all those corporate taxes and put them back up to 35 percent. And then live in a fantasy world that you didn't slow the economy down.

Do you know you only get two-thirds of the way to covering the structural deficit that is already built in?

That is assuming the fantasy world of hey, I just taxed the crap out of my country, took all of the available investment capital out of the country and consumed it in taxes and government spending, but the economy will still maintain the same GDP growth and there will never be another recession or another virus.

The inability to have adult conversations around here about the proposals are lunacy. They are great politicking. You go home, stand up in front of the town hall, you tell them these things--you are lying to them--and everyone applauds and says, oh, I really want free stuff.

Then you take the best estimate--understand, this number, the 2021, is probably double last year than it will be in the future years because this has huge amounts of COVID fraud. Many of us believe COVID unemployment may be the single biggest fraud maybe in world history. We have seen some underlying reports that it could be a couple hundred billion dollars.

But let's pretend that the fraud and waste of 2021 was something we could capture and that we can get every damn dollar. That is $662 billion. That is amazing.

Now, it is a one-time thing. You get it back. We were able to collect every dollar and stop all the waste and fraud. Great. Except that we are heading toward $2 trillion deficits at the end of the decade. So we took care of about a quarter of it.

Now, we need to work our heinies off to get every dollar of waste and fraud out of the system. We need to stop designing insane systems where we hand out money and we are going to figure out if you should have gotten it a year or 2 years or 3 years later. We have got to stop the fantasy that there are simple solutions.

Last week, I stood here, and I showed the board, saying, do you know, if we got rid of every single dollar of foreign aid, the $38 billion of foreign aid, it paid for about 11 days of borrowing--not spending-- borrowing.

I know we have been told over and over, Hey, there are simple solutions: Tax the rich; get rid of foreign aid; waste and fraud. There are rounding errors in the scale of what is hitting us. But there are solutions, and dammit, I need us all--whether you be on the left or the right or the public that is trying to understand--be willing to think differently. Be willing to stop this insanity of, oh, we will just do an entitlement reform. Like that is ever going to happen.

How many Members of Congress are going to come here and say, I cut Social Security and Medicare. It is never going to happen. Nor should we. Those are promises we have a moral obligation to keep.

Another moral obligation is: How do you finance them? How do you keep them? And every Member who refuses to tell you the truth about the math is also putting them at peril.

You can't lie, my brothers and sisters on the left, you got to tell the truth. Playing this game--oh, the 2017 tax reform, oh, it crashed revenues. Do you understand we are a trillion dollars higher in receipts--for those of us on the Ways and Means Committee--than we were when we did the 2017 tax reform?

It is a spending problem. If I had come to you in 2017 and said, Hey, 4 years from now we are going to be taking in $1 trillion additional revenue, you would have laughed your heinie off--but we did. How can we still be so upside down? How, in this year, when we are still not doing the crazy level of COVID spending, are we still a quarter of a trillion dollars--and we are only, what, into our second or third month of this fiscal year?

I beg of us--you look at charts like this and you understand, it really is a spending, it is a structural spending problem. As I was just showing you the really uncomfortable slide, over the next 30 years it is Medicare and Social Security. It is what it is.

You look at the projections. This slide is incredibly important for all my junior economists out there. We have

times since the 1960s until today, we have had very high marginal tax rates, we have had low marginal tax rates. And guess what, we always seem to come in with high tax rates, low tax rates; good economy, poor economy. We always seem to ultimately come in right about 19 percent of the size of the economy in revenues, in receipts, in taxes. I need you to think about that.

If I want more revenue, I need an economy that grows the size of the Nation, the wealth of this Nation, the prosperity. The poor get less poor, the working middle class get rewarded for their work. Do policies that grow. And the benefit of that is how you get more tax receipts. Because you have got to look here--understand that our spending is heading toward 30 percent of the entire size of the economy.

I know these are geeky numbers, but those are stunning numbers. Yet, the number of times--I showed you before all the projections--well, we will just raise taxes. Then you look at our history when we have done that. The growth--the size of the economy have flatlined or they shrank. The total dollars in aren't what you prayed for.

I want to do a little bit of hope, and I also want to talk about a couple opportunities. When we get back--I don't know when we come back to basically do this horrible omnibus and all these things whether I will get some floor time to go into more depth.

Mr. Speaker, can you share with me my time remaining?

Mr. Speaker, I am going to finish this up in 6 minutes and yield back to you.

I need us all to come back and think creatively. If I came to my brothers and sister here who are elected, our staff who are all freaky smart--a lot of them institutionalized, but they are smart. The public, who, if they knew the underlining numbers, their creativity could break us through on the crap we are doing.

If I came to you tomorrow, and said, I need ideas that crash the price of healthcare. That for the 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who have multiple chronic conditions that are well over 50 percent of our healthcare spending, what do we do to make them less sick--maybe even cure them?

What do you do to deal with environmental issues but do it in a way where the economy still grows instead of this model the Democrats have brought us--we are just going to subsidize everyone--and then wonder why the math ultimately blows up on us.

There is one opportunity that specifically interests me. I never want to hear another Member basically come behind the microphone and say, We need to regulate this more--or on my side--we need to deregulate this more. Can I beg of us to use the language--why don't we try some smart regulation. Why don't we join this century and use the technology we all walk around with. We all walk around with supercomputers in our pocket.

We had the Supreme Court case, it was West Virginia v. EPA, that basically says Congress has been derelict in its duties for years-- decades. Hey, EPA, wink, wink, nod, nod, we want you to do this, but we are not willing to tell our voters what we are willing to do because we are getting lobbied over here, so we are just going to hand over all of our congressional authority, our constitutional authority to a bureaucracy. The Supreme Court said we got to stop doing that.

We do it with the EPA, we do it with securities regulations, we do it with everything. Guess what it means? We are going to have to start acting like adults in this body and actually start reading our bills, working on the details, coming up with rational ways to make society safe, healthy, but prosperous.

I have a little video out there if someone wants to go look at it, it is Schweikert environmental crowdsourcing on YouTube. It is just the simple concept of--you know there are things that you can attach to this that actually would calculate air quality, you know, PM10 or organics and other things.

What would happen if you had a couple thousands of those floating around your community? You would always know what is going on. If you had someone painting cars behind your house, you would catch them immediately. If you had a model like that, do you need the same 1938 command and control system?

So I am the motorcycle paint shop--do they really need to file paperwork and fill up file cabinets full of paper because we all know file cabinets full of paper make the air quality cleaner. If you had a crowdsource model of data, the government could say, screw it, we are going to leave you alone and we are just going to get the bad actors. If you are playing by the rules and you are using your scrubbers and playing by the rules, you get left alone; you don't need the permitting model.

You can crowdsource the data. You can do this with sound and water and transportation and smart cities. It would crash the size of the bureaucracy--and I know a lot of folks would say, What about all the government unionized workers? This is about getting a productivity bump and then holding that bump long term because even if we can use technology to crash the price of healthcare and we don't get enough growth, I can't make the numbers work.

I have a 5-month little boy we are adopting, when he is 25 years old his tax rate will be double all of ours. It is already baked in the cake. It is done. We have already done this to our kids.

Corporate tax rates. I don't know why corporations don't have to disclose that their taxes are doubling over the next 25 years. We make them disclose things about potential environmental impairments, why didn't they have to disclose the fact that we are going to be doubling their taxes? It is baked into the cake. Because the whole baseline services that we have promised with our population getting older, everyone's taxes are about to be doubled over the next 25 years unless, of course, you use technology to crash the price and dramatically increase the productivity.

This one borders on silly, but it is making a point. The left is absolutely fixated on methane. Okay. Methane is a huge greenhouse gas-- okay, we will give them that. You know, a couple years ago we had to recalculate its half-life. It is down to, what, 8 or 9 years, for those of us who actually geek out on this stuff. And, oh, we need to start shutting down the use of hydrocarbons. We need to start calculating the methane load for any barrel of oil or any Btu of gas.

Then there are articles out there saying, you know, there is actually a real cheap, cheap, cheap solution--I am going to be a little silly--I believe it is copper oxidized clay. It is kitty litter. Do you know you can take a well or some other methane production source and it absorbs like a sponge, and it is dirt cheap. You know why? Because it is dirt.

How many Members of Congress have you seen here saying, We need to bring the researchers who did this--and their academic studies--bring them here because we want to understand this. Is there a way we could actually be making the environment cleaner, better, faster, and still keep the economy growing?

No. They are hell-bent on shutting down the use of hydrocarbons even though there are solutions. Why wouldn't this place expand its intellect and be willing to at least bring in the scientists saying: Wow, you did this study, and it really works.

Last week--and I got a little crap for this, and I want to make the point again--we calculate over half a trillion dollars a year in spending for people who don't take their pharmaceuticals properly. I agree. You know, being someone with hypertension, I am working really hard to work out and eat better and see if I can bend it and never have to take a calcium inhibitor or even a statin--that is cholesterol.

We know for a fact that if a population were to take their prescriptions--and some of this is true for diabetes and everything else--it is 16 percent of all healthcare spending. What if you could get half that? Right now we estimate the number is probably $520, $530 billion a year in healthcare costs because grandma didn't take her pill, or someone stroked out or those sorts of things--where the pill is pennies.

So a pill bottle cap that beeps at you in the morning that costs 99 cents and reminds you to take it has hundreds of billions of dollars of potential impact. Is that difficult? Well, apparently

around here that idea is difficult--the lack of science, the lack of math, the lack of basic creativity.

And then there is my holy grail. This is truly the holy grail. Truly, I pray to the dear Lord, let what I am reading be true: 33 percent of all America's healthcare spending is diabetes; 31 percent of all Medicare spending is diabetes. Most of that is type 2, it is not type 1. Type 2 in many ways has a lot to it and it is ultimately an autoimmune, but it is partially self-inflicted.

Is this body willing to have one of the most difficult political debates and conversations it has ever considered in modern times? Are we willing to change the farm bill? Are we willing to change the incentives of what we incentivize our brothers and sisters to eat? Are we willing to incentivize our brothers and sisters to be healthy?

You all saw the numbers of the misery this place brought to the Nation with the shutdowns and how many of the ZIP Codes around this country have doubled their obesity numbers. Why this is important is apparently we have been on the cusp--we have had a handful of people who look like they have been cured of type 1 diabetes--it is less than a year, maybe it ultimately doesn't work, but this is a big deal.

Why aren't we working on it? Why aren't we? Because if it is 31 percent of all Medicare spending, and we were able to help our brothers and sisters who are getting their feet cut off and going blind, wouldn't that be the compassionate thing? Wouldn't that be the moral thing instead of this damn conversation we have here? ``Well, let's build more clinics so people can manage their misery.''

I beg of you, if we are on the edge of a cure for--you saw last week it finally got approved--hemophilia, got a single-shot cure, really expensive. Work out the financing.

Cystic fibrosis, we may be on the cusp.

Sickle cell anemia--why doesn't this place seem to give a damn about people's misery and suffering?

By the way, they are part of the 50 percent that is also really good economics.

I ask anyone that is watching this, think differently. Curing our brothers and sisters, fixating on economic growth, crashing the price of technology by legalizing technology, is the only path I can come up with that saves us from the crushing debt.

The fact of the matter is, if you look at the models, it means the next couple of decades could be really prosperous. I just need this place to act very differently.

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

Mr. Speaker, you got to admit, a lot of people love Representative Keller. It has been fun, actually, watching them come up to the microphone and say actually sweet things about him. But the best thing is his granddaughter, my little girl just loves playing with her.

That is something I do hope this body does more of in the future--our kids. In the last couple of years they haven't been here. Before the pandemic, we would look out and people would have their families here. I will tell you, that helped in the relationships.

My little girl would go and jump on Maxine Waters' lap because she loved her necklace. I still have a great picture of that. Until this day, every time I see Ms. Waters she asks about my little girl. In some ways, it is those family units and how you build human relations in this body.

Just a thought for what is left of the majority and those things. We need to sort of think about the things that bind us together once again as people.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate Mr. Keller giving me a little bit of time here.

Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons we are doing this is we have been trying to do a series of presentations, and I keep being fussed at that I should do them shorter because we are trying to throw out lots of ideas.

For the last year, I have been coming behind the microphone and walking through just how terrified I am, and how terrified I believe all of us should be, on what is going on in the numbers. We are going to do the routine again. The beauty here is there is hope, and I am going to keep bringing ideas that do a couple things.

Number one: Make us freer, healthier, wealthier, but also show a path that we can grow, and we don't have to be crushed by the coming debt. Let's sort of walk through some of this.

We always start with this slide because this one really bothers everyone. This one makes everyone angry and it is the math. Today, we have $31 trillion of debt. In the next 30 years we add $114 trillion of borrowing. Every dime of that $114 trillion that is coming, 75 percent of it is Medicare, 25 percent is Social Security. The rest of the budget actually has a positive balance.

We got old.

Is the graying of America Republican or Democrat?

It is neither. It is just demographics; it is what we are. The unwillingness to deal with the reality that if you want to save the country--if you do not want my 5-month-old little boy that we are adopting, my 7-year-old little girl that plays together with others, if you want to save their future--do understand, today, 25 years from now we have to double their tax rates; we have to double your tax rates; we have to double corporations' tax rates just to maintain the baseline spending, and that is still with us going to like 140 percent of debt to GDP.

Do we understand how bad the numbers are?

It is demographics. So what do you do?

I am trying to pitch sort of a unified theory for us to think about. I am sorry this upsets people, but the math will always win. Instead of the craziness that goes on around here with where ``I got my feelings hurt,'' maybe the most powerful thing we can do is demonstrate we give a damn.

Growth is moral. Growth helps Democrats and Republicans, it helps poor people, it gives opportunity to the middle class. It is good for all of us. We are trying to say, okay, I have been spending lots of time behind the microphone talking about technology that can crash the price of healthcare. We are going to do a little more of that today.

But I am going to also talk about other ways we can do regulation that keeps us still healthy and safe but is much less bureaucratic and much faster. I am going to come back in the next couple weeks, if we get time, and talk about revolutionizing the tax system that incentivizes us to make things in America instead of functionally a tax system that incentivizes us to buy things made in other parts of the world because that is what we have today.

We are going to also talk about immigration--it is really uncomfortable to talk about, you are going to have to decide as a society: Do we keep the open borders that I have in Arizona where we functionally have a mass poverty movement into the United States? Or do we move to a system that maximizes economic growth?

You have got to decide, if you want us to have the money to be able to pay for Medicare, I have to have the economic growth.

Then the other thing is, what do we do to incentivize our brothers and sisters to stay in the labor market?

You just became 65. Are there things that we could do in a spiff on your Social Security, so you stay in the labor market?

How about if we let you keep your half of the FICA? What can we do?

There is a crazy piece of math out there for under 35, particularly males--they are not participating--there are numbers of them who have disappeared from the labor markets. This makes some of the math really difficult if you are trying to grow because it is not enough to have the disruption in the cost of the healthcare, if on the same side over here we don't have the economic growth.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to run through these fairly quickly because I want to keep the theme going. I am going to be dogged about this because we are going to save this country. We need to think a little bit differently because right now we are still having the same debates that we were having in the 1990s on this floor.

Last night, I mentioned this. Tonight, I thought I would bring the board with me. What would happen if I came to you tomorrow, and said: Hey, there is this thing that looks like a kazoo, and you blow in it and it almost instantly tells you you have a virus. It instantly bounces off your medical records. It instantly could order your antiviral. Oh, and by the way, the newest versions look like they can detect about 25 different dead cancer proteins.

Wouldn't that be really good for our constituents? Wouldn't that be-- the ability for that hardworking family, that working mom, to not try to find a way to take the day off from work, to be able to organize the kids, to find out if she can go into an urgent care center, but functionally have a breath biopsy in her medicine cabinet?

I will argue that it is both moral, it is faster, it is healthier, and it crashes the price of healthcare. This body keeps that type of technology illegal. It is something that would save so much time for the working people in this country, and we keep it illegal because this place is so much like a protection racket. It is not utopian, there are a dozen different versions, and it exists. Much of it has already made it through the FDA. Our problem is we don't reimburse it and we don't make it legal so it can write the script.

If you don't reduce the cost, you can't do marginal--I have some people come in here and say, well, we have an idea. We can remove 2 or 3 percent out of healthcare costs if we do this. We had 16 percent healthcare inflation in many of our markets so far this year. Great, we can find a 1 or 2 percent rounding error.

Do you understand how much trouble we are in?

Your government functionally is an insurance company with an army. It is going to be an insurance company where the insurance side is going to start consuming every dollar and the army is going to have to get smaller. It is demographics. It is the reality where we are.

Why wouldn't this body take an experiment and say let's make it legal. If you can find insurance, if the manufacturer can find insurance for it, FDA approves it, why wouldn't we let this write a script? There are dozens and dozens and dozens of these things.

For those of that walk around with these smartwatches or your fancy supercomputer in your pocket, the fact of the matter is, we should be using every piece of technology to crash the price of healthcare.

Last night, I came and showed some slides about a path, and who knows, maybe it doesn't work. But there might be a path for a cure for diabetes. Diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare

spending. It is 31 percent of all Medicare spending. It may be the leading contributor to income inequality.

You go, huh? Look at the data. Look at my data sets of who is suffering, who is going blind, who is having their feet cut off.

I represent a tribal community with the second highest per capita diabetes in the world. Is it moral not for us to go and throw every smart idea and sometimes the resources we need to cure it?

Wouldn't that be more moral than this crazy ass argument of, hey, let's go build more clinics so we can help people manage their misery, because that is what we do here. We are better than this. Well, no, we are not better than this, but we could be.

So let's go a little further down the crazy line of, what do you do to grow the economy? So think about what we did last week. We are going to stop this strike because we are going to fight for the way we move goods out of the port and put them on trucks and then put them on a rail car and move it over here.

Yes, we have all the environmental issues of, yes, it is really dirty, it is really filthy. Oh, but the Democrats in their inflation reduction--crazy name for what the bill actually did--bill, made it so if they are going to take the green money, they can't actually do certain innovation; they can't automate because they have to protect all their longshoremen union folks because that is who writes them checks.

So in one hand, we give great lip service; we have got to fix the supply chain; we have got to get greener in the economy. And then they make it illegal. It is in your legislation. You did it.

Yet, at the same time, we have brilliant innovators--and these things aren't Republican, they are just the next generation of innovation--of autonomous rail platforms. You take the container off; you put it on the platform. You hit the button and you say, go to the spur over here and dump this at the warehouse. Go take this and put at the manufacturing facility.

It is electric. The environmental load is dramatically cleaner. It would be a revolution of efficiency.

We keep saying, well, we have got to fix the supply chain. Well, damn it, you made parts of fixing the supply chain illegal.

Why does this place act like a barrier, a protection barrier of allowing innovation in the economy?

We do this over and over and over. Most of the Members don't know it is happening. But we have functionally made that disruption that grows the economy, that if we don't have that growth, we are absolutely--we are in real trouble. Go ahead.

We make it illegal.

How many times--and you have some of this in your district--will we get the lobbyists and the folks come in--and this has been going on for 30 years, so this is sort of one of the running joke scams around here.

We need money for rural broadband. We do. I have--well, communities in Arizona--I don't represent them--they have been waiting 20 years for that line to get out to the chapter house on the Navajo reservation.

The fact of the matter is every inch of this country actually has broadband right now. They just happen to be satellites. We have what, five companies? A couple of them already have most of the satellites up.

What is yours? I drive a long-bed pickup truck.

When I had my midlife crisis, I didn't want a new wife or a Porsche, I just wanted a long-bed pickup truck; and mine is 10 years old.

But you think about this; if I really cared about that community--and you see where this ties in, this is back to that unified theory. I believe much of my healthcare I can use technology, but I need access to the broadband. But I am going to wait for the wire to show up because that is incredibly inefficient.

But I do have an option right now where something like the Starlink satellites, I could actually put up a little oval-shaped dish so they have the broadband, so they can use the healthcare technology, let alone the education technology and the other things. I need you to see this as a unified theory.

But, instead, we are going to take that tax that is on your cell phone bill, hand it out to companies, and then we are going to wait another decade for that wire to get out; and it never gets there, when they already have access to broadband.

This could be urban, too. The technologies exist. So let me go to crazy town.

