Floor Statements

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I am going to yield to my friend from Florida, the sheriff, such time as he may consume.

War on Affordable Energy

I thank my friend from Florida.

Madam Speaker, we are going to try to do the rapid boards and try to show some data of what is going on out there.

What I am going to do is going to be a little harsh, but I need to beg the majority to think about the information. The data we are going to show may just prove, please, you have got to stop what you are doing. You are hurting people. The cascade may already be built in. We may now have years of really ugly, really bad, hurtful, cruel built into the economy.

Now, look, part of my premise is that good policy is not only good for the United States, it is good for the world, it is good for growth, it is good for the future, it is good for poverty, it closes income inequality.

You actually go back to after the 2017 tax reform. The Democrats came to these mikes and said: Oh, the world is coming to an end; there is going to be a recession. None of it was true, and they knew it wasn't true even though an economist said it wasn't true. You had some of the greatest growth in U.S. history, some of the fastest closing of income inequality, the poor got dramatically less poor, but you also saw GDP around the world got better.

Look, when I am holding articles like this about how many may die this coming fall because of food shortages, that is not the Democrats, but the Democrats' inaction is their fault. They run this place. They run the House, they run the Senate, they run the White House. Instead, the White House, along with the Democrats here, decide hey, let's burn some more ethanol by taking our food, our grain supply, and instead of doing the rotation, saying we need to stop this, we need to turn that into animal feed, you know, there is a fertilizer shortage, let's grow soybeans, the things to get prepared. They were so worried about their next election. The idiocy of this place is they were willing to sacrifice people around the world. That is the cruelty that continues to be Democrat policy.

Let's actually sort of walk through what Democrats are doing to Americans. When I am holding boards with quotes from Jason Furman, something is wrong in the world.

``The decline in real average hourly earnings at this point is terrible, the fastest pace of decline in 40 years.''

What is Jason Furman saying?

He is basically saying people are getting poorer every single day.

The Democrats have owned this place now for, what, 16 months? You have got 16 months functionally of people being poorer every single day.

But what does that mean?

You have Republican after Republican. You notice the Democrats almost never want to talk about what they have set off. We bring boards like this, and we say: Hey, do you realize your eggs are 33 percent more expensive? Nondurable goods, if you take the whole category, there was a number a couple days ago, the inflation number that was almost in the 30s on nondurable goods for that monthly snapshot.

But I need you to think much more grand in understanding inflation. Inflation is a lot more than you are paying 21 percent more for your butter. I need you to understand what inflation means to you and your family's survival and the cruelty of this place not giving a damn, the cruelty of this place being unwilling to actually do real legislation that would help.

They basically have decided: Oh, we are going to pretend it is the Fed's fault, it is Russia's fault, and this place

isn't going to do anything. We are going to let the Federal Reserve jack up interest rates to the point where they put lots of people out of work, have that misery, and somehow Democrats think they are not going to be held responsible for what they have done?

I was trying to come up with a way to help someone understand what inflation really means to your life. Well, this is a snapshot of the Democrats' congressional calendar. I represent the Scottsdale-Phoenix area, highest inflation in the continental United States. If you are a worker in my area and you haven't had a pay raise, but you still actually do things like eat, drive, live in shelter, do you understand how many days you are now working for free?

You need to think this through. You work so many days, but take a look down here, you functionally have lost almost 2 months of labor just for the inflation from the last 16 months. Think about that. If I came to you right now and said, Hey, guess what? You are going to lose 41 days of your labor. You are going to work for the government. Actually, you are going to work for the government for free. Because what is the great scam? Where did this money actually go?

I need you to conceptualize the value of your time that has been stripped from you. It didn't just disappear. That value functionally went to debt. It lowered the value of debt by raising your own costs. So you have actually sort of transferred a bunch of your wealth to the U.S. sovereign debt. It is a little ethereal to process, but that is functionally what happened.

So the trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of debt this place has piled up, the Democrats found a way to tax you. They basically set off inflation. They took away a couple months, a couple months of your labor, and then functionally transferred it so that will pay back these trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of debt but will pay it back with dollars that are worth less.

Do you see the picture? Maybe that is the real reason the left here isn't on fire trying to save people from this misery.

And it is dead serious. You can do the June 2021 or since December. If you do December, particularly for my Phoenix area--and I am the highest inflation in the continental United States. For the entire country, apparently urban Alaska--who ever knew that was a subcategory economic zone?--is slightly higher than us.

But if you go back to since December 2020, you have lost 1.9 months of your labor. The reason I am trying to chart it this way is people go, Oh, eggs are only 20 percent more, how many eggs are you going to eat? I need you to think about this, of how many days you are working not to feed your family anymore, not to pay your mortgage or your rent. You are basically giving it away. It has been ripped; it has been stripped away from you. And you start to think about that.

If you go since June 2021, you have lost 40 days of work that has been stripped away from you, the value. You worked for 40 days for free now. If you go back to December 2020, you now worked for 57 days. If you live in the Phoenix area, our inflation has been so high you worked for 57 days for free. This is what Democrat policies did to you. Tell me this isn't cruel.

Do you understand what this does to the working poor? We get this great speechifying here; the virtue signaling is great. But somehow Democrats get judged on pretty words, and we get judged on what we accomplish.

Look at what we accomplished after refining, fixing, reforming the tax code.

Look what we did economically for the working poor when we fixed the regulatory code.

Look at the misery. Look at the misery you have set off.

How many presentations here, how many pieces of legislation have come to the floor? Those of us in the Ways and Means Committee, Republicans, we keep offering ideas and saying, We will do this in partnership with you. There are things we can do legislatively to help take on inflation. We could no more get one of our amendments heard around here because it is being controlled out of Nancy Pelosi's office.

If you start taking a look at what inflation has done to my community--and I know this chart is noisy and there is a lot of movement on it, but you start looking at the median price of a home. Remember, when we talk about housing, you get knifed in two different directions. The price of the house goes way up, but the value of your savings that you have been saving up to buy that house goes down, so you get it on both sides of the seesaw.

You wonder why housing insecurity is just skyrocketing in this country. Once again, great speeches. Maybe we will throw a bunch more government money at it, but those are their policies that have made people's lives miserable.

This chart, you see that line that just collapses? That is the value of your hourly earnings. You may be being paid more. Great. Hey, I got a 5 percent pay raise. But in the Phoenix area, CPI-U went up, what, 13.1? Traditional CPI went up 12.1. Great, you got a 5 percent pay raise. Where are the other 7 points? You functionally are 7 percent poorer every day.

These are more than just charts. These are people. These are people just trying to find a way to air-condition their house, pay for the gas to get to work, to feed the family.

I understand I often come behind this microphone and hold my boards up and sound like an accountant on steroids. But these are people, and your country is poorer, substantially poorer today. All the progress we made after the 2017 reforms on the tax code, which created the miracle of economic growth and closing income inequality. The poor got less poor. They succeeded in stripping it all away. It is all gone. The thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars of increased purchasing power for the working middle class, it is all gone.

The left's policies are basically arsonists to this country's prosperity. And yet the brilliant policies of what they did a year ago when they pushed out another $1.9 trillion and required no work, asked for no work, asked for no job training. They just gave away money. And now we can't figure out why we can't get the population back into the labor force.

How do you think we are going to get productivity back?

How do you think we are ever going to get inflation back under control?

If inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods and services, guess what? You can do two things: you can have the Federal Reserve jack up interest rates and crash the economy, and that seems to be the Democrat playbook, just put people out of work, let's just push up misery.

Or we could get together in this place and find ways to help people, make our society, make business more productive. Help people have an incentive to take some of that cash and instead of going to buy a new television, put it aside for their future retirement. There are things we could do.

The policies that would get our brothers and sisters back in the labor force are absolutely key.

Do you think as Republicans we could ever get a Democrat to let us have a simple amendment, even though some of the ideas were ones we agreed upon a year ago?

It was a Republican-Democrat idea, but, today, oh God, we can't let the Republicans actually have something that might be good for society and actually may help knock down inflation because it encourages people back into the labor force, and therefore we could pump up productivity and therefore we have more goods and services to chew up the massive currency that the Democrats handed out from this place.

When I talk about the misery, it is not a snapshot, if I get one more idiot--and I am sorry, that is mean, and I probably broke decorum there. But if I get one more person who didn't show up at their basic economics class come behind these microphones and say, Well, it is transitory. No, it is not.

You have got to understand what is going on right now is these inflation numbers are becoming structural, meaning this misery is built into the next decade of your life.

When you see a chart like this, you start to understand the CPI and then the medical expenses. So you may be over here and then you come along, hit 2022, and you start to understand: How

are you going to afford your healthcare in the future?

Is the Democrats' goal: We will just subsidize it more?

I am going to show you a slide that the Democrats' approach is saying: Let's just give away more money. We will cover up our sins by giving away more money.

It turns out, we have now some great studies that say: As they pile up the debt, it also makes your life miserable and slows down your economic growth and slows down prosperity in society.

This is one we just came across, and it is a GAO study. You have got to understand what the left's policies are doing.

We need to create a whole new misery index. Forty years ago when Ronald Reagan was running against Jimmy Carter and they had high inflation and high unemployment, he created this misery index. It was just a way for people to understand the brutality the left's policies were doing to people's lives. Maybe we need to create new one.

Because this is a really weird cycle. We have high employment. We have a demographic bubble that goes against us. We are getting old very fast as a society. We have incentivized, we have financed people not to participate in the labor force, and we have handed out lots of free money that had no attachment to labor. Then you start to find out that GAO's own study basically was looking at homelessness.

Just a couple of weeks ago, we had a number of the Democrats that were giving beautiful speeches about how much they care about homelessness. I have ZIP Codes in my community where homelessness has doubled in the last year. There are some real problems in areas of Phoenix.

What happens if I come to you and say, a $100 increase in median rents was associated with a 9 percent increase in the estimated homelessness rate?

So what they are basically saying--and this is a GAO study--as rents go up, particularly in those sort of ``C apartments,'' or those basic living places--as those rents go up, for every $100, their study was finding another 9 percent increase in people displaced from housing.

Once again, the Democrats' solution will be, well, let's subsidize them, let's give out some more money, let's not do the things necessary to flatten out so we have economic stability in our society.

The homelessness, let alone what is going on on the border in my State and the fentanyl in my neighborhoods, also turns out our instinct was right--we found the study--that the inflation the left has set off is now making people displaced from their housing. They are living in alleys in my neighborhoods.

You start to look at the other misery index that they have brought to my community, the fentanyl. You have got to understand the amount of fentanyl that is pouring across my border. I have already done presentations on this. It is partially anecdotal because I don't think there is actually a public exchange. But when I have Phoenix police sergeants telling me that it is down to like $12 to get high for the day on fentanyl where a year ago it was over $100, does that tell you there is something really wrong on the border?

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

Madam Speaker, then you start to understand the other policies we are going to pay for, for decades.

Don't laugh. I have a little girl who is about to turn 7. Out of nowhere, my wife and I now have a little boy that is functionally 18 days old, one of the greatest gifts God has ever given us.

But I look at my little girl and I look at these other children that are first graders or second graders, and we are seeing some terrifying data on what the left's policy of locking down schools and--``you are going to do it through a computer screen''--are we prepared for the data we are already seeing on what is happening on standardized math scores around the country?

You do realize--this is, once again, like the inflation--it is a cascade effect that we will live with through the next decade, unless we sort of step in and fix this. This is a derivative of Democrat policies, when you start to see standardized math test scores suffering all across the country, particularly in those States and communities that engaged in the almost excessive lockdowns for theater. It was virtue signaling. The math never said it.

This is a fascinating one. Growing debt would result in a per-person income being lowered, functionally $9,000 lower, or a 10 percent reduction. What this study is trying to do is trying to understand--as the left basically says: Our solution is we are going to send someone money. What does it functionally do to future prosperity when you start to actually see what this does in future purchasing power for your income?

Now, it is a complicated formula. Part of it basically says you don't have as much capital revolving in the economy, so you don't have much investment in productivity, so the society doesn't get healthier, wealthier, better, or faster, because all of that cash is functionally financing U.S. sovereign debt. But are you prepared? Because this is what the left has brought you. As the debt skyrockets, you get to live about 10 percent poorer.

Now, stack that on the fact that you have lost a couple months of your labor. Tell me I am not wrong to be angry about the cruelty and the complete avoidance of the misery this place is creating across the country.

And then you start to look at where our future is. Remember, eventually the math wins. The pretty words here may get you reelected, but the math will always win.

This is where we are at. And you start to look at what is going on. The interest--because the piling up of debt, Social Security, Medicare, interest is now functionally crossing, in the next few years, across all defense spending and all Medicaid spending.

You understand, this is Social Security, this is Medicare, this is interest. A number of my friends on the left say: ``Well, if we cut defense.'' The green line is defense.

I know you may care more about this coming election, but we have got to stop the misery.

Just minutes ago, the Atlanta Fed's GDP calculator just announced that the second quarter looks like it wasn't 1.2 percent negative; it is 1\1/2\ percent negative. Remember your high school economic class? Even though it is not technically correct, congratulations, you brought us 2 months of negative GDP.

Please, to the majority, stop hurting people. Let some of us--I will give you the ideas. Put your own name on them.

We are better than this. It can't be all about the next election. If we don't stop this, we are about to get a decade of misery because of crappy decisions made in the last 16 months. That is just not fair.

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

Mr. Speaker, just because we are doing some organization and because we are all up against the tyranny of the clock, I yield to the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Mooney).

Rugby World Cup

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try something tonight because I am very, very concerned this place isn't paying attention to the numbers and how much trouble I believe we are in. My argument and my thesis is very simple: If I am wrong, I am wrong; but if I am right and this place didn't prepare because of the numbers we are seeing, then we will damage the people, we will damage the economics, we will damage the country, and we will damage our future. We are not taking it seriously enough on how the numbers are eroding and how fast--how fast--the numbers are eroding around us economically.

Now, originally, this was going to be a 1-hour presentation. Now it looks like I have 22 minutes because of the tyranny of the clock, so I will try not go too fast, and I promise I will dispose of some of the boards. As always, wave at me if I start rambling at high rates of speed.

This is our baseline. The problem is this chart is now a year and a half old and the numbers are much worse. The reality, 29 years from now, CBO--this

isn't some off group; this is our Congressional Budget Office-- functionally says we have $112 trillion. My back of the napkin now says $120 trillion of publicly borrowed debt in today's dollars, not inflated dollars.

Functionally, 75 percent of that debt is Medicare. Twenty-five percent is Social Security. The rest of the budget is in balance.

Well, what happens to Medicare particularly when you start having inflation like we do?

And I represent a district that has had over 11 percent inflation. I represent the district with the highest inflation in America.

Let's actually start to walk through what many of the experts are saying. And remember, I am trying to make a very simple point here. I am worried about my country. I am worried about our debt and the ability to pay, and it is skyrocketing; and then the cascade effect of how many people are getting poorer.

Remember, in the first 15 months of Democrat control here, Americans are dramatically poorer today than they were a year ago.

So let's actually walk through this. When Larry Summers--when I am coming to the floor using quotes for Larry Summers--you have got Larry Summers. In order to do what is necessary to stop inflation, the Fed is going to raise interest rates enough that the economy will slip into recession. That is one of the Democrats, at least up until he had heresy of telling the truth on Democrats' $1.9 trillion spending last year, and then you put him on the outs. But up till that moment he was Democrats' favorite economist.

But now he is basically telling us we have structurally built in so much inflation, we are going to have to have the Federal Reserve force us into recession.

Do you know what happens to people, what happens to poor people, the working middle class, the working poor when you are in a recessionary cycle, and how many years it takes for the public to get their lives back?

The economy is heading for a hard landing when we are now starting to see over and over and over the very economists that, a month ago, were saying we might be able to negotiate a soft landing. Oh, we may just tip a little bit of growth and unemployment and come back.

And now those same economists, a month later, are saying, no, we are heading toward a hard landing. We are going into recession.

By the love of the Dear Lord, I hope they are wrong. But if they are right, have you seen a single thing this body has done to prepare?

The U.S. economy is heading for a hard landing, and this one is important. We have got to understand. We are starting to see numbers now that--and we had a Member of the majority here, I think a couple of days ago, come and somewhere they threw out, oh, but there is all this excess money in the people's savings accounts. That isn't true anymore.

You do understand, the personal savings rate has plummeted from 26.6 percent a year ago, functionally, a year ago, to 4.4 in April, and it continues to vault. And understand, that personal savings rate of 4.4 is below where we were before the pandemic.

If we start to hit recession right now, our brothers and sisters out there don't have that cash reserve in their bank accounts.

Do you understand the concept of fragility?

And now we actually start to see the other thing that really genuinely terrifies me, and we are going to do a couple of slides on this. And I know I am going fast but we are up against the clock here. We have a mandatory shutdown in about 20 minutes.

Treasury yields are really starting to decline. And you have got to understand, we basically had budget projections, Congressional Budget Office and others, who had been basically building analysis of what will the debt look like? And they were using remarkably historically low interest rates.

A year ago we had expert after expert coming in front of the Ways and Means Committee and other places, Joint Economic Committee, oh, we are going to be in historically low interest rates because we are getting sold as a society. We have all these people saving. We are going to be more like Japan. Turns out they are wrong.

Remember the previous slide? The savings rate from the largesse of the giveaways, just structurally we are getting demographically older. We should be retaining. It is gone. The savings are gone.

And now we are going into an interest rate cycle where they are having to start to raise interest rates on Treasuries and everything else to attract capital from around the world. If you have been watching the U.S. dollar, you understand what is going on with this.

What happens when U.S. sovereign debt--if interest rates are 2 points historically--so we go a 30-year run, and if we are just 2 percent higher than what CBO modeled last year, 2 points, in about 25 years, I believe the math is, every dollar of tax receipts, tax revenues, goes just to pay interest. There is no more government. We are just covering our debt.

Do you understand the fragility we have done to ourselves with this inflationary cycle?

The average interest rate being paid on Federal debt--and this, I know this board is a little hard to read and hard to see. But historically, go back to the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, the period that we have modeled is way down here. This was not normal.

God forbid, if we go back to normality in U.S. sovereign interest rates, and then we are functionally running $30 trillion of debt, do you understand how much of--the left wants to spend money on these things. The right, we want to defend the military. There is no money.

And you saw the first board that basically said the massive, massive shortfall in Medicare. Remember, Medicare is mostly a general fund expenditure. It is like only 20 percent of it really is a part A trust fund, and that is gone in 5 years. And it has begun. It has begun.

And the other thing, it is more than what we borrow today. It is the amount of U.S. sovereign debt. And I didn't bring that board, and I probably should have, that has to be refinanced every month. So you may borrow $1 trillion this year, but you had to refinance 5 or 6 or $7 trillion, and every dime of that now is reset at the new interest rates.

And the higher interest costs--and I am going to do a couple of variations of this. But this is functionally, 9 budget years from now. If it is going where we think it is going, publicly held debt--you are now in the 126 percent of GDP. And most of this movement here, when you start to see this movement, it is the financing costs. It is the financing costs of this government. Because the real explosion of our demographic spending, you know, the fact that in 7 years, 22 percent of our country is 65 and older, that explosion of the baby boomers costs-- it really starts--it has already begun, but it really, that curve really starts to take off at the end of the decade; at the very time we are already pushing 126 percent of debt to GDP.

Does anyone understand the level of fragility? It is this inflationary cycle. Democrats did something horrible March last year. They didn't listen to their own economists because they were so busy living in this fantasy world of free money. Give it away. People will love us. Don't require them to participate in the economy. Now we are paying the price.

If you are trying to save for retirement; if you are a young couple trying to get ready to buy your first house, there is a technical form for it in economics. You are screwed. Because every single day that savings you have is worth less.

If you are a saver, your savings today is functionally about 7 percent less valuable than it was a year ago.

I mean, those of you who intend to retire one day, have you actually started to think about that the value of the savings you had, if you put it in safe things like bonds or savings accounts, is substantially less valuable today. Its purchasing power is less today than it was a year ago.

If this continues for a couple years, do you understand how many more years you really need to work? Do you understand how much more savings you have to have? Do you have an understanding of how much you are going to have to help your kids buy that first house? This is not a game.

Two weeks ago, I came here, and we tried to do some of the math on the board of how many seniors. If the current inflation cycle lasts for about 24 months, we basically were trying to do the math of, okay, here is what happens to seniors' savings. It falls, the value of it. It is functionally transferred to government.

What happens to the COLA? Well, the COLA and Social Security never gets close to keeping up to the actual inflation rate because of the lag problem.

That 20 percent copay you have on your healthcare, and if healthcare inflation is almost double the CPI rate, and you've got to pay that 20 percent, we were looking at math that said you could potentially double the number of seniors in poverty in a decade.

Has anyone here actually wanted to dig into that math and start to understand? This is not a game.

I know there is a desperate attempt by the administration and my Democrat colleagues, oh, this is inflation because of a war in Ukraine. This is greedy oil companies.

No, it is not. You believed in modern monetary policy, and it blew up.

Remember, much of this inflation was structurally built in before the war in Ukraine. You see it in these sorts of numbers.

By the end of 2021--and remember, that is before Russia's invasion, right?--credit card debt climbed to $856 billion. It is a 28 percent annualized increase in the fourth quarter of last year.

It had already begun. People were already borrowing on their credit cards because prices were going up so fast. So the way they were supplementing their consumption is they were building up debt.

I have showed you the board before. Savings rates have collapsed. We are now seeing credit card debt explode. When those hit up the wall-- you see what happened 3 weeks ago--consumer sentiment collapsed.

It is because all of a sudden I can't keep financing my lifestyle by using up my savings and chewing up credit card debt.

This is going on right now. Where is the concern? Does anyone here care about people and what is going on to them economically out there, outside the walls of this building?

The U.S. economy is heading for a hard landing, and this is just functionally that same thing, once again, by other sources talking about the growth of credit card debt--or, excuse me, the collapse of savings rates.

Credit card balances, once again, really, really--from other sources, saying the growth. This is a real problem.

If we were in a time of prosperity--a couple minutes ago, I was in the back room. I saw the spokesperson for the White House. These are fine economic times. Have they lost their minds? Do they own, like, a subscription to any economic journal?

To say things are fine at the same time you can see the aggregated data of savings collapsing, credit card debt exploding, interest rates going up, interest rates and sovereign debt, and now start to understand what that is going to mean in the financing of this government.

Now you have got to deal with the Democrats' policy set. The fact of the matter is, thank God, the Senate has a couple Democrats that actually may have saved the country--it is hard to say that--by stopping the Build Back Better and the just stunning amount of debt the left wanted to build on.

When you start seeing numbers saying that if the Democrats' package had passed, we functionally would have gone from about $17 trillion of publicly-held borrowing before the pandemic to $44 trillion by the end of the decade. This is if the Democrats' spending plans and borrowing plans had passed.

An absolute, absolute lie, and we have shown it over and over, oh, it is all paid for; except it wasn't. It wasn't even close.

I think in the Build Back Better, the best estimate we were able to come--and we used their math--was they were covering about 30 percent of the expenditures, and they were covering it in a way where they were going to raise certain taxes that would have actually slowed down the economic growth that we are desperate for.

Now you start to see my fear for the country. When we start to model what happens to the projected Federal debt under various interest rate scenarios--and I know I am sounding like a highly caffeinated accountant on steroids, but this is the stuff we are paid to read and understand.

We are not paid to stand behind these microphones and virtue signal. But, God, that seems to be what we do here. We do policy by virtue signaling.

Let's come here for just one moment. Here is functionally where we are at. If you start to say, okay, the mean of U.S. sovereign debt, the 30 years, the 10 years, the 20s, you know, up and down, CBO's baseline basically says we are at 202 percent of debt to GDP.

With a small increase going back to almost normality, with the historic average over the last 30 years, we are starting to hit numbers close to 300.

If we actually were slightly above historic normal, you are at 357 percent of debt to GDP. Does anyone believe this economy doesn't collapse long before that?

People run from the U.S. dollar. They dispose of U.S. debt. Can you imagine what the chaos, what the misery, what the dystopian nature of economics would be in this country if you start to run up these levels of debt.

You already saw in a previous chart we are heading toward 126 percent of debt functionally at the end of the decade. Debt to GDP. That is publicly held borrowed money.

At the same time, you are going to be up against the Social Security trust fund running out of money. Social Security recipients are heading toward a 25 to 27 percent cut. The Medicare trust fund will have already been gone for 5 years, so we still haven't figured out what is going to happen to the payments to doctors and hospitals within that.

This is not a game, and it is in front of us. If we get here a couple years from now, and all this is blowing up on us, and this place pretends they didn't know, maybe I could sit them in front of the hours I have spent behind this microphone going over the math. The math is in those binders that are sent to us two times a year.

Here is one of the things that truly terrifies me, as you start to get into the new interest rate scenarios. This isn't long term. This is basically, yeah, we start to think of what mean rates mean, and you start to add in just a 2 percent change.

That 2 percent--and this is within the current 10-year window--you start to basically add $13.4 trillion additional--well, debt, and this marginal here is just the marginal increase because you start to chase your tail.

I have a chart, and I need to actually have it graphically made so it is easier to see. We will be financing the debt that we are financing. We will be chasing our tail, and that is where we are heading.

Now the cruelty.

Mr. Speaker pro tem, may I ask, because I am looking at the clock above. Can you tell me how many minutes I have?

I promise you, I am going to use all 5 minutes.

This is the cruelty now to poor people, to the working poor, to that hardworking middle class, to those retirees. When you come to them and say, all right, let's take a look here.

Forgive the colors, but the green would have been if we had hit the 2 percent sort of Federal Reserve benchmark inflation goal. This here is where we seem to be annualizing right now, and this is some of the newest projection for the next couple years. It is about 7.4.

But when you see this bar come down, it basically means the $100 you had in 2022, if you get to 2032, so a decade, that $100 you have, if we stay at this sort of inflation rate, functionally, you have lost half of its purchasing value.

So you have saved and saved and saved and saved and saved, and if you start running--if the current interest or current inflation environment were to hang around for a decade, at the end of that decade, half the value is gone. You have lost half of your savings.

This is what is going on. What if it is just for 2 years? You start just doing it for 2 years, and you start to realize you have lost almost a quarter. Then you compound that out to you want to retire one day. You want to finance your kids' school. You want to do these things.

Do you understand how the difference of your earning power has to change just to make up for the loss of the value? I represent a community that is going through 11 percent inflation rates.

Then the last one in the last how many seconds I have. Please. Please. Someone hire an economist to talk to the White House. A gas tax holiday? I mean, you can hear the economists rolling on their backs laughing right now.

Mr. Speaker pro tem, thank you for your tolerance tonight. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do a continuation on a theme. Last week, I came to the floor and sort of walked through what inflation was doing to seniors. Today, I am going to try to walk through what it is doing to the poor, the working poor, the middle class, all of society.

One of the difficult things I am going to do, and I know it is somewhat rhetorical, is ask my brothers and sisters on the left: Are you happy with what you have accomplished?

Democrats took, functionally, power here 15 months ago. They had the House, the Senate, and they took the White House. And we got to see the playbook.

This is important because we often are so busy chasing shiny objects here, we never sort of talk about some of the economic differences and the way the left and those of us on the right view the world.

The left sort of believes in this model of consumption. Send people checks, and they will go buy stuff and, somehow, that will make society utopian. Of course, it also sets off really bad societal problems like: ``Hey, I have money. I don't have to participate in society and the economy.'' ``Hey, I have money. Let's just go buy stuff today,'' and it sets off inflation.

Those of us who actually showed up to our economics classes, we believe in this concept--it is often referred to as supply side. It is much more complicated. That is productivity in a society, when you are going to pay someone more money, when a worker is paid more money, it is, functionally, from two things: inflation, which doesn't mean they got anywhere. As a matter of fact, when you raise someone's salary because of inflation, they are often always behind the curve.

The second part is productivity. There was investment in plants and equipment to be more productive, to have that newest, best, functional product. That is a supply-side model. That is, functionally, what we accomplished in tax reform.

The other challenge I will give to our friends on the Democrat side is, take a look at our couple of years when we did regulatory reform, when we did tax reform, 2018, 2019. The middle class got much wealthier. Income inequality shrank. Food insecurity shrank. Minority populations had their best economic period in the modern economic time.

I would visit the homeless shelter in downtown Phoenix, and St. Joseph the Worker had a list of businesses that were desperate for anyone who would just show up.

Now, the contrast: The Democrats took over, and, functionally, 15 months ago, they moved $1.9 trillion of spending. I have been to the floor multiple times. I have shown you all the charts saying, isn't it fascinating that almost on the day you did this, you can actually see actual, functional, price changes in the wholesale markets? You can actually see the curve going: Hey, they passed a bill; there is inflation.

Now, some of that is not completely fair because some of it was actually already built into the policy sets the Democrats had adopted.

When they blew up the capital stack, meaning when the Biden administration took over, and they had a compliant Democrat Congress and a Democrat Senate and, particularly, the left controlling the House of Representatives, when they threatened capital markets for investing in hydrocarbons, when they threatened capital markets for investing in the transportation of hydrocarbons, moving natural gas--oh, you are going to build a pipeline. We are going to do everything so that you have to report to the SEC. We are going to basically make it so the companies, the investors in this, have to do documentation of their environmental scores.

You wonder why September a year ago you actually looked at the futures markets and saw it was already beginning--natural gas, crude prices. So, the horrible prices you are paying today at the pump, it is not because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That just moved it forward. This was already built into the Democrats' policy set.

Let's actually focus on something that is the derivative, that is the next level over from last week's. Last week, we focused substantially on what the left's policies were going to do to seniors, how many of them will be in poverty a decade from now because of inflation today.

But let's actually sort of talk through inflation through the economy because my fear is we do the headline discussion. Hey, did you see the number last week? It was 8.6. My community, it is 11 something. I happen to live in number one or number two, the Scottsdale-Phoenix area, inflation in the Nation.

But what does it actually mean? It is much more than the little number you saw saying, ``Hey, last month it was this.'' It is: What did it do to your retirement a decade from now? What did it do to your kids' and your grandkids' ability to ever purchase a house, to ever build up savings, when every single day their savings become worth less?

There is a reason inflation is the bogeyman. It is because it functionally is government. You have a government with debt the size of our economy, and we are out there taxing all of you. Whether you understand it or not, that is the scam of inflation. This is what the Democrats have set up.

Every single day, your savings becomes less, but also, the value of that massive debt the United States has becomes less because we are transferring your wealth. We are, functionally, devaluing your savings and then devaluing our debt because it is being paid for by inflated dollars.

I don't believe it is purposeful, but now that they have set it off, I promise you, there are economists in this government who basically look the other way and say let it run this way for a couple of years.

Think about it. The actual value of the debt, in constant dollars, stays the same, but--well, excuse me. It decreases because the dollar value has changed dramatically.

It is cruel. It is crushing. And the economic violence that the Democrats' failure to understand basic economics has done to the poor, the working poor, the middle class--please, just stop hurting people. It is math.

Let's take a look at this. We all got the May number, and we saw the price increases, the PCE. But when you started to look at the Consumer Price Index, 8.6--now, do you happen to remember before May, April, March, ``Oh, we have hit peak inflation.'' That is absolute crap.

Structurally, how many of you have actually looked at the gas pump this month? Have you seen where gas prices are? Put that as a factor in the inflation and tell me that prices are going down, that prices have stabilized.

There is an argument out there that we have hit a plateau. It just happens to be an outrageously high plateau. I don't see it yet.

We are in, functionally, what you call a wage-price spiral right now.

Look, this is functionally the same chart as the last one, except the point I am making on this one is we functionally moved from 1 trillion 726 billion up. Before that, we were at $1.3 trillion of household savings. The savings basically has collapsed.

Is anyone talking about this? Remember, that was supposed to be the big Democrat talking point is, yes, we gave away a lot of money, but, look, we shored up people's bank accounts. It is gone. It is gone. And it wasn't done through productivity. It wasn't done through investments that lead us into a greater future.

The left keeps on saying, well, you invest in green energy. Fine. But that is not what you did. You basically adopted almost every policy-- you do realize in the 15 months the Democrats have been in charge, we are burning a hell of a lot more coal today.

The 2021 number is 23 percent more coal was burnt to produce U.S. electrical energy because they blew up the natural gas markets. They made the United States dirtier, according to the greenhouse gas calculations. So even on that they screwed it up.

And then here is sort of the punch line of why I am here tonight. You see the chart, you see the red, the red line? Is that red or maroon? Let's go with red. Do you see this chart right here? That is for folks under $40,000 a year. And red basically means severe hardship. They are in economic stress.

This number here has exploded under the 15 months of Democrat control. This is what functionally they have caused by inflation, by everything around them. They have taken almost modest quartile of incomes, and they are brutalizing the poor. They are just brutalizing the working poor.

Now, those folks over $100,000, yeah, but most of it is no real hardship. Their income category, they are doing not fine, but better. But you get down to $40,000 and less. So if you ever let someone on the left tell you they are the ones who care about the poor and the working poor and the working middle class, they may care. They may care, but they brutalize them by their policies.

Look, it is in the math. Once again, the math doesn't lie. The math will set you free. But we seem to do policy by virtue signaling here, not by some of the most compassionate, which is do the right thing.

You have a model. Take a look what we accomplished in 2018, 2019, first quarter of 2020. The number of our brothers and sisters that were less poor, it was one of the most amazing economic revivals in U.S. history. Yes, we had the pandemic. Yes, it was miserable.

But think about this. Almost every bit of those gains are gone, and not gone because of the pandemic. They are gone because of the last 15 months of horrible economic policy that set off inflation, has set off optionality, has flatlined productivity, and actually really screwed up the next decade of our economic future.

These get a little more difficult to show, but basically you are trying to sort of demonstrate when we hit the Biden inauguration, so this is the moment where Democrats had absolute power here, and how quickly the financial cushion disappeared. Now, a lot of this disappeared because you have the occasion where we are going to hand you a bunch of cash, but we are also going to set off inflation. It turns out the inflation chews up the cash a lot faster than we are handing out free money.

As of April 2022, the average retirement benefits--now, this is going to make complete sense, and in the scale, the reality is much, much worse, but we are trying to do a calculation of if you are getting retirement benefits, how much are you losing? How much is it changing? Our first calculation was about $162.

Now I need you to add a couple more months to that. What we are starting to try to model is every month people on a fixed income, how much poorer are they getting. And that is also adjusting, say, they have COLAs, so they are going up, but the actual purchasing power, even adjusted with the COLA, they are falling, they are getting poorer every day.

Now we are finally starting to get some of the data. The problem is we are about 3 months behind on trying to do hard calculations.

Now you start to look, and this one is really important. I don't have a brilliant way to try to lay this out. When we look at different demographics and what they consume, a young family is going to have different consumption than a couple in their seventies. This one is going to be much more medical costs, and this one might be education and a new bicycle. So what happens when you start to realize that food energy, when you start to see it moving in the charts, but then you come down here and start to see medical services, where they are in the inflation graph, and then you try to adjust them to populations. Then you realize you are ending up with this crazy sort of bell curve of misery, where older Americans are getting crushed, and younger families are getting crushed because they don't have assets that are inflating. And this is what is going on.

I don't know why there is not a fire drill around here. I mean, what would it take for those of us as Republicans to basically turn to the Democrat majority and the White House and Speaker Pelosi and the left who is in charge here and say, we actually care about Americans. We are willing to work with you. Let's actually do the fire drill. Let's actually do the things that set off productivity. Let's fix expensing on the Tax Code. Let's do this, let's do that. What can we do instead of just letting the Federal Reserve jack up interest rates and put people out of work? And that way Democrats can blame the Federal Reserve and not their own policies because they need deniability.

Our job is to make people's lives freer, economically more stable, better, but also someone like myself--and, yes, I have a 6-year-old daughter, and my wife and I are the same age. It is the greatest thing that ever happened. Yes, I am an old dad. Greatest thing that has ever happened. What is my moral obligation to her future? Seriously.

For every person who on occasion actually shows up and works here, what is your moral obligation? What is your moral obligation to your parents and your grandparents but also to these kids? We already have this demographic curve that is going to make fixing inflation much more difficult, and we are basically shifting.

If you are functionally under 40 years old, and you are still voting for the left, please, please go to an economics class. Go buy a calculator. Understand the amount of misery that has been

shifted onto your future. My back-of-the-napkin math basically says for someone who basically is getting ready to graduate college today, when they hit their peak earning years, their tax rate will have to be double what today's is just to maintain today's benefits. Congratulations.

Look, Mr. Speaker Pro Tempore, I still have a number of charts, but basically they are all saying the same thing. You get to when the Democrats took power, and just what they did in blowing up affordability in our communities, blowing up affordability, productivity in the country, and it was Democrat policies because it is more than just what we voted on here.

It was basically threatening investors. It was threatening: The SEC is going to come and start to look at your investments. It is threatening. They used the regulatory state, they used the up and down, even the virtue signaling within businesses. I mean, how many businesses basically sold their souls so Democrats wouldn't say mean things about them?

You start to look at family economic insecurity, and it just has exploded again since the Democrats took power.

Mr. Speaker, and to whoever is interested, I am blessed to be the senior Republican for the Joint Economic Committee, so I have access to some very smart people, and we are just doing our best to try to understand the numbers but also what we can do with the numbers.

Last week I became the senior Republican for Social Security, and, you know, you are reading the actuary report, and then you are teaming it up with the actuary report for Medicare, and you start to realize the scale. The numbers here are stunning. The numbers of zeros.

And we will get the clown show around this place that says, well, if you fix waste and fraud; well, if you get rid of foreign aid; hey, if you just tax rich people some more, everything will be fine. None of those things are close to being true.

The scale of the problem that was already built into just our demographics and our promises, remember, the shortfall for Social Security and Medicare when you pile on our current debt is $120 trillion, and that functionally hits in 29 years, and that is adjusted to today's dollars. Add in inflation, and the distortion.

So my last comment I really want to try to share is one of our projects we are working very hard in our office is if the Democrats' inflation continues for 24 months, how much of our society will be in poverty? How many seniors, how many younger people because of the distortion? They functionally have wiped out all the amazing economic progress we made in 2018 and 2019 and the first quarter of 2020.

Congratulations, you hated the last President, you hated the Republicans and what we did for the economy. Fine, you got rid of it. You wiped it all out.

But understand, in just 15 months, we have whole regions, whole populations, whole segments of our society that are several percent-- sorry to put it in a percent--poorer today. It just doesn't go away, and you can't just do another transfer payment to make it up.

Turns out who you vote for does make a difference. Now, America gets to pay a price for what they did in the last couple of elections. But they were lied to. They basically thought virtue signaling was policy, and it wasn't. It was about winning elections.

At some point, Mr. Speaker pro tempore, the calculator tells the truth. Mr. Speaker pro tempore, at some point, we should be judged by our accomplishments for the American people. If that accomplishment is misery, be held to it. If it is prosperity, take joy in it. But we need to step up and demonstrate that we actually understand what is going on in our communities and that we are willing to step up and try to fix it instead of talk away from it.

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

Madam Speaker, I appreciate you and the staff's patience as I am racing up the elevator.

We are going to do something that is new to me today. And please wave at me if I start machine gun speaking.

And I have gotten teased about it a bit, so this week, I got to become the ranking member for the Republicans, that is sort of the senior Republican over Social Security in the Ways and Means Committee. And it is an area I have had a fascination with since I got here because, you know, it is $1 trillion a year, and it is running out of money.

So, the last few times I have come behind these microphones, I have turned to my brothers and sisters on the left and begged them to stop doing what they are doing because we have showed board after board after board after board of how many people they are hurting, the working poor, the poor, the working middle class. It is just being destroyed by Democrat policies.

And I appreciate the virtue signaling. I understand maybe for many of them they didn't understand the most basic economics of what inflation was going to do and crushing people.

But now, all of a sudden, I have the responsibility--I take this really seriously. How do you save Medicare? How do you save Social Security?

And it is not a game, and it is not just little adjustments here. You talk to groups, even fellow Members, and they somehow think a little adjustment here, waste and fraud. A little adjustment here. We are talking trillions.

Remember, our best math right now is functionally, over the next 30 years, just Social Security and just Medicare, when you add them together, and then the financing costs, are close to $120 trillion short. So functionally, every dime of future debt is the shortfall of Medicare and Social Security.

It is demographics. We got old. At the end of this decade, 22 percent of us are 65 and older. A country like Japan, it is 30 percent. Japan has dramatically higher savings rates.

At the end of this decade, 22 percent of our neighbors will be 65 or older. And we functionally have nothing set aside for that.

Medicare is moving to being 100 percent general fund. The Medicare trust fund, the part A, the hospital portion, we got a good number a couple of days ago, so now it is gone in about 5 years. And we have no idea how we replace that because the model right now, as it is written in statute, is hey, just stop paying doctors and hospitals. That is going to work really well, isn't it?

And we will see here, the actuarial report for Social Security got extended out a bit. But functionally, in a decade, our parents, our grandma and grandpa, the model is at this moment, 27 percent cut. And that isn't the true story. It is much, much, much darker.

And I am going to do my very best here. And look, I have got to be honest; I am only partially through starting to dig through the numbers that Keith handed me, and we are trying to understand the Medicare actuaries and the Social Security actuaries. They just published their report, but it is based on data that may be as much as a year out of date. They have missed much of the inflation cycle so--one of the benchmarks was February this year. Well, think about what has happened to inflation since then.

And I am going to do my best right now to present the cruelty, just the cruelty of what the left has done to the poor, but particularly to the elderly poor.

And once again, I will give them credit. I don't think it was meant, but there is a misunderstanding here of what inflation does, because it is not just today. It is not just this year.

We are trying to build a model here of how many of our brothers and sisters who are older at the end of this decade are going to be living in poverty because of what this place did this last year.

So my best model right now is about 22 percent of our brothers and sisters who are 65 and over are living in poverty today. And it is a back of the napkin math, and I may be wrong. God, I hope I am wrong.

But if inflation stays substantially above the mean for a few more years, it is going to be a third of our retirees who are going to be living in poverty. This is what they did.

And so, in past weeks I have come behind the mike and said, here are ideas to knock down inflation. If inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, let's make more goods.

Right now, it is the passive approach. We had Janet Yellen in front of the Ways and Means Committee yesterday, and it is basically: Well, we are going to let the Federal Reserve jack up interest rates, put a bunch of people out of work. We are just going to raise the misery, but it is their problem. It has nothing to do with the crappy economic policies that have been pushed through this body.

How about some things the left and the right could agree upon? Instead of just spending trillions and trillions of dollars, how about incentives and mechanisms to create productivity because when you make more stuff, that is the most elegant way to knock down inflation. Of course, that would mean for our brothers and sisters on the Democrat side to accept something called supply-side economics.

First, we need a little bit of a reference here. These numbers are almost 2 years out of date because we haven't gotten a CBO updated number yet, which I believe should have already happened. Projected 2051, so that is basically 29 years from now.

Outlays as a percentage of GDP--this is policy. This should be driving every bit of policy around here. We chase shiny objects all day long, but we are basically saying, hey, Social Security and Medicare, the dedicated revenues, the revenues we expect to be getting in over that 29 years are going to be about 6 percent of GDP. Outlays will almost be 21 percent of GDP. The rest of the budget, revenues actually exceed outlays.

Once again, we have to get this through our heads. Medicare, Social Security, the baseline from a couple of years ago was $112 trillion. My math says it is about $120 trillion of borrowing. The rest of the budget is in balance.

Why isn't this what we talk about every single day? Don't we care about the 22 percent of our brothers and sisters who are going to be 65 or older by the end of this decade? Do we have not a moral, an ethical, an economic obligation to fix a system that is collapsing and has been collapsing for years?

You have all heard the saying that it is the third rail. I have been teased by some of my colleagues here. ``Schweikert, you are an idiot,'' which may be absolutely true. ``Your willingness to take on Social Security, have you decided to end your political career?''

You can't get in front of microphones and tell people the truth about the math. They don't want to hear that. They have been lied to for decades, and they believe the lies because the lies are comfortable. You can't show them the slides of what is actually about to happen.

Yet, how do you fix something unless you admit there is a problem? This place is like an alcoholic who is unwilling to take that first step at their 12-step meeting, admit they have a problem. If this board doesn't tell you the problem, I don't know what will.

This board is 2 years old. Once again, I don't have an updated number from CBO. This shows $112 trillion of borrowing solely from Social Security and Medicare. Obviously, Medicare is functionally three- quarters of the problem. Social Security is a quarter of the problem. But that is $112 trillion, 2-year-old number, my current number, $120 trillion of borrowing in today's dollars, so inflation baseline dollars. The inflation that has exploded in the last year because of Democrat fiscal policies makes these numbers much uglier.

Just as a reference to understand why I am so concerned and why I am mad this place isn't on fire with almost a level of panic over these numbers, when you see this scale of debt, in a couple of decades, if the mean borrowing cost is 2 points higher, in about 20, 25 years, every dime of tax revenues, tax receipts, every dime is just the interest cost.

Do you get that? Do you realize the level of fragility we have given to this country? Do you care about people, care about kids? Do you care about seniors? Then this should be the fixation because this is real math. Unless somehow the Democrats have come up with a way to repeal the laws of mathematics, this is what we are up against.

Yes, you will be booed when you get up in front of an audience and say: ``Hey, do you realize with Social Security, in about a decade, you will get about a 27 percent cut? That is not even calculating the dramatic increase in your Medicare portion of your premiums that for many seniors will eat up every dime of their Social Security check.''

This is real. It is the biggest thing going on in our country at this moment, but it is like a slow-moving avalanche coming at us. It is going to wipe us out, but it is not here yet, so let's worry about something else.

Just to emphasize a little bit, Medicare faces a $78 trillion cash shortfall over the next--and this is now 29 years, and the number is worse now. Once again, I just haven't gotten an update because these are `21 numbers. We should already be starting to project the `22 and `23 numbers. But do you see that?

We have about $20 trillion coming in in payroll taxes and almost $98 trillion in projected expenditures, and this is before the inflation cycle. Medical inflation, baseline inflation, is going to drive these numbers up dramatically.

Maybe this is too much of a current snapshot, but you are starting to see it. Everyone just got--if you are on Medicare, you just saw it, or you just got it. Functionally, your healthcare costs just bounced up for part B $250 a person, $500 a couple. The dirty number is that that is not even close to what is coming. That is what you just got. You are going, whoa, it went up $500. But functionally, 2 years from now, we may get as much as an 8 percent COLA because, remember, the COLA adjustment on Social Security is about 24 months behind. It takes that long to get the calculations.