No, no, no. This is one, it is a little more ethereal, but it is in the field. It is being tested right now. I am not going to do the whole thing about a C4 plant and a C3 plant. Remember your high school biology class.

But what would happen in a world--I am sorry, this slide is a little old, so it is a little beaten on. How do you get the Agriculture Committee to have an honest conversation saying, you do realize there is about to be a revolution in food?

This whole thing called synthetic biology: They basically figured out how to take a plant--our high school biology plant--the plant really, really wants a carbon molecule so it turns it into a sugar so it can grow. It accidentally grabs an oxygen. It doesn't need the oxygen, so it has to spend all this energy getting rid of the oxygen so it gets a carbon so it can grow.

What happens if the plant every time got a carbon molecule?

In some plants you could have a 40 percent improvement in growth; dramatically less water; dramatically less land needed; dramatically less fertilizer. This is being tested right now, I think it is University of Illinois. It is out there.

How much discussion have we had that there is a revolution coming in agriculture? And it would be incredibly productive. It would be incredibly disruptive because, what happens in agriculture land if, all of a sudden, I have crops that grow dramatically more efficiently?

But it would also be amazing for the environment. At 40 percent production improvement--which you are not going to get, but if you did, theoretically--in world agriculture, you do realize that would be like removing every car off the face of the Earth.

How many hearings have we had on is this coming, is this feasible?

No, because that would require thinking, something we just don't do here.

The other thing I am going to give you is just a conceptual idea, and if anyone is crazy enough, go on YouTube, Schweikert Environmental Crowdsourcing.

Five, 6 years ago, I did a little YouTube cartoon. It is like 90 seconds, with this concept, you could actually attach a little environmental sensor to the bottom of this.

How about if in your community you had a couple of thousand people driving around with a little environmental sensor saying, hey, we are keeping an eye on the air quality. Hey, it is spouting off. I have some clowns over here painting cars in the back of their house, but the motorcycle paint shop over here that has its filters, it is not setting the alarm off. Leave them alone.

What would happen if your environmental data was living data?

You wouldn't need people to go fill out paperwork. You don't need an inspector. Do file cabinets full of paper make the environment cleaner? They don't, they just build bureaucracy.

What makes the environment cleaner is knowing when someone has done something stupid and stopping them.

Crowdsourcing. The data is living. Use a living data model. And guess what? You can do that for water, for sound; you can actually do it for health. You can do it for all sorts of things.

How many hearings has this place had to discuss dragging our regulatory environment; and it is not deregulating, it is smart regulating. Make us more efficient.

It turns out, the data says that we would be healthier, cleaner, faster, and you would get the bad guys, and you could build a model where you just leave the good actors alone.

If you are the motorcycle paint shop, and your filters are working, and your booth is working, why should you be bothered? Just leave them alone; and if they screw up, a crowdsourced environmental sensor model will catch them instantly.

You would be amazed the pushback you get because, well, we are a consulting firm. You just put us out of business. Hey, I work for the group. I shove paperwork in the file cabinets. Why do you want to unemploy me?

We are going to have to have the discussion if we intend to survive, where we are going population-wise, debt-wise.

Remember, functionally, in 10 years, we have two $1 trillion running deficits, and it is demographics. It is trying to pay for healthcare. We have got to have the growth, and we have got to have the technology disruption and healthcare, or we are in for some very dark times.

The fact of the matter is, we could have incredibly prosperous times for the future. But that prosperity is only going to come if I, and you, and the people who are willing to listen to this are willing to pound on Members of Congress and our staff and the lobbying communities and our creative thinkers out there and say, okay, guys. There is hope out there. There is hope. We just need to be willing to think differently and embrace the disruption and embrace an economy that actually starts to do good things for our people, instead of basically being a protection racket for incumbent models.

It is uncomfortable, but there is hope. But there is no hope if we keep doing the same thing.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Pennsylvania for letting me do this. We are finding the only way it is going to sink in is if I keep coming and giving more and more examples that there is hope if we just do things differently. So I thank the gentleman for giving me some of his time.

Madam Speaker, forgive me as I get myself somewhat organized as is the chaos when you use lots of boards.

Madam Speaker, we are going to sort of do something in sort of a continuation on a theme.

A couple weeks ago, I was behind the microphones here, and it is something I have done a lot, and I walked through just how much trouble we are in as a society. The debt is coming, and it turns out that debt is not Democrat or Republican, it is demographics; we got old.

But before I start to walk through what I believe is the thought process of the solutions that actually can save us, I am going to ask some favors of anyone who is crazy enough to give us time to watch some of this.

I actually do read the comments when these things are put out on social media. When you look around the room, there is almost no one here, but we are on several hundred televisions right now around the campus. Right now in offices in the buildings there are young people working on policy papers who have this on their screen. This is part of the way we communicate with each other. There is a purpose.

The second thing I am going to ask, as I start to walk through these ideas, is open your minds. Some of these will offend Republicans. Some are going to offend Democrats. But the math, the math is true. And the family motto: ``The math will always win.''

There is hope out there, but every single day this place continues to operate like a clown show. And I am sorry, that was very mean to clowns. Being sarcastic and being mean, the scale of what is coming at us and the immorality of not dealing with it terrifies me. So we are going to do a quick recap.

The next 30 years--and these are last year's CBO numbers, this is before inflation has been calculated in--we functionally have, and the newest one was 114, this one is $116 trillion of borrowed money coming. That is in today's dollars.

So think about that. On this board we are going to borrow $116 trillion or $114 trillion. We have about $1.9 trillion--we are in the positive.

So where is all the borrowing coming from?

Every dime of borrowing over the next 30 years, 75 percent of it is Medicare, 25 is a shortfall in Social Security.

That is immoral. But it is math. We got old. Baby boomers started retiring. It is math.

How many conversations have happened on the floor today saying: Hey, this is going to drive all public policy because it is going to consume every dollar?

This is the reality.

Madam Speaker, we are in the process of adopting a little boy right now. He is 5 months old. He has been with us since his first few days of life. It is a joy. When he turns 25, we have to double--his tax rate will have to have doubled what we all pay, and that is just to maintain the baseline of services.

So if you think about where you are going to be 20 years from now, Madam Speaker, 25 years from now, are you ready to pay double the taxes?

We make businesses actually do disclosures now saying: Well, global warming, environmental change, you should have to disclose that.

Damn it, should those same businesses have to disclose the fact that their tax rates are doubling over the next couple of decades?

It is baked in the cake. It is this math. Unless you have a revolution in two areas: crashing the cost of healthcare and economic growth. And growth is moral. Think about the end of 2017, 2018, and 2019 when the poor got dramatically less poor, the middle class got much more prosperous, and income inequality shrank dramatically. It is moral.

In this place we are going to fight over the stupidest things because it is easy to understand, it is theatrical, and I have $100-plus trillion of crushing debt coming on top of the $31 trillion already out there, and that is going to crush all of you.

If you think you are retiring, Madam Speaker, if you think my little boy or my 7-year-old girl, when they hit their peak earning years, are going to live more prosperous than we do, then we need to engage in some sort thought revolution, and that is what I am asking everyone to give me. I am going to do this in a couple of series, so this is going to be over a couple of nights. But I also need you to understand how dangerous it is.

Debt markets are smart. Those debt markets out there where we are having to borrow trillions see Congress is actually starting to take this stuff seriously, we will be benefited by the price of money into the future.

Right now they don't think we are taking it seriously.

Do understand, Madam Speaker, if interest rates on U.S. sovereign debt go up 2 points--my math says about 25 years, this board was actually originally off a print that said 30 years--then every single dime of U.S. tax receipts goes just to cover interest. We need to take a step back and think about that. We are piling on so much debt, and the curve expands. In about a decade, we are running into almost structural $2-trillion-a-year deficits, and it gets bigger from there.

It is demographics. Almost every dime of that borrowing--75 percent will be Medicare and 25 percent will be Social Security--yet around here we will beat the crap out of each other for even mentioning Social Security and Medicare. But to save it is to actually understand the math.

What would happen if we don't convince debt markets that we are going to take this debt seriously?

The CBO model that was a year ago was, hey, the mean interest rate on U.S. sovereigns is going to be like 1.78. Now it is like 2.8. But if it remained around 4, you do realize, Madam Speaker, in two decades every dime just goes to interest. This is what we are handing to our kids.

So I also need to crush some of the stupidity out there. I accept the political class in our campaigns and those things, there has been a certain lack of truthfulness. Democrats will say: Well, let's tax rich people.

Do you realize, Madam Speaker, if you took every billionaire in America and took every dime they had--every dime, and the price of their yachts didn't crash--if you took every dime, then you could run the government for maybe 7\1/2\ months. Now, you would crash us into a massive depression. The scale of this spending and the debt is just ginormous. I love that word.

But also for us on the conservative side, we often have our people who get behind the microphone and say: If we

got rid of foreign aid; get rid of every dime of foreign aid.

Last year I think foreign aid is about $38 billion. Let's see, last year we were borrowing $26 billion, $26,444,000,000 every week. So get rid of every dime of foreign aid, that is what, 10\1/2\, 11 days?

What are you going to do with the rest of the year?

Think of that. Every dime of foreign aid, maybe 11, 12 days of borrowing; and remember, our borrowing is going to double functionally over the next 10 years.

We need to tell the truth about the scale. So if I get one more person on my side saying: Well, if we got rid of waste and fraud or foreign aid; or they say: Just tax the rich people more--the math doesn't work. It is great campaign rhetoric and looks good in a brochure.

So you saw in the first chart we have $114 trillion of borrowing, and that is last year's number before inflation coming.

There are solutions. So let's actually start to be optimistic because there is hope. But we first also have to have that moment of reality. Stop talking about things that are rounding errors. We should still do some of them, like price transparency. Many of us on the Republican side believe very much that you should know what the price of everything in healthcare is.

Great. Let's do it. But the best academic study says: Well, maybe about 1 percent, 0.1 to 0.7 is what the academic studies said if you have price transparency because we have the third-party payer system.

It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. But don't think it makes that big of a deal in a society while I have healthcare markets around the United States that just had 16 percent inflation. Think of that. The healthcare costs in some of these markets went up 16 percent.

Madam Speaker, if you want to see a lot of detail, go to Brian Riddell's charts, Manhattan Institute. This is one of them. It talks about all the different ideas, both particularly from the right and mostly from left: If we did this sort of tax, then here is how much more tax we get over a decade of GDP.

When you start to add it up, then you start to realize that none of these get you even close. If you double the tax rate, take people and move them from 35 to 50 to 60 to 70 percent tax rate, then you don't get anything. And that is without an attempt to do the economic effects because there is a math reality that those ones in the tax world--I am on the Committee of Ways and Means--and it is for 100-plus years.

When we lower taxes, we basically seem to get about that 18, 19 percent of GDP, the size of the economy, in taxes. When we have raised taxes in the United States, you seem to get about that 18 or 19 percent of GDP in taxes. It is math, and you have got lots of history on this. So when you have raised taxes, we are still getting this size, much of the economy, but the economy gets smaller. When you have lower taxes, the economy gets bigger, and you get this percentage.

It turns out that right now we are getting almost $1 trillion more in receipts, revenues, and taxes than we were getting just a couple of years ago. A lot of that is based on the growth that came after tax reform. A lot of it was the amazing amount of government spending here that we had some of that stimulus that we are going to take some taxes in on money we put out; we still have to borrow the money, so we are screwed from that--sorry, an economic term. But the fact of the matter is, a lot of the folks who predicted: Oh, revenues are going to crash.

They didn't. Society got much more productive.

Expensing turns out to be most valuable thing in tax reform because it forced us to do investment and growth. At one point we will talk about that.

So let's talk about right now the primary driver of U.S. debt over the next 30 years. Some reality: 5 percent of our brothers and sisters are over 50 percent of all of our healthcare spending. Now, these are our friends, our neighbors, and our family members who have multiple chronic conditions.

The majority of healthcare spending comes through government. The majority of this population is getting their healthcare through government. If this is the primary driver of costs in our society and the primary driver of debt, wouldn't we think about what we can do about that 5 percent of our society that is out there suffering?

It is worth thinking about.

So if I came to you right now, Madam Speaker, and said: Let our ideas we have out there that are doable in divided government that won't scare people too much or won't bring the armies of lobbyists down saying: Oh, we are screwing up their business model, but also have that morality of actually potentially working and doing something good--I am going to start with something really simple and then get more complicated--what would happen, Madam Speaker, if I came to all of us and said: Did you know that it is estimated that 16 percent of all healthcare spending is people just not taking their meds?

So I have hypertension. I take a calcium inhibitor. I don't stroke out, and it is a really, really, cheap, cheap pill. As long as you take it, it is incredibly effective.

Madam Speaker, how many people do you know who take statins for their cholesterol?

There are drug regimens where if you take them and take them according to the prescription, you are healthy, and you are safe. But when you don't, you stroke out, and that costs hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It turns out that is 16 percent of all healthcare spending. You do realize that is over a half a trillion dollars a year in healthcare spending.

So why wouldn't we have a conversation around this place and say: Okay, we all walk around with these little supercomputers in our pocket, we have seen these studies now saying that people not adhering to their pharmaceutical regimen to stay stable is over 16 percent of healthcare spending, why wouldn't you do something silly like a solution?

It turns out that they have pill bottle caps that beep at you if you don't open them in the morning. When you are really busy running around saying, oh, I forgot to take my calcium inhibitor for my hypertension, the thing is beeping at you. The other ones also will beep at your phone.

I know this sounds silly, but could you imagine, instead of 16 percent of healthcare being the cost of people having not maintained theirs, we cut it in half? That is $250 billion, $300 billion a year, and it would have been what, a $0.99 to $2 pill bottle cap that beeps at you, or the one that dispenses for grandma her mixture of pills that she is having trouble remembering.

We are walking through simple ideas that could pass here. Why wouldn't we have this discussion? There are other derivatives and discussions that make people uncomfortable, like for high-priced medicines. Put them in sterile packaging so if someone passes away, they can go back to the health co-op or whatever is out there and reuse them. There are all sorts of these ideas.

Think about something as simple as this. This is half a trillion dollars a year. For something you need, why wouldn't we invest and say, hey, put the pill bottle cap on that beeps at you if you don't open it in the morning? Is this simple enough conceptually?

There are ideas like this that have massive dollar impacts, and we never even discuss them because they are simple to absorb.

I have been here multiple times and talked about the item you can blow into. In our office, we have nicknamed it the flu kazoo because that was cute, people got it, but it is a breath biopsy.

I showed it, I think, a couple of weeks ago on the floor, that there are all things where you can functionally have a medical lab in your home medicine cabinet.

But here is the disruption. This is what makes so many people angry. If I brought you something right now, for a couple hundred dollars, you could have it in your home medicine cabinet. You could blow into it and instantly tell you if you have the flu, instantly bang off your medical records, instantly order your antiviral, and Lyft or Uber could drop it off at your house in 2 hours. Wouldn't you like that?

For everyone here who talks about accessibility, remember, I just talked about having a little person at home. It is a lot easier to blow into that thing for the breath biopsy and get the prescription delivered than it is to go wait

in an emergency room or try to get that doctor's appointment.

Believe it or not, that technology is illegal. The way our laws are set up right now, that disruptive technology is illegal. It is crazy.

Why wouldn't you allow that algorithm that statistically is more accurate than a human to write a prescription? Would it make your life better?

Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

Excellent. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

This is part of what we are talking about: Legalize the technology that will make our lives easier, better, faster, raise accessibility, and, yes, it is going to cause a disruption.

If you are an investor in the urgent care system, you may not like telemedicine. You may not like these things. But how many of us used to go to Blockbuster Video, stand in line, and have the nice person hand us a suggestion on a movie because the one we really wanted wasn't there?

If they had hired enough lobbyists, would this place have slowed down the internet to keep Netflix?

I need you to think this way, and this is what I am asking anyone that is viewing. It is the reality of it, when you looked at that first slide, and we talked about trillions and trillions of that coming from just the shortfall in Medicare.

If this were 20 years ago or 25 years ago, you would have this debate with the left or the right. Well, we are going to do entitlement reform. No, we are not.

Does anyone remember the experience that this body had back in the early 2000s when someone was willing to talk about trying to save Social Security back then, and it became political ads, fundraising?

The math was true, but the politics were great to destroy then George Bush and the people that were willing to tell the truth about the math. This place will pay lip service, but it is not going to happen.

The path I am proposing is embracing what we have gotten really good at in this country. I mean, this is a supercomputer. Think of the power that is in this thing.

Yes, it is an iPhone. It is expensive. But it is--what?--10,000 times more powerful than the old IBM PC I used to have. Take that concept, and what would happen if we would legalize technology to crash the price of healthcare?

What is one of the biggest drivers of healthcare costs in the country? The number one? It is a little uncomfortable to talk about. It is diabetes.

The fact of the matter is 31 percent of all Medicare--Medicare, not Medicaid--Medicare spending is related to diabetes, and 33 percent of all healthcare spending is related to diabetes. It is crazy.

I represent a Tribal community that is actually pretty well off. They are incredibly well-managed, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Tribal community right alongside Scottsdale, and they have gaming, sports, and all sorts of other things.

They are very good at what they do, and they are the second highest per capita population, I think, in the world for diabetes. Their sister Tribe, Gila River, is number one.

Is it moral if I came to you right now and said, there is a path, and yes, it might not ultimately work, but there is a path out there of a stem cell treatment working with CRISPR where they have tagged it so you don't need antirejection drugs?

Yes, it is type 1, but there is a proof of concept that is starting to work where they have actually had a handful of Americans who they have been able to transfer the stem cells, and their islet cells are now producing insulin.

Remember, I just told you 33 percent of all healthcare spending is 31 percent of all Medicare. It would be the single biggest thing you could do for debt. It would also be one of the most moral things you could do for our brothers and sisters who are out there suffering, who are going blind and losing parts of their feet.

There is math out there that health may be one of the primary drivers of income inequality in society. You can't work if you have a family member who you are having to take care of because disease is ravaging them.

This is forcing the body to think differently, that if a cure is moral, but it is also really good economics and would help us take on the primary driver of our future debt with healthcare, why wouldn't you fixate on that 5 percent of our brothers and sisters that have chronic conditions that are over 50 percent of all healthcare spending?

The 31 percent that is actually Medicare, that is just diabetes. How about a Moonshot? If I came to you right now and said they are having some success, why can't we bring these?

I have been trying now, under Democrat control for a couple of years, and look. Being in the minority, we basically get told to go to hell. I will talk to my brothers and sisters on the Democrat side, and they say that is amazing but don't believe it.

Shouldn't we go out and build a bunch more diabetes centers? Great. You are going to help people manage their misery. How about curing it? Isn't this the moral thing to do?

By the way, it would be the single most powerful thing you could do for U.S. sovereign debt and my 5-month-old's economic future and your retirement.

This is just a taste of the disruptive ideas we are going to try to bring here over the next handful of times I get in front of the floor.

There is hope, but this body needs to start thinking that we care. This body needs to start acting like we give a damn. Instead, we spend so much time doing theater.

Look, I care a lot about what is on Hunter Biden's laptop. Well, not really. I do care about the media hiding it and screwing with our elections. That is important.

They mentioned at the end of the decade or so we are going to have $2 million a year deficit and it goes up from there.

You have got to decide: Are you going to save the Republic?

Are you going to embrace the morality of the prosperity?

Start understanding the science, the synthetic biology, the opportunities around us where we can cure people. Because I am going to argue that finding a path, whether it be the single shot cure that is now available for hemophilia, which is really expensive, but it cures hemophilia.

Now, we should probably come together as a body and say, hey, why don't we work out a financing mechanism so we can use the future savings to pay for the purchase of the drug today? Because wouldn't that be the moral thing to do. And, oh, by the way, it gets rid of that chronic condition.

Sickle cell anemia, we are so close. There are so many things out there where--we talk about the lack of productivity in society.

What would happen if we cured so many of our brothers and sisters so that they are able to participate in the economics?

Part of this closing here--we are going to talk about sort of the unified theory to save the country. Part of that unified theory--this is the economics--is embracing the technology. And yes, disruption is scary and it may mess up your business model, but it is moral.

Talking about immigration--really hard--but the fact of the matter is, importing poverty by open borders crushes the working poor because now that is who they are competing with. We need talent.