A community like mine--I represent the Phoenix-Scottsdale area--has the highest inflation in the Nation. My area is over 11 percent inflation. But they will do a national mean, which will probably be closer to 8-something, and you are not going to get that for a couple of years. You are going to get 3-plus, 3\1/2\-plus this year. You are going to get to live poorer, substantially poorer, for the next couple of years, and the COLA is not going to keep up.

The basket that is used to calculate doesn't keep up, and it has already begun. The eating up of how you survive in retirement has already begun. The money is disappearing. We are working on this. This is a work in progress.

This is a dangerous speech for me to be giving because I am going to anger a number of people who don't want to know the truth. I am going to anger a bunch of my brother and sister Members here who are terrified their voters find out.

The fact of the matter is, I will be back in a couple of weeks revising these numbers, but this is from some of the best literature we found when I found out I was going to be taking on the responsibility over Social Security.

What this board is basically saying is this is your cost. If you are 65 years old today, and you are stepping into retirement, we expect your out-of-pocket to have gone up about $85,000. It is an assumption that healthcare inflation remains at 1.5 percent over the Consumer Price Index for 2 years. This is the change you get if it is 2 years.

The problem is my Joint Economic Committee is saying the structure of inflation may be with us for a decade. Now, it may not be running at like my neighborhood, 11 percent, or your neighborhood, probably 8 percent, for another 7 to 10 years, but it is going to be higher than normal. We are having to rebuild all of our models.

What does this mean, though, if it is just for 2 years? If you are 45 years old, the change in your cost when you hit retirement that you are going to have to be contributing to the healthcare portion--so you get your Social Security check, the portion that is put off for the healthcare, for Medicare. You are 45 years old; just these 2 years of the above inflation. It is a quarter million dollars, and that is out of your pocket.

We keep talking about, well, here are your fuel prices today. Fine. Be outraged about that. You should be. But understand the cascade effect, that we are going to drive so many people into poverty through the rest of this decade and at the end of this decade, and this place is silent.

We are just silent on the damage we are doing to people's survival because

the shiny object is what is at the gas pump right now. You should be enraged. The economic devastation, the misery the left has foisted on this country--and I am sorry. I am being a bit of a jerk, but they did it, and they were warned.

They were warned by my kind. Well, they were warned by my kind, but they were warned by their own economists. Yes, they have about a dozen economists that said, go ahead and spend the trillions. It won't make a difference. Please stop listening to them.

But you did have a number of your leftist economists who said: Don't do this. You are going to hurt people. But it buys us votes, and they did it. Congratulations.

This is your future, and this is only if the increased inflation lasts for 2 years. What if my model is correct, and it lasts throughout the decade?

This isn't my math. This is some literature we are finding out there. We haven't had time to break it down and do our best vetting, but these all came from big boy researchers, well respected. This is a little hard to get our heads around, but we are going to do our best here.

Short-term healthcare inflation can have devastating retirement consequences. What they are saying is with the spike today in healthcare costs, you turn 65, you start getting your Medicare, you start getting your Social Security, the change in cost you have for the next 20 years is in these numbers.

They are basically trying to say, what happens if you are 65, you have 1 year of the current medical inflation, and this is underestimating it. The latest number I had as of this week was in the high 16s for healthcare inflation. This one is 15.8.

But just the increase in your healthcare cash; this isn't your Medicare payment. This is cash coming out of your Social Security check, out of your bank account. So, you are 65. It is going to be an additional $72,000.

But if you are 45 today, and this increased inflation is only for 2 years, it is $434,000 of additional spending you need to be prepared for in your retirement. This is the math.

Just a little bit of healthcare inflation today. So if the baseline is 8.3--that is my prediction for tomorrow's May number. We will see how accurate I am. Healthcare is almost double the baseline inflation.

If it ran at that for 2 years and then went back to the mean, and you are 45 years old today, so you retire 20 some years from now, the change in the baseline of your future cost is now approaching a half million dollars. Well, in this case, $434,000. Let's be a little more accurate.

Is anyone here talking about this? How many people, with the savings you have right now, with just trying to survive buying that tank of gas today, are going to be able to save enough money for future expenses? That Social Security check you have basically disappears, shrinks away, because you are now having to deal with the inflationary costs.

That is why my back of the napkin math or back of the envelope math, if I can use the colloquialism, is starting to say, oh, my God, I hope my math is wrong. But where this is going right now, I think we are heading toward about a third of our retirees being in poverty in a decade.

Remember, Social Security was an antipoverty program. But, once again, crappy public policy here by the left, and this is the decades and decades of future misery they brought to us. Does anyone on the other side own a calculator or actually showed up at their economics class?

Social Security income functionally gets erased by rising healthcare costs. Now, this is what brought me to do this on the floor. This last weekend, I had inklings I was going to get the responsibility over Social Security for the Republicans, and so I don't sleep well. The only way I fall asleep often is I sit up and read, and I try to read stuff that is actually important to this job.

I came across this article that didn't have good math in it, but it was functionally alluding that the healthcare inflation--and this is beyond just all the other inflation of just trying to buy food and pay for your rent and everything else, just healthcare inflation--was going to destroy, was going to consume many, many, many seniors' entire Social Security check.

I don't get credit for this. My staff actually found this. But let's actually go back to our 45-year-old, this bottom line. This is for a couple--because they found this on someone else's literature, so I can't take credit for the math. A couple, they are going to get about $1.153 million, $1,153,000 in Social Security benefits when that 45- year-old couple basically enters their Social Security benefits.

Okay. But with the inflation that has been built in--and this is, I think, only a couple years of inflation, but the calculation over 20 years, with the change of inflation, so they are going to get $1,153,000 of Social Security benefits, but they are going to spend functionally out of their pocket $1,543,000 in healthcare costs, and that is with Medicare.

Does anyone see a problem?

So you start looking at the lifetime retirement healthcare costs when it is 1.8. Based on cost projection, two years of inflation cost projection, functionally their healthcare costs in this model are 156 percent. So every dime of their Social Security check, plus another 56 percent that they are going to have to find other resources to pay for, just to cover their healthcare because of inflation.

The couple that turns 65 today--or actually a month or so ago when this calculation was done. Remember, this calculation under calculates inflation. This was done almost back in February with those numbers, and inflation turned out to be much worse. That couple, as a mean across the country, is going to get about $968,000 in Social Security benefits over what we calculate as the average mortality numbers lifetime. Seventy-one percent of their Social Security income is going to healthcare costs driven by, substantially driven by this increase in inflation.

So if anyone is listening right now, God, I hope I am wrong. Start saving every dime you can because this government's Democrat policies from this last 2 years have absolutely screwed you over. We are going to spend the rest of the decade fixing the damage that was done in the last 15 months. The math is the math.

If I am being hyperbolic, I am doing it because it is important. I don't want to live in a country where a third of my seniors are in poverty because of a decision they made a year ago.

This is the actuarial report on Social Security and Medicare when the trust funds are gone, and there is a problem with their math, and that is it was done on February's baseline. Inflation is dramatically higher than what we thought the February baseline was. Now, the economists are saying it is going to last much longer, meaning these dates are going to erode.

But functionally, you are 66 months, according to the actuary report, and Medicare part A, the hospital portion, is gone. So functionally, you go into your hospital, and your doctor doesn't get paid to see you. How is that going to work out? Seriously, who is going to pay?

The new number is about 150 months for Social Security. I think that is wildly optimistic in this inflationary time. But the baseline model, how are you going to do it? Do you plan to live for another 10 years? Okay. Whether in those 10 years you are on Social Security or you are heading into retirement, are you prepared to have not 25, but 27 percent of your Social Security check disappear? At the same time, I am showing you charts saying, hey, you are 65 today. Because of medical inflation--if it lasts where we are at, 2 years--76 percent of your Social Security money is going to healthcare costs, and we are also then going to reach over and reduce your Social Security check by 27 percent.

Does anyone else see a problem coming?

This place doesn't own a calculator, and yet as I used to get teased when I was a child, the math always wins. But this place will avoid the math because it is hard. It is the sort of thing that gets you unelected. It is the sort of thing that makes your voters mad.

It is your absolute moral obligation to fix these programs without lying.

In a future presentation, I am going to come back here, and I am going to

also overlay the private pension systems, the multi-employer pension systems, all the other shortfalls, and if any Member here uses the words ``retirement security'' and isn't bathing in fixing these numbers, they should be ashamed of themselves.

Madam Speaker, I apologize for the amount of caffeine I have had today, but I am not here to be hyperbolic. I am here to beg of this place to stop chasing the daily shiny object that may get us some press, get us a few minutes on cable television. This is the hard work we are elected to fix, and it is also our moral obligation to save the future.

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

Madam Speaker, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``nay'' on rollcall No. 233.

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Wilson (FL) (Neguse)

Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do the impossible. We are going to do like 20 boards in 30 minutes. Just please wave at me if I start rambling at hyper rates of speed.

One of the reasons for today's presentation, it is somewhat of a follow-up from a couple of weeks ago, but also somewhat of just this frustration of statements from our brothers and sisters on the left, from the President, even the comments this week of: Okay, Republicans, where is your plan?

Have you seen the numbers of bills that we have offered to take on inflation, to promote economic growth, to promote fairness? None of them can get a hearing around here.

My point comes to something very, very simple. We intend to judge the

left over what you have accomplished the last 15 months, and we will make it to 2 years.

Are the poor better off, the working poor better off, the middle class better off? Is the environment better off? Is the world safer and healthier?

Then, we expect you to turn around and judge us when we had the majority and the White House. Take a look at 2017, '18, '19, and we will bookend the pandemic, and judge us. I believe you will see the policies we brought to this floor, to this country, made the poor less poor, the working poor substantially less poor, the middle class much more prosperous, and it didn't have the cruelty that Democrat policy has executed the last 15 months.

Look, I am not being hyperbolic. It is a crappy environment out there.

It is just exhausting having to do this every couple of months because of the willingness just not to tell the truth here by my brothers and sisters on the left.

Once again, tax reform was done at the very end of 2017. Speaker after speaker, the Speaker herself, came to the floor and told us how this was a giveaway to the rich, that it was going to crash revenues, that we are heading to recession. None of that was true.

We ended up having a couple of years there before the pandemic--and I am going to show you, if we hadn't had it, how miserable the pandemic economics would have been.

The fact of the matter is, when we passed tax reform, corporate tax receipts--we don't call them revenues; we call them receipts if you are on the Ways and Means Committee--went up 75 percent, far beyond CBO's early projections.

The fact of the matter is individual income taxes were up 27\1/2\ percent, and 80 percent of that was paid by the top 10 percent.

Bit of trivia, Mr. Speaker pro tem, and to my Democrat colleagues. Our tax reform was more progressive, meaning the top tier of income earners were paying a higher percentage, a larger percentage, of the Federal income tax burden than the previous tax system.

Stop lying about what we did because what we did was pretty darn amazing. When you think about just the economic effects, income inequality shrank, food insecurity shrank, and we did it without inflation.

Look, I accept there is a huge divide here. Democrats don't particularly like Republican policies. We obviously don't like theirs. Fine.

Do you care about poor people? Do you care about the middle class? Then step up and just steal our ideas. We will be happy to let you take them if it is good for America. But the crap that has been moved here in the last 15 months has just been cruel.

Let's go back and, one more time, take a look at the actual math. If you take a look at the middle income, what was happening in that mean of our country--and this is adjusted to, I believe, 2019, so it is all consistent.

You take a look at that growth, the opportunity, and you take a look at what happened when we did tax reform, just the incredible growth of income. This is real purchasing power. This is adjusted for inflation.

The fact of the matter is, take a look at these miserable years here during the Obama administration, where we basically just flatlined, and we stayed there.

The 2008 recession was brutal. Why did it take years and years and years and years and years just to get back to mean?

The fact of the matter is regulatory policy, tax policy, and trade policy make a difference, and you have to basically embrace something. Maybe this is where some of the left and right divide is.

As a conservative, I believe growth is moral. I believe my daughter and the next generation of Americans deserve to live better tomorrow and the next year and the next decade better than they did yesterday. Instead, the policies of this administration and this Congress have made America poorer.

Once again, you take a look at what was being said here. That blue is what all the pretax reform trend line was. This is where we were going. We were all excited that we might get slightly over 2 percent GDP growth.

Understand, when we talk about gross domestic product growth, it is a big deal because it builds on itself. It is like a staircase. When you get another 1 percent here, 1 percent may not seem like a lot to you, but it becomes the new basis for the next year and the next year. When you start to look at that over a decade, it starts being remarkable amounts of wealth that is distributed throughout society.

The red is what we accomplished by fixing the regulatory and tax system around here.

The fact of the matter is, if you care about the middle class, if you care about the working poor, if you care about this society, if you care about our future, embrace the truth. Embrace that it worked. If you want, say you could have done it better. But the fact of the matter is, what we accomplished worked.

This is taking a little bit to geekdom, and I am sorry about that, but how horrendous the Democrats' forecasts were on accuracy, and how, when Republicans took over the majority, we functionally nailed it.

As a matter of fact, for 2018, we substantially underestimated the amount of growth we were going to accomplish with our regulatory and tax reform.

I know this may not seem important, but it is because, once again, in this place, we play this game: ``Well, CBO says this.'' But for some reason, when the Democrats are in charge of this place, CBO gives these projections, and we never get there. When Republicans are in charge, CBO gives us projections, and we touch them or exceed them.

Then, we turn around and see the President and Democrat leadership talk about it as if it was some dystopian time. It is just this bizarre place, being judged by what we actually accomplished just as we intend to judge you and what you have done to this country.

This one is actually important because we are going through this right now. There is an argument that inputs in inflation is basically it is too many dollars--simplistic--too many dollars chasing too few goods and services.

You can do what the Federal Reserve is doing right now, which is basically squeeze dollars, squeeze liquidity out of our society. It will drive us into a recession, and it will raise misery, and people will lose their jobs. But that is what is being required to get out the excess liquidity that the Democrats here--not a single Republican voted for it--did to this country.

There is a reason Larry Summers begged you not to do it. You know, big-time Republican Larry Summers, right? He begged you not to do it. You did it anyway, and you set it off. You basically took a flaming log and threw it on the kindling. Then you run around and say, ``Well, it was Russia.'' I am going to show you over and over here that it was going on before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I am going to show you that your policies, for years, are what set off energy prices. But one of the inputs, if you want to tamp down inflation, that we as Members of Congress can do is incentivize society. You incentivize industry to make more stuff.

Some of the ways you do that is you get more of our brothers and sisters to participate in the economy. The fact of the matter is that was also one of the miracles that we accomplished with tax reform, the number of folks that came from the sidelines and came back into work because it became profitable for their lives, because there were opportunities.

Once again, is growth moral? Because what we accomplished was pretty remarkable.

I know it may be hard to try to get your head around some of these charts, but the fact of the matter is the spike we saw of people coming back out of retirement and going back into the labor force and young people, I guess, dropping their video games and going into the labor force, it didn't set off inflation. In many ways, what it did was help set off productivity so we had those amazing wealth effects there, particularly in 2018, 2019, the first quarter of 2020 before the pandemic.

Look where we are at today. Today, we are now seeing articles that labor force participation--our numbers of brothers and sister who are going to choose not to participate in the economy, who are going to take early retirement, not come back into labor--continues to leave us flatlined, leaving our country with the solution the left is going to give us for inflation is to let

the Federal Reserve drive us into a recession. That is all you are giving us right now.

This chart is absolutely fascinating for folks. Remember how Democrats believed they made people's lives so much better by functionally handing out cash?

Did you know that our brothers and sister had a hell of a lot more cash in their bank accounts before COVID? The amount of economic growth that was happening over here--they weren't spending it as fast as they got it. It was actually starting to go into their future retirement, their retirement security, the money for their kids' education.

The fact of the matter is the chart is the chart. These are the increases in household income, household checking deposits for the lowest 20 percent of quartiles. I despise that term. The fact of the matter is these are our brothers and sisters who are considered to be at the bottom 20 percent of the income quartiles. You see this dramatic change in how much money they had in their checking accounts? Over here you can see--here is the blip where we sent out COVID money, and here is where they are today. It is gone. As a matter of fact, it is now lower than it was pre-COVID.

This is the Democrats' great success in the Keynesian stimulus model of handing out cash. Our brothers and sisters have less cash in the bank than they did before. When we were doing it through economic growth and not handouts, our brothers and sisters out there--if you care about the poor and the working poor, you made them poorer.

If I get one more Democrat here who comes behind the microphone, and says: Well, energy prices are because of the invasion. Come on. We all know that isn't true.

How many times have there been votes in this House and every single Democrat voted no to construction of new refineries, no construction to even provide permits for new refineries, no new drilling? We have vote after vote after vote and this has been going on for decades.

You have all heard this discussion of when the Biden administration took over and they functionally took their regulatory apparatus, and said, you give a loan, you are a pension system, and you invest in hydrocarbons. We need you now to file new disclosures on what you did for the environment and greenhouse. What are your risk levels?

You functionally basically created this chilling effect for what we call the capital stack, the access to capital to extract and refine hydrocarbons. It sounds a little geeky. Let's make this simple.

It is not because of the cancellation of the pipelines; it is a little bit. It is not because of the lack of leases; it is a little bit. It is substantially because in 2020 you had the collapse of the useful hydrocarbons because everyone is staying home. If you remember, we went to negative oil prices. Lots and lots of fields and lots of delivery systems shut down. A year later, we desperately need those back into production.

The Democrats have taken over everything and now they make it damn hard to get any money. They make it damn hard to put that field back into production. What did you think was going to happen?

I am going to show you in a couple of charts--it is a couple charts away--the pricing that we are paying today for heating and cooling our homes, for filling up our vehicle, was coming before the invasion. What Russia is doing to Ukraine just brought it forward by a few months, but you could already see it in the futures market.

Don't you remember last fall we were having discussions here on the floor about how people were going to heat their homes this winter? Once again, you are going to have the President and Democrats say, well, it is Putin's inflation. It is just not true. It is Democrat policy.

The fact of the matter is--think about this--when we functionally hit 2019 and going into the first part of 2020, we were energy independent. We functionally had accomplished the miracle that we had not seen for 30, 40, 50 years. Imagine if we had that today? It shows you how much damage the left has been able to accomplish in 15 months.

There is a great irony here. One of the pledges of the Democrats when they were running in the last election and the Biden campaign, and even the people that ran against me--we are going to clean the environment. We actually care. We are going to deal with greenhouse gases. Their lack of understanding of basic economics--they do all these things, they screw up the capital stack, they screw up the ability to extract natural gas, natural gas goes way up in price, and power plants all across the country have to convert back to coal.

Congratulations, guys. Last year, America burned 23 percent more coal because you raised the price of the dramatically cleaner natural gas so much they had to convert back to coal. So when the environmental party--at least the party that claims to be. But if you look at the math, the Republicans' ability to get natural gas to the market cheaply and efficiently is what got us so darn close to those Paris accord numbers, just organically, because we believed in economics.

The control freaks here that thought they controlled the energy markets--sorry, guys, you made it much worse. You made it much worse. The math is the math. This is math coming from the Democrat administration admitting they made it much worse.

Once again, if you take a look at the futures market--and this is long before the invasion--when you see these spikes, this is almost a year ago, it was already coming because the constraint on supplies was already built into the policy of Democrat control of this government.

The misery today--even though there is going to be this desperate attempt to say it is Putin's inflation and Putin's gas prices--it is just not true. Some of us were on this floor last October saying that we were already seeing this in the futures market. The only thing the invasion did is just brought it forward by a few months.

You wonder why you have inflation. Let's see. Left policies blew up the energy market. Left policies financed massive amounts of liquidity and the incentive to functionally stay home and not be part of a productive society. Great Democrat policies again.

Take a look at the misery index--which actually I should do a calculation. I should go back and try to figure out--in this misery index we would probably just do inflation and how many people are living on the street and how many kids are dying of fentanyl overdose because the border is open. That may be one of our coming projects.

The fact of the matter is, the CPI calculation--and this is just from the last couple of weeks--is now well over 14 percent, and we are seeing food, energy, shelter coming close to 20 percent. These are the core components. This is year over year. This isn't the little transitory--do you remember how we were promised over and over by the administration and my Democrat colleagues that it was transitory? This is year over year. This is your version of transitory?

If you want to make Americans poorer, what are some of the cruelest things you can do? Let's go back to our working poor. What are the two things you do to crush the working poor? Inflation and open up the border. You flood the population with individuals with similar skill sets and then you make the core things you need: food, rent and fuel-- if you are rich, which we know the Democratic Party now has become substantially an elite party. If you take a look at your money, it is rich coastal people that write the checks. It is what it is.

That working class, particularly the poor working class, are just getting their heads kicked in. The only solution we get from the left is, well, let's send them more checks, even though that worked brilliantly a year ago.

If you start to look at fuel, 58.8, gasoline up 43 percent. Then you start taking a look at changes in food and shelter. In my community, I represent a population that has had the highest inflation now for almost a year and a half. The calculation that just came out last week, my community just suffered 11 percent year-over-year inflation. Last January, the year-over-year inflation was 10.9. My community has gotten poorer, substantially poorer, because of Democrat policies.

Now you start to think about that middle class, how much of their income actually goes to buy fuel or, in this case, buy food? You get the con job here saying, well, the core CPI says this. Okay.

When you adjust core CPI, the consumer price index, and you start to think about individuals of--if I am in the working middle class, that hardworking middle class, or even some of the lower quartiles, the amount of your income that goes to food, fuel and shelter, you start to realize across the country that it is not 8.1 or whatever that number is that was the national average, it is over 10.

It is folks with assets, like a bunch of the Members here. They own houses, they own a second house, they own a vacation home. They are invested in real estate equities. They own some REITs holdings. They are doing fine. All those adjust with inflation.

But for our brothers and sisters who are just trying to survive, we are kicking their heads in. It is policy that came from the floor of this House that did it.

You start to think about the share of income now having to be spent just on shelter, when our lowest quartiles, or quintiles, however you prefer to say it, is now over 24\1/2\ percent for our lowest quintile to basically just pay for their rent. These are nationwide numbers. This isn't my Phoenix-Scottsdale number where it is actually substantially higher.

Congratulations to my community, Democrats brought you 11 percent inflation. Yay. After redistricting--I am blessed, I have an amazing community, but my community voted for Joe Biden by a couple of points, but they didn't vote for this.

If you want to make someone that is retired, if you want to make a working person poorer, do this. This is misery. The unwillingness--this is an uncomfortable analogy, but I think it works.

Does anyone have a friend that they tried to help through being an alcoholic and you took them to their 12-step meeting?

What is the first step? They admit they have a problem. My brothers and sisters on the left here won't admit they have a problem because they won't admit they did this.

Let's start going over some of the brilliant policy ideas--and I only use this one as a simple example because it is easy to digest. In the Democrats' Build Back Better, they have been speechifying to us that supply chains are setting off inflation, we need more production, we need this.

Then they slip language into their own legislation that says--but you can't automate the ports because we are beholden to the unions. Think about that. The Build Back Better has a provision in there, slipped in there, hidden in there, that you can't automate the very things that technology disruptions can help make us more productive, so that we can actually start to drive inflation down and get the wealth cycle back to our brothers and sisters here in this country. They are more beholden to their union constituency than the working men and women of this country.

Then here is the very last slide.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask for my time?

It shows you how fast you can talk if you have been just sucking down coffee all day, Mr. Speaker.

I should throw this out: I have had the pleasure of sitting there when I have someone on the other side, and I know it is sometimes like fingernails on a chalkboard, and you are a good guy to tolerate because I am frustrated. I am frustrated that this body is not living up to what we are capable of. There are lots of reasons and lots of excuses. But, please, to anyone here, no more going behind the microphone and saying: but it is all paid for.

The math up to this point of just what has been passed--this isn't what has been proposed, what is proposed is off the chart--just what has been passed, the left has functionally increased the deficit by $2\1/2\ trillion dollars.

That is actually using the much more favorable CBO scoring. So no more pretending and saying everything is paid for. It is not.

All I'm trying to do here is a simple point: judge us as conservatives and Republicans by what we did policywise in 2017, `18, and `19 and the good it was for the country. It was good for everyone across the board. And then take a look at particularly the last 15 months.

I beg of my Democratic colleagues: reach back, figure out what we did that worked, steal the ideas and call them your own. But the country deserves so much better than what they are getting from this body today.

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

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Ellzey).

Recognizing Midlothian Innovative Learning Experience

Madam Speaker, I am going to do something this evening that isn't sort of traditional for me because I mostly do economics. I tried to do that circle of how everything ties together, and I accept I get a little geeky. For those who are trying to keep an eye on the history of our words, wave at me if I start speaking too fast because I have had a lot of coffee today.

Today, I am going to try to talk about what I saw on the border last week, but I am going to try to do it in a slightly different way. You have had lots of us come up here--and I am going to do part of it; I am going to show the boards and the numbers and all that.

In economics, there is this concept of a second-degree effect, a third-degree effect. I wish I could come up with a definition for a misery effect. The fact of the matter is, let's pretend it is really done out of compassion. Let's pretend our brothers and sisters on the left, this administration, their approach to the border is because they are heartfelt, and they believe this is kind and compassionate. My argument here is going to be really simple: Please think through your definition of ``compassion.''

Now that we know there are functionally 700 migrants who have lost their lives trying to cross the river, or when I was with the Border Patrol last Wednesday in Yuma, Arizona, and the Border Patrol agent, she was telling me of the heartbreak of finding a couple of children dead in the desert just a few hundred yards from the border, how can that be our definition of ``compassion''?

And then we are going to have to walk through the reality of the misery you have brought to my State, my community.

Last Thursday, we did a roundtable with the true experts in our community in regard to fentanyl and drug use. I was sitting next to a mother who lost her teenage son by taking a single pill.

You have us come here and talk about the fentanyl crisis. Do you understand the scale?

Phoenix has functionally become the distribution hub of North America. One of the reasons--and I am going try to show it in the numbers here. When the border is just crowded with populations coming across it--and I stood there for a good 3 minutes, and there were 30- something people coming across the border. Over here were some other migrants crossing over the dam. Over here is the Border Patrol agent saying, I am in the concierge business. I basically take people, I walk them over to the trucks, and we take them to processing, and when we do that, whole sections over here on the border are left unmanned.

Then you wonder why a sergeant who is a Phoenix police officer, my neighbor and friend, tells me a year ago it cost about $112 for some poor soul to get high for the day. Today it is $12.

If you believe in basic economics, when the price crashes by 112 to 12, do you understand the depravity, the cruelty that Democrats' definition of ``compassion'' has brought to our own communities?

I will try to do this--and I have done a version of this before--you have got to think of the effects of the policy that the left is engaged in. When you open up the borders, you get more drugs. If you get more drugs, you are getting more homeless. If you are getting more homeless, you have increased crime. And then you have deaths.

How many people in the last day or so have come behind these microphones and said, Well, according to the latest statistics, we have 112 Americans who died of fentanyl that we know of. Well, our problem in the Phoenix area is not only fentanyl, it is meth, and it is other things.

How do I get the left to be willing to understand, if you love and care about people, your version of compassion is cruel?

So let's actually walk through some of the obvious, and then try to add a little bit of color and see if we can make this sort of come together as an understanding.

First, let's just do the basic math. We are being told, Hey, we are heading in this fiscal year already to almost a million people.

I had the experience last Wednesday of standing there. I have some distant relatives who do some farming down in the Yuma area, so I am an Arizonan, and I am at the border dozens of times.

I went and visited the Border Patrol station, and I know some of the folks there, and I saw the faces of individuals who feel like they have just been crushed. They are law enforcement, and they are not able to protect the

border because they are functionally in the people management business. They are taking people here and moving them over here so they can be processed, so they can be let go, so they can get a return order 6 years from now. This is what is going on.

Then they turn to you and say, I am here to stop drugs and weapons and potentially horrible people, terrorists, coming across our border, and I am now functionally in the human transportation business. That is what we have turned our Border Patrol into.

Then you meet with some of the Customs and Border Protection officials, and they say, Yes, you know, fentanyl may be coming right through the borders, but they only have to go several hundred yards that way and there is no more Border Patrol because all of them are taking care of people; you can just walk across.

Somewhere here I am going to try to do the other part of the discussion, where we talk about potentially if that is a million in the first half of the year, is it a couple million? Will the left have an honest discussion with us of why their version of compassion has a level of human exploitation that is really uncomfortable to talk about?

The agent I was standing there with turns to me and says, You understand most of these people who are walking across right now are going to spend the next few years of their life paying off the cartels, those are the costs that they had to commit to to cross the border.

If they can't pay it off with a job that they are not allowed to have, do they have to pay it off with their body?

Do they have to pay it off with smuggling, moving narcotics?

Is anyone here willing to take a step back from sort of the radicalized ideology and say this is not compassion, this is cruelty?

We are functionally in the business of human exploitation right now, that is our border policy. Yet, when we see numbers of border encounters have increased 278 percent, it is just another guy coming behind the microphone here and sounding like an accountant on steroids.

These are people. And is it enough that several hundred of them will die at the border?

Is it enough that many of them are going to have to engage in activities that are just absolutely exploitive to pay off the coyotes?

Is it enough that the cartels are now said to be making billions of dollars on human smuggling? And they are using that money now to actually build their own little factories, so they can make the precursor chemicals for fentanyl and synthetic opioids because it is cheaper than getting them imported from China?

We financed their Industrial Revolution.

Think about this: The left says, Well, inflation, these things are supply chains. Well, dammit, they did a great job. We solved the cartel supply chain. We financed them enough so now they can make their own drugs from precursor chemicals all the way up to stamping the pill. You have got to think about those second-degree, third-degree effects of misery that really crappy policy brings.

Why have there been so many on the right and now a handful of Democrats--who are obviously concerned about their elections and realizing what they have embraced, but they are not willing to sign the discharge petition on title 42--why are so many of us talking about this: The Border Patrol--if you have an honest conversation with them-- will turn to you and say, We are maxed out. And if you double the populations that are approaching the border because you functionally have removed title 42 so they don't get sent back, they get processed, it is no longer being overwhelmed, it is just a catastrophe. There functionally will be no protection on our border, and once again, U.S. policy is functionally financing the cartels. Congratulations.

The misery, the murders, the exploitation, which is U.S. policy. That is functionally what we have done here, but you did it in the name of, Well, this was compassionate. It is an amazing definition of ``compassion.''

Now, let's actually get to some other bits of misery. This number is a fraud. The reason this fentanyl number is--saying we have had 133 percent increase of capturing, collecting, stopping fentanyl at the border--when you meet with law enforcement down on the border they say most people we can't catch; we are too busy taking care of these million--now 2 million potentially--people crossing the border.

What a great system.

Let's see. The cartels get to march people to the border. They may get a few thousand bucks a head, so they get financed there. And because Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection are overwhelmed, it creates these massive openings where you can just move lots of narcotics across the border.

And here is what should be ripping your hearts apart: I got to sit next to a mom who told the story of her teenage son taking a single pill, a single pill that was stamped as something completely different, and 2 hours later that mom didn't have a son anymore.

In Arizona, 95 percent of our kids that died in the previous year-- out of the 60 who died, 57 of them were from these fentanyl pills. Is there any love and compassion and caring for these moms that have lost their children? What is going on here?

Is the ideology of this administration of the Democrats here in the House, are they so radically calcified that the definition of ``compassion'' is the death of 57 Arizonan children? Is that really where they are at? Because that is the outcome.

I don't know how else to humanize this story, but this is what we have done. Yet, now we see some of our brothers and sisters on the left, once again, saying, Well, we are actually concerned now, too. But you notice they won't come sign the actual piece of legislation so we can vote on it to actually stop that increase.

Forgive me, I can't stop myself with the charts.

Part of it, when you start seeing the explosion of increase--and it is Arizona, it is my community that is the one that is crushed--when you start seeing Arizona having a 79.5 percent increase in, functionally, fentanyl pills crossing our border, and that is what is captured.

Remember, I mentioned before I did the ride-along with the Phoenix police sergeant? And in parts of the discussion he was saying, Yeah, it is about $12 now for that heartbreaking, homeless person there sleeping in that alley to get high for the day.

That is what we have done.

We have ZIP Codes now, I am being told, that the homelessness has doubled in the last year.

And what is the consistent policy thing that happened in the last year? The Democrats opened up the border.

So let's play economist for a moment.

What are the couple of things you do to make the working poor and the poor, to make their life more miserable?

Okay. Inflation. We have done a great job at that.

Remember, one year ago, March, we functionally dropped another $1.9 trillion on the economy. You look at the charts and, boom, there goes inflation. My community had functionally a 10.9 percent inflation increase. I represent the community that had the highest growth of inflation year to year.

Do you know how many people no longer can afford their apartment-- functionally, can't afford?

You are crushing the working poor.

But you can do more. You can open up the border. And this was actually left-wing economists that wrote these papers about 10 years ago. If you want to crush the working poor, import millions of people with similar skill sets.

So one of the classic definitions of the profile of someone as working poor is they may not have finished high school, but they are selling their labor. They are out there hanging drywall, working their hearts out, they are trying to find a way to get out. And now they are going to compete against who knows how many people who are going to work in the underground economy.

You have added millions of people with similar skill sets.

So how are they going to get the money to pay off their smugglers? Don't you think they are going to be coming in the back door saying, I will work for cash; I will do this and that?

Now you have other things that make the poor poorer: Crime, drugs,

someone stealing their stuff because they need money. And you look at all those numbers. The Democrats are in their, what? Now, 15 months of control. Every single number. Income inequality, the poor getting poorer, misery, death, retirees getting poorer, the middle class getting poorer.

Great job, guys. Great job.

Tell me something you have done that hasn't increased misery in this country.

I know this is uncomfortable, but I am doing it on purpose. Sometimes the smartest thing is to just stop what you are doing. Take a breath. Maybe the ideology is a false ideology. Back up.

I am sorry the former President was into border security. But do you remember a decade and a half ago when it was the hallmark of Democrats that were concerned about illegal immigration?

Do you remember it was Republicans and Chambers of Commerce that wanted to flood the country with cheap labor?

Isn't it amazing what happened here?

It was only about 15 years ago that the left were the protectors of working men and women.

We will not flood the country with cheap labor.

We need our folks to be able to have a working wage.

Oh, we are going to open the border now because it is compassionate, and we are going to screw up everyone's life.

What happened?

When did the Democrats abandon the middle class, the working poor? Is it they weren't voting for them enough?

It is about the math. Now, we are moving beyond pounds, we are heading towards tonnage in the amounts of fentanyl coming through my State.

Let's put this in context.

You see this little picture right here, those few crystals there? That functionally is enough to kill you. So that is a penny. Those? That kills you.

When does this become terrorism? Because it is already functionally killing our children.

Does anyone care?

Now, we have got to go just a little bit further down the rabbit hole.

The border agents report over a thousand percent increase, and these are the ones in Texas. The argument I was given by our friends at Customs and Border Patrol is they are not catching much of it.

But it goes further. You have got to understand what has been happening in my community. This is just one of a dozen headlines when there is a bust and it is enough to functionally kill every single person in my State.

There was a bust the night before we did our fentanyl roundtable. There was enough to kill everyone in my county, and I have the third or fourth most populous county in the Nation.

Do you understand the scale? When you have the experts here saying, Well, David, you don't understand. Prices have so crashed, a couple of years ago it would be several dollars a pill. Now it might be, at wholesale, 45 cents a pill. When it gets that cheap, you want to try to understand why it is in your elementary schools, your high schools, throughout your community, and the homeless campuses.

That is the cascade effect.

So I'm begging the majority to just take a breath for a moment, back away from the radicalized ideology and just take a breath and say, Do you actually love and care about people?

Will you accept the misery, the death, just the dystopian devastation that is happening in our communities right now because of an open- border policy? That is what it is.

And title 42 is not a solution. It is just trying to stop the catastrophe.

Sign the discharge petition. Prove that your rhetoric actually fits reality.

Or maybe the constituencies are now so gerrymandered and intellectually calcified that you can't tell the truth.

Another chart that absolutely proves we have turned, functionally, our legal apparatus to protect the Nation into, functionally, a transportation service, ICE. Immigration enforcement is, functionally, beyond the border in our communities. Those who got through, who were not stopped, it is up to law enforcement.

How do you catch someone and functionally remove them from the country?

You see where we were in 2019. And then you see where we were in 2020. And do you see the crash over here? These deportations?

Now, what is fascinating is this line way up here was actually even further up during the Obama administration.

Did the left basically just crash this because the last President was so hated by the left for protecting working men and women that if he said it is Black, you had to say White? You had to walk away from it?

We would be elated to get back to the actual law enforcement protection of the border numbers that were there during the Obama administration.

There is this weird irony, and I just show this so folks understand the bizarreness of Democrat management leadership of this government right now.

So illegal immigration goes up--well, it is not immigration, it is illegal captures at the border, presentations, those things--278 percent.

But legal, if the person had just got their Ph.D. in electrical engineering at ASU and they can't process the paperwork, legal immigration has crashed. So at the same time we get the complaints from businesses that they can't hire anyone, that we need talent to grow the economy.

As you saw the brilliance today, GDP actually fell pretty substantially in the last quarter. Yay, Democrats are doing a great job.

One of the factors of economic growth is when you bring in smart people. Well, that has crashed but we are imparting massive numbers of poverty into the country. That is the left's version of compassion.

I accept that some of this presentation is a little bit on the aggressive, maybe slightly jerky side, but I don't have another way to basically say, Is this really the Democrats' vision of America?

Is this really how you think we are going to make poor people less poor, the working poor more prosperous, the middle class much more prosperous?

The thought experiment is very simple. Anyone out there, contact my office with something, give me a single thing in the last 15 months of absolute Democrat control of this Congress, this government, that the left has done that has turned out to actually be good for America, good for working people, good for poor people. You have made rich people a lot richer. Isn't that amazing?

Income inequality was shrinking dramatically in 2018, 2019, and the first quarter of 2020.

Pandemic; Democrats take over--boom. All the things they told us that they cared about basically have gone to crap. And the math is the math. But as you all know, we work in a math-free zone.

And maybe at some point we will tie our hearts, our compassion, to the actual facts. And when we do that, the really bad things that this Congress and this White House are doing to the American people will stop.

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

Mr. Speaker, one more time, I am going to do something that is a little difficult, and I apologize for you being the poor person in the chair when we do this. I am going to walk through inflation.

I don't think we understand the damage, the economic violence, that is happening to the poor, the working poor, and the economic future of the country.

Sorry, guys, the Democrats get the blame on this one.

We are going to walk through the facts, the mechanisms, but also maybe a couple of solutions.

This is going to be a tough one. So if you like economics, stay tuned. If you don't like math and economics, I suggest you get away from this presentation as fast as possible.

Also, another weird aside because I get this question all the time: The Chamber is empty, but we are probably on 1,000 televisions throughout the campus here in the House and the Senate, with staff and Members, and that is, in many ways, partially who we are communicating with to think differently.

First off, 1 year ago, I think it was March 21, 2021, the Democrats did one of their huge stimulus bills. Not a single Republican voted for it. That is the moment you can track the explosion in inflation.

I am stealing Larry Summers' quote from one of his presentations a couple of days ago. There was a piling of dry kindling, and the Democrats decided to take a kerosene-soaked log, light it on fire, throw it on that kindling, and boom. Now, we are having a number of our economists saying we may have inflation for an entire decade. This is not transitory.

Do you remember over and over and over when Treasury Secretary Yellen--who I used to have amazing respect for, but now she has become a partisan--would say to us, oh, it is transitory. A number of the Democratic economists would say it is transitory. They are no longer saying that. They basically admitted they screwed up, and a lot of people are getting hurt right now.

I am going to show over and over, if you are a middle-class person, if you are part of the working poor, you are poorer today than 14 months ago when the Democrats took power.

Let's have a little bit of amusement here. You may all remember this. This is from before the stimulus bill, from a year ago. Larry Summers, not a big Republican--come on, Larry Summers has classically always been one of the left's favorite economists, except when he told them: Don't do this. Don't do this. You already have pumped so much cash into the system.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, the world is sort of split. The left believes in sort of a Keynesian model of consumption economics. The right sort of believes in productivity: make more things. It is referred to as supply side. They decided to stimulate consumption and hand out lots of money, and now you are poorer today than you were a year ago, Mr. Speaker. The left's own sort of biggest voice, Larry Summers, basically begged them not to do it. But there is a policy around here: buy your votes and spend lots of taxpayer money. Even today, The Wall Street Journal has an editorial featuring many of the comments from Larry Summers talking about how he expects actually a pretty severe recession now.

We are going to pay a price for my brothers and sisters on the left basically failing their basic economics class. So let's actually walk through it. Here is basically the chart, Mr. Speaker, and you can see the inflationary expectations when the Democrats took power, when they actually passed their big stimulus bill, and off to the races.

My community in January had a 10.9 percent year-over-year inflation. Some of our models right now say that this month and next month we are actually going to be having inflationary spikes.

I need you to have a concept. So everyone is fretting right now: Oh, the Federal Reserve is going to raise interest rates. It is 2 percent. They might actually go one-half of 1 percent. Mr. Speaker, if you go back to the early, early eighties and the Paul Volcker time, they had to raise the Federal funds rate equal to inflation.

If today the actual inflation rate as of this moment is not 6 percent but closer to 8, 8.1, are you ready for a Federal funds rate at 8?

Because that is what it takes. Because understand, Mr. Speaker, if you are borrowing money today at a Federal funds rate of 2, 2\1/2\, and inflation really is closer to 8, there a huge, huge gap. Those need to actually be in alignment because you have a negative actual interest rate. When you are borrowing below what inflation is costing, if the dollar goes to this value every day and you are paying this, you have substantial negative interest rates.

What do you think is going to happen?

So back to the reality. This is what we have done. Actually, I take that back. We didn't do this. The Republicans didn't do it. The Democrats did it, and they did it without a single--without a single-- Republican vote.

This line, functionally, is your income, Mr. Speaker, and, yes, it has had a little bit of movement up, but this is your purchasing power because your income has become worth less. In January when we got the 2021 basic data, the mean in our country was about 2\1/2\ percent poorer. Their purchasing power, they became poorer.

Inflation has only increased since then.

The reality of it is that really bad economics end up hurting people. You will notice, Mr. Speaker, it is this White House saying--in an absolutely almost laughable--well, it is Putin's inflation. Of course, it was going on long before Putin invaded Ukraine.

Well, it is the Big Oil companies. Except it was Democrat policies that created the natural gas shortages last year.

They are desperate to run away from the responsibility of what they have done.

It is not part of this board deck, but, repeatedly, I have come to this floor and tried to walk through what the two things are, if you want to kick the working poor's head in economically; what do you do?

Well, inflation, right?

Here is another article right now from The Washington Post--a truly conservative publication--``Fed official: Inflation falls hardest on poorer families.''

So the excuse of saying: Well, inflation really wasn't hurting the poor. I mean, come on. We are back to reality. You are killing and you are crushing, economically, the poor.

So number one is inflation. Number two, if you actually look at the data on those folks we put in that category of the working poor, they are individuals who often didn't finish high school or they didn't go to college. They sell their labor.

Do what the left has done this last year: open up the border. Have millions--millions--of people cross the border and come into the country who offer similar skill sets where their economic value is they are going to sell their labor. And now you take the population we love and care about, but we are crushing that working poor, and say, Hey, you now get to compete with a couple of million new residents who are going to sell their labor.

The policy of the last 14 months has just been brutal. You see it in the budget data, Mr. Speaker. Income inequality has gotten worse since the Democrats have taken charge. Food insecurity has gotten worse. Minority populations' incredible gains that happened in 2018, 2019, and the first quarter of 2020 before the pandemic have been lost.

So if you actually care, Mr. Speaker, if you say, I care about economic growth, economic growth is moral, then would you keep doing policies that keep hurting people?

It is math. At some point I would be elated if the left said: Okay, they accept that their model doesn't work and basically has never worked, and instead of spending massive amounts of money--we are going to talk about the danger the country is now in because of the incredible levels of spending and how fragile. There is this fragility concept of interest rates and debt we are going to walk through in a bit.

If the Democrats really cared, they would basically steal the supply- side economics, call it their own--they have done that before on other things--and say, We care about poor people. We are actually going to help them.

But you can't do it this way. Every single day the Democrats have had absolute control, people have gotten poorer.

Once again, there was one Democrat that voted ``no,'' so I will give that person credit. Zero Republicans voted ``yes,'' but 220, 211 voting ``no.'' This is what they called the American Rescue Plan, except now we need to be rescued from the Democrats' American Rescue Plan.

Some of these slides are going to get a little thick.

Purchasing power of $100--we talk about inflation, but most people don't really process what it means. So let's actually pretend that the baseline inflation that we believe we are at this last quarter, about 7.4, if you had that for 10 years, so if I gave you $100 today, Mr. Speaker, 10 years ago what would the purchasing power of that $100 be? It, functionally, is about $40, $46. You have lost more than half of it. Basically, your value and your wealth got cut in half.

Now, if you are on the rich side, Mr. Speaker, you own lots of real estate and you have lots of assets. With inflation, basically those assets become a hedge. But if you are a young family, if you are someone who is retired, you are living on a pension or you are living on your savings or you are trying to get a family started, every day being able to participate in the American Dream gets harder.

There is a reason inflation is one of the most destructive forces in the world in societies. It is because it is the ultimate spreader of income inequality. Those who have assets basically are indemnified from inflation. But if you don't have a bunch of assets, you are this. That is what happens to you. Your dollar at the current rate of inflation will be cut in half in a decade. This is the result of the policies of this place from the last 14 months.

And now we are seeing models saying that it may not be at 7.4. Some are saying it could be 4 or 5. Now, I am a little more worried. But some of the best experts are now saying that inflation now may be structurally built in for this next decade.

Do you understand the damage that is going to do to the American people?

Just some of the different slides trying to understand what the trajectory is right now. We are basically looking at what was projected to be some of the inflationary trends. The current line, basically, is starting to look at about an 8, 8.4. I actually think this year-- remember, last year: Oh, it is transitory. Oh, it is just a seasonal spike. It is a supply chain spike.

Now we see the studies that say: Hey, no, half of the inflation from last year--so if you are my community, 10.9 year over year was policy from this body. It wasn't Federal Reserve; it was policy from this body. The other half: Well, we will call it supply chain.