With the fertility rates all across the western world, in the next couple decades there is going to be a fight for smart people.

Over here is a tax code that fixates on growth. Maybe it is time to stop subsidizing, importing stuff from other countries, and functionally taxing ourselves to send things out of the country.

You realize, we functionally crush ourselves in the way we design our tax code today? Why wouldn't you flip that, so you incentivize? Make it here.

The other thing is regulatory. If I came to you tomorrow and said you could crowdsource air quality, you don't need buildings full of paperwork shoved in file cabinets. You could make the air cleaner, better, faster.

Things like what happened to the water in Detroit or other places-- actually it wasn't Detroit. Sorry, I am from

out West--but the little thing that you are able to sample your water or the thing you can put on your lapel.

Madam Speaker, I am going to beg of us, and I am going to bring boards talking about there is technology around us where we can crush the size of the bureaucracy to get cleaner, better, faster, healthier, and grow. And the growth is moral and the growth gives us a path to not be crushed by the debt that is coming with that.

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

Madam Speaker, Ron is one of the good guys. For those of us who are blessed to be on the Ways and Means Committee, many times it is one of those committees where you have to do adult stuff that affects not only this country but the world. Having people that you can talk to and work it through with is important. Ron is going to be missed. I thank him for being one of the good guys.

Madam Speaker, this is going to be sort of a two-parter. I am going to come back in 2 weeks and provide solutions, but right now I need to define the problem.

As you know, right now around the Capitol complex, we have dozens and dozens of brand-new Members and hundreds of potentially new staffers. They are all trying to find their office and which way is up and where the bathrooms are; I mean, all the things we go through when we are brand-new around here.

My fear is no one is telling these Members that are new--and even talking to the Members who have been here a while--the truth. The truth is the math, and the math always wins.

We are in real trouble. What scares me is with some of the things going on in the economy right now, with where interest rates look like they are going, with inflation now becoming structural, it is potentially just devastating to the individuals out there, our brothers and sisters in the country, just the affordability, being able to afford a house, food, but you have got to understand what it also means to the stability of this country.

Let's actually walk through it. Some of this is big-boy math, it is going to be complex, but there are a couple punch lines in here I want to be remembered.

I am not going to take you back to 1965, but let's do last year. This is last year's budget cycle. Understand, over 71 percent of all of our spending is on autopilot. The fact of the matter is this is what we call mandatory. Only 13 percent was defense, 16 percent was discretionary, what we functionally debate here which we really fight over.

But this mandatory here, you see red, your government functionally is an insurance company with an army. This is health, Medicare, Social Security, other benefits, pensions for military, for government workers, those sorts of things. This is mandatory. And it is on autopilot.

I don't think there is a Member here who has ever ultimately voted on this red portion. It is a formula. You turn 65, you get certain benefits. You serve in the military a certain amount of time, you get certain benefits. It is autopilot.

Defense, well, that we debate, we work through, but the fact of the matter is defense sort of stays within a certain mean of the GDP.

And then domestic. The crazy thing, domestic, actually, as a percentage of GDP, at the end of a decade will be flat.

So where is all this debt coming from? Where is all this growth coming from?

I am going to give you an answer, and it is going to make people really unhappy. You need to understand, when we talk about just last year's borrowing, does anyone out there understand how big it was?

Okay. So we borrowed, functionally, $1.375 trillion.

How much is that?

It is $114 billion a month.

It is $26 billion a week.

It is $3.7 billion a day.

It is $159 million an hour.

It is $2.6 million a minute.

We are told with big numbers, how do you get it so it is understandable? If I came to you right now and said to you, how much last year did your government borrow every second? Anyone in this body able to answer that? It turns out it was $43,600 a second. We borrowed $43,600 every second last year.

Does anyone see a problem? Or is it one of those things that as long as we are handing out goodies and subsidizing the folks who will vote for us or contribute to us, the world is good?

Where is all this debt coming from? Brian Riedl, Manhattan Institute, basically just put out a series of slides where they take the Congressional Budget Office, the OMB office from the administration, and sort of look at it and say, what is driving the debt?

Today we hold $31 trillion of total debt. That is borrowing from trust funds and everything, but that is the total debt.

But from today for the next 30 years, based on a previous interest rate calculation--so we haven't even plugged in the new higher interest rates that we are borrowing money on--anyone want to guess what the borrowing is from today to the future, how much money? We are going to borrow, functionally, $114 trillion. There is a $114 trillion shortfall.

Now, the interesting thing--remember on that previous slide, I was saying, here is mandatory, here is discretionary. Well, it turns out the discretionary military we calculate today to actually have about a $1.9 trillion surplus over the next 30 years.

So where is $114 trillion of borrowing coming from? This is really uncomfortable. I will tell you, I believe the Democrats did something actually really crappy during the election, but it is a knife fight. I accept the knives come out, it is all about winning.

But when you had campaigns out there--``They are going to cut your Medicare''--you can't even have an honest conversation here what is going on.

The shortfall in Medicare, when you add in the interest cost, is $80 trillion. The shortfall in Social Security is $35.8 trillion. The entire borrowing over the next 30 years is Social Security and Medicare.

We got old. The fact of the matter is this place didn't pay any attention. There was this thing called baby boomers.

You get the clown show around here that says, well, we will do Medicare for All. That is a financing bill. It had nothing to do with what we pay. ObamaCare, that is a financing bill; who gets subsidized, who has to pay. The Republican alternative was ultimately a financing bill. You need a revolution in what we pay, not who pays it.

But that is actually more uncomfortable here than actually having a debate over raising taxes or doing entitlement reform, an actual discussion of should we legalize technology, should we legalize the things that actually create disruptions in providing our brothers and sisters the healthcare that we as a society made a deal? We are going to keep our promise on Social Security and Medicare. Well, I think we are.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, what is it now? In a decade, because of the new COLA increase, we just shortened the lifespan of the Social Security trust fund by, what?, almost a year. So you have a little bit over a decade, and our brothers and sisters who live on Social Security are heading toward a 25 percent cut.

What is this place going to do?

Medicare is just unsustainable. The stunning amount to finance our brothers and sisters, our promise for those who turn 65 and get Medicare, to finance it, basically consumes every dollar of this government.

It is math. It is the reality.

How many of you during this last campaign had an honest debate, honest conversation, anyone who was even willing to talk about this? Really dangerous because the other side will run nasty ads about you to scare people, yet by not dealing with it, you are sentencing our seniors to misery because at some point this hits the wall.

So what is going on? Why am I even more dour right now than I was several months ago?

It is inflation, it is the cost of everything. It is the affordability in our society. But you are crushing people. We are going to walk through a little bit of that. But you have got to understand--I am sorry, I am going to geek out on interest rates for a moment, but then I am going to try to show what it actually means to everyone in this country. What we are doing to you and so many of our brothers and sisters out there, you don't understand how--oh, I am sorry, it is a sort of high-level, technical, economic term--how screwed you are.

Let's sort of walk through this. We were building budgets a year ago on an assumption that U.S. sovereign debt when you did the 2-year, the 5-year, the 10-year, the 20-year, the 30-year, the blended interest rate, the weighted daily average, it was all these fun calculations. Actually really interesting stuff.

We were originally about 1.78 we thought would be our mean interest rate. Then last--what was it, was this March or May?--March we recalculated because of this thing called inflation. Oh, we are going to be up to 2.10. Then the reality of it is that we ended up at a recalculation of, hey, the U.S. mean now is heading toward 2.85. That is on the 10-year.

We have some economists around us who are starting to say, it is going higher; it is going higher. I am going to show you a couple things here of what happens to us as a country if the way the Federal Reserve has to stop inflation is raising, raising, raising interest rates, breaking the labor market because you understand within there, even though there is this delay effect, that also means what you and I have to pay the interest back on all the borrowing, and the biggest part of the borrowing cycle has not even hit us yet because we are just now starting to absorb and get ready for the huge spike in costs because of our demographics.

Remember, baby boomers, the final tail end of the baby boomers is moving into their retirement benefits, and as they get slightly older and a little bit older, a little bit older, the Medicare costs start to really go up, and we haven't even hit that financing cycle. It is coming. What happens if we have to finance that at the higher interest rates?

You start looking at some of this. Three months T-bill back in March was 0.2. That was our Biden administration estimate for the 3-year. The actual 3-year right now is 1.75.

Let's see, what is the difference between a 0.2 and a 1.75? Can anyone say ``a whole lot''?

This may not mean much to you, but this is money your taxes are going to be paying back.

Here is the punch line. I am going to make it really simple. What if this inflationary cycle stuck with us? What if instead of that, what was it, 1.78 or even the 2.3 percent interest rate on U.S. sovereign debt, what if it were 2 points higher, just 2 percent higher?

Fifteen years ago, that is where we were at. Remember, we actually had a reprieve, a completely fake economic reprieve for a decade with artificially low interest rates. We were borrowing, and the Federal Reserve kept interest rates lower, particularly since 2008. Now, we are about to pay the cost of it.

What would happen if we paid that 2 percent higher? Functionally--and my math is a little bit less--the end of 30 years, 100 percent of all tax receipts, of all taxes, all tariffs, all everything that comes into the government, 100 percent goes just to pay interest.

You have to understand how sensitive we are as a government, as a society, as a country, how fragile we have made ourselves because we structurally are going to borrow another $1 trillion to $1.3 trillion-- there is one estimate of $1.4 trillion--this year. We are never paying off anything.

It gets worse and worse because of our demographics as we get older, unless we crash the price of healthcare. Two weeks from now, we are going to talk about things we can do to accomplish that.

Are you prepared to live in a country that if our mean interest rate goes up 2 percent and stays there, all tax receipts go just to cover our interest?

There is no more government. There is no more military. There are no more benefits. There is no more Social Security. There is no more Medicare.

That is why it is so crucial around here to have an honest conversation where people put batteries in their calculators. Instead, this place is living on theater. Oh, modern monetary policy--we can spend all the money we want, and look, nothing happens. Oh, got it. Didn't work.

I can show you right now the largest tax increase in modern history has happened in the last year. If you live in my Phoenix-Scottsdale area and are a working person, you are a hardworking taxpayer, and you have not had a pay hike, do you realize you have lost 6 weeks, maybe more, of your labor? We are still at 12.1 percent inflation in my community. You have lost 6 weeks of your labor.

If I had walked in and told you that I was going to take a month and a half of your salary, that that is going to be my new tax hike, you would have lost your mind. But if we do it through this thing called inflation, where we strip the affordability of your groceries and your gasoline and everything else in your life, did you notice it? Well, you know there is a problem. You know life has gotten much harder. You know sometimes you get to the checkout stand and are taking things back because the price just doesn't work on your budget.

The perverse thing, you are going to see a chart here, my next one, where actually there is going to be this little drop in sort of the debt-to-GDP and those things. That is because that inflation actually has been a tax. We lowered the value of your income. We lowered the value of your savings. At the same time, we lowered the value of all this debt because we are going to pay it back with what we call inflated dollars, which is wonderful up until the next year or 2 when we have to refinance the debt and refinance the new spending at the higher interest rates. Then that little benefit of taxing you through inflation goes away, and we are off to the races, and it becomes hell.

Remember, this has brought down other countries for hundreds of years, and it is right in front of us. No one seems to come behind these microphones--they talk about it, educate about it, and for the last couple years I have come here behind these microphones and tried to show solutions, and then it drives the lobbyists out of their minds.

Let's take a look at this. Let's see if I can make this work. These are deficits during the Biden administration fiscal year 2023 budget baseline versus a 1 percent rise in interest. Do we all agree that we have had at least a 1 percent rise in interest rates? Yes. Do you see this one little bit of a fall right there? This orange is what happens when you tack on the additional interest. That little fall is, functionally, the fact that we devalued your dollar. That is our little benefit from taxing you in a way you didn't know.

But then, boom. Functionally, the budget cycle we are about to work on is the 2024 budget cycle. You are basically going to have a budget deficit of $1.4 trillion, and then, boom, it is $1.5 trillion. You get out a couple more years, you are heading toward $1.75 trillion. In less than a decade, you are well over $2 trillion a year in just borrowing. This chart explodes if we go beyond that 1 percent rise in interest rates.

Structurally, even if I say we are going to go back to living in that world of that fantasy artificially low interest rate, we are still heading toward $2 trillion a year borrowing. It just takes 10 years. This is insane.

Right in here, interest will be just the basic borrowing. All of defense, a whole bunch of discretionary, and other things will all live on borrowed money.

Most people have no idea what the concept of debt-to-GDP is. It is the concept of: Here is the size of my economy, and, yes, we are borrowing all this money, but look how big my economy is, and that economy's ability to finance--just like your income finances your credit cards. As long as your income keeps going up faster than the debt on your credit cards, you can live. You are going to be okay. What happens when your economy isn't growing, when your income isn't growing as fast as you are borrowing on those credit cards? At a certain point, it comes to an end.

We are heading toward a time where if we add--this is our baseline. If we start adding a little bit of higher interest rates because we have to finance the debt, we have to sell our bonds, the bond markets are expecting higher interest rates because of inflation--you start seeing the chart where you are hitting a world where at the end--now, I know these are 30-year projections, but remember, we are selling 30- year bonds. The baseline number is 185 percent of debt-to-GDP. That means the debt will be 85 percent bigger than the entire economy. If we had 3 percent higher interest rates, the debt is, functionally, 245 percent bigger than the entire economy.

Do you think we ever get anywhere--because this is what we are doing to ourselves. This is already baked in the cake if these interest rates go up. But this down here, the base CBO assumption--remember, we are already over 100 percent. Right now, our borrowing is already substantially bigger than the entire size of our economy.

It is why growth is moral but is also necessary. If we don't start growing this economy and we are continuing just the borrowing-- remember, what was the primary driver of our borrowing? Medicare and Social Security. We got old. It is demographics. Getting old is not Republican or Democrat; it is just who we are. That is driving most of our borrowing. We are not adopting policies that maximize growth at every opportunity.

We are destroying the future. I need my brothers and sisters on the left to at least embrace some basic truths.

The very end of 2017, we did tax reform. Some people go, oh, it was tax cuts, except the rich actually pay a higher percentage of Federal income taxes today than they did under the old tax system. But, 2022, tax receipts, the highest in U.S. history by far, and this is under the new tax system. If you are going to demagogue us for doing tax reform, trying to bring businesses back to the United States and get them to domicile and manufacture and do things here in this country, you can at least pull out a chart and show me where the revenues disappeared because they didn't. They are right here.

We brought in $4.8 trillion in tax receipts last year, and we are still borrowing $1.3 trillion. The spending has just exploded around here, and now we hit our structural deficits because of our demographics. It gets uglier and uglier, and we have made ourselves incredibly fragile.

God forbid we ever have a failed bond auction or an undersubscribed one, and interest rates start to spike. Do you understand what happens to the entire world, let alone your savings?

We don't need to do this to ourselves. There are solutions, but this body is incapable of having that debate.

Dear God, please, with a Republican majority, no matter how thin it is, maybe we will actually try to do something honest and adult with the calculators.

You keep looking at the charts, and there are charts out there. It is not revenues. There is this whole line of thought out there that has been worked on by the left and the right that we raise taxes, somehow we stay within a certain mean of the size of the economy. When we have lowered taxes, somehow the revenues come back up. Taxes always seem to come in just right about here. If this is 20 percent of GDP, you raise the taxes, the economy seems to shrink, the growth shrinks, we fall back to the mean. You lower taxes, the economy grows, the revenues come back. You have decades and decades of data. You look at the charts, and it is pretty darn clear. We are going to take in 19.1 to 20 percent. Sometimes we fall down to 18 percent of the economy in revenues, in receipts, in taxes.

The art here is to design a tax code, design a regulatory code, adopt embracing of technology and other things that maximize growth. The ultimate solution is grow, grow, grow, and then adopt disruptive technologies that lower prices, so affordability.

Imagine if you had a society once again that was growing, your wages were going up, but inflation wasn't; where your healthcare costs were actually going down; where your savings, your investments, your planning for retirement, your ability to help your

kids go to college got better. We can do that. We did that in 2017, 2018, 2019, even the first quarter of 2020 before the pandemic. There is a model to do it.

All that progress, all that closing income inequality, making the poor less poor, the hardworking, tax-paying middle class, making them more prosperous, it is all gone. The Democrats succeeded, in 18 months, in crushing the people of this country by really crappy policy--great virtue signaling, just incredibly good virtue signaling, really crappy policy.

Once again, I need my brothers and sisters on the left to buy a calculator and understand if you came in and said I am going to take every dime, you make small businesses, rich people, high-income earners, if I take every dime--if you make $500,000, the next dollar we just take everything. You have heard this, oh, rich people aren't paying enough, take every dime. You, functionally, don't get anywhere.

This is assuming that they continue to work as hard, that they make the same amount of money so they don't change their behavior at all. It is a math experiment, and you get about 5.1 percent of GDP in taxes.

The problem is our borrowing is already about to hit 6 percent, and in a couple more decades, we are over 12 percent. It is a fantasy.

Look, the Republicans have their sin, too. We will often say, well, waste and fraud, foreign aid, that is just almost a rounding error. Remember a little while ago, $40,000-plus a second in borrowing?

The scale of the problems ahead of us is terrifying, and it is no longer getting postponed to the future.

I have gotten in front of audiences, and, A, they will boo when you try to explain to them the truth of the math. They say, Well, I was told this 10 years ago.

Yes, but we had 10 years of artificially low interest rates that allowed Congress to engage in really crappy policies.

What is that saying, ``the chickens are coming home to roost''? I am not particularly good at colloquialisms. But it is time. It is here.

Will this new Congress with a divided government step up, tell the public the truth, tell our new freshman class the truth, and actually take on a really tough decision?

Madam Speaker, do you want a society and a country that is prosperous, innovative, and disruptive but we are growing so fast and so healthy that you can imagine a world where healthcare prices aren't going up twice as fast as inflation, where your wages go up faster than inflation, and where affordability when you go to the grocery store or your gasoline station doesn't take your breath away?

We can do that. At least I think we can do it.

I just want to know: Are we going to have partners on the other side to do what is honorable?

Because growth is moral.

Are we going to do the right thing for our society, for our brothers and sisters out there, or are we going to continue with virtue signaling?

Because virtue signaling may be brilliant politics, but it is really crappy economics.

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

Mr. Speaker, I'm going to do my best not to sound frustrated and defeated. I actually do believe there is hope. But somewhere here--and I'm going to show the numbers--we have got to figure out some way, particularly my brothers and sisters on the left but even some on my side, to understand what is going on in the math. The math will always win.

Tonight, I am going to throw a lot of math, a lot of the facts. These facts functionally decide whether this country survives or not. These facts decide whether we are going to have prosperity or not. And the avoidance of the math around here, the avoidance of the actual math. The level of cruelty, the level of just viciousness that will make to the poor, the working middle class, to anyone in this country, because the actual economic data that has flowed through to today is pretty damn ugly.

Let's start to deal with some reality on the math. And this board is already out of date.

In the next 30 years, CBO--and this is from a couple months ago-- says, in today's dollars, 30 years from now, we will have $138 trillion--and the reason I had to do this is because the number keeps changing, and this is already out of date--$138 trillion of borrowed money.

And this is one of the hard things, because we are terrified to tell our voters this, but it is the math. It is the truth. Every dime of this borrowed money, from today's $31 trillion of borrowed to $138 trillion borrowed, is the shortfall on Medicare. It is the shortfall on Social Security. It is the demographics.

And what is terrifying is this Medicare number, when healthcare right now has doubled the inflation rate, doubled the inflation rate of the rest of the country. I represent the highest inflation in the continental United States; the Scottsdale-Phoenix area. We are sitting around 13 percent. And in my marketplace, we are being told 20-plus percent is my medical inflation. This number explodes.

How many times this last week have you had anyone come behind these microphones and say: I am terrified what I just did to people trying to head toward retirement. I am terrified what we have done to the next generation.

This is reality. This is the math. And this doesn't really have all the spending.

President Biden, unified control of the left, has been here, what, 18-some months. Congratulations, he added $4.8 trillion to the deficit.

Remember the campaign rhetoric? Oh, they're going to be responsible, they are going to balance things--$4.8 trillion to the deficit.