But then you have to read the rest of the article. It basically breaks down that the stresses in the supply chain were workers, misallocation, those things, that also happened to be substantially related to Federal policy. This is an occasion where the Federal Reserve may be a sinner of keeping interest rates too low too long, but Congress, 1 year ago with their American Rescue Plan--not a single Republican voted for it--decided to throw kerosene and matches when their own Democrat economist, when Larry Summers is saying: Don't do it.

Congratulations. You made America poorer.

Now, there is this concept out there called a wage-price spiral. This is really important to get your head around, Mr. Speaker, because there are those out there who think: Oh, the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates a little bit, some of the container ships will come in, and the supply chain and everything will be wonderful. That is not the math.

There is this concept of, well, prices went up, so I need to be paid more. But if I need to be paid more, the business, to keep its margins, needs to raise its prices. Well, if they raise their prices, I need to be paid more because the business needs to keep their margins, and I need to be able to afford the goods and services. You start this sort of ratchet, it is referred to as a wage-price spiral, and it becomes an unholy circle where wages and demand make a circle. The firm needs to keep its margins to stay in business, well, then you have higher prices and you have higher inflation, and you chase each other.

One of the only ways economists have to break this is you have two choices: You do a bunch of policies very quickly to spike productivity. Well, that would mean my brothers and sisters on the left will, basically, walk away from their economic theory and say that they just became supply-siders and we are going to do everything we can to make more stuff. Or we go into a recession. A number of economists basically now say that we are heading to recession, and Larry Summers actually thinks it is a pretty tough recession coming.

It is a really miserable, horrible thing to do to people who are just getting out of a pandemic trying to get their lives back together. You hit them with inflation, you flood the borders, you push up crime, you push up fentanyl deaths in my area, and now you are going to run the country into a recession. Yay team.

This is from last week. I am told some of these numbers have actually gotten worse this week, but we didn't have time to print a new board. Citibank basically now says 25 percent chance of a recession before the end of the year. Goldman, they were at 27\1/2\ last week. I am told some of these numbers are now up.

Economists like Larry Lindsey, I think, is predicting before the end of this month we will actually start to hit the very first steps of a recessionary cycle.

Now, remember, Mr. Speaker, prices have gone up faster than your wages. So every day you are getting a little bit poorer, then you begin to pull back on your purchases. The model basically says that is what kicks off a recessionary cycle.

Now, in the past, when you did your high school economics class, it was, oh, inventories go up too high and you stop buying stuff and you bleed down your inventories. There is such a thing as an inflationary- driven recessionary cycle, because all of a sudden, you don't have the same purchasing power. You actually saw some of the consumer data hitting last week that, all of a sudden, consumers are starting to change their behavior.

Larry Lindsey may have it right, that these Democrat policies are basically paying off what Larry Summers told you was going to happen. Trust me, I never thought I would be behind this microphone saying Larry Summers got it right.

Now, you actually go into what are some of the other stressors that will make it so inflation doesn't taper off. Remember: What is inflation? It is too many dollars chasing too few goods and services.

So you can slow down, you can crush, you can remove liquidity. You can have the Federal Reserve basically bleed off some its inventory of bonds and other holdings. They can raise interest rates, and that squeezes down the money supply.

Or the other side, you can make more stuff. But it would require our brothers and sisters on the left, who run this place--they run Washington; they have the Presidency; they have the House; they have the Senate--to do things to incentivize our brothers and sisters not to retire early; for young people to get into the workforce; for some of the populations that, you know, it is dystopian policies of COVID where we forced so many working families and working moms out of the labor force after those miracle years of 2018, 2019, first quarter of 2020, where we saw wages, particularly for women of color, just miraculous numbers.

Then comes the policy of shutting down the schools, shutting down the economy. Those are the populations who you can see have just been crushed. Unless we get back to levels of participating in the economy, you can't get the productivity.

So, could you and I come together, as people on left and the right, and say we are going to incentivize our brothers and sisters who may have chosen to retire to come back in? We are going to incentivize individuals to come back into the labor force because we need to make more stuff. This is not complicated economics. It is just a lot of complicated decisions, and it will require the left, basically, to walk away from some of their orthodoxy.

The other thing--I show this slide just to point out what is happening demographically. It is also an opportunity, but it is also really tough. We actually have a situation here, if you look where we are at, you come to the 10-year marks, so at the end of the decade, we, functionally, are heading at parts where 20, 22 percent--actually, I think 22 percent of the population at the end of the decade are 65 and older.

What are the leverages we would have here in Congress to encourage those individuals to stay in the labor force? We have already done some things in regard to the Social Security tax penalties, but could we do more of that? If this is about a labor shortage that is also going to continue the inflationary cycle and you have the choice of making people poorer by shoving us into a recession or making more stuff, what are the levers you can pull to incentivize capital investments by businesses and organizations and then our brothers and sisters get into or come back into the labor force.

There are also other reasons, and this does tie together. You understand how fragile--this is a basic chart showing how soon Social Security and the Medicare part A trust fund--most of Medicare is actually a general fund expenditures. The hospital portion, what we call part A, is in a trust fund, and they are out of money. By 2027, Medicare part A is modeled to be empty, and this number is actually sooner because of what we did last year. This board was printed last year.

The Social Security trust fund is out of money, I think, in 2032 or 2031, it may be our best guess now. If we have more of our brothers and sisters in the labor force, these numbers go out, if you have productivity. But there is a small problem. As inflation kicks off and the COLA mechanisms and Medicare healthcare costs keep going up, we are not absolutely sure what happens if we don't get more labor force participation, more people in the economy working.

All the costs here, these numbers, these bankruptcies, running out of money, Social Security and Medicare part A may be happening a lot sooner.

So the brain trust around here has this idea that says, hey, let's take the Medicare benefit age and instead of making it 65, let's make it 60, because that way we can have the bankruptcy of it happen much sooner. It is good politics; it is great virtue-signaling from the speechifying. It may be good at getting reelected, but it is horrible economics.

To understand how bad the economics have been, this is a slide I made last year, at the end of last year, to understand what 2021 was like from a fiscal standpoint.

The punch line, when you look at all of these numbers, is we were borrowing over $47,000 every second. Every second we were borrowing $47,000. You wonder why we kicked off inflation--excuse me--they kicked off inflation? You also wonder why your country, from a financial standpoint, is so fragile.

I am going to show you a slide here at the end. It is basically the punch line at the end, that if the 2 points higher interest rate holds for a couple decades, at the end of those decades, every dime of revenue, receipts, into the Federal Government just covers interest costs.

Does anyone around here own a calculator? Don't give me, oh, we need more tax receipts, because the fact of the matter, post tax reform, you had number 2 and number 3 highest revenue years in U.S. history, adjusted for inflation, real receipts adjusted for inflation. You are going to notice, even last year was the highest highest ever. And the only reason these two weren't number 1 and number 2 is I think 2014 had a weird timing effect on some paybacks from TARP and some other things.

The folks here don't tell the truth about math and say, Oh, you guys did tax reform at the end of 2017. Yeah, but we grew the economy at a breakneck pace, the poor got dramatically less poor, and tax receipts came screaming in, particularly from overseas, unlike what was predicted by the left. Oh, it is a giveaway, except we took in a hell of a lot more taxes.

Remember, the new tax code, that we are still under today, was more progressive than the old one. In other words, the rich are paying a higher percentage of Federal income taxes than they were before we did tax reform at the very end of 2017. But that was a supply side type of tax reform, encouraging people to make more stuff, to make the society more productive, to provide more opportunity. It worked. But it wasn't, basically, the giveaway model that the left embraces, and, therefore, they repeatedly lie about it.

Yes, think about this. Even with all the horrible things that went on in 2020, a slight reduction in total tax revenues, receipts; 2021, highest ever. We basically broke through $4 trillion dollars. Our problem is, we still took that $4 trillion and then spent a couple trillion on top of that, so we borrowed a couple trillion last year on top of all of the cash that came in through taxes.

With all that borrowing, you start to realize the fraud, the danger. You see this whole section here, that green? That is magic money. That is, functionally, the Federal Reserve buying our debt. So they basically lay a claim on banking deposits, a theoretical claim, and buy it. So when you have $5 trillion thrown in, do you blame the Federal Reserve or do you blame us, who basically are running these massive deficits and debt?

Look, the Federal Reserve is like the family member of an alcoholic family that keeps buying them beer. They basically have enabled our bad policy decisions. If we had to pay the actual price for a lot of this crazy spending--but by doing what they did here--and the next time you have someone say, Oh, it is Japan, well, Japan is down here. China is there. This is the Federal Reserve, and then this is, functionally, individuals.

I am going to show some of the slides that really worry me of what is the appetite for people to basically buy a U.S. bond to help us keep financing this crazy debt and deficits and the fact that every day the bond is actually worth less money.

If you go by a 10-year bond today--and I think the post I saw just before I came in here, it was sitting at about 2.5. If it is true that at this moment, inflation may be running somewhere from 6 to 8 percent, how much are you losing every single day in your value? People are loaning the money and taking a negative rate of return. That isn't going to go on long. That is when you hear this discussion of inverted yield curves.

I was going to do a whole presentation on yield curves, and the staff,

basically, looked at me in terror, so I am not going to do that to you.

Just basically understand, when you hear the term ``inverted,'' it basically says, theoretically, if I loan you money on a short-term, I should be willing to take a lower interest rate, because there is less risk than if I loan you money longer. I should ask for a little bit more premium, because more bad things, more unknowns, more black swans can happen.

When it inverts, it basically says: I expect something bad in the short term, but eventually it will work itself out, so I am willing to give you longer-term money at a better yield or at a better price.

The yield curve has, right now, two things that should send you some very weird messages. The short term is inverted and then comes back and inverts. But at the end of the curve, longer term, you start to see people are getting very worried about those 20 years, 30 years of long- term U.S. debt. You are starting to see it in the actual pricing of our debt, and that should be signaling you some very scary messages.

A chart like this--and I am not even sure it is completely accurate yet. I think the numbers are actually worse. We are right here. We are, functionally, now working on the 2023 budget, and they are basically trying to tell you: Hey, be prepared; we are going to be well over a trillion dollars a year. Eight budget years from now, just the interest cost is a trillion bucks. That is assuming the CBO's baseline interest rate that is nowhere near high enough.

So we were already heading, at the end of this decade, to trillion- dollar-a-year just borrowing cost. That was just the interest. Remember, it is not what we borrow today; it is what we borrow today and all of the other debt that has to be refinanced. Because when the bond that was sold 10 years ago comes due, we don't pay it off. We just sell more debt and refinance it.

If you have a $100 billion option of new debt, new borrowing, because of our incredible spending, there may be another $200 or $300 billion on top of that, that's what we call the roll, the weighted daily average.

Just have that in your head. Functionally, in 8 years, interest-- interest--is a trillion dollars a year. And the hits keep getting worse. This is before the craziness of the spending.

This board was printed, I think, in 2021, so it missed trillions of dollars of additional borrowing and spending. We were already scheduled to borrow $112 trillion of running debt in today's dollars in 29 years. Three-quarters of it was Medicare, functionally, one-quarter of it was Social Security. The rest of the budget is substantially in balance.

Inflation now is about to drive medical costs up, and inflation actually changes the COLA of Social Security. These numbers get dramatically worse. But there is a scam here. I am going to do my best to try to explain this. You are retired. You have savings. You are getting your Medicare, your Social Security. But your savings, as this inflation continues, every day is worth a little less money.

You hear the term, eating away at your value. If inflation is eating away at your value, where does that value go? It basically goes to this side of the ledger. When you are paying back those bonds, that debt, you are paying it back now with less valuable dollars. It is basically a transfer from everyone that saved, particularly our retired population.

Remember, at the end of the decade, 22 percent of the population is 65 or older. The population that has saved, they become poorer, and that money is transferred to being able to pay back our debt. But now you get to pay it back with inflated dollars. It's a secret backdoor way to strip savers, older Americans of their wealth, and move it to pay back the crazy amounts of borrowing that are going on.

So now we structurally will also make--it really affects our retired population; they get poorer. But it is also a way to pay back the amazing amount of debt with what you call inflated dollars, less valuable dollars, and it is a wink-wink-nod-nod.

There are some economists, particularly here in Washington, who will actually say, Don't say it out loud, Schweikert; but we almost need to do this because there is no way this body is capable of doing the policies that would create the level of growth and economic participation that would raise everyone's wealth, everyone's prosperity, and, therefore, the tax receipts and the less need for social entitlements and social transfer programs.

We can do really good policy for really good economics, or we can just inflate our way out of part of the crushing debt, and it looks like Democrat policies have decided we are going to inflate our way because that is what has happened here. That is the decision that has been made.

This chart is a little hard to get our head around, but what is important about it is to get our sense of how fast, since January `21, the levels of borrowing through the Federal Reserve are going. This one basically says since January `21 there has been another $2, $2\1/2\ trillion of transfer from Federal Reserve absorbing U.S. sovereign debt. Basically, they are creating magic money to help us keep financing our spending. That is also money because of our fiscal decisions.

Inflation didn't come out of nowhere. This is the third time I am going to say it. Even Democrat economists were warning the majority here that this was coming, and you decided to kick Americans in the head.

So, think about this: President Biden, Speaker Pelosi made a decision, and so far in President Biden's term we, functionally, have well over $2\1/2\ trillion of additional debt piled on. It is a remarkable record. In a time when we were coming out of the COVID dystopia, we piled on another $2\1/2\ trillion plus created all sorts of other unfunded liabilities.

The next slide is really important to get our heads around. There is this concept of fragility. If it is true, we may be heading into not just--because we all agree the fraud of saying the inflation is transitory, okay, that con job has now come to an end. Now, the left is going to try to say, well, it is Putin's inflation, it is Big Oil inflation. Americans aren't stupid.

I am particularly blessed, I represent one of the best-educated districts in all of America, so I have freaky smart people in my Phoenix-Scottsdale district, and they get this. But there is this concept of fragility. What happens to the country if interest rates are just a bit higher than we have modeled? Do you have a sense of what happens?

This board is from a year ago when we did the math. If interest rates are just 2 points, 2 percent--which is already happening--2 percent higher than CBO's baseline, Congressional Budget Office's baseline, functionally, in 29 years, every dollar of tax receipts, tax income, however you want to call it--in Ways and Means we call it receipts-- every dollar just pays the interest bill. It buys nothing. There is no more money for education, space travel; there is no more money for Medicare, Medicaid; there is no more money because all we are paying is interest.

This is the fragility. This is how dangerous you have made this country's economics by borrowing so much money and then screwing up the economics.

My point of this 45 minutes of rambling: Inflation--very, very dangerous. There are policy decisions. Those policy decisions will require the Democrats to walk away from their orthodoxy. They will have to admit they have been worshipping a false economics god and join us in doing things that are, actually, good for society, good for poor people, good for the working poor, good for the middle class.

And then, dear God, hopefully we are not too late, because if Larry Summers is correct that we are actually going to go into a pretty harsh recession, you want to kick people in the head; you want to destroy the middle class; you want to make it so it takes years to get back to normality; and now you have economists saying the inflation may be with us for a decade. Even if Republicans take back Congress and then take back the White House, it could be a decade before we repair the damage that this body did in 14 months.

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

Madam Speaker, you do realize what is going on here, and I am going to be a little sarcastic because I am frustrated.

Insulin prices are outrageous.

But why is it outrageous?

The fact of the matter is our regulatory mechanic and our payment mechanic are the very things that broke this, and here you do a piece of legislation that will break it more.

Please, I beg of the majority: Hire an economist. And I will walk you through some of the facts on it. So, Madam Speaker, you are doing a bill here where you are going to subsidize the dollar amount in the back, but you are still going to keep the regulatory mechanics the way they are in their archaic designs, and then you are going to be joyful that individuals will pay what, $35 a vial?

At the same time we are subsidizing it billions and billions and billions of dollars.

Does anyone have a subscription to an aggregator on healthcare policy on your side?

You do realize, there is a co-op coming out of the ground right now that is going to be $50, $55 for a box of five. It is lower than your subsidized price. And this is their market price.

If you were doing something good for society, you would actually be moving this covax to the top of the regulatory stack and say: We want them to get permitted and licensed as fast as possible because they are still a year plus away. But it is being built right now, and you are about to screw up the solution. And if you really, really, really, really care about people--remember, I represent the population with the second highest number of diabetes. I represent a Tribal community that is number two in the world. Come with me some time and let me introduce you to people who have had their feet cut off. If you actually care about solving the misery, then read the science journals that made it clear last November, December, the success.

We know how to cure. And for my friend over here, you have a family member type 1--I know I need to go through the Speaker--but a family member with type 1, we know how to cure it now. And there is even the next generation of this. We have even learned how to do the stem cell, the isolate cell, tag it with a CRISPR so you can do a bio-foundry, meaning it doesn't have to come from your skin cells, we can basically now cure type 1 and the same technology will work for type 2. But we are going to have to deal with some societal issues. If you want to end the misery in society don't build more clinics, don't do a subsidy, get this technology to people.

And for those of us who are fiscal hawks and actually care about where we are going, you do realize that 31 percent of all Medicare spending is just diabetes. Thirty-three percent of all healthcare spending is diabetes. And so the brain trust here decides: Hey, let's subsidize this by billions and billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars, screw up the movement to actually have cures to actually have a co-op provide the product dramatically less expensive.

Remember, the co-op is going to bring it in cheaper than the subsidized price without all the taxpayer money.

Please, I know the virtue signaling here is powerful. The economics are crap.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Mooney).

Partisan Games--Supreme Court Justice Thomas

Mr. Speaker, tonight is going to be a tricky presentation, and I want to apologize immediately to those who have to try take down our words. But tonight, I am going to actually try to focus on solutions.

Last week, I spent an hour behind this microphone begging our friends on the left, begging our Democrat colleagues to stop doing much of what they have been doing. And I demonstrated that it has been hurting people. Last year was miserable for the working poor, for the poor, for the middle class.

And in some ways, it is our own fault in this body because intellectually, this place is calcified--that is my word of the day. Because we see the math. We see the facts. And we have the folks lay out what is going to happen. But because it is already part of, particularly in this case, the left's dogma, we do it anyway. And then we act surprised here a year later when my community had 10.9 percent inflation last year.

Year over year, how many people is that crushing? And now we are seeing some data. And this is important; this isn't transitory. A number of the most powerful modelers in the economic world in this country are now starting to ring the alarm bells of both: We are heading towards a recession and that inflation may now be with us for decades because of how we have screwed things up in this place.

First, this is as of almost today, you have Goldman Sachs now saying there is a 27\1/2\ percent chance of a recession--not a slowdown, a recession, which means two quarters of negative GDP by the end of this year.

Citi is at 25 percent.

J.P. Morgan is still at 15, which were the numbers from last week.

These numbers have skyrocketed. If you and I looked at this three weeks ago, it was 9 percent.

Does anyone here actually care about people? Do you care about working men and women? Do you understand what a recession does to people? How long it takes to get your feet back underneath you? Let alone the head kick we are giving to the American public with inflation.

So here is my goal. I am going to race through just a boatload of slides here, and I am going to throw out concept after concept after concept. Some of them are marginal. Some of them you are going to go, Oh, that makes sense.

But the point is, there are actually solutions. If the left would ever allow us to offer a genuine amendment in committee, to actually have a genuine discussion and debate, maybe we could change some hearts and minds in this place, or just even enlighten some intellect around here. But that isn't what this place does.

So let's actually start to walk through the bill that a number of folks are so giddy about today.

I am fixated on diabetes because of what it does and the misery to parts of my district. I represent a Tribal community that is number 2 as a percentage of population who suffer from diabetes. Come to the reservation. I will introduce you to families that I have known where mom has her feet cut off.

But to tout the bill that was passed here today as a solution is an absolute fraud. You do realize the con job that the Democrats are touting here? And I am not sure it is purposeful. I don't think they spent time understanding.

First, you basically created a subsidy bill for Big Pharma. Congratulations. You didn't reduce the price. What you did is you created, functionally, $20 billion of subsidy to buy down the price of insulin. And you bought it down with a fraud because you are doing a-- well, we are going to pretend that the Trump administration's rule in regard to rebates is in effect, which it was never going into effect. So you made magic money again.

And at the same time, you just took away the pressure we could have done together to actually get a real solution on the price of insulin. And some of that solution could have been something as simple as the co-op that is in construction right now, that is saying they are going to bring $30 a vial, $55 a box--and a box is 5 vials--of insulin to market in a year.

So if we were actually doing solutions here, the Democrats' bill, working with Republicans, would have been, We are going to put it in the stack for licensing and permitting. We are going to put aside some money to make sure that they get their factory up and running in Virginia as soon as possible.

And, oh, by the way, this is substantially less expensive than the subsidized version that is going to cost society $20 billion. And you are handing that to Big Pharma. Isn't that amusing?

I mean, amusing the speechifying here. And the Democrats' approach to helping people who can't afford their insulin is to blow up the market, screw up the incentives, and then screw up the actual solution. And the solution is coming.

Does anyone actually subscribe to something where they read?

And you have got to understand, we need to go--and the whole debate around diabetes, we have got to go much, much further.

Mr. Speaker, 31 percent of all Medicare spending is diabetes; 33 percent of all healthcare spending. Understand, in 29 years, the United States is scheduled to have about $112 trillion of borrowed money in today's dollars.

Mr. Speaker, 75 percent of that is just Medicare, but if 31 percent of Medicare spending is diabetes, cure it. And you go, But, David, how would we do that?

Well, I have been to this floor a dozen times over the last 12 months saying the research is happening. The early numbers look good.

Guess what? It succeeded. Hey, the phase 1s worked. Now we are actually on another set of phase 1s where they are actually using CRISPR to tag the stem cell that has become an isolate cell to make it so you can do a biofoundry. And it could be a production line, so it doesn't even need to come from your skin to get the stem cells.

Meaning, if we would get our reimbursement sets straight here, our licensing sets straight here, our incentives lined up. The modelers say in about 5 years you could actually be rolling out--the cure to type 1 is actually the easy part, it is the cure to type 2 which is much more difficult. We have to have a brutal conversation of nutrition support and maybe nutrition support that is healthy.

Encouraging our brothers and sisters in my Tribal communities, the lifestyles and things, to be ready to actually accept the cure. But the fact of the matter is it is here. So what did the Democrats just do? They did a subsidy bill for insulin that is going to cost $20 billion. How about if they had taken that $20 billion and put it into the price for getting this cure to market?

It is just an example we don't seem to get our heads around. The world works in incentives and disincentives. We have made it so bureaucratic and so expensive that we are in an incumbent protection racket here. It is not incumbent Members of Congress, it is incumbent bureaucracies, incumbent business models, and the disruptions like this that would end so much misery and also be the single biggest thing we can do to affect the debt in this country.

We applaud ourselves for voting through a bill that actually will have made things worse. If there is an economist in the room and you walk through saying, well, because you just functionally government- subsidized this, you just took away the pricing pressure to actually have the revolution of both the cost and the cure.

I am begging my brothers and sisters here to think. There is this incredible hope. They have already had the successes in the phase ones, and now the ability to actually tag it and make it

so you don't need to be on anti-rejection drugs. Think about what it means to the health of the country.