Here is where the math gets terrifying, and I am just livid that no one is willing to walk behind these microphones and tell the voters the truth because we need to hand out cash, so they vote for us; so they cuddle with us and say, Oh, we like you. Thank you, Mr. Congressman, for funding this, funding that.

This is going to make sense in a moment.

The end of 2021, we functionally had zero percent interest when you did the adjustment for--here is our inflation and here is UST bills, when you do the WAM, the weighted average daily.

September 22. We are at 3.1. We are now calculating. And this is real interest. So, yes, bonds and T-bills are up here, but when you adjust for inflation, we believe the futures are going to continue to go up.

For the next few years, as far as we can see on the current futures market, interest rates are 2, 3, 4 points higher than the Congressional Budget Office's modeling.

What does that actually mean?

Let's just do the easiest one. If we are 2 points higher than what the CBO had projected just a few months ago, in just a decade you are well over 126 percent of debt-to-GDP. But it gets crazier.

Remember, what I am saying here is with inflation, with expectations, and the speech I did last week where we showed you data after data after data points.

First, the lie from earlier this year: Inflation is transitory. It was never transitory. Anyone that said that didn't show up at their economics class.

Look at the structural inputs we saw last week. Inflation now is structural, meaning the Federal Reserve is going to either have to bust the labor markets because this place is incapable of doing what is necessary, which is incentivizing savings, and incentivizing, in a big- time way, productivity.

Because if you don't make more stuff--and I know it is supply side and supply side is a rightwing, except it is economics. It works. If we don't get more productive as a society--it is an economic term--what is it--oh, yeah, we are screwed.

So do understand, under the current CBO protections, and this is from months and months ago before they plugged in the inflation data we are in right now, in 30 years, 50 percent of all tax receipts, we are just paying interest.

Now, most of this is not Republican or Democrat, it is demographics. We got old as a society, but this is our future. Now you put in the crappy fiscal decisions and economic decisions this place has made over the last 18 months, and you start to see what the future actually looks like.

This is from the CBO numbers. This is CBO data from a year ago, that if we had just a single percentage point higher mean on U.S. sovereign debt interest rates, in 30 years, 70 percent of all tax receipts are consumed by just paying back the interest. Not paying down the principal, 70 percent just paying interest.

So what happens if where we are at right now becomes long term? Because we are right now 2 points plus on that CBO model. If it were to last 30 years--and I don't believe it will--but if it did--you have got to understand this is from CBO last year--if we ran 2 percent higher on U.S. sovereign--so T bills, the 10 years, the 30 years, you know, 2 percent higher, 100 percent of the tax receipts of this country go just to pay our interest.

Doesn't this scare the crap out of anyone? Does anyone here own a calculator with a battery in it?

Mr. Speaker, I have a 12-week little boy that just came to us. And, yes, my wife and I, we are going to be old parents, but he is 12 weeks. If this is our future where because we have borrowed so much money, because we have set off inflation, because we have blown up productivity--and I showed last week that productivity per work hour is actually crashing. It is falling. The incentives to participate in the labor markets are not working.

So we say, Well, we have this great unemployment number, except if you look at the U6 data and those things, why are there so many millions of young males missing from the workforce? The incentives we should be engaging in to get older Americans to stay in the workforce, what can we do to incentivize that, because if we don't, this is our future. One hundred percent of all tax receipts being consumed just paying back the interest; not paying down the debt, not paying for government. It is just the United States have

basically become functionally an insurance company with an army.

At the rate we are going, we are not going to be able to pay our insurance benefits: Social Security, Medicare, VA, Indian Health Service. It just drives me to the edge just in anger; the trite, the crazy.

We are going to talk about anything that we think will motivate our voters or get them to get excited or maybe give us money, or this and that, but to tell them the truth on how much trouble we are in.

I accept that maybe I am a heretic. Maybe the job of a Member of Congress is not to come behind this microphone and tell the public the truth. I accept these are big numbers; we are talking trillions.

Think of this: The shortfall in Social Security over the next 65 years--and I know it is a long time, but that is actually how you do the Social Security. I am the ranking Republican on Social Security. The shortfall in just Social Security over the next 65 years is $202 trillion.

In, functionally, a decade it is out of money; and at that point, you take a 25 percent cut. We will double the number of our brothers and sisters who are seniors who will be in poverty.

How much discussion do you see around here that anyone here cares about people? But we do brilliant virtue signaling. We virtue signal the hell out of this place, and then when it comes to anything requiring a calculator--and all of your phones have a calculator on it--we do, what?

Mr. Speaker, I am going to show this because hopefully this will make sense. I am going to try to tie in that there are solutions. There are actually things we could be doing.

With the amount of money the left has spent in the last 18 months, if that money had been actually directed to things that actually would have made a difference, hell, they might be heading toward the majority again--they are not--but we also would save the country, and there would be optimism. Instead, we do pandering. We spend our money on basically buying the next generation of votes.

So, look, this is actually really a societal problem, and we need to have an honest discussion about it. And this is terrifying, because Members are terrified to come behind these microphones and say anything where the Twitter army is going to attack you.

But the 2021 estimate, 37.3 million people, up from 26 million, will have diabetes. I'm going to show you a slide in a moment that we may have doubled in certain areas the number of our brothers and sisters who are obese during the COVID shutdowns.

Why is this board important? Our estimates from a couple years ago was that diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spending. It is 31 percent of all Medicare spending; diabetes and the associated.

Mr. Speaker, I represent the population with the second highest diabetes in the United States. It is a Tribal community on the side of Scottsdale. You want to meet the misery? Come visit. I will introduce you to families who actually are doing okay financially, and grandma's feet have been cut off. So the solution in this place is: Well, we will build more diabetic clinics. We will find ways to help people maintain their misery.

I know I am going to get crap for this: Body mass index approximately doubled during the shutdowns.

We have been trying to dive into why the excess mortality numbers from this last year, and we are trying to do it intellectually honest, intellectually robust, saying: Here is our COVID deaths. Here is our fentanyl deaths.

Mr. Speaker, come to Phoenix, Arizona, and see the number of people now living in alleys. Talk to my local police about the number of bodies they are picking up every week who are dying on fentanyl because fentanyl has become so incredibly cheap. We are now the distribution center because the border is wide open.

But, hey, these are loving, caring Democrats who don't give a damn about the border.

But understand the misery.

But this just hit us saying: Oh, God, what happens in society if we just doubled obesity in the country?

We know what this means, and we also know that diabetes in the previous model was 33 percent of all healthcare spending. We know this health index: lots of folks gaining weight during the time that we were locked in because that was the brilliance of this government.

How many people have we made sicker and more miserable?

Maybe that is the reason those young people aren't in the workforce. Maybe that is the reason productivity isn't working. It is a unified theory: health, immigration, and technology; all these things come together to make this country healthy.

The reality is we are in trouble. We are in just real trouble. The debt is exploded, now the interest on that debt is exploded, and the elements where we say: Well, we are going to cut--look, the Democrat mantra is: Well, rich people don't pay enough taxes.

I have shown boards after boards after boards. You can take every dime they have, and you functionally don't cover but a fraction of the crushing debt that is coming.

Republicans have their sin. We will say: It is waste and fraud.

Well, it turns out that waste and fraud and foreign aid are just a fraction. They need to be fixed. They are all things that probably should be fixed. They are part of the formula.

Think of the cash the left spent on some of their legislation on giving cash to the Big Pharma that make insulin instead of doing something that would have been much more brilliant. Not too many miles from D.C., here in Virginia, there is a co-op that is actually about to make I think it is about eight types of generic insulin, and they are going to make it less than the subsidized price.

Why wouldn't you pass legislation saying: We are going to bring that online, and we are going to do the things to incentivize this type of working together.

By the way, this is how you bring entries into the market because the additional competition is what lowers price. But, instead, the brain trust around here says: We hate Big Pharma. Hey, here is a bunch of cash. Here is billions of dollars.

That was the Democrat solution. It was fascinating how many groups actually wanted the cash much more than they wanted the competition because this place is always about the money.

This is something I have been trying to pitch here. Maybe it won't work. Maybe it is just too utopian for this place to get their heads around. But I think we now have a half a dozen Americans who have been cured of type 1 diabetes. I did a whole functionally 40 minutes here on the floor a couple of months ago walking through the process of the stem cell being tagged with CRISPR so the body doesn't see it as foreign; so you can do it in a biofoundry, so you can make lots of this; and then putting it into the body, the islet cells actually start to attach, and it produces insulin.

Mr. Speaker, why wouldn't you put a fortune into bringing this and seeing if it works?

The Operation Warp Speed, the Democrats can call it anything they want, because this is moral. This is actually loving and kind.

Mr. Speaker, if you look at the previous slides, then you understand we have a debt avalanche, and now the interest on that debt avalanche is about to crush us.

We need our brothers and sisters to be healthy and able to participate in the economy. There are some fascinating things we have been working on showing that, hey, income inequality, why is this population poor over here?

We would always get from our brothers and sisters on the left: Well, it is racism. It is education.

It turns out it is a hell of a lot more complicated. It turns out if we actually start to dig into the data, we actually start to see health--health--and the fact that crime and people break your bones and steal your stuff--but health was an incredibly large component of why some of these urban populations--my Tribal populations--weren't participating in the economy. It was diabetes, the commonality of diabetes in these populations.

So why wouldn't this be everything?

We are going to take on the farm bill and make it so we can help our brothers and sisters in type 2 get healthy. Yes, it will take time, it will be controversial, and it will be difficult. But

if this is the modern plague, when you saw the numbers of the growth of diabetes, why wouldn't we throw everything we have at it?

Because from a math standpoint, it is singularly the most important thing you and I could do for U.S. sovereign debt. Think of that, Mr. Speaker. It is crazy, but if 31 percent of all Medicare spending is diabetes--and that number is about to grow substantially because of what we have done the last couple years--and Medicare is 75 percent of all the future debt, ta-da, the math doesn't take a brain surgeon.

So let's actually start to walk through more of the things that are actuality optimistic and hopeful, and maybe when Republicans are the majority here, we will actually have the competence to try to do hard and complicated things to actually make people's lives better.

I just pulled this up as just a thought experiment except for the fact that the product actually exists today. It is functionally a home biopsy. You can get this and have it on your shelf at home. It actually will be functioning a laboratory where you can put some saliva on it, some other body fluids, and it calculates, it talks to the phone; it talks to the algorithm; it gives you a diagnosis; and it would be in your home. It would help crash parts of the healthcare.

Now, this technology is substantially illegal if you allow the algorithm to write a script in this country. We also know that healthcare costs are the things that are about to crush us. You would think that this place would be contemplating: What can we do in the technology disruption?

But, instead, the brain trust here somehow thinks: Well, the ACA, ObamaCare.

No. Mr. Speaker, you have got to understand that was a financing bill. The Republican alternative was one, and Medicare for All, they are financing bills: Who gets to pay and who gets subsidized. In Medicare for All everybody is subsidized. Those are financing bills. They have nothing to do with what--with what--we pay.

This is one of the ways you disrupt the cost of healthcare.

But I believe this place is terrified because you just took, what, hospitals are the largest lobbyists here in Washington, D.C. They should love and embrace these types of technology disruption. We are just afraid to have that conversation with them.

The other thing is actually one of my pieces of legislation. It is just a simple idea.

What is inflation?

Let's first go back to our high school economics class. Inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. Okay. We can make more stuff.

Part of my argument is reform the Tax Code and reform the regulatory codes--things we did in the 2017 tax reform with expensing where we had that productivity spike--because investments and things that make the society more productive means you can pay people more.

The other side is also too many dollars.

How do I get my brothers and sisters to say: Don't take that cash that is sitting in your checking account and go buy another big screen television?

What if this place would give an incentive and say: Take the cash and go put it in your retirement account?

Believe it or not, it accomplishes much of the same thing. We have gotten some nice write-ups on the piece of legislation Congressman Donalds from Florida and I are doing that says: Let's provide an incentive for people to take excess cash and instead of spending it in the marketplace continuing the inflationary cycle, put it in retirement security.

But, instead, Congress seems absolutely content on letting the Federal Reserve blow up the economy. You already see what is happening around the world. When the United States has inflation and we start to raise our interest rates and money comes screaming in from the world and the U.S. dollar spikes up and the other currencies in the world collapse, and yet they need to buy fuel and food in U.S. dollars, then understand the decisions Democrats here made 2 years ago--a little less than 2 years ago--to push out almost $2 trillion in excess spending that set the match on the inflation kindling, you just blew up much of the world.

This time next year there will be countries around the world that can't make their debt payments.

Mr. Speaker, do you think we will hear anyone on the left actually come behind the microphone and say: We screwed up, we didn't show up at our economics class, and we just blew up the world?

Because they did it in my community. I have 13 percent inflation in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area.

Mr. Speaker, if you work and you haven't had a pay raise, then you have lost a month and a half of your wages--a month and a half of your wages.

That is the biggest modern tax hike.

I tried to explain this last week: Who are the winners and losers in inflation?

Society and people who save money, that young couple who is trying to save to get their family going, and that retired couple. They are crushed.

Who is the biggest debtor in the world?

This place. We have $31 trillion of borrowed money.

And guess what, Mr. Speaker?

We now get to pay back that $31 trillion--or at least the interest on it--with deflated dollars, with cheaper dollars because we lowered your economics, and we made it cheaper for us to do.

That is one of the reasons why there is this sort of whisper here in Washington, particularly the Treasury-type folks, who say that inflation is horrible. But at least in the short term, Democrats are almost giddy that, hey, by the end of the year, the debt-to-GDP ratio in real dollars will actually close.

It is not because they did anything to grow the economy. It is because the dollar value has crashed because of inflation. The value of the debt, because you are paying it back with deflated dollars, that debt to GDP in real dollar terms will close.

Now, the punch line is a year or so from now when we have had to sell the new bonds at the higher interest rates and the higher interest rates and the higher interest rates, then it moves against us. That is like those slides I told you where we had long-term interest rates, 2 percent over CBO model, it is 100 percent. One hundred percent of all tax receipts go to pay just interest. This is where we are heading.

Shouldn't this be the number one conversation in this place, the survival of the country and the survival of my new little boy?

But it doesn't give a damn because it is math and our voters--let's face it--our voters want the shiny object because it is our fault because we are terrified to have a conversation with our voters saying: If we don't do these things, then we can't save Medicare and we can't save Social Security.

That becomes the attack ad. We do it to each other. I believe Democrats are much more duplicitous in it. But math is scary, and it doesn't need to be. There is hope.

Mr. Speaker, I just bring this one up because this was in a recent article talking about some of the productivity effects, the GDP growth effects when we got the parts of the Tax Code right. We didn't get everything we should have.

But, Mr. Speaker, I need you, if you want a real living example, to look at the fourth quarter of 2017. Because remember, the fourth quarter of 2017 got the benefit of expensing even though the tax reform didn't finish until the end of 2017. But we did that retrospective.

Then look at 2018. Look at 2019. The shrinkage of income inequality. The poor got much less poor. The working middle class had a couple of their most prosperous years in modern history. African-American females had this amazing growth in wages and job opportunities.

But it is a demonstration. I know it is heresy for the left to compliment tax reform. It wasn't tax cuts, it was tax reform, because the actual receipts, the revenues that came in, the number of times our friends on that side said: You are going to put us into depression.

I am waiting for my apology because we actually took in more money. Corporate receipts went up. Thank God we had actually that robust of an economy and that robust of a tax system when the pandemic hit.

Could you imagine if we didn't, Mr. Speaker, how miserable we would have been?

The last thing, this is not meant to be a non sequitur. It is meant to be a closing on the discussion of the misery.

I am a border State. I know most of the Democrat votes aren't anywhere near the border States, so you don't give a damn about us, but I am dead serious.

I am blessed. I have just an amazingly wonderful congressional district. It is where I grew up. It is my home. It is my obligation to try to defend them.

Even neighborhoods that don't vote for me, come drive with me, and come see the misery that is living in the alleys behind these houses.

Fentanyl has crashed in price in the Phoenix area. I have a Phoenix police sergeant who is my neighbor. He was telling me, a year or 2 ago, $120 to get high for the day. Today, it is like $12. Now, we are finding a new form of synthetic opioid crossing our border. It is 10 times more potent than fentanyl.

Maybe you don't give a damn about people in the Southwest or the misery of the little 14-year-old girl who just died down the way from me, taking one pill. But when this stuff gets left on a countertop somewhere at your favorite wine bar, and everyone in the room is dead, will the left take seriously the misery that their open border policies have brought to us?

Look, my pitch is really simple. The economics are all screwed up. The Democrats set off inflation. That piled on the debt, piled on our demographics, piled on our healthcare. We are in real trouble as a nation.

If we would embrace the disruptions of technology and the incentives for productivity, we can at least bend the curve. We are not going to pay down the debt, but we can bend it so that debt-to-GDP is survivable, but you have to get other policies right.

This place is having no conversations that are actually serious, honest, and important, and I don't know how this became Republican versus Democrat. We are now just talking about the survival of our Republic.

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

Mr. Speaker, forgive my getting organized. The floor has been moving a little faster than we expected.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try a couple of things and try not to bore everyone out of their minds over the next hour. Some of what I am going to touch on is going to be a little technical. Part of it is really cranky.

I have a number of different boards, and they are going to try to hit different points in different orders. I will beg of staff, help me sort of get them all stacked up right here, if we could.

First thing, I want to go to geek town for a moment. Just to put this in perspective, I have come to this floor since January talking about inflation. Now, how many of you remember the discussions we were all having--actually, it would be more had at us--that inflation was transitory. Now, they sort of apologize--the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Secretary Yellen, hopefully the White House, though the White House seems to be disconnected from reality--that it is not transitory.

If you saw the numbers that came out last Thursday, Friday, we have something called structural. What does that mean to anyone? Does this place even care to understand?

First, let's do the first bit of geeky. When you hear a discussion that the yield curve is inverted, how many of you immediately reach over to your television and say, ``Oh, God, I have the wrong channel on,'' and turn it off? It is not that complicated. It is a way of people using big words to try to sound smart.

Inverted yield curve just means, hey, I expect over the next 2 years to have higher inflation so the value of my dollar goes down faster than I do over the 10 years.

That means if I buy a 10-year bond, I might be willing to take an interest rate here, but I expect inflation to be so high in the next 2 years, I want a higher interest rate because, theoretically, it is real simple: When things take longer, you should have more risk and, therefore, want a higher interest rate.

Why is this important to a conversation on the floor of the House? Go look on your favorite financial website right now. The 2 years has a higher interest rate than the 10 year. The 5 years has a higher interest rate than a 10 year. The 7 year has a higher interest rate than the 10 year. That is the markets telling you that they expect inflation to be with us for years.

You also saw in the inflation report we received last week, you saw my brothers and sisters on the left: Hey, energy prices are down--yay. Oh, why is the core inflation so high?

Congratulations, you did it. Functionally, 30 years of substantial stability in inflation, and we got ourselves a wage-price spiral. We dumped, in March 2001, so much money into the economy that it set off what is called a wage-price spiral. Wages go up; you have to raise your prices. Well, if you raise your prices, you have to pay your workers more. If you pay your workers more, you have to raise your prices.

What happens when that becomes embedded into the structure of the economy and energy goes up and down? And how many of our friends on the left keep saying, ``Well, it is Ukraine''? Of course, if you remove energy prices, you still have inflation built into the core.

This is really, really horrible, dangerous, and brutal.

Does anyone here give a damn about poor people?

Does anyone here care about the working middle class?

Does anyone care about people trying to retire?

Mr. Speaker, you have got to understand the brutality.

Because where does that money go?

I am going to show some boards here. I represent the Phoenix- Scottsdale area. I have the highest inflation in the continental United States. I am still trying to figure out why Alaska has an urban zone that is higher than mine. But functionally I have the highest inflation in the country.

If you live and work in my community and did not have a pay hike--I am going to show it, and you are going to hear this multiple times--you now work for a month and a half for free, Mr. Speaker.

This place functionally taxed you. One month and a half of your labor has been stripped from you. And the money doesn't disappear. What happens is your wages become worth less purchasing, but that wealth transfer from you, Mr. Speaker, is actually a form of tax because the $30 trillion over here of borrowed money your government has, actually now it gets to be paid back with dollars of less value.