Why would I go to diabetes right after showing you that the projections of a recession at the end of this year are skyrocketing because you are heading in an approach where you are making a substantial portion of our population--making them available to participate in the economy.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to throw out a really uncomfortable subject for a second. I am the senior Republican on the Joint Economic Committee and we have been trying a little side project for almost a year. What makes people poor? What is the real cause of income inequality? And unlike the rhetorical crap virtue signaling that is said around here, we are actually starting to find out there are a lot of things, but health, education, things of that nature that we can affect are actually major precursors, then you look at the amount of the population that is in the lower quartiles that either they or their family or because they have someone who is horribly sick substantially because of renal failure or diabetes.

My other side of the argument is why this is moral to pursue. It also would end lots of misery. It would actually really help the poor. It actually might squeeze down income inequality. It is sort of the trifecta. Yet, I will do these presentations on how it works and that it would be amazing for economic growth, and if it truly brought more of our brothers and sisters to be able to participate in the economy, it would also be really good for inflation, too.

I have done this slide multiple times. I'm trying to sort of explain the mechanisms of a stem cell and you can now direct--think of it as a biofoundry mechanism, sort of like CRISPR. You can direct that stem cell to become an insulin-producing cell. In the previous slide you can walk through how you can actually do this in a fashion that it can be almost a factory production. So even beyond the personalized medicine concept.

Why this is so important is we are on the cusp of a revolution to make people's lives so much better--so much healthier. Instead, what we have done in this place over the last 12 months is we have set off inflation. We have set off crime. We have set off homelessness because of really, really bad policies. Lots of great virtue signaling. There have been beautiful speeches behind these microphones telling you how much we care and how we feel, and then the economics are just horrible.

Some more of the disruption that I believe would be great for the country--and the technology is already here, we just have to learn how to legalize it--is your ability to wear something on your wrist. This is one of my favorites. I am just going to walk you through a concept.

This is a breath biopsy. A couple versions of this out there think it would be a couple hundred dollars, at most, and you could have functionally a medical lab in your medicine cabinet at home. Blow into it. Within a couple moments it tells you: Hey, guess what, you have a virus. It can then bang off your medical records, order your antivirals, and maybe Lyft or someone can drop it off at your house in a couple hours.

Would that make your life easier? Would that give you more time with your family and faster to get healed? Would it help crash parts of healthcare costs? Remember, three-quarters of that $112 trillion is healthcare, it is Medicare. Healthcare is what is substantially bankrupting this country.

Do you know what the problem with that technology is? It is illegal. The fact of the matter is you would let this breath biopsy be able to order your antivirals, allow the algorithm--and the data says the algorithm is more accurate than those of us that are humans. I know that just hurt a bunch of people's feelings.

If you legalize the technology you could have a disruption in the price of healthcare. You could make this society--our country-- dramatically more efficient and give us more time with our families and be healthy. It would be an economic virtuous cycle and a healthy one. It would just require us around here to actually have to deal with the avalanche of lobbyists that hate this technology. As I said before, we are sort of calcified intellectually around here, aren't we?

Mr. Speaker, now I want to talk about the heresy that is in President Biden's budget and the solutions. How many times have you gotten up here and seen the Speaker herself, multiple times--tax reform in 2017 was for the rich. No, it wasn't. CBO--more revenues came in. Corporate tax receipts leaped 75 percent after we reformed the tax code a couple years ago.

The fact of the matter is--what we call receipts in Ways and Means, revenues as most people would think of--coming into in government went up dramatically. Why that was so important is that 2018 and 2019 were our most successful years in modern economic history of poor people getting less poor, the middle class doing better, income inequality shrinking, food insecurity shrinking.

Minority populations had the biggest movement ever in U.S. history in getting less poor, getting wealthier. That income inequality gap shrank because we got the tax incentives correct. But because it was Republicans that did it, there is this running away from it--we have seen--great job, guys. Think about what has happened to this country in 1 year.

You are poorer today than you were 1 year ago. The fact of the matter is the setting off of inflation--God knows some of the other things that have gone on and we are going to touch on them--we are poorer today than we were 1 year ago. Yes, there was COVID. We stood behind these microphones a year ago and said, you don't want to keep dumping money the way you are doing, you are going to set off inflation. They told us to go jump in the lake. Congratulations, they did it.

Now some of the economists are telling us a recession by the end of the year, oh, and maybe 10 years of an inflationary cycle before we can squeeze it out of the system.

Once again, if you actually look at the charts, it was actually working women that exploded. This big of a movement here--I know this chart doesn't express it--that type of steep curve increasing is remarkable. It is just remarkable in what happened after tax reform.

It was actually working women, substantially those from minority populations, that had just remarkable increases in income. They are the ones that also got crushed during the way we approached the pandemic. Anyone that tells you, oh, it was this huge give-away of money.

Well, it is sort of amazing because it was the second and the third highest receipts or revenues in 2018 and 2019. You got to remember there was a little bit of a con in 2017 because the expensing went in-- you could expense in the last quarter before the tax reform. So the fourth quarter of 2017 you could begin expensing. So this actually had some of the economic growth effects pulled into the previous year--I know I am geeking out a bit--but it continued.

One of the reasons we actually economically held up pretty well is the Democrats haven't been able to repeal the 2017 tax reform. And I know this slide is a little hard to see, but it is the best one we could put together in the short timeframe. Guess what? We crossed over $4 trillion in revenues and receipts.

If you go back--think about that, it was only a couple years earlier that we were at $3.3 trillion. You understand, that is like a $700 billion increase in receipts in a time when the Democrats told us we had eviscerated the tax code and gave it all away. At some point the calculator does tell the truth.

So back to our earlier thesis. Getting the tax system correct is amazing for the economics. This is the other side of the question I want to ask. How many here believe growth is moral? I will try to argue over and over that economic growth creates opportunity, and those opportunities driven by that growth is moral. I wish I could just get us to focus on--that growth also is a way we survive the debt bubble that is expanding like an alligator mouth. Here is the size of our economy and here is the scale of the debt.

You do understand that CBO basically says in 9 years, every single year just our interest payment will be $1 trillion. That is where we are heading. Here is a crazy thought. If I needed to tap down inflation today but I wanted to do it by not solely having the Federal Reserve do monetary policy, which

is squeezing cash out of the system--remember, inflation is what, too many dollars chasing too few goods. You have the monetary side of inflation pull the dollars out of the economy. The other side is to make more stuff.

This year, expensing. The reality of it--tax reform--it was the expensing that drove much of the economic expansion, the investment in productivity, it goes to 80 percent this fiscal year and then drops down I think to 60 percent the next year. Do a mechanism where you add a bonus.

If you say: Business, if you are willing to take some of that cash functioning out of the system and go invest it in productivity capital, buy a new plant, put in new equipment, do things that will make it so you can pay workers more. We make more stuff because when we have more stuff you knock down inflation because it is now the number of dollars divided by numbers of stuff. Crazy idea.

Do a tax adjustment.

Mr. Speaker, say we are going to give you a bonus on your expenses to encourage you to take that money out of liquidity and buy things that make us more productive as a country. It is a win-win, and it has the benefit of being a long-term benefit to society.

It is sort of. We have been working on this. This is just as a thought experiment. And it may not be brilliant, but it is more the concept of right now. Today there are too many dollars chasing too few goods. Then create a deal with business in America saying, Hey, if you take some cash, set it aside, functionally, ah, screw it, and you are going to put it into new equipment that makes it more efficient so you can have more goods, better transportation, better supply chains, that is what we want to incentivize instead of trying to buy things today and shove them in a warehouse because you are worried the price is going to go up tomorrow.

This is the type of thought experiments policy we should be pursuing, Mr. Speaker, if you need to knock down inflation but you want to do it by growing as an economy.

Instead, around here, we are going to sit around on our backsides and let the Federal Reserve basically squeeze us out and put many people through months and months and months of recessionary misery because that is how we are going to knock down inflation.

Another part of the thought experiment: I have some new areas--if I am blessed enough to represent in the coming cycle--and we did some polling. And they came back that crime is their number one issue.

I went on a ride-along with a sergeant who is actually a friend. He was showing me neighborhoods saying, You do realize the homelessness in these neighborhoods has doubled in a year. Doubled. He is explaining to me that someone now can get high for a fraction of the cost they could a year ago. Every single one of those are what we call knockoff effects, second-degree, third-degree effects.

Do you all remember your high school economics class?

You opened up the borders. What did you think was going to happen?

My community of Phoenix is flooded with narcotics. As a matter of fact, we just had a bust a couple months ago. There was enough fentanyl to kill every single resident in Arizona.

So the compassion that this administration and Speaker Pelosi wanted to show for the border, thank you, because you are killing my neighbors.

The homelessness--I don't believe the Phoenix market is the only area that is seeing incredible increases in homelessness. The crime--go on to the city of Phoenix's heat map and click, click, click, and you can see the expansion of the crime and where it is moving and the number of overdoses.

The fact of the matter is when you screw up a policy, then you need to think through the knockoff effects.

You screwed up the border policy.

How much misery did you bring to society?

Remember, we have done a number of presentations.

What are the two ways you make the working middle class or the working lower class poorer?

Inflation. We are doing a great job at that. And you flood the marketplace with people with similar skill sets. So if you are that individual who may not have finished high school, but you are a good drywaller and you are busting your backside--and it is hard work; I hung drywall as a young man--we just flooded the marketplace with people of similar skill sets.

Does anyone around here own a basic economics book?

So let's go to a couple other things. So the principle there is, get the border policy right because there is this incredible irony--legal immigration for individuals with specific talent sets that we actually need in this society, the young man who just got his Ph.D. at Arizona State University and is leaving because the State Department's ability to process visas and ability to be immigration has functionally become nonexistent in the last 2 years. But over here, a couple million cross the border.

Does anyone see just the weird irony of the Democrats' policies of, they hurt?

I don't think they were meant to hurt. I think they had the virtue signaling quality of sounding compassionate, but that is not what has happened.

So let's actually walk through a couple of things that are actually additional solutions.

How many times do we talk about supply chains?

And you have seen the latest data. It basically says--and I am not going to argue with it because I haven't had a chance to break down the numbers--half of inflation is we spent too damn much money. But half of inflation is second degree knockoff effects in supply chains.

So we just did the transportation bill. The transportation bill was substantially green oriented, very little of the money actually went to roads and bridges. None of it actually went to disruptive technologies.

But there are ideas like this, where this was some SpaceX engineers who are out raising capital to build this, where you would actually have autonomous trains. So you pull a container off, stick it on one of these, the autonomous lorry right underneath it on the track drives it to the warehouse it is supposed to be dropped off at.

So you are telling me we have a crisis in truck drivers in the Alameda Corridor outside L.A. Our ability to use technology, why didn't we incentivize this sort of thing?

But do you want to know what the Democrats chose to incentivize in their Build Back Better, Mr. Speaker?

It wasn't creative things to make us more productive as a society. It was ideas like this: in their legislation it is illegal for the ports to automate.

Huh?

But they just told us that they were trying to fix the supply chains--except for the numbers of giveaways to the unions they put into their legislation that you can't automate the ports.

So on one hand, Mr. Speaker, you have breakthrough technology that says that we think we have a way to move these containers. And then the next thing that the brain trust around here does policy-wise is, we are going to make it illegal for you to do the automation that would move the supply chains that you are telling us is half the inflationary spike.

There are solutions. Stop putting up these impediments and start embracing the technology to fix the problem.

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

So in the President's proposal, in the Democrats' proposals, they want to tax the rich more. The new President Biden's budget, I think, has 36 new taxes in it. But here is the great irony. Okay. So they want to do this one tax where they want to functionally tax unrealized capital or unrealized gains which is the taking--it will be ruled unconstitutional. But it is an interesting concept. We want to make a simple proposal that something both Republicans and Democrats might agree upon, stop subsidizing the rich. We have come here to this floor a couple of times and shown there are $1.4 trillion every 10 years that the left subsidizes the rich.

And so what do the Democrats do?

They say: We need to tax the rich more.

Okay. And then they put in Build Back Better you can make $800,000 a

year and we are going to hand you $125,000 of tax credits--not tax deductions--credits.

Does anyone see the lunacy going on here?

So the virtue signaling is rich people aren't paying enough, and then over here we are going to give them 1 trillion-plus dollars in subsidies, and then they are going to add more in their Build Back Better for more rich people to have more subsidies. It is just infuriating.

Does anyone actually read this stuff?

Does anyone own a calculator?

Mr. Speaker, you start to see the numbers.

I have a number of these slides here, and the point is really simple: policy after policy, if you can afford your fourth $6-million house on a beach somewhere, do you deserve subsidized flood insurance?

But all through this government there are items like that where we wink and nod, we say we are going to tax rich people more, and then we are handing out massive subsidies.

As a Republican, I want to cut spending. You say you want more revenues, Mr. Speaker. Great. Stop putting through the Tax Code, regulatory code, these programs of wink, wink, nod, nod, a bunch of subsidies to people who write checks.

So, Mr. Speaker, you have had a number of, particularly, Republicans who have come behind the microphone and said: You canceled the Keystone pipeline. You made it really hard to put new land into production for pulling hydrocarbons out.

That is actually not the big thing that the left did. What the left did are things like this where the Securities and Exchange Commission is functionally adding new rules that if you invest in hydrocarbons or you are a pension system or these, you are going to have to fill out paperwork to explain your effect on global warming.

What are your effects on carbon?

They functionally did what we call, they screwed up the capital stack. So you could have a natural gas field that was substantially shut down when prices collapsed during the pandemic. It is ready to go, but you need a bunch of capital to put it back into production.

And where do you go to get a loan, Mr. Speaker?

The Democrats did something brilliant, if the goal was to make us much poorer and dependent on foreign countries' hydrocarbons like Venezuela. They said, Okay. We can do the regulatory side, by that is a little bit obvious, but if we make it so no one can get capital to actually put these fields into production, they have succeeded.

Do not let someone try to con you, Mr. Speaker, that what you are paying at the gas pump today and what you had to pay for your heating bill yesterday happened because of Putin's invasion. Natural gas prices exploded last September, October.

Mr. Speaker, do you remember this room being full of people wanting to talk about how we are going to survive the winter heating bills?

That was because if this. It didn't just happen.

But my proposal is, okay. I am fascinated with the use of natural gas. Our friends on the left, our brothers and sisters on the left, say, But, David, yes, it may burn about half the CO 2 emitting as coal, but there is methane.

Let's see if I can find this slide. The technology that is out there to basically gobble up methane--and maybe this works, maybe it doesn't work, but the fact that the technology exists and it has been scientifically proven to work, why wouldn't we pursue that saying: If you could get your natural gas out--because remember, President Biden just promised we are going to ship a bunch of liquified natural gas to Europe, except we don't really have the production right now and you can't get capital for it and the left is going to protest leakage from methane. Well, it turns out you can take clay, a copper oxide--so it is kitty litter. Think about that. It is a cheap solution to absorb that methane.

Why wouldn't we bring the brain trusts around here and say, We need the natural gas desperately. Some are worried about the methane bleed. Fine. Let's find a solution. It turns out there may be a really inexpensive one.

Why don't we invest and pursue it?

There are solutions.

Instead, around here, it is the Malthusian economics of let's just shut it down and see how long people are willing to live in poverty and misery.

The transportation bill again: What is one of the most powerful things you can do to move traffic in urban areas and suburban areas, Mr. Speaker?

Technology. It turns out if you actually care about the environment and you want to move more traffic, invest in the technology that synchronizes the stoplights that tell you when school is out, so it synchronizes the lights, the on-ramps to a freeway that tell you when an ambulance is coming. The studies over and over and over say whether it be in an algorithm or an AI-managed smart grid system for traffic is one of the most impactful things you can do, Mr. Speaker, to clean the air because you move the traffic.

We couldn't get anyone here willing to even listen to one of our amendments on the left about promoting that type of technology.

There is a biotech revolution going on around us and substantially this is happening because of what we did in that 2017 tax reform which moved--exploded--the investments. Whether it be messenger RNA, my fascination with synthetic biology, the stem cells, there are disease after disease after disease and misery after misery we are about to cure. We know how to cure hemophilia now. I think we are on the cusp of knowing how to cure sickle cell anemia, an incredibly painful disease. They are here.

This place should be doing everything we can to promote getting those things to market safely and quickly, as fast as we can to end the misery. By the way, it has amazing financial benefits to the economy and to our tax base.

And you start to look at the innovations that are coming right now from the biotech industry.

One of the reasons I did this--and I didn't bring the other slides. Then, the left offers their H.R. 3, which, functionally, the economists, even the leftwing economists, said, yes, it will lower some drug prices, because we are basically going to do scarcity pricing. Functionally, we are going to say you can't have certain drugs if it costs more than a certain amount, like they do in Europe. But it will also crash the capital stock once again. A lot of you are going to die because you are not going to get this next generation of cure, and this amazing cycle of cures that are coming goes away--great virtue signaling.

The left will tell you they are about to do a piece of legislation to lower drug prices, and we all go ``yay,'' because they are too high. But by the end of the decade, there are fewer cures, and the value goes away because you didn't remove people from being sick.

It is all about curing people. In the misery, help bring those cures to market.

Personalized medicine, let's legalize it. I showed you the wearables, those things. This here should be part of your ability to stay healthy. Legalize it.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time is remaining.

Forgive me. I have been trying to talk fast so as to not chew it all up.

Mr. Speaker, in a couple of the pieces of legislation that passed here, we have put aside boatloads of cash to run wire to rural America, and they deserve to have internet access.

I thought this slide was amusing, but you are actually seeing it happening in Ukraine right now. These are a bunch of little kitties in a Starlink satellite dish because apparently a Starlink satellite dish stays a bit warm in the winter so it defrosts itself. See, it is cute-- kitties.

But the fact of the matter is, every inch of North America now has broadband internet. It is a bunch of satellites flying over us.

So, let me get this straight: In Ukraine, they are now using this, Starlink, to be able to communicate, but we can't seem to get our brothers and sisters here in the House of Representatives to understand there is a solution to broadband all over the country. They just happen to be flying in low-Earth orbit above our heads. It is here.

Instead, we are going to turn around and put out billions and billions and

billions and billions of dollars of subsidies to put more fiber and more wire in the ground to the middle of nowhere.

Mr. Speaker, there is a huge disruption coming. We need to make sure that our regulatory and policy sets are ready for this.

This is another thing that would also dramatically help this coming decade's inflation cycle. Researchers, particularly at the University of Illinois, have done this remarkable thing. I did a series of presentations on this a year ago. I will do this real quick.

You-all remember your high school biology class. You remember a C4 plant, plants that really, really want carbon to turn it into a sugar and grow. But they accidentally grab an oxygen molecule, and they have to spend all of this energy purging that oxygen molecule and go back and try to get a carbon molecule. I know this is a little geeky, but it is important to get our heads around it.

They have come up with a way to tweak the plant so, every time, it always grabs the carbon so it turns it into a sugar. Some plants will grow 40 percent more efficiently on the same land, the same fertilizer, and the same water. You do realize, just that basic math--and it won't turn out this way, but just conceptually--that is like removing every car off the face of the Earth.

If our brothers and sisters really care about the environment, they would be running as fast as they can to allow these types of available technologies to feed the world and feed our country. Yes, it would be a disruption, but these things exist.

Mr. Speaker, the other topic I want to touch on is a tax policy. This is a conceptual one.

How many of you have ever heard of a VAT tax, a value-added tax? Okay, so much for the enthusiasm.

A value-added tax is what substantially most of the rest of the world uses. If we are going to have a conversation about: We want businesses back in the United States; we want manufacturing back in the United States; we want to take on China; we are going to do tariffs; we are going to do these regulations; and we are going to do import and export controls--great. Realize most of those aren't really going to do much. Here is how I am going to try to explain what the rest of the world does to stick it to the United States.

This is a picture of a beautiful Audi. Let's pretend it is a $100,000 car. My guess is, this one is a little more expensive. It is being made in Germany, but someone in Scottsdale, Arizona, is about to buy this Audi.

When it is in Germany, there is a 19 percent VAT tax on it, a value- added tax. But the moment it leaves the shore of Germany and is on its way to the United States, the car has been exported. They give them back the $19,000, that 19 percent. When it comes to the United States, it is $19,000 less than it was sitting there in Germany. When it hits our shore, we put a small tariff or duty on it.

But the $100,000 Tesla that is made in Texas, when someone in Germany is buying it, it has all the tax load--corporate tax, income tax, all the other things that we would do in the United States--in that price. When this car leaves the United States, we don't refund 19 percent of the taxes. It hits the German shore, and they put that $19,000 on top of the price.

So, we get it both ways, coming and going. When we want to export, other countries put their VAT tax on our products. But when they send a product to us, they take it off.

We can be incredibly competitive. We can automate in ways to make up for labor differential costs. Our energy costs are actually much more competitive than the rest of the world.

Why isn't all manufacturing in the United States right now? It is because we are basically getting arbitraged on the value-added tax because the rest of the world refunds it. Until we fix that, all the talk of ``we want made in America,'' the math doesn't work.

There are a couple of creative solutions. They are technically difficult, where you would have to take that refunded VAT and put it back on at our shore, so, functionally, everyone is treated exactly the same. The $100,000 American-made car and the $100,000 German-made car have the same tax load when they are being sold in their respective countries.

I have been trying to figure out a way to try to explain this concept simply, but the tax system, the current tax system as it is, is one of the reasons it is so difficult to compete with other countries' manufacturing, because they refund that value-added tax.

Mr. Speaker, the last thing is, I am truly worried about something. I believe it is going to affect the United States, but I fear it is going to affect the entire world.

How many of you have seen the stories that a number of the agrarian economists, food economists, believe that this coming fall, parts of the world are going to starve?

The price of fertilizer is up dramatically. The price of grain is up dramatically. Putin's war on Ukraine has screwed up the grain markets.

Do we have a moral obligation to step up and understand that, 6 months from now, part of the world may be starving? What happens in the world when you have people going hungry? You have violence and horrible things happening.

We see it coming. All the things we are seeing in the futures markets, the price of fertilizer blowing up, if they don't actually affect food supplies, if I am wrong, it is a free option. But if I am right, we should be pulling the alarm cord.

We should be begging farmers--in our farm policy, our ag committee, we should be removing set-asides, encouraging ways to take corn that would be used to make corn-based ethanol and turn it into animal feed, using the rotation that is already happening to soy because soy only uses--it is not my specialty--a quarter or a third of the amount of fertilizer.

If this is about to happen to the world, and we see it 6 months ahead, what is our moral obligation to pull that alarm cord and get it right? By getting it right, we also help our own inflation and maybe a couple of million people don't die in sub-Saharan Africa.

Mr. Speaker, I know that was a lot of different subjects thrown really quickly. If someone is interested, almost everything I touched on, we have done much longer presentations on how the policy would work, how it would help inflation, how it would make people's lives healthier and better.

But my point tonight is a really simple one. Stop doing the things that ultimately are hurting people. Start looking for the optimism and the opportunity that can make America more prosperous, that can make the poor less poor, and that can actually knock down inflation. It would actually be able to be done together.

A lot of these ideas aren't actually Republican or Democrat. They are just disruptive. If we would embrace the disruption, this could be an amazing decade. Right now, the data we are getting today, we may be in for years of misery because of policy from this last year.

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

Madam Speaker, it is neat to see us actually have something that we are all doing together.

A bit of trivia, at the end of this decade, 22 percent of our population will be 65 or older. Retirement security is--besides just the moral imperative--it is going to be the financial, it is going to be the driver of almost all sovereign debt.