Whether you know it or not, Mr. Speaker, if you are my neighbor in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, you have been taxed out of a month and a half of your wages. And thank you. You helped to actually buy down the U.S. debt because borrowers benefit from inflation, but people trying to save, people getting ready to buy a home, getting ready for retirement, and people just trying to survive get crushed.

So if you had listened to the floor the last couple of days, Mr. Speaker, how many times have you had someone come to this floor and actually show they even care?

No. We will give some great speeches about: Hey, 50 illegal crossers of our border got shipped to Martha's Vineyard. Ooh.

Come to my State. That is like every few minutes. I am a border State. Come down to Yuma with me, Mr. Speaker, and let me show you what the hell is actually going on.

But in Washington, D.C., I am still waiting for my brothers and sisters on the left to come behind these microphones and apologize for, functionally, what is the biggest tax in U.S. history. We are now rivaling what happened to this country in the late seventies and very early eighties, except the crisis is much more complex now.

Here is why: Yes, you had the wage spirals, the price spirals, and the fuel spirals of the late seventies, but we had a beneficial demographic. We had lots of available workers.

Today, we have this crazy thing going on where our available work population because of our demographics--my fear is the Federal Reserve is going to have to break the back of employment in this country to squeeze out inflation.

Are we all ready for that?

Because we Republicans in this legislature and in this Congress have come behind these mikes multiple times--I have introduced legislation and said, Look, what is inflation?

Inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods.

You can do one of two things. You can squeeze the dollars out of society so all that free money the Democrats gave away over the last couple years will raise interest rates, pull liquidity out, and take it away; or we could make more stuff.

I am going to show a couple of boards here of what has happened to productivity in the last couple of quarters. We are crashing. Our productivity is crashing. So when you do the fancy math, Mr. Speaker, and you are not making more stuff, it means what the Federal Reserve is going to have to do to us is more and more brutal. And I think actually some of the markets are actually starting to wake up the last couple of days and are starting to understand the malfeasance, the economic malfeasance, of this place.

But then again, I sometimes wonder: Do I work with a bunch of people who don't own a calculator or didn't show up to their high school economics class?

Because this isn't that complicated.

We use big, fancy words. We do brilliant virtue signaling. But the math is brutal, and I think we need to wake up when we saw what the President did, what was it, on ``60 Minutes'' a couple of days ago. It was a complete disconnect from what is happening to the middle class and the poor going on in this country.

So let's actually use a few boards here just to try to provide some textual facts to how this all works.

Now, I am just trying to make a point, and this is for myself. I represent the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. Now we have the highest inflation in the Nation. So maybe if you are in a community that, hey, you only had 7 percent, my folks are breaking 13.

Try being a working family that is trying to survive in a world where your purchasing power lost 13 percent and your rents are still going up. Rents are eventually going to come down when the Federal Reserve has started to break the back of employment. That may be as much as 18 months away. We are finally starting to see our home prices start to tip a bit because a Firstrust first mortgage these days is now well over 6 percent if it is a conforming loan.

But it is fascinating. It is also the communities that have had some of the greatest economic prosperity because there are people moving there who also seem to be suffering the highest inflation.

Mr. Speaker, let us start to actually look at some of the drivers. This is July 21 to July 22.

Okay, energy, hey, it is 2.7 percent of that inflation. But start to add in shelter, start to add in energy, and start to add in--and come back up here and all the other things, and this is the stuff right here, this, this, and food, just skip the energy portion, and that is how we are making the argument. You saw it in the CPI data this last week. It is now structural. It is now structural.

At some point, if I lose my mind, I am going to talk about what happens now that the U.S. dollar is going up.

Remember, why is the U.S. dollar now starting to go up?

I know we are geeking out.

Our interest rates are going up. If you are in a country over here, you can say, Hey, I can put money into a U.S. dollar-denominated bond and get this high interest rate. I am going to pull my money out of this country and put it over here.

Okay. So now there is a hunger to convert to dollars raising the value of the dollar.

Okay. Do you understand we are now exporting our inflation around the world? So the crappy economics this place did, now you are kicking the rest of the world's head in.

So we also talk about how much we care about the poor and how much we care about the poor around the world.

Does anyone understand here when we blow up our own economics, we export our bad policy?

It is very much like when we did the tax reform at the very end of 2017, because we did so many things right and boosted economic growth so substantially and GDP growth, and we lowered income inequality and all these good things were happening here in the United States, the World Bank actually raised worldwide GDP projections because when we got our economics right, the rest of the world actually got less poor.

Well, now you are seeing the other side of the coin, Mr. Speaker. When we get our economics wrong, we also export misery.

Mr. Speaker, some of these charts you have all seen before. I have had them here on the floor, and it is just basically trying to show what has happened. Just look at this line here. This is functionally what is happening to your ability to afford things. And you will notice it happened, functionally, almost the day this place had unified leftist control, when the Democrats took control of the White House, already had control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and they pushed through their policies. You can almost see, hey, policies change, and, yes, look at the time of the pandemic, but at least when it came to your purchasing power and your ability to survive, it was fairly stable.

This line coming down here, do you see that collapse?

That is thanks to you for Democrat policies.

We have been trying it. If anyone has a suggestion on a better way we could do this, I am trying to visually come up with some way because we are often engaged in sort of a malpractice here. We use big, fancy words. We talk about, well, I have 13 percent inflation in my Phoenix market.

I have been trying to find a way to describe what that actually means to a working family. So that is where we came up with this concept of saying: Do you realize how many days of your labor you have lost?

And then we have tried doing it where you also adjust it for what the gasoline prices are.

How many days of labor do you lose for higher gasoline prices?

If anyone has a suggestion how graphically we can sort of show, here is the labor you lost just because of higher fuel prices. But here is the labor you lost just because of what has happened.

In my area it is air-conditioning prices. In your area, Mr. Speaker, it might be heating. We are going to have a fun winter for those of you who don't live in the desert.

But also our core inflation, we have been trying to do things like show a calendar.

Is there another way you can help the American people understand the stress they are feeling?

What is the old saying?

There is a lot more month left instead of cash at the end of the month?

It is real, and it is pervasive.

There also needs to be an understanding. The inflation that this place set off this last year will be part of our economics for a decade or two.

So, Mr. Speaker, if you are the person thinking about retiring a decade from now, I sure hope you are re-looking at everything you need and how many dollars you have to set aside.

What is your housing? What is your healthcare?

Because you have got to also understand there are some inputs here. So let's say the mean inflation in the country is 8, 9 percent. Healthcare in the country is functionally running double that.

Mr. Speaker, are you ready to have your copay on your future healthcare be doubled what it is today?

Because that is what is coming at you. So, yes, the Democrats have pushed a subsidy bill on drug prices, but that doesn't cover the fact that inflation is about to come and kick your head in. And, once again, it is also reaching into the general fund, putting it over here. We are going to borrow the money; we are going to try to find some way to tax it from you or tax it from my kids.

You know the world has changed, Mr. Speaker. Let's see if I can actually find some of these to make it a little easier.

But you start to realize when even the left-wing talking head Democrat apologists who hold economics degrees are basically standing up and talking about the misery the Democrat policies have brought to this country.

So let's see. We have Jason Furman.

How many of us have ever seen Jason Furman say a single nice thing about a Republican?

Of course not. He basically makes his living berating those of us on the right and basically defending Democrat policies.

The math has gotten so ugly he can no longer defend what Democrats have done to people in this country. The medium CPI excludes all of the large changes in either direction and is a better predictor of labor market slack.

Now, this is important, where I'm trying to get here. Jason Furman is basically trying to help us understand that we are busting through a 9.5 percent annual rate in August, which is the single highest monthly print in the datasets which started in 1983. I don't mean this to be disjointed. I want it to sort of become crisp. The core of inflation is functionally higher than any time it has been published since 1983.

Mr. Speaker, how old were you in 1983?

Do you remember the level of misery?

Congratulations. This is what the policies around this place did.

And then you get a clown who says, Oh, it is Ukraine. It is this and that.

No, it is not. This stuff was in the futures market long before.

Mr. Speaker, do you remember a year ago September when the futures markets in energies and those things were blowing off the charts?

That was telling you this was coming.

But that would require some economic literacy.

Look, I accept some of this is geeking out when you start to try to do CPI and core CPI.

The simple point of a chart like this is it is not like, hey, we had this huge fluctuation of fuel prices, but everything else was fairly normal.

Sorry. It is not.

This is my Phoenix area.

When you start to realize that my folks are living with over 13 percent, it might be a reason why a lot of us from the West are incredibly cranky because we are just now getting the announcements of how much our electricity is going to be going up.

For the rest of you in the country--you know, we are about to hit our lovely time of the year when the temperature comes down, and we are not running our air conditioners. You are all getting ready to turn on your heat.

Have all of you in the colder States, have you started to budget your money for what is about to hit you in your heating bills? For my brothers and sisters on the left, you better hope that it doesn't get cold before the election day before your folks start to see their power bills.

Just sort of making the point--food prices continue to increase with food at home having the largest annual increase since the end of the 1970s. I was in high school in the late 1970s--I am willing to admit it--and fashion was pretty horrible and inflation was worse.

I remember watching my President get up on television, wearing a sweater, explaining that we were going to have to live poorer. I remember this old guy running for President, who was actually optimistic, saying, hey, if we open up our reserves and natural gas and those things, we will live better.

That was also one of the great ironies that I think the oldest candidate running for President, Ronald Reagan, had the biggest portion of young people voting for him. It was because of optimism.

I desperately want to get behind this microphone and demonstrate optimism. I have a 7-year-old and an 11-week-old--at my age--that is being pathologically optimistic. I want my little boy and my little girl to have an amazing American life. The American dream is not some sort of piece of rhetoric to me, it is what we are structurally; it is a gift we are given. The math is horrendous.

My 11-week-old son--that just came to us as a surprise--in 30 years, he is entering sort of the beginning of his peak earning years, and the United States will have--on today's dollars and today's math, without inflation calculated in it--this is from CBO a couple weeks ago, and they had not put long-term inflation into the math--$128 trillion of borrowed money in today's dollars. That is $128 trillion borrowed money in today's dollars.

So, of course, this place is fixated on how we are going to save that next generation and how we are going to create economic prosperity and economic growth because growth is moral.

Oh, sorry, I take that back. It is moral to some of us. Control, power, voting out $4 trillion of borrowing since this White House and since this unified Democrat government--with a stunning amount of that money being transferred in subsidies to people that vote for them--and they don't demonstrate even a hoot of caring for survival of people who are going to be in retirement. And for these young people, that is another Congress' problem.

If this place had a soul, we would be fixated day after day on what we are going to do to make more stuff to bend inflation so the Federal Reserve doesn't have to break the back of people's lives. Of a future where instead of having the debate of--hey, ObamaCare, let's subsidize things more, the Republican alternative, which was also a subsidy bill. Screw that.

Why don't we do something that is rational? Maybe we should change the price of healthcare, adopt technology, cure things. Look, I have done dozens of presentations here on the economics of cures, the economics of technology disruptions in healthcare. Yes, it means you have to say ``no'' to armies of lobbyists.

It is also the only mathematical way I can find you save this place, save this country, save this experiment, save little boy's economic future, my little girl's future. We are not going to do it, because it doesn't hand huge amounts of power and control to the left.

It is not a check from government to someone that is going to turn around and write one political party a check. It is that cynical. What do we do? We are going to watch cable television for a couple days, complain about 50 migrants who illegally crossed into the country showing up in Martha's Vineyard because that is easy to understand and it is good television.

The same day--you got how much poorer that day because of inflation. You got that much closer to Social Security having no money left in the trust fund. That $128 trillion I just mentioned to you, every dime from the $30 trillion borrowing we are at today to the $128 trillion--the model says every dime of that increased borrowing--75 percent is Medicare, 25 percent is Social Security, and the rest of the budget is in balance.

Okay. The problem is right in front of us. Let's do something bold and fix Social Security. Except the Social Security proposals around her are absurd. There are some things we can do where you don't do taxes in a mechanism where you actually slow the economy down, and therefore, lose much of the economic growth you were trying to fix to be able to have revenues in FICA.

Then the revolution I have talked about so many times here on the floor of disruption of cure diseases. I don't mean this to sound like a non sequitur, but it ties in. Diabetes is basically a third of all healthcare spending. Type 2 is really complex, some genetic, a lot of it lifestyle, but we help fund it through how we do the farm bill and other things.

We know there has been a breakthrough, it is only like a half a dozen people, and it is very short-term, so we don't have the longer latitudinal data, who have been cured of type 1.

Think about the hundreds of billions of dollars this place basically was handing out--that we all know we are going to be here a year or two from now holding hearings on how much was stolen, wasted, handed out to political cronies, and favoritism. Could you imagine if we took a fraction of those dollars, and said: Well, diabetes is 31 percent of all Medicare spending, it is 33 percent of all healthcare spending, maybe having the revolution of a cure there--really hard.

Oh, by the way, it is also the single biggest thing you can do for U.S. sovereign debt and the future economic growth of the country. It turns out when we look at poverty--the number of our brothers and sisters who are really below the poverty line--I have some Members hear that say, oh, it is racism. Oh, it is education.

It turns out health may be the number one component. Grandma just had her foot cut off because of diabetes. What does that do to the entire family structure's ability to participate in the economy? Maybe the moral discussion--I represent a Tribal community that has the second highest per capita diabetes in the world. Number one is right down the street; it is the sister Tribe.

If you actually cared--having the disruptive conversation of, screw it, we are going to find a way to have this health revolution because it is great economics. It is also moral. It is compassionate. It is loving. And saying that we are going to build one more clinic--we are going to build more clinics. That is compassion? We are going to help teach you how to live with your misery when there is a path for a cure?

It is just that optimism that should be part of the ethos of what we are. Maybe it doesn't raise us political money. Maybe it is not good campaigns. Maybe it is beyond our intellectual comprehension around here. God knows, the intellectual gravitas of this place has just almost become trite when you hear the debates and discussions we have on the floor.

The economics are sound. The compassion is noble. And it is actually the right thing to do. Yet, I can't tell you--I have been doing this for a few years now--the poor staff here who has had to listen to these speeches and watch me hold up these boards and then try to scribe it down--which I apologize when I do the machine gun talking.

There is a path here. I am trying to find a couple of the slides that are just terrifying me right now. I accept the media--excuse me, the Democrat propagandas--media, same thing--don't want to talk about inflation and what it does to people. Don't want to talk to what it does to retirees and young couples and those things because it is not going to help their friends win.

But maybe understanding it--maybe actually having it be written about in

a moral aspect, a moral discussion of what we are doing to working families in this country might actually get some of us off our heinies to come here and do things, saying, hey, you do realize there is policy we can engage in.

Naming a piece of legislation the Inflation Reduction Act, when it does no such thing. When it comes back being scored as, hey, you know, several years from now it is still borrowing money. The way the Democrats were scoring, saying, well, we get inflation reduction by taxing people and yanking money out of the economy by lowering productivity and taking their money away. Oh, by the way, all the savings ended in the future years, and it is all gimmicks.

That is not me talking. That is actually liberal groups that were scoring the bill that were outraged on the fake economics. You start looking at this growing divergence, the split of inflation in metro areas and other parts of the country.

San Francisco where you now have people abandoning it has only about 5.7 percent inflation. Where they are coming to, places like my community, I am busting through 13. Can you see why I'm concerned?

I am looking for a chart. My fear is I don't have it here, it may be in the piles over there.

There was data out about 10 days ago talking about productivity. Now who knows what productivity is?

Okay. The way they do the model, you know, the people that score this, they basically say, hey, we have this many workers and those workers produce this many units of production. Okay. And we have been doing this modeling for a very long time. It is really good for the economy when a worker actually produces more every day than they did the day before. That is not just because, hey, they made the production line go faster, it is because we got the tax code, right, so they did investments.

One of the amazing things that happened after the 2017 tax reform is we did something called expensing it. Now, part of that expensing you actually got to take--I am going to geek out--the last quarter of 2017. So that is why there is this sudden lift in the end of 2017, even before the tax reform was done because we did something retrospectively.

Then the next couple years, boom, you saw all this capital coming back in from the rest of the world because we fixed the international repatriation incentives to bring money back to the country. Then we said, if you go buy a piece of equipment that will make you faster, better, cleaner, more productive, we are going to let you--instead of depreciating it over the next decade, we are going to let you take it on day one.

Yes, we take a big hit today on tax receipts, but--eventually that was going to happen on the tax receipts, it just happens over a longer time, but we take it today--here is the catch, we get a sudden pop of productivity. So there is more economic activity and that new step up in activity means we get more tax revenues in the next couple years.

Guess what happened in speech after speech of our brothers and sisters on the left? This is a giveaway to the rich. It is a giveaway to the big corporations. I have quotes from a half dozen Members, senior Democrat Members here, who told us we were going to go into depression because of what the Republicans did in tax reform.

Guess what happened? Within a year, the poor started getting less poor. The middle class got much more prosperous. Income inequality started to shrink. Food insecurity shrank. Corporate tax receipts grew.

How is that possible? Because it turns out that getting the tax and regulatory code meant investment in things that made us more productive.

When you make society more productive, what are the two ways you get paid more? Inflation, which just means you are getting compensated for really bad public policy. The dollar is worth less, so we are going to pay you more so you just hold even. When your paycheck goes up for inflation, you didn't gain anything.

The other thing economics tells you is you pay people more because they are being more productive, and that productivity is absolutely necessary if we are going to survive our demographic curve, if we are going to make our promises on Social Security and Medicare.

You have to understand that all this has to work together. You have to do everything from immigration policy to environmental policy to tax policy to regulatory policy. You have to get all these things right. Instead, we are going just to do the try it around here, and we are going to do great virtue signaling.

Why this board is important is the quarters now where we are starting to see Democrat policy kick in, we are having an absolute crash of productivity. So, you are saying, but we have all these people working. Okay, but the math is the math.

They may be working, but something is going on out there. Maybe this is the phasing out of the expensing, which was part of tax reform. Some on our side are trying to make it permanent; Democrats oppose it. But this is really bad. You need this to look very different.

Even if you just cared about inflation, productivity is one of your cures. If you get someone here who says Congress doesn't have influence, this is about monetary supply, and it is the Federal Reserve, yes, it is.

My argument is when we pump out spending that is going to require borrowing, and the Federal Reserve basically acts like our daddy who indemnifies us from really stupid policy and buys up our debt, we are functionally creating monetary policy by our profligate spending.

Instead of putting those dollars into things that change productivity, change people's ability to survive and have wealth and economically grow and, therefore, bend the inflation curve, we did just the opposite. We handed out money at one point to encourage people to stay home.

Somewhere here I think I have the Larry Summers chart. Remember a couple of years ago, Larry Summers was, like, an absolute hero of the left, great academics, well spoken, well respected, and then he made the sin of saying: Please don't do this. Dumping another $1.9 trillion on the economy when you are not asking people to either step up their skills or actually participate in the economy, please don't do this.

All of a sudden, the left, as they do because he didn't engage in sort of the theater of virtue signaling, turned on him. Oh, he is evil. He is bad. Well, it turns out, he was right.

The amount of misery these crappy economics have created to people in this country, the number of people who are poorer--one of the projects we are working on in our office is, in a decade, the Social Security trust fund runs out of money, 12\1/2\ years. We haven't calculated in the inflationary cycle yet. That wasn't part of the trustees' report.

Let's say this place continues to do what it does, which is nothing, and we don't fix it. With the cost of everything being higher, even though you have the Social Security COLAs, you have to still pay your healthcare copays, which are inflation doubled, at double the rate. You may be heading toward doubling the number of senior Americans who are in poverty.

The number of Members here who are getting behind the microphone and saying, ``Oh, this is just transitory. It is Putin's tax hike. It is the evil oil companies.'' No. It is crappy policy. Larry Summers and others told you it was. They told you this was coming. You are trying to continue to virtue signal or blame other people.

Madam Speaker, may I ask how much time remains.

I will do my very best not to use up that time.

I am not even sure I should do this one to all of you. We will come back to that previous one and see if we can make it make more sense.

Let's see. The left has been in control here for, what are we, about 18 months? Since President Biden was sworn in, off the top of your head, before looking at the slide, how much has been added to the deficit? Under unified Democrat control, how much have we borrowed?