Look, there are a couple dozen provisions in this legislation, and in many ways they look like tinkering, but they come together. If you happen to have a profession where you have a mandatory retirement age that might be 60, 65, the ability to do catch-up--to be a small business and knowing what you can contribute to your 401(k) when you are doing your taxes instead of trying to guess at the end of the year--these things all come together.

We are also going to have to look forward in the coming year and deal with the reality of what did inflation do to the cost of future retirement? The taxation on, really, gain, that isn't purchasing power, but is inflation. This is a terrific first step and it is neat to have us do something together.

Mr. Speaker, I want to apologize right now, because I have had a lot of coffee, and I am just cranky today. I am just cranky. I also apologize for those who have to try to keep track. I will, on occasion, try to slow down. I torment them on occasion by talking too fast.

I started to do part of this a week ago and only wanted to do a little part, but we have a 10 o'clock shutdown rule, so I got up against the clock and had to stop. So, God forbid, they let me have the entire hour, which means I brought a whole bunch of boards.

A week ago, I pitched to some of our friends here a really mean, difficult, and absolutely honest question: Tell me something good that has been done in the last year of absolute control of Congress, of the White House, and of, functionally, the levers of our Government. Tell us something good that has been done policy-wise, legislative-wise, that has passed here for working men and women, for the future of my 6- year-old daughter, for people's retirement security, what has actually happened here.

Then I am going to walk through a whole bunch of things where the words, the virtue signaling, the discussion had great language, warm and fuzzy and caring, and it has actually been devastating to poor people, to the working poor.

I don't think they meant to, but the fact of the matter is, at some point, my brothers and sisters on the left have to have a brutally honest conversation with themselves of what their policies are doing.

We are going to start with, being from a border State, immigration. But it is not immigration. It is opening up the border. What has the Democrats' policy, what has this President's policy, on functionally ignoring the border, done to my community in Arizona and to the country.

First, let's also get our heads around the scale of the numbers when you start seeing that border encounters increased 278 percent, functionally, in a year, when you start seeing numbers over 1.7 million crossings, when you start seeing crossings that are in the millions.

But do you remember all the speechifying that was here a year ago? Do you remember how mean the last President was? We are going to be compassionate and loving.

Does anyone here understand the economic concept of first degree, second degree, third degree effects, what you have done to my communities in Phoenix, what you have done to the communities in this country? Let's show the actual math.

Now, I also have an economic premise, and we have done this presentation multiple times. They were written by liberal economists that talked about the two things you do to make the working poor poorer.

Number one was inflation. Well, congratulations. We are going to talk about that.

Number two was open borders, and it was a very simple concept. If you look at the profile of our brothers and sisters who we would categorize--and I hate these categories, but we do them for policy purposes--who are considered the working poor, they are often our brothers and sisters who did not graduate high school, who sell their labor. That is their income.

You open up the border and import millions of individuals who their economic contribution will be to sell their labor. One of these economic papers, written a decade ago, says you have just taken the working poor in the country and made them poor for another decade. One of them talks about that their income, at the end of the decade, will be at least 6 percent lower.

For all those folks that like to preach about compassion, where is the compassion for those who are just grinding it out, trying to survive here? Do you understand that, at some point, the math always wins?

Let's have a little fun here. Here is my premise, and I am going to try to do this on a number of these boards.

You open up the border. We are going to talk about how many of our brothers and sisters and families and the kids in my community and across this country are now dying of fentanyl.

I did a ride-along a month ago with one of my neighbors who happens to be a police sergeant in a portion of north central Phoenix. He is telling me that, a year ago--and I am not going to get

these numbers exactly right. It was like $70 to $100 for that addict to get high, and now it might be $12.

Remember your basic economics classes. When a price crashes, what does that mean? The availability has skyrocketed.

We are also going to talk a little bit about--I have ZIP Codes in my community where the social workers, the charities, some of my churches are telling me homelessness has doubled in 1 year. Have you seen the crime numbers? We have to deal with reality.

Then, we probably should have an interesting conversation. What makes poor communities poorer? If you have made drugs available, if you have flooded the communities with homelessness, if now you have also increased crime--and do you see the death numbers of our brothers and sisters who are dying of drugs?

Are we willing to have a basic understanding--when you make a really crappy decision that we are not going to enforce the border because it is more compassionate, do you understand the cascade of misery that the left has brought to many of their own constituencies?

The fact of the matter is, a lot of these neighborhoods that are suffering this aren't the ones voting for me. But, dammit, I care because their misery should be all of ours, except it is not politically expedient around here because it basically proves the rhetoric: Let's defund the police. Let's defund ICE.

Great job, guys. Look what you did to your neighborhoods. Look what you did to our communities. Look at the misery. Look at the death you brought. And the math will always win.

For every Member and staffer who may be on one of the televisions around this campus, if you are watching, I want you to have the experience I have had where you have to pick up the phone and talk to a mother who had their child die because they thought they were taking some party drug, and it turned out to have fentanyl in it.

That is the misery. And you are on that phone, and the tears are running down, and you are terrified.

I have a 6\1/2\-year-old, the greatest gift God has ever given me. I am terrified that this is the society that you get when you put the left in charge.

Did they mean this? The rhetoric doesn't say so, but, dammit, will they actually stop and take a look at the outcome of their decisions?

When you see a 133 percent increase, people in our communities are dying. They come behind these microphones and tell us how they are the ones that care. Fine. Maybe you should be on the next phone call with me when you are talking to that mother. You can explain to them that it was compassion to open up the border and make it so drug prices crash, so now fentanyl comes screaming into my community, and their child gets to die.

There are consequences to really bad policy. It may have been great rhetoric when you had a different President, but the misery has been foisted on our neighborhoods, our suburbs, our communities, and particularly the communities that the Democrats claim they care about.

If you look at what is going on, on the drug overdoses--by the way, I brought this because, believe it or not, for anyone watching, there are rules where I can't reach over here and write on this, so we did something sort of silly. We had to print it and put some tape on it.

There is your number for 2021, and that is only as of October. We don't have the final data. So, congratulations, Democrats. Over 100,000 of our brothers and sisters are dead, of our children, of our next generation. And there are still a couple more months to be added to that math.

I don't believe it is purposeful, but I believe there is an embarrassment of saying, oh, God, what have we done? The number of times around this place you make a policy decision, you campaign on it, it is in your brochures, you have given speeches, and then you find out it crashes and burns and creates more misery, that willingness to get up behind a microphone and say: I am wrong.

I have had a couple of those, where I thought I understood the math. I thought I understood the societal implications. I am waiting.

Now, we did hear a little bit of it. I was optimistic. The President got behind that microphone up ahead of me and said: Let's fund the police.

You could hear the grumbling of a number of our brothers and sisters on this side because they had campaigned on something very different for years.

Now, let's talk about other levels of crime, and this is not my area of specialty. I do Medicare finance. I do trade. I do taxes. I love working on the geeky stuff. Yes, it doesn't get you on television. You don't raise lots of money because you said something crazy, but it is important. It is what keeps the economy going. It is what keeps prosperity, and I believe economic growth is moral.

But we have been working on a side project on the Joint Economic Committee, and here is our outline. What makes people poor?

Well, you get people that say, oh, education, racism. You start looking at the data sets and truly grinding in, and then things we could do something about, and you start seeing things that pop off the data if you are willing to open your eyes and own a calculator.

Diabetes actually pops off as one of the top things when you see the concentrations of our brothers and sisters with diabetes.

When you actually see crime--and this is one that almost is never talked about here. Communities often that have the most economic misery, is it a chicken and the egg? It is a little hard to get ahead in life when people keep stealing stuff or killing your family members.

Maybe it is time. Reagan, back in the 1980 election, had something called the misery index. It was, functionally, inflation and unemployment. Maybe it is time we could do something much more effective and create the Biden and Democrat-controlled misery index. We could just lay out how many of our brothers and sisters are OD'ing, how many of our brothers and sisters are dying, how many of our brothers and sisters are victims of crime, how many of our brothers and sisters are sicker today, how many of our brothers and sisters now have mental health issues because they spent a couple of years locked up, how many of our kids are almost afraid to take their masks off now.

Think about the sort of psychodrama that this place has foisted on the citizens of this country. And the hits keep coming.

Look, I put this one here more just as a--and I know I am being a bit snarky, but I have to get it off my chest. The number of get-togethers I had a year ago, so during 2020, and fussing and screaming: Why aren't you doing more about COVID? If we had Democrats in charge, people would be healthier. We would solve the problem.

Do you remember President Biden's campaign promises? Do you remember the Democrat leadership's promises here? Put us in charge. We will take care of it.

So, a time where there are therapeutics, a time where there are vaccines, you did a great job, guys, a great job. Because do you see the math? A hell of a lot more of our brothers and sisters died in a time where we actually had the tools.

What happened? My argument is rhetoric sure does sound a lot better than actually explaining competence.

Now, let's talk about--in my 8 minutes I had last week, it was basically trying to have a conversation of what the Democrats have done making the environment worse. And you go, huh?

The fact of the matter--and I will show you the slide here in a moment. As soon as the Biden administration took over--but it even goes back to 2018 when the Democrats won the House.

They basically set off a campaign or jihad, whatever colloquialism you want to use, and it wasn't, hey, we are just going to cancel pipelines. What was it? In 2020, President Biden, in a debate with Bernie Sanders, said there will be no more permitting. No more permitting of pipelines. No more permitting of wells. It was an absolute promise.

Well, to his credit, he kept his promise. But did anyone stop for a moment to think about what they were going to do?

So, functionally, what is ESG? I can give you the quote, or we can just do something really simple. It is when you

basically add such a risk premium to investing in any type of hydrocarbons.

So, you are a pension system, you are our pension systems, you are the California teachers, you are a mutual fund, you are an index fund, and you are going to now have to, with all the threats and things coming through the administration--this isn't votes. This isn't a proclamation from the President. This is the infrastructure of our society and our financial markets basically raising a risk premium for investing in natural gas, for investing in the infrastructure of hydrocarbons. Well, what happens?

What happens when you do that? Because remember, it wasn't the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Go back to last September and October when natural gas prices shot off the charts, and there were people here coming--people on the left--you know, attacking hydrocarbon and natural gas companies. But the fact of the matter is, we were talking about how miserable this winter was going to be, what was happening to your fuel prices.

And look, I have never actually seen heating oil. I am from the desert. I have lived in the desert my entire life. I have seen pictures of it. And then you see people saying it is two, three, four times more expensive for these people to heat their homes, and then you also realize the ZIP Codes they live in and who they vote for. They voted for it.

But the reality of it is, there is a punch line here. When Democrat policy drove up the price of natural gas so high that power generation all across North America converted back to coal, you realize the United States burnt 23 percent more coal last year.

I mean, did anyone just do the basic math? Okay. You are going to engage in policies that make natural gas dramatically more expensive. The next least expensive fuel, all of a sudden, became coal. Congratulations.

Now, during President Trump's time, the use of coal--and this was a guy who claimed to be a coal supporter--went down dramatically because natural gas crashed in price. Remember, the last 15 years, the movement we had to become dramatically less carbon-centric, you know, greenhouse gas formula, heading towards--for those who cared about the math on the Paris accords, was almost exclusively, exclusively the use of natural gas because, remember, we took off so much baseload nuclear, we took off more baseload nuclear in the United States in the previous 15 years than we actually did produce new photovoltaic and wind. So if someone says, oh, it is because of all the clean energy generation. No, it is actually because of natural gas displacing coal. I mean, the math is the math.

This one we need to share. Anyone notice if you were here--and this is even for the poor staff here, please don't move your eyes or anything because someone will take a shot at you for it--a couple weeks ago, before the State of the Union, we came to the floor here, we had to wear masks. Then we all hear about polling being done by the White House and the Democrat leadership, and all of a sudden, we find out, hey, turns out the public is over it, even Democrat-based voters are pretty much over the enforcement of mask mandates, and did you notice pretty much a little bit after the Impact Research poll that the Democrats did, 48 hours later after the poll was published, guess what happened? I don't have to wear a mask on the floor anymore.

Policy by virtue signaling instead of a calculator, it is theater. Welcome to how this Congress has been run. It happened. It happened. Look, I am not the only one to point this out. Even a number of leftist publications said: Isn't it just amazing, as soon as the Democrats got a poll that it no longer was popular even with their base, all the masks come off?

Even the people, even the experience of a couple of the Democrat matriarchs that fussed at me not to get into an elevator with them because I wasn't wearing a mask in the hallway, which I was very respectful, I didn't, 48 hours later didn't care that I was in the elevator with them without a mask because the polling said it was okay. I am happy to know we now make public health policy on the Democrat side with polling. But it is real. It happened.

So let's actually have a little bit more fun here. The absurdity of Democrat policy. Guess when statutorily--the Democrats passed this about 3 weeks ago, they set a date. They set a date when the pandemic will be over. Not based on science, not based even on their polling. They set a date. Congratulations, it is September 30, 2025.

Two years ago, when we were actually working together on this, we had a collective understanding we were worried that emergency rooms, hospitals were going to be just packed, we wouldn't have enough ventilators, we were racing for vaccines. We didn't have antivirals. But there was, I thought, a collective societal that we declare a pandemic.

Do you remember 15 days to slow the spread? We will all stay home for 15 days, slow the spread. And here we are a couple years later. We have antivirals; we have vaccines; we have therapeutics; we understand the virus; and the policy set is to make September 30, 2025.

Now, we should actually let whoever is watching know the joke. It is about the money. This place is always about the money. There are lots and lots and lots of special spending line items that come with the declaration of a pandemic, and this pretty much locks in saying, hey, you know, this person may hate vaccine passports or hate masks or this and that, but wink wink, nod nod we have made sure the declaration of the pandemic is until 2025 so we can keep getting the largesse of the SPIFs on the cash. If that is what it is, tell the truth. Say, look, you know, we buy our elections by handouts through our policies here. Okay. But tell the truth.

I have a personal fixation on diabetes, and I have done speeches, presentation after presentation on this, and I want to walk through why. Look, we will come back to this two or three times.

This slide, the numbers are much higher now because this slide is from a year ago because the CBO, Congressional Budget Office, hasn't given us an update. But 29 years from now, we are scheduled to have $112 trillion of borrowing, and that is in today's dollars, so adjusted for inflation. Functionally, 75 percent of that spending is Medicare. 31 percent of all Medicare spending is diabetes. 33 percent of all healthcare spending in the United States is diabetic related. I represent, I believe, the second highest percentage of population, one of my Tribal communities that I represent--I love them dearly--they are number two in, we think the world, in the percentage of their members who have diabetes, and their sister Tribe is number one.

Come to my community sometime. I will take you out in the community, introduce you to some of the families I have known my whole life, and grandma has her foot cut off.

So the President did something a lot of people cheered for: Hey, insulin is outrageously expensive, we are going to subsidize it. Okay. Fine. Fine.

Does anyone on the Democrat side actually read any of the healthcare, the pharmaceutical, the science journals? The facility is almost up and running where it is a co-op. If they actually cared about crashing the price of insulin, someone would have paid attention that it is already here. This stuff is about to roll out.

A number of the pharmacies and hospitals got together and said: Screw this, we are going to use a market. We are going to go around, and we are going to make it ourselves, and we are going to do direct sales. They are talking about no more than $30 per vial, $55 per box. It is not requiring government subsidies, regulations, because you know how efficiently that works: We will subsidize it, but the cost of the bureaucracy to do it will be a nightmare.

But does anyone pay attention? I was here about 3 weeks ago talking about if the left really wants to be compassionate--and I can get my brothers and sisters on the right to be loving and compassionate--we know how to cure type 1, at least that is what the science journals are saying. We have figured out how to take a stem cell and direct it to become--I always mispronounce it--an islet cell to produce insulin. There is now even a new version where the taking of that cell and adjusting it with CRISPR so the body doesn't see it as foreign so you can actually have a constant line.

Wouldn't it be miraculous if you actually had some thinking people here

that said: Screw this, instead of patching up people's misery, we are going to subsidize insulin so you can live in misery, just cheaper?

And back to my previous comments that we have been working on a model about what creates income inequality, what creates poverty? We are actually seeing health and crime and these things. Hold it. We know diabetes is actually for our brothers, the urban poor, my Tribal poor, rural poor, is truly everywhere. If you cared, wouldn't you throw everything you have at this concept of, okay, we know how to cure type 1?

The articles, if you read through them--and some of it is thick--is, yeah, the same concept, you could take someone with type 2 and get their body to produce insulin again, but you would actually have to have them engage in much healthier life practices. Would we be willing to have the really brutal conversation here of we are going to change how the farm bill works, we are going to change how nutrition support works, and those who would actually like to see a future where their diabetes type 2 is cured, would they be willing to work with their community to eat different? Would we be willing to work on that? Would we be willing to deliver, have Lyft deliver food boxes to the home and say we are loving, caring about your future and your health, and we don't want you to be like the grandma who is a friend of mine who has had her foot cut off? And if you will do this, the societal trade will be, we will do the stem cell to islet cell to get your body back to producing insulin.

And, oh, by the way, diabetes is the single biggest contributor to U.S. sovereign debt. So for those who are fiscal hawks, great. For those who actually give a darn about people, wonderful.

And, instead, our solution coming from our President standing right there is: I am going to subsidize insulin. I am not going to cure the misery; I am just going to make it cheaper. Where's the vision here?

So now let's actually go back to the previous, the two things you do most to make the working poor poor. Okay. We talked about opening the border, making them compete with others with similar skill sets. My numbers are already out of date because it keeps getting worse. You also crush them by making everything they buy--because if you are poor, if you are that working middle class, if you are just hardworking middle class, the amount of your income that goes to food, the amount of your income that goes to rent, the amount of your income that goes to driving is substantially more than the vast majority of the people in this body.

The income we are paid, we are in the top quartile. And then we also have some of the richest people you can imagine that are here, and it is always funny hearing them talk about--when they are worth millions and millions and millions of dollars, but to the family that is struggling out there, this has been a really crappy year.

I will point it out, and I am going to do it a couple times. Guess which community had the highest inflation rate in the United States? Mine. I had 10.9 percent in my neighborhoods. You want to talk about kicking people in the head? That is year over year. This is what unified Democrat government has brought you. You are poorer today than the day Joe Biden took office.

And then the hallmark here used to be, well, the gap between the rich and poor, income inequality. Well, guess what? That gap, particularly in 2018, 2019, was the greatest shrinkage in modern economic times. 2018, 2019, the fastest movement of the poor getting less poor, the fastest movement of food insecurity shrinking. Congratulations, Democrats, you have done a great job.

It turns out income inequality really started to expand last year. Inflation crushing people. Except if you own lots of assets. If you are one of the rich people here, and you have multiple houses, you have lots of stocks and bonds, you have other things, you got richer or at least your assets went up in value.

Does anyone else see the cruelty going on here, or does it just not fit because you have a pasty White guy here giving the speech?

But the math is the math. I mean, at some point the math will always win.

And my brothers and sisters in the Phoenix area--now, Phoenix is a big community. Remember, Maricopa County is the fourth most populous--I still think we are catching up with Harris County, but fourth most populous county in the country. It is functionally almost seven congressional districts.

And my brothers and sisters in the Phoenix area had a 10.9 percent inflation year over year. Go talk to those families and explain to them how, hasn't this been a great year for you? Aren't you happy you voted for this?

And then you start to look at some of the other data. And I have got to give the left credit. They have done one thing that I didn't think could happen. I am seeing some polling coming out of my community where, not by a little bit, but by almost double digits, Hispanic voters are now going to vote for Republicans. And then you see this and you start to understand why.

Look what has happened, particularly to the African American and Latino voters--or the population, what has happened to their rents? 28 percent increases. They may have thought Democrats were their protectors, but Democrats have basically been their tormentors because the policies have been so badly designed.

And when they were voting for these, we stood here and explained, do you understand what you are about to set off? And the arrogance--well, in a weird way, thank you. It looks like now the Hispanic vote may actually be Republican. Is it because we are so wonderful, or their policies have been so brutal to those communities?

So let's have the hits keep going. The United States--you have heard this over and over and lots of other people have come here and talked about this, but it is worth saying again.

What happens when a nation has the ability to be secure in its energy? What happens to a nation when you are Germany; when you are basically beholden to someone else's hydrocarbons?

And there is one here, and I am going to do this a little bit out of order because I find it absolutely fascinating. We should do this one two or three times. Now we understand that a decade, a decade and a half ago, the protests in Germany, and now we find out much of the activism here, the researchers, the reporters, the journalists that actually do investigative, hey, this stuff may have been financed by countries that sell hydrocarbons. I can't imagine who that would be.

But we now know the stories in Germany--you have seen the stories of the suitcases of cash going to their green movement to shut down their base load nuclear, and Germany today is dramatically dirtier in greenhouse gases than they were 10, 15 years ago because they are living on Russian hydrocarbons and coal.

And I think out of the 20-plus nuclear facilities, I think they have one facility and they are scrambling to find out can they put them back into service. It turns out, same concept here.

I would love for our brothers and sisters on the left to help us actually do an investigation of who has been financing these shut down the pipelines, shut down much of the--particularly natural gas, which I have a great fondness for natural gas because of its miracle on reducing greenhouse gases.

But it looks like much of that part of the green movement may have been financed by countries that could care less about the world's global warming. But it was more about market constraints so they could sell more of their product.

And once again, we had become energy independent. We had become an exporter. The Biden administration takes over, and all of a sudden, the extortion games begin. The threat games begin. You start to find out you are going to be invested by the Securities and Exchange Commission because you may not have disclosed your global warming impact on your investments.

And then you wonder why it was actually months ago that natural gas prices went through the ceiling. I was going to say exploded, but that is a really bad pun. It is in the charts. It wasn't an invasion of Ukraine. It was the election of Democrats really, really screwing up policy.

And now, we don't actually have a complete answer on this. I am hoping it is purely for technical reasons because a couple of weeks ago I did a couple of charts here showing how much

base load nuclear is coming offline. And the fact of the matter is when that comes offline, even with adoption of all the clean energy, all the photovoltaic, all the wind, we actually are upside down. We will have to actually use more hydrocarbons.

And then you hear the story this week that the Feds have rescinded license for a Florida facility that is under construction, which I understand there are stunning amounts of capital already sitting there. I hope this is temporary.

But you would think this would be the type of thing we would be struggling, saying we really want non-carbon emitting base load power in this country. Except for the fact of the matter is--and it is reality--photovoltaic, wind, they write a lot of checks to the Democrats.

It is a dark thing I say, but the fact of the matter is, I can walk you through policy after policy after policy here where it seems to be chasing--I mean, look at H.R. 1 and the other things that this place has passed which had ultimately nothing to do with access to voting. It had to do with building a model that elects Democrats.

I mean, financing Democratic campaigns with six to one money; industrializing ballot harvesting because they have the networks to do that? I mean, it is just--

But, once again, we virtue signal. We say pretty words, and then just hope that the public never finds out what is actually underlying in the real piece of legislation.

And back to what I said before, congratulations Democrats. You burned 23 percent more coal last year.

Yes, I am from Arizona. We are one of the photovoltaic--I mean, it is a Holy Grail where we are. Power actually almost goes to zero for two, three, four hours in the afternoon because we produce so much. But let's get the policies right.