Remember, you have a President who almost gleefully gets behind a microphone and says, I have lowered. Well,

that is because some of the borrowing during the pandemic was insane. We borrowed $4.8 trillion, and here are some of the things: the rescue plan, the omnibus, you know.

You start to add in just the growth of spending, and then what is fascinating is we are now finally starting to see some of these charts that have interest. It is one of the reasons I wanted to touch on that.

You do realize our borrowing costs today have almost doubled. Actually, I think they have more than doubled since the day President Biden was sworn in.

There is a model out there that says if you had a 2-point higher interest rate on U.S. sovereign debt over--functionally, I think the model was 25 years, 2 points higher. We are 2-plus points higher right now. But if that were to be sustained for about 25 years, at the end of that 25 years, every dime of tax receipts from this government pays nothing but interest.

Now, back to the slide where I was fixated on productivity and economic growth. Are you getting the pitch? If we would stop the clown show and start to fixate on things that help people--and is helping people really Republican or Democrat, because this place isn't doing it. We subsidize people. We sure hand out a hell of a lot of checks, but almost none of that makes society healthier and more productive.

There is a path. When you start to see things like this and realize when we factor in the new interest rates, the amount of just the financing, just the financing on $4.8 trillion of additional borrowing we have done in--what?--the last 18 months, when the 2 year today was in--what?--3 and a half, still going up.

Why isn't there a sense of worry around here? I mean, you all walk around with these cell phones. You know, there are calculators on them.

This was just an attempt--and I know the slide is noisy. We were just trying to work in the components of GDPNow. Let's see if I can make this make sense.

If you are crazy enough to have been watching this, there is an app you can go to right now and download it from the Atlanta Federal Reserve. It is called GDPNow.

What they try to do is take datasets as they come out, and it is a formula. It is pure math. This isn't like the New York Fed, which actually does attitudinal things and sort of purchasing attitudes and savings attitudes. GDPNow is just cold, hard math.

This was an attempt to try to show, hey, here are some of the components. GDPNow is a real GDP calculator. What is going on, because as you know, GDP in the first quarter came in negative, but there were genuinely some timing and some energy effects on that one.

But GDPNow in the second quarter came in negative, and that one was-- well, it looks like it is structural. As of about 2 hours ago, the GDPNow web app you can put on your phone--a couple of weeks ago, they thought this quarter was going to be about a 2\1/2\ percent growth rate, which would have been nice. It sort of meant, hey, the fall of economic expansion looks like it had bent and was coming back up.

As of a couple of hours ago, now it has fallen all the way down to 0.3 with negative bias, meaning these inputs that the Atlanta Fed is using continue to fall.

I am going to predict we are heading into a third negative GDP quarter.

Now, are we going to have the same argument that we had last quarter? Well, technically, two negative quarters is not a recession. Technically, we have this little committee over here, and they decide if it is a recession. So, we spent a week trying to decide: Should we call it a recession? Should we say we are not in a recession?

My attitude was: Who cares? How about we do something that would be much more compassionate? Let's go talk to the family down the street that is just trying to survive and ask them how they are doing.

I am going to get up here and geek out on the components that actually go into a GDP calculator. My real request is this place functionally start to understand the crappy policies we have made the last 18 months.

We can reverse course. We can do things policy-wise that get economic growth, get productivity, produce hydrocarbons, produce the things that are components for prosperity, or we can continue to functionally export misery, not only throughout our country but throughout the world, because that is what we have done.

Be prepared. In a couple of weeks, you are going to find out we have had another quarter of negative growth. We are going to have the press and the Democrats say: Oh, but that is not a real definition of recession. That is a committee over here. Let's talk about migrants being shipped to, you know.

Instead, we will do everything we can to understand the scale of the economic dislocations that policy around here has done in the last year and a half.

Understand, Republicans: We are going to take the majority of this House this November. My math, from what I can see policy-wise, even if we controlled everything, it is going to take years to fix.

Remember the opening here? I tried to explain something, and that was called the yield curve. When you have an inverted yield curve, what does it mean? It is not that complicated.

My 2-year T bill, I give you money to hold a 2-year Treasury bond, full faith and credit of you, the taxpayers, or a 5 year, a 7 year. All those are paying higher interest rates than if you bought a 10 year.

That lets you know the markets now believe inflation is here for years and years. The data on these boards now says inflation is here for years and years.

How much policy do you see coming from our brothers and sisters in the majority demonstrating they care enough to actually take on the misery, or are we just going to engage in the political theater, the virtue signaling, to survive the next election cycle?

Madam Speaker pro tempore, I apologize for the discombobulation of not having the boards set up.

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

Mr. Speaker, this is one of those--you have already touched on C.T.'s resume. But I get to do something that is a little unique right now. I am not going to give his resume again.

He was my neighbor. He and Mary were my friends.

Have you ever had someone in your life, and they are just sort of an acquaintance, and they just ooze something really unique called love.

C.T. was a big guy, powerful voice. He could sing and the rafters shook. Every time he gave the prayer at a Kiwanis meeting, or a Republican meeting, or something else, I almost felt like I was going to do an altar call. And being Catholic, that is actually a little odd. I thought that would be funnier.

He and his wife did something amazing. They were involved in everything from my school board to the Arizona clemency board.

The fact of the matter is he had a powerful impact on a lot of us who live in an upper income suburb on the side of Scottsdale, Arizona. It is a beautiful place.

I remember sitting down with him and saying, ``Okay, C.T., you are my neighbor. You are my friend. Why are you a Republican?'' In this powerful voice, ``David, son, I am going to be part of that abolitionist party,'' and then he went on to explain his history, his life.

I know often we break down into partisan this, partisan that, but to have someone who didn't look like every other suburban person in this neighborhood, and yet, his intellect, his love, his wife Mary's love-- they became icons in the community because of their intellect, because of their love, and because of their leadership.

It proved so powerful for the community because so often when there was something happening, one of the first things we all did was say: Well, we have to ask Dr. Wright. What does he think? What does he feel? What is his understanding of what is going on?

We lost him a couple of years ago, and the community has mourned and felt a little bit more hollow since. By naming our post office, I am hoping my 7-year-old daughter and my now-10-week-old son will see the plaque and will tell the story, and it will become part of the heritage of my little town, Fountain Hills, Arizona.

Madam Speaker, for everyone here, this is a subsidy bill. And this is the classic difference between the left and the right. They are functionally subsidizing. We on the right actually want to change the market. We want competition.

So I am going to pull out one very simple example. In here, we have $2.5 billion of subsidies for our ports to get greener and more efficient. But then the Democrats slip in language that says human- operated, meaning you are not going to take on the unions, you are not actually going to make it more efficient, you are not going to actually embrace disruption and technology.

We keep coming to the floor and talking about things that would make our ports greener, faster, more efficient, feed the supply chain--these electric rail cars, except you functionally just made them not happen.

This is a subsidy for those unions, those folks who right checks to the left. You claim you are making the environment better and cleaner, but then you build the very barriers in the language that stop those good things from happening.

Madam Speaker, I have got to tell you, being on the Ways and Means Committee and never actually engaging in some of your Rules debate, you guys are really polite with each other.

But here's a simple question: What are the two times in life you think you know everything?

When you turn 13 years old and the day after you get elected to Congress.

I am going to argue the arrogance of this place right now doing a piece of legislation like this. Why is this bill, the underlying bill, the underlying rule here so dangerous? And why this resolution actually fits this.

Basically, the underlying bill is industrial policy. Let's face it, some of the scoring is saying this is $400 billion, and it is the politicization functionally of a category of incredibly important industry, grants that you saw the President a couple days ago talk about--now you are going to have to come in front of me.

Do you understand how dangerous that is for an economy? That arrogance of the political class thinking you understand what the next disruption is. The controlling of intellect, the controlling of taking risk.

If you actually gave a darn about American competitiveness, of where chips--and who knows, quantum, and all the other possibilities of data management, data movement, of processing--are going, you would fix the Tax Code, you would fix the regulatory code.

If you care about China, deal with the made-in-America tax, the fact that they refund the VAT; and when we export, they put the VAT back on, and it makes us not competitive.

You also now have to deal with the reality, when The Economist is writing articles that we are heading toward a glut of chips. Look, I am from Arizona. On the side of my district, I have a $16 billion investment from Taiwan Semiconductor. Down the street I have Intel, I think they are spending $18 billion. It is coming.

But the brain trust around here is we are going to do industrial policy. We are going to control the money. It will be great for fund- raising. And the concept, once again, is we have politicized everything. Think of now the debate we have had the last couple days, is two quarters of negative GDP, well, that is not a recession. Okay, technically it might not be because the definition of recession now is a committee that is politicized.

Could we at least have some benchmarks here in Congress, here in Washington that we know what the rules are? I don't mean your type of rules. I mean the rules for society, the rules for tax policy, the rules for how we allocate capital, because you are offering right now functionally $400 billion of subsidies, controls, management, and industrial policy, government.

Why don't you just nationalize the chip industry because you are pretty much heading that direction.

This is a simple amendment. In some ways, it is actually very symbolic of we can't even agree anymore on what a recession is.

Okay, fine. Let's just make it a rule instead of making it a committee of individuals that get to express their opinion and their feelings.

I would love to actually offer something more complex. Maybe we should go back to the old misery index debates of how many people can't afford living anymore. You do realize the inflation from just the last 12 months, my constituents--I represent the highest inflation in the Nation--get to work about 6 weeks without compensation. The purchasing power of their lives has crashed so much, they now work a month-and-a- half for free.

These are the brilliant policies this place has brought. It is time we actually start to set some benchmarks on what the rules are.

Simple amendment. Just saying, hey, we will call it a recession when we have two consecutive quarters, and we can stop the politicization of everything here in Washington.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that I may hereafter be considered to be the first sponsor of H.R. 4270, a bill originally introduced by Representative Reed of New York, for the purpose of adding cosponsors and requesting reprintings pursuant to clause 7 of rule XII.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that I may hereafter be considered to be the first sponsor of H.R. 4720, a bill originally introduced by Representative Reed of New York, for the purpose of adding cosponsors and requesting reprintings pursuant to clause 7 of rule XII.

Madam Speaker, you hear everyone here all say something nice. We all like telehealth. I am frustrated because I can't get my head around why we are not going further.

Outside the internal political theater, those of us who have worked on this legislation since the day we got here and then all of a sudden wake up one day and it is a different bill with someone who I have never even heard of working on it, God bless. The majority gets to do things like that.

We want a change in the price of healthcare. Can we come together and unleash technology? Telehealth is more than just looking at the phone and doing FaceTime or now talking. It is the wearable. It is the thing. It is the thing you lick.

There is technology with which we could be crushing the price of healthcare, and instead, we are doing little incremental steps here.

There are a couple of problems with the bill the Democrats decided to bring to the floor. It is for 2 years. We compromised to 4. If you want capital investments in the technology, you have to give us at least 4. It should be permanent.

There is also something in here that is just frustrating. You missed the language on health savings accounts. You have 32 million people now who functionally are not going to have access to be able to use those accounts for their telehealth.

Madam Speaker, there is just a frustration here because we all talk pretty about this, and then we are unwilling to do the things that could potentially help us all by disrupting the price of healthcare and increasing access, maybe making people's lives better. Instead, it just became more political theater. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment in the Record immediately prior to the vote on the motion to recommit.

Madam Speaker, if I came to the body and said the bill we had all been working on, H.R. 8489--when you have someone like Lloyd Doggett and someone like me, and we are actually working together, we are working on some of the antifraud provisions, program integrity provisions, you actually had something this body was doing where we weren't beating the crap out of each other. It was something that actually might be good for people in the country. Instead, we turned it back into another opportunity for political gamesmanship.

It is my intense disappointment because it is our language, substantially something I have worked on for years, that was grabbed for the pandemic. We all know it expires the day the pandemic is declared over. It is time to take this opportunity--I know there is an army of lobbyists out there that despise telehealth because it changes the populations that walk in the threshold. To hell with them. Let's finally do what is right.

Madam Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Madam Speaker, one of the reasons and one of the focuses for tonight's presentation is I am just frustrated because of the silliness that not only has become this body but even when you listen to the White House, Madam Speaker.

So the White House is terribly concerned that on Thursday we will get the latest statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I believe it is on second quarter GDP. GDP now is the Atlanta Fed calculator. It is a wonderful app if you want to look at it.

It is basically saying: Hey, we may be negative, and when we were all in high school they said that two consecutive quarters of negative GDP, well, that is a recession. Technically it is not. Yes, there is a committee that decides it. That is what we argue about.

Has this place lost its mind?

So the press cycle becomes: Oh, are we in recession or not?

It is not, technically. If it goes negative it will be a recession. But isn't this horrible that we are talking about this?

Let's just pretend and stop worrying about it and actually let's try something unique.

Could we actually talk about what is happening to people, what is happening to the country, what is happening to the budgets, the debt and the deficits, the actual thing that will either make or break society, which will make people's lives more miserable or more prosperous?

Because right now we are in avoidance of all the big things.

But we do have some great virtue signaling bills. I mean, I had the blessing earlier today of my telehealth bill being stolen from me and handed to another Member because, well, we needed the politics.

Hey, good job, majority.

But I have to give Democrats credit. They have done some amazing things in, what, their 16, 17 months of absolute control, when they won the House back in the 2018 election.

So this is a chart I have had here multiple times. Yes, it is all beaten up. The number is from, functionally, the 2021 CBO numbers. A couple of hours ago we got the updated numbers.

For anyone wanting to know why I am using tape, apparently it is against House rules for me to reach over and use a big marker and write on the boards.

But the number we had been operating with is in, functionally, 29 years we are going to have $112 trillion of debt in today's dollars-- not inflation-adjusted dollars, but in today's dollars--and it is almost all Medicare and Social Security. The rest of the budget is in balance.

A couple hours ago--and I have only made it through the first dozen pages of the new CBO report, and you can get it online, Madam Speaker, it is only 90 pages--we moved from $112 trillion last year to-- congratulations to the Democrats, they got us to $138 trillion--$138 trillion of borrowing in the next 30 years in today's dollars.

Now, the reality, we are never going to get there. We will blow up before that. But this talk, the virtue signaling, the insanity of this place, well the Democrats are getting in; we are going to pay for everything. We are going to do policies that are fiscally sensible.

Well, okay. Congratulations. CBO just actually took us from $112 trillion to $138 trillion on the math. It is just stunning. Does anyone around this place give a damn?

And maybe I am a little on the cranky side. You know, I had a miracle happen about 3 weeks ago. I was at home, and the phone rings, and my little girl's birth mom had a little boy; so now I have a little boy. So my wife and I, we have a 30-day-old baby at home, so there hasn't been a lot of sleep.

And I am holding this little guy, and I am going, he is only 30 years old when this happens. And the economy most likely blows up long before then.

Does anyone here care about the next generation? Does anyone here care about your own retirement?

You have got to understand how fast the numbers are rotting away from us. But at least we are going to have a debate for the next couple of days of are we in recession or not recession.

Well, technically two consecutive quarters are not technically a recession; and the White House cares a lot about that because we know that it is about the message and virtue signaling as the economy around us is burning down.

And I am going to show you some numbers here. Could we try something new? How about let's go back to a type of misery index? How miserable are our constituents? How miserable is America and the public?

And we are going to look at some slides here that show you just how much of people's wages have been stripped from them.

So a simple slide, and this is from the new CBO, from a couple of hours ago. We did our best to put it together, and it is not going to make a lot of sense. But basically, what I am trying to show is, $138 trillion of borrowing in today's dollars. That is a pretty steep curve. Every bit of this steepness here that you see here is Social Security and Medicare.

How many of us here are willing--I am the senior Republican, I am the ranking Republican over Social Security. We are busting our humps to try to come up with a bipartisan way to save the program, in a functionally--in a decade.

If you are on Social Security, you are going to have a quarter of your Social Security check disappear. Let alone, we expect, just because of inflation, your copay on your Medicare is probably going to more than double.

The number of our brothers and sisters who will be seniors at the end of the decade, who will be moved into poverty because of what the Democrats have done this last year and a half; does anyone care about them?

And then, this is the stuff we have been able to start to pull out from the CBO numbers that should start to scare this place half to death. If you start looking at what they call the alternative scenarios, and that is actually when inflation or interest rates have small variances, and the speed that, if you actually go to the baseline scenario, but if you actually start to go to a scenario over there where interest rates are just 2 percent, 3 percent higher than the predicted average, you actually get in a line here in about 20, 25 years, every dime of tax receipts, every dime of tax receipts just pays interest.

There is no more government. There is no more military. There is no more medical research. There is no more education. There is no more Social Security and Medicare.

How many of you are going to spend your August going home and telling townhalls how you are going to protect Social Security and Medicare, but you are not willing to actually talk about the real math?

It is real. This isn't Republican or Democrat; it is math. And this place has basically become a math-free zone.

And look, this is a chart I bring up here all the time because it is nice and simple and graphic. 77 percent in 2001, was mandatory. Okay. This is Social Security and Medicare. These are things we put on formula. We don't vote on any of this.

Well, about 10 percent of our budget is defense; unlike, I had a Democrat just last week saying oh--no, defense is 10 percent of our spending. The entire budget that we, functionally, truly vote on, discretionary is now to 13. And guess what? This is the `21. The new numbers, the mandatory now is about 80 percent of all of our spending.

Discretionary, if you adjust for inflation, has basically been flat for a decade. There is some stuff we vote on substantially because of what Republicans did when we still had control here. We flattened out discretionary spending.

But unless we are going to tell the truth of what is going on here-- we are getting old as a society. Last year was our lowest fertility rate in U.S. history.

And once again, in 10 years, people on Social Security are going to be taking one hell of a cut. How many people here, when the political class is back in the home district this August, will stand up and talk about what they intend to do to save the program?

So now, let's talk about the current misery. This is what the left's policies have brought to people. Earnings lost due to inflation--and let's use the Phoenix/Scottsdale area because that is where I live. That is my home. That is who I am here to protect.

And let's just use the since August 2020 date so it is nice and simple. You, functionally, have just lost 1.9, almost 2 months of your labor. So you are, functionally, almost--in the Phoenix area, inflation has been so high, you are almost working for 2 months, and you are getting no compensation. You, functionally, have had the value of your labor stripped. You have lost a couple of months.

If I make some of the adjustments, you start to realize you will get to work for about 57 days. You get to go 57 days for free.

So instead of me standing in front of you and saying well, the Phoenix has had 12.3 inflation, and if I use CPIW, with the other adjustment which adjusts food and fuel, it is 13.1.

Screw talking about the percentages. Congratulations. Even if you are part of the population that has had wage hikes, if I take the average wage hike in my community, you are, functionally, working at least a month to a month and a half for free, and this has been done to you in less than a year and a half.

Does anyone care about the working people? The people that get up in the morning, the retired couple, the young couple that is trying to put their home together to maybe 1 day be able to afford a house?

I have no idea how people are surviving out there. And does this place--we are going to have a debate on whether we are technically in a recession or not because that is our talking point for the week.

And look here, I am going to give you two boards here, just to try to understand; and we have been trying to adjust, so let's just use something like healthcare support occupation. And this is just the loss of purchasing power just due to fuel prices. And I even rolled the fuel price back down.

You, functionally, lose, every month, 4 days of labor. You start to think about what these costs mean. So let's use that's even bigger.

Let's actually use--this one I love. Does anyone recognize this? This is our congressional calendar. You know, this is the days we are here supposed to be doing the people's work.

Take a look, functionally. Come down here. You will notice a couple of months with Xs on it. Those are days of labor you lose. You may get your paycheck, but it has no new purchasing power. Actually, it has lost purchasing power because of inflation.

Anyone watching C-SPAN today, how many of you heard people come behind these microphones and actually demonstrate they care about you? They care about your savings, your retirement, your future, the future of my kids, your kids.

The average working person in my community--because I represent the community with the highest inflation in America--has lost 40 days of their labor. Their purchasing power has been stripped from them in a year.

And I am going to get a little geeky for a second. Do you know where the value has gone? You do realize inflation, basically, benefits debtors, and crushes workers and savers.

Okay. Who is the biggest debtor in the world? We are. The United States is the biggest debtor in the world. We are basically--one of the wink and nods that are going on, I believe, with the administration and the majority here is oh, inflation is bad, wink, wink, nod, nod.

But it is really reducing the value of the debt in real dollar terms, because inflation is a tax transfer from you to the debt because it devalues the borrowing by deflating the value of your purchasing power.

So we strip purchasing power from you, but by doing that, when we pay back the debt, when we pay back the debt, the debt is paid back by inflated dollars. It is a tax.

So when the left actually promises--when the President promises, we are not going to tax anyone under $400,000; the hell you are not.

And in my community, you, functionally, have just taxed everyone 12.3 percent, new additional tax this year. You stripped that value from them. And the wink, wink, nod, nod, fancy economists, basically realized, hey, but we devalued the debt by that much. So you have got the stealth tax.

And now you start to realize why America is poorer today. So the Democrats get elected. We just went through 2018, 2019, first quarter of 2020, one of the miracle moments of this country. We closed income inequality.

Wages were growing. Inflation was flat. Poor people became less poor. The working poor become more prosperous. The middle class became substantially more prosperous. Wages were up, what, several thousand dollars in real purchasing power. Every dime of that is gone.

And look, I am friends with a couple of the Democrats, and they despise these floor speeches because it is so uncomfortable to hear that their policies have almost been dystopian in destruction. But it is math and at some point the math will win.

And the fact of the matter is, all the progress this economy, this society, the closing income inequality, the reduction of food insecurity, it is all gone. In a year and a half of, functionally, Democrat control, it is all gone.

You are poorer today than you were the day they were elected. And all that progress we made in that '18, '19, the beginning of 2020, from the tax reform, the regulatory reform, it has all been stripped from you.

But yet, we are going to sit here and argue about, oh, are we in recession? Oh, is it two quarters? No, you are not technically.

We will do anything around here to either virtue signal or avoid real issues, while people are getting crushed.

We have got to stop the whining, the small ball around here, and start doing something that makes people's lives better.

And yes, I can go out and snip all of the nice headlines talking about, oh, it is not a recession. Oh, you know, God willing, don't think we are going to go into a recession.

Okay. Fine. Let's pretend God's willing. Let's pretend we are not in a recession. Let's remove that word.

How could we then pretend--could we just pretend--you are willing to virtue signal on everything else. Are you willing to pretend we actually care about people, care about the economy, care about the future, care about the debt and the country collapsing because of the rate we are borrowing?

And there are other things in the data that let us know, if you are a data geek, and you actually sit and watch the financial news channels, and the talking heads, and the spokespeople from the White House, you are not being told the truth.

And how do you make public policy when it is the political theater is the only thing that matters?

It is the spin. We have become an Orwellian body. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

I am the senior Republican for also the Joint Economic Committee, as well as being the ranking member, the senior Republican over Social Security.

We have been holding Joint Economic hearings instead of doing what we used to do, where the left would have their economists; the right would have their economists; we would bring in really professional people, and we would try to understand what was going on and how we could make society healthier, wealthier.

Instead, we are going to bring in people and we are going to talk about the economics of whatever the pop culture--gun violence today, or we are going to talk about--we don't do real stuff anymore. We are basically writing people's campaign brochures now.

This is really important because unless we as a body can get the incentives right to get up labor force participation--I know these are geeky terms but our brothers' and sisters' participation in the economy, I do not believe we can get the productivity back where we have to be to take on inflation, to start to stabilize the economy in the future.

We have a problem here. This should have been the trend line. Something is going on. We have millions of our brothers and sisters who have disappeared.

Of course, you have a great unemployment number. We have great unemployment numbers. They are really low, except we have millions of people who disappeared. They are not participating.

Once again, it is spin through not telling the truth about the math. Now, it gets even darker and more misleading. I am sorry to be geeking out, but you do realize we have multiple agencies, multiple groups that do the calcs of what is unemployment, what is labor force participation, and who is participating in the economy, and there is some crazy divergence going on out there.

There is something called the establishment survey. That is what you get every week, every month on this month's unemployment--we have everyone working. Except at the very same time, there is something called the household survey, and that is showing numbers that have hundreds of thousands of people who have moved into unemployment.

How is that possible? How is it possible that two government surveys in the same sample times are starting to produce such divergence in the numbers?

I would love to tell you that I know, but I haven't had time to dig into this. But there is something going on there. There is some noise within our economy, yet we are all pretending.

This is the talking point the left keeps giving you. Well, we are not in recession. Look at the employment data, except, also, I need you not to look at the household survey because that number is going in the wrong direction.

Remember, how does the Federal Reserve take on inflation? They break the economy. They break the labor markets. They raise interest rates like they did today. And the dirty secret is, oh, I don't think we will drive it into recession--wink, wink, nod, nod.

Of course they will. That is how it works. They need to break the wage-price spiral, which is real and has begun. You all know what the wage-price spiral is, right? Prices go up, so I have to pay my workers more. Well, if I pay my workers more, I have to raise my prices. Well, if I raise my prices, I have to pay my workers more. Well, if I pay my workers more, I have to raise my prices. You end up in this ratcheting effect, and we are in that right now.

A couple of months ago, we would have a debate on the floor with a couple of my more geeky colleagues, and they would still want to try to say, oh, inflation is transitory. No. It is structural now. It is built into everything you are buying.

Fuel prices go up here, but eventually, the distillates from that fuel that are in that mug that holds the milk that you go buy is now in the components of production. It is structural.

That is a real problem because we are trying to do some of the math about what happens, God forbid, if we have substantially higher than normal inflation for a year. God forbid it is 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, even if they start to knock it down, and there you bring the Fed in.

What is the Fed doing right now? They are jacking up interest rates. They are making your life more miserable. They are functionally trying to put you out of work.

They need to raise unemployment. They need to create the elasticity in the employment markets. So, all of a sudden, that wage-price spiral--you are willing to work for less because you need the job. But you already see the data right now of how many of our brothers and sisters are just trying to maintain their life.

Their rent has gone up. They are using their credit cards. Now, their credit cards are going to get substantially more expensive because interest rates are going up. Now, we are actually seeing articles that the Treasury may have to write checks to the Federal Reserve.

One day, I will do a whole Fed presentation on how it actually works. But when they raise interest rates, they are actually raising interest rates on what they are willing to pay on bank deposits. Therefore, they are paying interest on the bank deposits.

The Federal Reserve needs to get cash to pay a rate of return on the bank deposits, and they get that from the Treasury, which is a little crazy, but that is how it works.

You start to think about the math. I know these are just statistics, but they are also people. They are people, and this place has just become cruel.

I guess the virtue signaling here is only done when it is a good line for a brochure, and I know it is half an hour of talking about economic data, but these are people.

We are trying to do a breakdown right now of how seniors survive. You do realize how many of our seniors, even with the Social Security COLA that may be over 8 points, their copay on healthcare--because, remember, some of the healthcare inflation has been double baseline CPI. Many seniors now have to pay 20 percent of that, so they are bleeding.

The COLA for Social Security doesn't keep up with actual inflation, and it is also a lagger. I won't walk through the table, but understand we are trying to do the math here of how many of our seniors basically are moving into poverty, and we are trying to do something latitudinal over a decade. By the end of the decade, what population has just this cycle of inflation done?

On Thursday, when the second quarter GDP number comes out, and the White House and Democrats say, ``Oh, we are not in recession. It is not a technical recession,'' how many of them are going to get behind a microphone and say, ``I don't care whether we are in recession or not. I care about seniors who are about to become poverty-stricken.'' How many are going to say, ``I care about the family that is having trouble surviving.'' Where is the empathy in this place? Does anyone care?

We make public policy by feelings, by virtue signaling, not by a calculator, and I accept I sound like an accountant on steroids. It is my sin. But these are people.

We are going to sit here, and we are going to fuss like crazy over little symbolisms. We are going to fight over the naming of a post office.

At the same time, someone is going to go home and realize they have to figure out whether they can pay the air-conditioning bill or be able to have enough gas to drive down to the food bank. There are ugly things happening out there, and it doesn't need to happen.

We as Republicans have some ideas to stop it. It may not completely stop inflation, but at least it would help. The brain trust on the other side, the idea is, well, let's send them a check. That is what caused the problem.

Please, can you have some folks that actually showed up for their basic economics class be the ones making public policy here? Let's stop hurting people. This isn't partisan. This is our job.

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

Mr. Speaker, I have been coming behind this mike every week when we are here, sometimes for half an hour or an hour, and I have been basically taking the bark off our brothers and sisters on the left because of my belief that so much of the policy here hurts people.

I have shown over and over the working poor are getting poorer, the poor are getting poorer, the middle class--I mean, last week, I had charts here that showed that, in my Phoenix-Scottsdale area, we have the highest inflation in the continental United States. You get to work a month-and-a-half for free just because of the change in our inflation index. Even when you plug in any salary growth we have had in our marketplace, you are functionally donating over a month of labor that you get no purchasing power for, no compensation. That is inflation.

I have tried in those previous speeches to turn to my brothers and sisters in the majority, the Democrat side, and say: Hey, here are some things we could do policy-wise to take on inflation. Inflation is not just a monetary issue; it is also things we can do on policy, the fiscal side.

I thought I would go to crazy town for a moment and show some things that are optimistic. The fact of the matter is that a lot of them aren't necessarily right or left. They are just technology adoption.

We have to stop doing the dumb--sorry, I think it is a break in decorum if I curse on the floor, so you can just fill in the blank there--but the virtue signaling, like we just did a half hour ago on the floor. It is theater.

I understand the polling numbers are miserable for my brothers and sisters on the left, so they are going to throw out every virtue signaling vote, whether it is actually legal or mechanically sensible or even has any place in reality. So let's go to what is really going on and some things that would be good that we could do together.

First off, we need to understand the scale of how much trouble we are in. This slide is almost a year old, but the

fact of the matter is that we are in a world right now where your government is an insurance company with an army. It is a way to think about it. We are an insurance company with an army.

Then you start to understand, over the next 30 years, Medicare and Social Security are 100 percent of future debt. That future debt, from last year's CBO number, is $112 trillion in today's value. If you add in inflation, our calculations are now blowing through $120 trillion of borrowed money.

Now, the fact of the matter is, almost every model says we can never get there; we blow up long before that. But you have to understand, mandatory--that is Social Security and Medicare and other things that we have made that are formula. Over here is the defense, and over here are other domestic programs. Only about 13--actually, I think this coming year it may be less of everything we spend is really--it is FBI. It is environment. It is research. It is this tiny sliver down here.

The reality is, what is driving that mandatory monster that is consuming everything? It is Medicare. About three-quarters of all the spending, about three-quarters of all the debt that is coming, is Medicare. The vast majority of Medicare comes out of the general fund. It is healthcare costs.

The brain trust around here--we will do things like the ACA, ObamaCare, the Republican alternative, Medicare for All. They are all financing bills. We play games around here. It is about who gets subsidized, who has to pay.

A number of the boards that I am going to show today are about healthcare disruption to change not who pays but what we pay.

There is a reason you don't go back to Blockbuster video anymore. There was a technology revolution where you no longer go wait in line at the local strip mall, get a little silver disc, and take it home. Half the time, three-quarters of the time, you couldn't get the silver disc you wanted because somebody else already had it.

Today, you go home and hit a button, and you have dozens of streaming services. That is a technology disruption. If Blockbuster video had hired enough lobbyists, this place would have slowed down the internet to make sure Netflix couldn't exist.

You need to think about what goes on here. Let's start to walk through and understand how much trouble we really are in.

This board is a year or 2 old. You start to add in. When you do Social Security and healthcare entitlements, it is this line. The rest of the budget is actually in decline or flat. Defense is down here. You can wipe out every dime of defense, and you can't keep up with the growth of the debt being caused by Social Security and Medicare.

That is not Republican or Democrat. We got old as a society. Does anyone ever hear about baby boomers? This place basically didn't figure out baby boomers existed until the last couple of years.

It is demographics, and it is happening all over the industrialized world. When you look at our numbers--and we are working on this right now in our office--of what has happened the last couple of years, sort of the post-COVID baby bust--remember, last year was the lowest fertility rate in U.S. history. The math is getting really ugly.

I am the ranking Republican over Social Security, and we had the Social Security actuary report come out a couple of weeks ago, saying: Hey, we added a whole year. We now have 11, 12 years before Social Security runs out of cash, and we just live on the revenues.

But they missed inflation. They also screwed up, I believe, on the fertility rates, population growth.

Let's start to walk through it. If healthcare costs are the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt, what can you and I do? What could this place do? Some of this stuff will not work, but, damn it, we need to try.

We do enough virtue signaling here where we say pretty words, and then we walk off the floor and say: Well, that is never going to actually happen, but, damn it, it is a great campaign ad.

Maybe it is time we start to try to do some of the things that are really difficult.

Some basic math--first, come down to this line. Thirty-three percent of all healthcare spending is associated with diabetes. That is type 2 and some type 1, but mostly type 2, 33 percent of all healthcare spending and 31 percent of all Medicare spending. Why wouldn't you absolutely fixate?

Look, we won't call it Operation Warp Speed because that had something to do with Donald Trump, and the left despises him, so give it any damn name you want.

But come on, people. If I came to you and said 33 percent of all of our healthcare spending and 31 percent of all Medicare spending is diabetes and Medicare is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt, can't we hold hands together and jump and say we are going to throw everything we have at this because we know there has been a breakthrough?

Now, it is only like a half dozen people who have been cured of type 1 diabetes, and we don't have any long-term data on it, but it is optimism.

First, I want to go over my frustration. You will see this as a policy split on the way the brains around here work differently between my brothers and sisters on the left and those of us on the right.

A few weeks ago, this place committed to give, I think it was $36 billion--might be 38--but I think I remember $36 billion of cash subsidies to Big Pharma, which they were railing against, saying they are charging too much for insulin.

And the way we are going to stop these crazy insulin prices is, we are going to give a bunch of cash to the very people we think are charging too much.

Does anyone see the absurdity?

Instead of creating, Hey, we are going to incentivize competition. We are going to put more people in the marketplace. We are going to make the systems work--no, because the left is addicted to handing out cash.

Well, it turns out at the same time they are doing that, not too far from here, in Virginia, there is functionally a co-op that had been put together years ago that is in construction right now that is going to bring a number of generic insulins to market at less than the new subsidized price.

And the fact of the matter is, what the Democrats did a few weeks ago in trying to subsidize Big Pharma's insulin production, may have blown up some of the economics and the financing behind this.

Why wouldn't we have said, for a fraction of the money--say we are going to set aside some money. We are going to help these folks get their permitting, their reviews. We are going to actually put FDA reviewers on site as they are building so that the day the clean rooms are up and ready, it can be in production.

Add competition, not subsidies. And it exists.

And think about this: They are talking about $55 for a whole box; $30 per vial. That is cheaper than the legislation we passed a few weeks ago where we are handing out, what, $36 billion in subsidies to Big Pharma.

You see the craziness around here. The virtue signaling was more important than actually something that made people's lives better, and actually added optionality and competition.

And this isn't a Republican or Democrat, this is a solution. But I guess there is a hell of a lot more power--maybe better fundraising opportunities--when you are handing $36 billion to the very people you rail against and then--wink wink, nod nod--here is the cash. This place has actually become perverse.

So back to where I was going. I have talked about this over and over because it is one of my personal fixations. The discussion of an end to insulin, where there has actually been--and we saw the first academic article on this last December, and we try to track it, functionally, every week, we try to follow what is going on.

One of the trials that is actually in the FDA phase is on hold right now as they are doing some safety efficacy. But the fact of the matter is, we have a half-dozen Americans, who through a stem cell and now the newest ladle is they are taking it and apparently tagging it with a CRISPR mechanism, so the body doesn't see it as foreign. The elegance of that is that means that this mechanism works.

You can do a production line of these insulin-producing cells--the islet cells. I always get made fun of because I mispronounce that. But the ability to get someone's body to produce insulin again, why isn't there just excitement around here?

Remember, 33 percent of all healthcare spending is associated with diabetes. If there is a potential, just a potential, we can cure our brothers and sisters--and yes, it is going to cause all sorts of difficult decisions around here when you start dealing with type 2. I represent the population with the second highest per capita population of diabetes in the Nation. My Tribal communities, Salt River Pima- Maricopa, amazing community; smart, well run. And genetically, they are number two and their sister Tribe is number one, they are a population that has diabetes.

Next year, we are going to be doing the farm bill. Within that there will be nutrition support. One of the ways this place has always passed the farm subsidy bills and nutrition support is they merge them together.

How about if I came to you and said, Let's just have a really uncomfortable conversation instead of the EBT card--which is sort of the modern-day food stamp. If you have someone who wants to sign up for the program, saying to them, We are going to try to cure your body and get your body to make insulin again, but you have to do the nutrition program with us. And that may be 2 years of a food box showing up three times a day at your house, where it is microwavable; Lyft can drop it off.

But what is more elegant? From a society standpoint, what is kinder is, Here is an EBT card, go to Jack in the Box--I love the onion rings--and you can use the EBT card at Jack in the Box.

Is that really making society healthy? Better? Because we have also been doing some experiments in the Joint Economic Committee, just trying to do math. And starting to realize health--the fact that you have a household member who has severe diabetes that may be heading to get a foot cut off is a component in income inequality. I thought that was the holy grail to my brothers and sisters on the left. Let's try to make our brothers and sisters healthier.

And the fact of the matter is, if there is something going on out there in the literature, why wouldn't we take some of the dollars we spend here, the things we put into pure theater, and say--this science is already in phase 1. Whether it be through tax incentives, whether it be through other types of incentives, how do we get this into the field? And then we, as a body, have to have really difficult discussions because you're not going to give someone stem cells to get their pancreas to start producing insulin again if they are still morbidly obese.

I mean, this is a big boy conversation--a big person conversation, knowing we are not allowed to use gender identity anymore.

But what is merciful? What would be great for the budget? What would be great for society? What would be great for productivity?

Because at the end of the speech, my hook is going to be inflation is killing our country. It is blowing up the future of young people. It is eating the savings of older people.

How do you get productivity back in the society? It is actually disruptions. It turns out if you can disrupt things like this, you have this virtuous circle. And how many times does this body even talk about doing big things that are actually really good for everyone.

And if it is true, you would think the majority here, who basically controls all the power, one of the first things they would have done is invited the researchers who had gotten together with CRISPR and the stem cell and brought them in here and said, Let's have a conversation.

How real is this? How far is it?

What resources, what incentives, what things could we do in the capital stack to get money to invest in it?

What could we do as a body?

Because if this is really 33 percent of all healthcare spending is associated with diabetes. Could you imagine? Even if it was a fraction of that population of our brothers and sisters, we are removed from the suffering.

I have pitched over and over and over to people with power in this body saying, Invite the researchers here. We need to understand this. And instead, over and over, my brothers and sisters on the left seem to say, no. We care more. We are going to build more diabetes clinics. We are going to build more community-based clinics.

And I am saying the disruption is the solution. Cure the damn disease. It is going to be hard. There will be things that will go wrong. There will be people who will call us names because we are trying to say, Well, we need to do the nutrition, and maybe some exercises, as we get ready to make this investment in you. But it is the moral thing to do for our society, and also economically really smart.

Let alone, also think of the economic expansion we get when we live in a society where we have so many of our brothers and sisters who can't participate in the economy because parts of their lives are miserable, their health issues. The cure is the solution. Patching people up is--it may be great virtue signaling but it is not that merciful.

So that is sort of the theme. I am going to walk through these boards.

Now, let's go through other things we could do as a society to disrupt.

So how many times have we all been here on the floor and we hear about the Build Back Better? Yes, we can spend more money and that would be good for inflation. And you sit there and scratch your head and say, My elementary school economics teacher was wrong. But they are working on it in the Senate.

We are being told there is a pared back version coming. In that pared back version, would you believe there is a provision that you can't automate the ports in California? Huh?

You have to back up and think about this. So I have a White House-- and some of my brothers and sisters here on the left, inflation isn't their fault. It is not the incredible amounts of spending; the trillions of dollars being handed out to people without any requirement for them to participate in the society or the economy. It is not their fault. It is supply chains. And one of the first things they really want to do is a piece of legislation that would restrict automating the ports. Huh?

There is a worker shortage. There is a technology shortage. We have ships parked, but the longshoremen write checks to Democrats so they will slow down--you can't have it both ways.

So the fact of the matter is, the language is there. I have had a number of people look at me and say, Oh, that can't be. No? That slipped in, and it is still over there in the Senate draft. This is absurd.

I will argue the disruption is the cure. So it is not only automating the ports, it is the second half.

There are some brilliant articles out there with some technology now that say that the rail spurs in the Port of Long Beach, the Port of Los Angeles--some of the others--and these are some former space engineers that have designed this--you take the container, you park it on the electric rail car, and you tell it where to go. And it just goes automatically to the spur, to drop it off, this and that.

Functionally, you go from an automated port to an automated travel delivery system. That is forward thinking. That is policy that is rule set that popped that productivity, popped the problems in the supply chain. Ta-da. You did something positive, and when you do that, you also take on inflation.

And instead, this body is trying to stop the very disruptions that would make our lives better. They are pandering to a group that writes them a check.

But it exists. I mean, there are fun articles about these automated freight train cars. And they are electric. You just, boom, put the container on it and tell it where to go.

Look, we have a demographic crisis. We have trouble with workers. We have all these things. The disruption is the solution. Do you see any attempt around here? Instead, we have debates here where we sound like it is still the 1990s.

So one of the other battles here is energy prices. And I have had an ongoing, reasonably friendly discussion with a Democrat who's from back East, who is a friend--and I will call him a friend: Oh, we have to stop hydrocarbon. Oh, natural gas isn't this clean. Oh, David, you don't understand.

Yes, natural gas when properly burned for energy, those things may be 40 to 50 percent cleaner than other fuel sources, but you have methane leakage.

Okay, I'll do that with you.

And we know the methane math on the latest calc is like 8.79 to 1 in its greenhouse effect if you do the math. But it also has--as we know, the new math has a much shorter half-life. That's why so many of the global warming models from a year or two ago are actually wrong because we are now recalculating methane.

But it turns out that some experiments have been going on the last two years of, functionally, a solution for capturing methane, particularly in oil and gas and pipelines. And I am going to be a little silly here because it is a dirt-cheap solution. It is clay. I think it's a copper-oxidized clay. It's like a sponge for methane.

Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. But there are a couple good academic papers saying, Hey, you do realize we could functionally take kitty litter, pack it into wellheads, pack it into the pipe fittings, pack it into the other things, and it is a methane sponge.

Why wouldn't we take a run at this? Instead, the Malthusians around here that basically run this place, say, No, we are going to restrict ourselves because, oh, God, we can't have access to this.

No, the solution is in the disruption. I am just excited about this one because it is super cheap. It is not some of the grandiose, build a new regulatory body, build an inspection, build these huge tankers that sit on top of the wellheads and capture the methane. Turns out it could be functionally copper-oxidized kitty litter.

Does anyone around here read?

So I have had a proposal here, and for anyone who is bored out of their mind, go to Schweikert environmental crowdsourcing. There is a YouTube video I put together a couple years ago that basically said, look, we all walk around with these super computers in our pocket. What if I came to you tomorrow and said, Instead of the regulatory model we use right now to protect air quality and you can use those for water and other things, where functionally you fill out pieces of paper, you take them to your local regulatory body--your EPA, county air quality, whatever you have in your area--and they stick it in a file cabinet.

And everyone knows that file cabinets full of pieces of paper make the air quality better, right? No, it's documentation so one day someone can sue you.

What would happen if I came to you and said they exist today and they are not expensive. If you had a couple thousand people in your marketplace, a few thousand--something like Maricopa County, which is huge--had a little attachment on their phone and it does air quality samples?

You crowd source the problem. You no longer need people filling out pieces of paper for their permitting because if someone screws up, you catch them immediately. The elegance of this is the clowns that may be painting cars in their backyard behind your house, they are never getting a permit, they are never getting caught unless you had a crowd source model where the UPS driver, the soccer mom, everyone else is walking around with a little thing attached to their phone or a Bluetooth on their car or attached on the side.

The beauty of these things--they do PM10, they do volatile organics. There is even one out there, a little panel, that actually does radioactive, which there was a discussion of putting those on UPS vans.

The solutions are out there. Think of how different the world would be. I want to open up a motorcycle paint shop. I have to go get an engineer to stamp my air quality permit. I have to go get the scrubbers. I have to do this, do this, do this, do this.

What if the solution is, hey, here are the things you have to do. You don't need a permit because the moment you screw up, we catch you that same day. It is a living. Do any of you use Waze when you go driving? It is a living crowd source model. These ideas exist out there.

In Detroit where they had the water issue. There is a little ring out there that is like $39. If you put it under the sink, you would have caught it. You could have crowd-sourced the information and not gone through multibillion dollars of misery. The unwillingness of this place to understand what century we are in. If someone gets bored, take a look at that YouTube video, it sort of explains the concept.

For those of us in the West, this is a crazy one but it's worth thinking about. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. Desalinization. You know we know there is a number of desalinization plants along the coast of California. There are even some discussions of some in Mexico and other places and around the world, but there is always an issue of the brine. You have got to really spread the brine out, so you don't create intense areas.

Now, there are some researchers out there that are going, hey, that brine--did you know, there may be all sorts of really neat stuff in that. There may be rare earths. As the desalinization plant is mining potable water, we could be mining the brine for rare earths.

I am just begging the people around here--think--think a little more creatively because this place is absolutely dystopian anymore, and there are solutions out there. Is this Republican or Democrat?

I am sure someone will make a contribution to one side or the other and then immediately the other side will say, oh, that is a Republican idea. The fact of the matter is it is worth at least understanding.

It turns out, I have an absolute fascination with carbon capture. There is actually a tax credit in those things that I am the lead author on that is out there in law and other things. The break- throughs--it turns out we are getting really good at this.

There is ambient where they are actually pulling in the air. There is point source. There is a power generation outside of Houston called an Allam cycle where they actually blow up the natural gas, and they don't heat up steam to throw the turbine, they use the actual gas from the burn. It has no smokestack; they capture every bit of it.

We are actually getting really good. And all over the world there are researchers spending time on this. There was even an amazing paper about 2 years ago, MIT came up with a nanotube electric-charged plate that goes on, off, on, off, but it actually crashed the cost of capturing--and they were doing it ambient. They were just blowing air across it, and it crashed the energy to do carbon capture.

Okay. So my brothers and sisters on the left say they are the ones that care about the environment. Okay. But we are the ones actually doing the policy that is practical that works, that we don't actually put ourselves back in the stone age, and options to grab the carbon.

There are multiple versions of this. This is actually--there is an actual facility, and I think this one may actually be in Canada--and, yes, it has Gates Foundation money and others. This is an active ambient capture. It apparently does amazing things. This technology is only a couple years old, and it is already out of date.

The technology is moving so fast. This isn't pie in the sky. This isn't theoretical--they exist. What could we do policy-wise other than me doing the 45 on the tax code to try to say, hey, we are going to give you a tax credit for carbon you have captured if you sequester it or put it in concrete or other things.

Are there things we could do?

This becomes a moment where those of us who believe the use of hydrocarbons is basically keeping a society prosperous. My brothers and sisters on the left that want to eliminate hydrocarbons--maybe there is a technology solution that brings us together. It is worth understanding and working on.

How many detailed hearings have we seen here where we brought in the engineers?

Not the talking heads, not the lobbyists. Not another idiot doing virtue signaling for us, but the actual engineers. You know, those types where you have to have a conversation where you own a calculator. This stuff exists.

There are other revolutions happening around us that are incredible opportunities--very scary, very wonderful. We are going to do the farm bill next year. I grabbed this article almost 2 years ago and we have been tracking it, and they have had some success. I

am going to geek out for a couple seconds. I will try to do this as quickly and lightly as I can.

Do you all remember your high school biology class--C4 plants, C3 plants. These plants actually need a carbon molecule to grow because they turned it into a sugar. But the dear Lord--there is actually this weird little glitch where sometimes the plant grabs an oxygen molecule, and it goes: Oh, I don't need this. And it spends its energy purging the oxygen molecule and going back trying to get a carbon.

What would happen if researchers--through a little synthetic biology--could tweak it so every time it grabbed the carbon?

Some of the researchers think for some plants that could be a 40-- now, on some of the other articles I am reading it is down, in some others plants it might be in the 20s, 25, 28, there is a 30. Think about it.

If I had a crop that could grow 40 percent more efficiently--40 percent less land, 40 percent less fertilizer, 40 percent less water. The disruption to the world--you basically just fed the world for the next century.

Worldwide agriculture functionally produces 2.2 times more global greenhouse gases--I guess is the term the left uses--than every car on Earth--2.2 times more. So if I had a 40 percent improvement, just this synthetic biology on plants would be equal to removing every car off the face of the Earth.

Now, we all know the math is going to turn out that way--yes, there will be lots of people who resist it because they are scared of technology. Why wouldn't we have this part of our conversation if we care about--those of us that live in drought-prone areas--care about the environment and care about feeding the world.

This is the future. What is the chance anything like this will be part of the farm bill next year?

Pretty much zero because it is a disruption of technology, and this place basically has become a protection racket. We protect incumbents. Not incumbent Members of Congress, incumbent business models, incumbent associations, incumbent bureaucracies. We don't ask them to leap into the future. This is the future.

This one I use on occasion, it is fairly snarky, but I think it makes a point. How many care about plastic in the ocean? Oh, the hands go up. Here in D.C. I don't think we are allowed to use plastic straws because everyone knows D.C. plastic straws were critical to ocean-wide plastic except there is almost no plastic from North America in the ocean.

It turns out that 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers--8 in Asia, 2 in Africa. Ninety percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers, 8 in Asia and 2 in Africa.

If you actually cared about plastic in the ocean, would you be writing your checks--or in this case, your credit card--to groups that go out and say, we are going to go out and capture plastic. Great. Or wouldn't we adjust some of our technical foreign aid, our response in environmental aid? Saying, we are going to go to those 10 rivers, 8 in Asia and 2 in Africa, and we are going to do something like we are going to create a value for the plastic. All of a sudden, I have an economic solution. Instead of dumping it into the river, we are going to collect it.

See, this is an actual solution. The problem is the solution takes away the virtue signaling. This place lives on telling great stories demonstrating you care. It doesn't give a darn about actual solutions. Ninety percent of the ocean plastic comes from 10 rivers. Go to those rivers and let's deal with it.

Another thought experiment--and now I am going to do a lot more on healthcare. I accept a number of these will not work. I accept a number of these will make some people angry because it blows up their business model. Remember, money, power, vanity, but most of the time D.C. is about the money.

What is the single most powerful thing this place could do tomorrow?

If I said between now and the end of the year, I want to have a disruption in the cost of healthcare. But, David, that is only a few months. D.C. is not capable of actually setting off a revolution in a few months to do something powerful for the price of healthcare.

What if I came to you tomorrow and said: The models say--the research says--and this one we have known for years and years and years and years--16 percent of all healthcare spending is actually people not taking their medicine--not taking it properly or not taking it at all.

If you have hypertension and you don't take the calcium inhibitor. You have high cholesterol; you don't take your statin. It turns out you stroke out; you have a heart attack; you cost the system a fortune. You stay on your meds--actually, they are cheap, they are safe, they are very effective. We have decades and decades of history on their effectiveness; you stay healthy.

It turns out you could actually just say for certain types of health pharmaceuticals, put the 99 cent pill cap on it that beeps at you when you didn't open it today. If you want to do the fancy one--this slide's a little year or two old--there is the fancy one where the pill cap actually talks to your phone and the phone tells you you didn't take it.

Mr. Speaker, 16 percent of U.S. healthcare costs--it would be $570 billion a year--so over a half a trillion dollars a year. What would happen if tomorrow this place got together, and said: Hey, for some of our populations that we know are likely to miss taking their pills, or grandma is having some cognitive issues, or someone is just busy in their life, let's spend the 99 cents on the pill bottle, give them the thing that beeps when it is not open.

If that actually helped even a fraction--maybe it is not 16 percent, but what if we were able to do half of that? We are talking hundreds of billions of dollars. Is this Republican or Democrat?

It smacks us in the face. There is just no constituency here lobbying or writing us checks for this.

The solution is in the disruption. The disruption is part of the technology.

Before I do this slide, I need to tell a story and see if I can put this in perspective.

Mr. Speaker, there is a reason I seem to just annoy the hell out of so many folks here because this is a challenge to how we think. A few years ago, I was reading one of my crazy blogs. It is a material science blog, oddly enough. A professor, I think it was Duke, I may have the university wrong, she had been working on this breath biopsy where you could put breath across it, and it could designate if you have this category of flu. The model basically said that once we know that category, then we can bounce off your medical records on your phone, and it can just automatically work your antivirals. It has been worked on and worked on.

Think of this, Mr. Speaker. It is a flu kazoo. You blow into it, and it can designate, and the latest models and experiments now are picking up dead cancer proteins. When a cancer cell dies, it throws off a DNA strip. Some of the sensors are getting so good they can actually identify them.

What is the problem with something like a breath biopsy? I wish I had some brothers and sisters here in the body to yell at me. What is the problem with it? You blow into it, it bangs up your medical records, and it orders your antivirals.

What is the problem with it? It is illegal. I am allowing an algorithm to prescribe. The Social Security Act says I will see a doctor, not an algorithm. Now, the fact of the matter is wink, wink, nod, nod, if you have something with a diabetic pump, they already have an algorithm that is prescribing, and they have been doing it for years. This is not new. If you had it certified by the FDA--and there are algorithms certified by the FDA--why wouldn't we make them reimbursable?

Why wouldn't we do some simple conceptual ideas that you could have technology in your home medicine cabinet that you lick, you spit, you urinate, or you blow into--whatever it is--and you can monitor your health? That technology exists today.

One of the reasons the capital stack won't invest in it is it is functionally illegal, and they are basically betting that the lobbyist armies will keep it illegal here because--I have to be honest--it will change the foot traffic in many of our medical facilities. It will also save society from the debt implosion that is being driven by future healthcare costs.

So, you have to decide: Are you going to save us? Are we going to protect the world from disruption?

It is back to my Blockbuster example. Should Congress have stopped Netflix or streaming and protected the renting of the little silver disks? That is, functionally, what we do in healthcare.

There is technology out there coming. The newest version is of folks with the Apple watches. The reality is if I can know your O2, your temperature, your pulse rates, then the algorithm may say: Hey, you might have a problem here.

What happens with the new versions that are stunningly accurate? We have math for a number of these that are more accurate than a human. Yes, it is scary. Disruption always is. If we don't have a disruption in the cost of healthcare, then there is a technical economic term: We are screwed.

There are lots of these at-home biopsy-type tests. You have all seen the one because it had some great pop culture last year of an iPhone app where you could zoom in on a mole, and the algorithm behind it was stunningly accurate: Yes, you need to get that thing cut off because that is skin cancer.

Why aren't we promoting things here?

Mr. Speaker, I have been at war since I got here on telehealth. I had a piece of legislation over and over, and I could never get a hearing on it for telemedicine, telehealth, until the pandemic hit. Then, they functionally took our language--I was actually doing this with a couple of my Democrat colleagues. They took our telehealth expansion language and put it into law for the pandemic. Mr. Speaker, do you know that the expansion of telehealth goes away the day the pandemic is declared over?

The argument used to be: Well, David, you don't understand. Seniors aren't going to figure out how to hit the button and use FaceTime to talk to their doctor. Seniors aren't going to figure out how to put something on their wrist or on their chest or blow into it. You don't understand.

It turns out they were wrong.

I am looking forward to this body deciding: Are you going to be with the lobbyists or the expansion of access to healthcare through telehealth? Because this goes away when the pandemic is declared over.

Here is another example. It is just another breath biopsy. These things exist. They have put them together. What is fascinating is this slide is about a year or so old, and it keeps going and going. They are working now on a number where it is a breath biopsy to detect different types of cancers.

Why doesn't this place find joy and embrace the solutions?

Mr. Speaker, you start to understand that, outside the folks that politicized messenger RNA and didn't understand the mechanisms and all those things--but we are getting so close to treating so many diseases, whether it be my fascination with the stem cell being able to set off insulin production again, to the fact--I am going to show a number of slides here where an incredible number of the cancers, particularly soft cell, we can set off your body to fight them now using messenger RNA. We are getting right on the cusp.

If I came to you right now, Mr. Speaker, and said: Hey, malaria, certain cancers, HIV, influenza, heart disease--the heart disease one is fascinating, teaching your body through a messenger RNA how to build certain protein stacks to help rebuild heart damage. It is here.

How much discussion do you have in this body? How many experts have we brought in saying that technology is the cure if healthcare is what is chewing us alive? Do we do another bill on who is going to get subsidized and who has to pay? Do we do another group saying: Oh, there is a group out there we are not taxing enough. We need their cash to throw into Medicare because we all know the crisis that is happening on Medicare financing.

Why is this place incapable of having a conversation about crashing the price of healthcare?

I am going to go through a number of these because I collect these. I spend 10 hours a week on an airplane, and I get bored easily. I read a lot of things. I keep coming across these.

This one is really interesting. It is immunotherapy for brain cancer. Now, it is not the solid tumor, but they think they have had amazing success on this. This was one of those we didn't think we could do anything with, and it looks like there is an immunotherapy for brain cancer.

Here is one. I have not read the details on this because I just saw this on my flight, I think, a couple of days ago. A drug cures 100 percent of colorectal cancer patients in a small initial trial.

Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. But this is what we need to be fixating on. Instead, what we are going to do here is watch the bill that comes from the Senate, where they are going to blow up the capital stack for the very research that finances these sorts of things.

A couple more, just for the fun of it. Biotech--and I think this one is already out in phase one, in multiple phase ones; I don't know if it has reached phase two--malaria. You do understand, Mr. Speaker, for much of the world, malaria is just a brutal, vicious disease. I saw some data a couple of months ago. They were only about 30 percent effective. Believe it or not, that is actually terrific because if they have hit 30 percent effective, we can through adjustments and through other factors. Could you imagine the amount of misery you could end in the world? They could get a 50 percent effective vaccine for malaria.

Instead, we will do certain types of foreign aid. Instead, it turns out one of the most powerful things we could do for the world is our intellectual property, fixing what we incentivize, and it is not handouts of cash. It is to fix the regulatory model here, fix the capital stacks, fix the tax incentive, and you do amazing things for the world.

I did a presentation on sickle cell anemia last year, and I got a little over the top on getting a little technical. I used to have about a dozen slides on this one. But it turns out we think we know how to do a certain type of gene editing with a couple of other optionalities for sickle cell anemia, and this one is out there in trials.

Isn't that a moral thing to do? The fact of the matter is, do you try to help people maintain their misery? Or when you actually see data that says there is a path, do you pursue the cure?

My argument here is the cure is better for us as a society financially, productivity-wise. Just from a purely ethical and moral standpoint, removing someone's misery is a pretty neat thing to do.

This is a heart disease one. I just found it fascinating that through a functioning CAR T, which is the derivative of the mRNA, you are setting off your body. In this case, instead of it going after a disease, it is actually repairing damage. I think this one is coming out of the Boston area. There is a reason that these folks have Nobel Prizes.

When you start to understand these infectious diseases, herpes, diabetes, the other things, we are on the cusp of having cures, and the misery that I believe the last 16 months of really bad policy here have brought to this country, the damage inflation is doing, the damage that is going on at the border of my State, the homelessness, the fentanyl, imagine, Mr. Speaker, if this place would set aside some of the virtue signaling legislation--oh, this is going to get the other side in the next legislation; oh, that just writes a great ad--and you brought in the engineers and experts in the different areas that we all claim to pretend we know something about and say: Here is what the future looks like, and if we get it right, the future is amazing.

A little while ago, Mr. Speaker, you saw a little girl behind me. I have a 6-year-old. Two weeks ago, out of nowhere, my phone rang, and the birth mother of my little girl had a little boy. Now, my wife and I have a little boy. I have a 3-week-old.

It is my primary reason for running again. I have to find a way to beat this body into submission to understand there are good things out there, but it doesn't work into our current political construct. It doesn't work in the way this place raises political money or keeps certain friends. The cures are disruptive, and disruption is the future.

Disruption makes society healthier, better, wealthier, and more productive. That productivity solves the inflation problem, and it solves so many other things.

How do we move this body to stop being terrified of its own shadow and saying, screw it, we are going to do what is right, not necessarily what is easy or political?

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