We need storage. There are some breakthroughs in storage now. I have a fascination with the rust iron battery. It doesn't work in a car because it is really big, really heavy, but it works in a utility scale.

But will the left take responsibility that they say one thing and the proof, they burnt 23 percent more coal last year. They made greenhouse gases worse. Pretty rhetoric isn't good math.

And the movement of natural gas--so the folks that say we have got to stop pipelines; have you seen what the pipelines actually look like in the United States? They are everywhere.

So the brain trust here raises lots of money; does lots of campaigns. We are going to cancel something like Keystone so they can put the oil on railcars, or maybe shove it out to the West Coast of Canada so it can be shipped to Asia? Because heaven knows, when they crack it, refine it, they do it in a really clean, well-regulated, EPA-controlled facilities, right?

It had nothing to do with what was good for the environment. It had to do with what was good for raising money.

And now the brain trust gets to deal with the mess they have created policywise. So now we get to see great stories that we are out visiting Venezuela. We are out visiting other countries that functionally are either--I accept the humiliation. Let's take the humiliation.

But if my brothers and sisters over here are truly committed to their green agenda, aren't they just horrified that the decision and policies that they have set up have actually made the environment worse, and now we are actually going to go to countries that actually do it in a filthy fashion.

Huge global warming impacts in the way they pull their hydrocarbon, and that is actually who we are reaching out to to ask for their help.

Of course, I think the real reality, the reason they do is because they have an idea what is about to hit them this election cycle because they have made working men and women's lives, the hard working men and women's lives in this country more miserable, and they are pedaling as fast as they can to find a way to back off the damage they have done.

So let's also see the efficiencies. Remember, we are going to have an administration with no drama. We are going to bring professionalism back.

Well, great. Passport backlog now at 2 million. VA claim backlog over a quarter million. IRS returns backed up over 24 million. SSA hearings, taking functionally almost a year.

Tell me something--so back to my opening question, give me something, anything, one thing that unified leftist control of this government has done to make people's lives better; to make the future of this country better? It has been like a misery factory.

And then, the next board, I want to point out, and it is just one of dozens of examples, but it is for people out there who may be paying attention to understand what is said over there has nothing to do with what they actually do.

So remember the build back better, you had the Speaker and the President and their spokespeople, well, if we spend all this money, if we engage in this policy, it will be good for inflation.

Mr. Speaker, can you tell me my time?

Mr. Speaker, so, tucked into--now here is the great irony. So we found this, tucked into their thousands and thousands of pages of build back better, because, remember, on one hand, they are telling you, hey, we are going to make things more efficient. We are going to actually help reduce inflation. Oh, except for the way that if you actually find out it is a bunch of pandering to the unions, and they made it so you can't automate ports. Huh?

So you are giving us speeches about how the supply chains are the real responsibility for inflation, and build back better is supposed to help inflation, except for you have done the very things that will make it so just the opposite happens. You have made it so I can't automate ports legally anymore.

So all this money, your largesse, you are going to throw out will go to green stuff at ports, but you can't make it more efficient.

You lied to the American people. And how many of my brothers and sisters on the left even knew these sorts of little land mines were tucked into. I mean, they had the unionization of all the government employees in my State if they want the largesse money for family and medical leave; yet they had to do it through a collective bargaining agreement.

The legislation was pandering to those who financed their campaigns, and it would make people's lives more miserable.

I mean, think of that. Inside their build back better was you can't automate ports. You can't make this stuff up.

And then you start to realize, why do we have so many unfilled jobs? Something went horribly off the rails here.

When we functionally--and I need to update this chart because apparently the number is actually even worse.

But we have--I have a fixation on demographic issues. I have done lots of presentations here on the floor, because demographics are actually the primary driver of our U.S. sovereign debt, and Democrat policies continue to make the policy sets around that worse.

So we have 1.5 million more of other brothers and sisters who have said, I quit, I am out of here, I am taking early retirement, I leave, than we expected. Instead of encouraging our brothers and sisters to stay in the economy because we have got to step up productivity because if we don't step up productivity, we can't start to knock down inflation.

Remember, what is inflation? It is too many dollars chasing too few goods.

There is a couple of ways you attack inflation. You can squeeze down the money supply, and you saw that happen with interest rates starting to go up. Or you could also do what Reagan did in 1981. People forget this. Paul Volcker is jacking up interest rates and jacking up interest rates.

Congress, a Democrat Congress at that time, also did a tax cut, a tax reform to try to make business more productive so they would make more stuff. Remember, too many dollars chasing too few goods and services; make more goods and services.

Then, when you are driving people out of the workforce, how do you make more goods and services? Get the policy sets right.

You say you care about inflation, you care about it crushing working men and women, and then you do the very things that continue to make it worse in a society.

When we get through this period of misery, we still have the thing that wipes us out as a society, leads us to decades of misery. The current calculation basically says, in 29 years, my new math says we get to be about 210 percent of debt-to-GDP. That is publicly held debt.

Remember, last year, we were borrowing functionally $47,000 a second. I know most of this place just cares about surviving the next election. I mean, look at the legislation that keeps being offered. But is there at all a moral responsibility here to understand this destroys your kids, this destroys your grandkids, this destroys the future generations? We will be handing the next couple of generations a much poorer--they will live poorer--country than we inherited.

This is $112 trillion of publicly borrowed money adjusted for inflation. This isn't my math; this is CBO's math from a year ago. This is before the crazy spending of last year.

Mr. Speaker, when I came to the mike, I shared with you I was a bit cranky, and I had had a lot of coffee. I don't believe Democrats are evil. Misguided, yes, but I believe many of them are my friends. They have good hearts. But you have to stop the policies that hurt people. You have to stop hurting people, and you have to stop making the Nation poorer.

There are a number of us whose ideas, that aren't even traditionally Republican, we could embrace. I mean, curing diabetes is one of them. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is neither. It is just moral.

Maybe, once in a while, let a Republican have an amendment or an open debate because there is a path. There is a path where we can make our future better, but you have to stop the bloodletting.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to go back and have some decaf.

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

Madam Speaker, we have a bit of the tyranny of the clock, as you know, so I am going to try to do this somewhat rapidly.

There has been a lot of speechifying today. I am frustrated because I don't have an elegant or delicate way to say this, but people keep making crap up. Let's actually walk through some basic math so we understand something.

Does anyone here have any memory of last fall when a number of us were coming behind these microphones getting ready to talk about the winter that was coming. Do you remember the discussion of about how high the power bills, the heating bills were going to be? It is because fuel prices--hydrocarbon prices--didn't just go up because of the Russian invasion.

If you look at the charts, this began functionally when the left took power. It really began in 2018 and really took off when they had unified control. It didn't just happen. As a matter of fact, there is a number of charts out there and futures contracts that were basically saying the prices you are seeing today at the gas pump--they just showed up about 6 months early--that that is actually where we were going because consumption and supply wasn't keeping up because of what we have done to ourselves.

You see it already. Do you not remember last October and September crossing $6 on natural gas? It was already coming at us and it was our own fault. How does this craziness happen? We keep getting folks coming behind the microphone and saying: It is because of the Keystone pipeline; it is a little bit. It is because of some of the drilling bans; it is a little bit.

It is mostly because over, particularly this last year, but also going back when the left took power after the 2018 election, they basically started to threaten capital markets. If you are a company and you invest in hydrocarbons, I think the SEC should look into you. If you're CalPERS or a pension fund and you invest in hydrocarbons, we are going to look down

upon that. As a matter of fact, we are going encourage universities and other pension funds no more investing in hydrocarbons.

What did you think was going to happen? When you actually see this frustration and the absolute distorted rhetoric coming from the White House--well, there are 9,000 drilling permits out there. I think most of America already understand that is lunacy; you get a permit, you find out if there are any hydrocarbons in the ground. But how do you go to capital markets and get any money to stick that straw in the ground? This continued.

Over and over, the Biden administration's executive orders missed the mark. It was actually talking about the Treasury coming at anyone that is putting capital markets into hydrocarbons. Understand what you are paying at the gas pump, what you are paying to heat your house. You voted for this.

If you voted for the left, if you voted for them in 2018, if you voted for them in 2020, you voted for this. You voted for that price because this is what they promised us. Do you remember the discussions here, the debates here? We are going to make it so you can't raise money to finance a pipeline, to finance new hydrocarbon extractions, to finance natural gas.

What is so ironic about this--just quote after quote after quote. Pension systems and others--the idea was strangle hydrocarbon extraction, oil and gas, and make it so they don't have the capital to open up new wells, to invest in more efficiencies. The left actually got what they wanted.

Are they now willing to admit that they got what they wanted there? We are now seeing $5 gasoline. You see the price of natural gas. Guess what, congratulations, we burned 23 percent more coal last year because they made natural gas so expensive; we moved from one fuel source that was dramatically cleaner than coal, but you raised the price so high. Remember, power generation is regulated. Power plant after power plant after power plant around America moved back to coal.

So now you have the brain trust in the administration saying things like: Well, go buy an electric car. Except that electric car is going to be powered by coal because the dramatically cleaner burning fuel of natural gas you have just made really expensive.

A couple of months ago we came here to the floor and talked about natural gas and the concerns the left has said over it--well, what about methane--showing them some breakthroughs of really inexpensive ways to capture that methane.

There is a rational argument there. Methane is a 9-1, but has only now a shorter half life of what is considered to be a greenhouse gas. Instead of saying, hey, we are going to look for technologies that deal with the problem there, the left's opinion is, well, let's wipe them out because those who invest in green energy finance and write checks to Democrats. The green mafia basically owns the Democrat Party.

Then you go look at other absurdities that is Democrat policy. I am sorry I had to grab an older slide. Do you realize the amount of baseload nuclear we have in this country that is going off line? You do realize over this 10-year period the United States is going to get dirtier? This is even before the left functionally raised the price of natural gas so much that power plants moved back to coal.

We are moving so much clean baseload nuclear off the grid that it doesn't even offset every bit of photovoltaic and wind we have put on the grid.

We give lots of pretty speeches here. We do lots of virtue signaling, but the math is the math is the math. The virtue signaling creating policy has actually raised more greenhouse gases. Look what Germany did by shutting down its baseload nuclear. They now burn massive amounts of coal. They got dirtier.

You have heard speech after speech here today about how much we despise Putin, but we also know his propaganda wing absolutely supported the left's movement to strangle these hydrocarbons. This is what you get when you make crappy policy. It didn't happen overnight. It is going to take us years to fix this mess.

Can I beg the Democrats: Stop hurting people. Stop making the poor poorer. Stop crushing the middle class. Come back to sensibility. Guess what, there might be a bonus there, and that is all the coal that is being burnt, all the dirty imports, you would actually get a benefit of the greenhouse gases, but you got to come back and do math again.

Madam Speaker, I think I am up against my time and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, this is going to be one of those moments where you sort of walk through. We obviously had the State of the Union a couple nights ago. Instead of just sort of walking through my frustrations with it, I want to dice up a couple of things that I considered the most outrageous, but also a continuation of a theme, and that is something has happened here.

My brothers and sisters on the left over here, somehow, somewhere in the last year or two have moved into trying to make public policy by virtue signaling. And I think I will prove this.

And I am open, if anyone out there from my Democratic colleagues can give me something you did in the last year of absolute power and control here in Washington, D.C., that actually made the lives and the country better or that over the next decade will make their lives better. It is almost like we are in this clown show of you get rewarded for saying pretty words and be damned the actual outcomes.

So let's walk through some of the reality.

Now, you remember at one point we were talking about energy, and the fact of the matter is, the world is financing Putin's war machine. Remember, it was last October that natural gas prices exploded, and it was obvious. You set up policy sets as soon as the administration took power, canceling the Keystone Pipeline, trying to do all sorts of restrictions, which the courts had to roll back, so now the administration threw up new restrictions.

What did you think would happen? And you can actually, though, look at the lunacy that are policies from the United States; and I will also blame Western Europe.

These are the pipelines. This is how you finance functionally a gas station with nuclear weapons, which is functionally what Russia is today. And you start to understand--and a couple weeks ago we came here and even on a YouTube channel we tried to explain policies that have happened in places like Germany.

Go back a decade ago. Do you all remember when the green left movement in Germany--now that we know it was backdoor financed by Russia--was out there protesting we need to get rid of the nuclear power plants, the baseload nuclear? I think they got rid of 20- something plants. There are only one or two still functioning, and they are scheduled for decommissioning.

Germany actually got dirtier, you know, so the very people that used to preach to us about global warming, about greenhouse gases got dirtier. They are burning more coal. And, also, they don't just take natural gas from Russia and oil from Russia, now they even take coal from Russia, and you actually see the pipelines. So at the same time, a sort of Malthusian left here has been trying to strangle American hydrocarbons--and understand, I am a huge fan of natural gas.

The last 15 years, the remarkable reduction in greenhouse gasses coming from North America is because of natural gas. Remember, the decommissioning of North American nuclear power, baseload power, pretty much equals all the clean energy, the photovoltaic, the wind, that has gone in.

So you can say, Oh, look at all these new solar panels, but the fact of the matter is the amount of nuclear we have removed--so how do we get so clean?

Remember, a year or two ago, we were within a margin of even hitting the Paris accord, something we didn't sign on to because of the use of natural gas. So as we are starting to restrict ours, you see the pipelines coming out of Russia moving into Europe, instead of us expanding ours and saying we are going to liquify natural gas and get it out of here, sell it to the world, balance the payments, grow the economy.

So there's great irony, think of the virtue signaling here over and over.

Even a couple days ago, when we were getting a briefing, and there was the discussion of how we get more energy exports to Europe as they are engaging in the sanctions. And someone from the left screams out, But what about the environment? You do realize the Democrats and Biden policy had us burn 23 percent more coal this last year. The policy so jacked up the price of natural gas here in the United States that power is regulated. Power facility after power facility converted back to coal because the brain trust on the left and in the White House so restricted access to natural gas, prices went up dramatically.

Remember we went from, what, $2 on the futures market to at one point we hit $6? And it didn't just happen because of the invasion of Ukraine. Those numbers were hitting last October.

If you care about the environment will someone on the left hire an economist that owns a calculator? We burned 23 percent more coal last year. This is a direct result of crappy policy.

And then you think about being from Arizona. I did a ride along about a month ago with a police officer that is a friend of mine. And he was taking me through an area that he has patrolled for 28 years. And he was saying, I am seeing neighborhoods here that have doubled the homelessness, the number of overdose deaths that are happening in these neighborhoods has exploded this last year.

Do you not think when you let the borders open up that you are not screwing over America?

Look, we have come here over and over and said, What are the two most economically violent things you can do to the working middle class? Inflation and opening the borders, where you flood the society with people with similar skill sets.

And these weren't conservative economic models, these were done by leftist professors a decade ago that said, when you take the working poor and flood the market with people with similar skill sets, you inhibit their economic growth, their wages. One of them said this population will be poorer for a decade.

The fact of the matter is when the left allows the open borders-- because remember, that was going to be compassionate except for Americans.

I am now being told that drug prices in the Phoenix market have crashed. Now, in this area I am no expert. My mother was a substance abuse counselor for many years, heard many heartbreaking stories.

But when you have the patrol officer telling you that a year ago it may take $70, $100 for someone to get high that day, and today it can be less than $10, the basic rule of economics tells you something. And it is fentanyl which kills people.

So now, all the sudden, I am seeing more drugs, I am seeing more homelessness, a dramatic increase in homelessness. I am actually seeing a huge spike of crime. And then the deaths.

If you are playing economist, we all talk about second-degree effects and third-degree effects but does anyone here actually have any love and compassion in their heart to understand the misery, just the misery that the Democrat policies have been virtue signaling. We are going to be compassionate. We are a loving country. We are going to open up our borders. But what about the misery that has been foisted on so many people?

And the tricky part is, if you look at the economic model, even if we went back to normality tomorrow, because of the populations that are here that are going to compete for those moderate-skill jobs, you will have suppressed income opportunity for a whole segment of our country for a decade.

And then the President gets up and goes, Well, you know, the tax cuts for the rich. Come on. Look, I know Democrats love to use fact- checking, except when it is actual fact-checking. Tax reform that was done in December 2017

made the tax code more progressive. Once again, the top 10 percent of income earners pay a higher percentage of the Federal income tax today than they did before tax reform. The left knows this, but God forbid, they tell the truth. And look, once again, 2015 had a timing anomaly on tax receipts. For those of us in Ways and Means they are tax receipts. 2018, 2019, two of the highest receipts revenue in history.

So number two and three, and if you do the timing effects, it is number one and number two. The fact of the matter is there was tax reform, and more money came in. If you and I did a survey of Democrats, how many of them would actually know that, or actually if they knew it would be willing to say it in front of a camera?

The fact of the matter is corporate tax revenues, receipts, rose by 75 percent, the repatriation of money the companies had been leaving. Do you remember the complaints from the Obama administration about how many companies were leaving the United States? They stopped leaving. They started coming back. But we also saw individual income taxes went up, what, 27\1/2\ percent according to CBO, and that 80 percent increase was paid by the top 10 percent of income earners.

You know, I understand things that grow the economy, supply side, that create a more egalitarian society, that make the poor less poor, that crushed food insecurity, that actually, for minority populations, had the fastest wage growth in U.S. history is really uncomfortable for folks on the left because they have to admit that they are sort of--and it is not even Keynesian, it is like a bastardized Keynesian model of throw lots of money and pretend everything is okay model because that is what the left's economics are these days. It is just bizarre, the fact that some people like to call it supply side, it is just the incentives to make more stuff, the incentives to hire more people, the incentives to have a growing economy. Because I am one of those people--and I actually believe most Republicans are--that growth is moral because that growth provides a chance.

Look at the math. You know, after what we called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, do you see the curve? Do you see the growth in wages? And the yellow line here is female wages. They exploded. Their growth dramatically outpaced males. It was the best income growth ever for women of color, the best income growth ever for the very minority populations that we hear the virtue signaling pandering to, but the difference is the Republicans actually delivered it.

Yet, the left's model is: Hey, we will just send out checks, and we will send out some more checks, and then we won't ask anyone to go get job training or actually work for the checks.

Then you wonder why America today is poorer than it was a year ago. I mean, it is the math. I know it is uncomfortable, but it is the math. Working men and women, the working poor, are poorer today than the day Joe Biden, the day the Democrats, took absolute control of this government.

You see it on the charts. The fact of the matter is, when you see the spread--we are here. That spread, that is substantially income inequality, and it is blowing apart. It is becoming like an alligator mouth driven by the left's policies.

Do you accept you are hurting people?

It is economics. It is math. You can virtue signal all you want, but eventually, the math always wins.

Then you take what the left has done in inflation. You are making Americans poorer. I know this is hard to see, but you are making people poorer. I mean, the other day, there was a New York Times Noble Prize economist saying: Well, the poor aren't getting that poor because of the data.

Well, no. He forgot to also--and he knows this, that inflation has moved up the price of housing. Inflation, you will see what's happening in fuel and in food, but the housing index, the way they do the calculations in CPI has a--think of it as a shock absorber. Your rent goes up a couple of hundred bucks per month for the rest of the year; that doesn't actually enter into the CPI. It is slowly baked in because you have just signed a contract for a year, right?

The willingness to rationalize and lie so you can continue the virtue signaling of fantasy, the math is the math is the math. And the terrifying thing is, okay, yes, you are at a 7-plus percent inflation last year. In areas like mine, in the Phoenix area, it was 9 percent, substantially because of housing. Then you go back to the homelessness and you understand why people of very modest income can't even afford a basic place to live.

We are looking at data in the Joint Economic Committee. We could hit 10 percent this year. You understand how kicking people in the head with policies that make them poorer screw up their retirements, their ability to feed their family and have any savings.

What was the President's solution? Well, we are going to look at businesses and ask them to function with less profits, and we are going to just pay less. Huh? Did anyone listen to the speech? The Ukraine portion, great. Yay. We all cheered. But as the President walked through the economic portion of his speech, it was, A, not truthful, and economically delusional.

So we want to come here with a couple of ideas, and we would be elated if the majority actually takes them and runs away with them.

So, back to our elementary school economics class. What is inflation? Classic definition of inflation: too much cash chasing too few goods and services. Will we agree to that?

Look, I know this is uncomfortable, but the reality of it--Democrat policies are actually hurting people. Maybe we can actually turn the ship around. So if I came to you and said it is too many dollars chasing too few goods, you have what the Federal Reserve will do, which is start to pull liquidity out of the market--you know, the extraordinary measures, buying U.S. sovereign debt, which has functionally enabled Congress to spend like crazy because the Federal Reserve is buying our bots, raising interest rates to pull liquidity out of society.

But that is going to hurt people, too, right? Your interest rates are going to go up. Your credit cards are going to go up, and everything else.

How about a President that comes behind the microphone, Democrats come behind the microphone, and actually offer real, big-boy solutions that actually, A, are founded in economics but, second, would actually be good for society, would actually work.

We want to propose a couple of quirky ideas. Just think of it as an idea box. If I came to you tomorrow and said one of the reasons you have inflation is the Democrats last year shoveled out so much cash, there is so much cash out there moving around, that there is too much money facing too few goods--great.

What would happen if you turned to Americans and said: Hey, instead of going and buying that new big-screen television, we are going to encourage you to take a few hundred bucks and we are going to give you the spiff to go put it in your retirement account. Hell, we will let you use pre-tax money, and we will call it a Roth IRA.

It would help retirement security. It also would be a way to pull-- functionally, the same thing the Federal Reserve is trying to do--pull liquidity out of the markets. Republicans and Democrats both would probably stand up and say: Hey.

So let's see. We could pull a whole bunch of the dollars out of the economy that are chasing too few goods and put them into people's retirement so they have retirement security. Hey, this should be a win- win.

Did you hear anything creative like that? Instead, you hear the virtue signaling. Or how about one of my personal fixations, productivity? Remember what was the most powerful thing we did in tax reform? We built an incentive for businesses to take their money and build better plants and invest in more fishing equipment so they could pay people more.

The President goes, well, the corporations made billions of dollars and didn't pay any taxes.

We built a tax code saying: Take your cash and make your company more efficient so you can pay people more so the economy grows.

Once again, remember, we are borrowing. Last year, we were borrowing $47,000 a second. If this economy does not grow like crazy because that debt

curve, as that becomes more and more of an alligator mouth of here is our debt, here is the size of the economy, that gap is what wipes us out.

If we can grow and keep that ratio of debt to the size of our economy--growth, growth, growth. Well, the idea is if you are trying to take on inflation, you know you need a society that becomes more productive because, long term, that means people will be paid more. We become wealthier as a country and the ability to deal with the demographic curve, that is the primary driver of our debt--do things like, hey, instead of just doing expensing on your capital goods, we will give you a little bit of like a bonus-type of depreciation to do it.

These are economic ideas that would both help inflation but also make us more robust as an economy, as a country, if we have to take on the challenges of the world.

So I beg of our brothers and sisters on the left, I don't know how to get you to stop hurting people. You use very pretty words, brilliant virtue signaling. For those who aren't thinking, it sounds great until you sort of sit there and say, hold it, how does that work?

There are ideas out there both the left and the right should be able to embrace to take on inflation, to stop hurting people in the country. But instead, this place seems to reward itself by flowery language. We are judged on our intentions, not our successes.

Look, this is what I am begging for: There are ideas at work, but the first thing we need to do is stop doing the crazy stuff that is hurting people.

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

Mr. Speaker, last week, I got behind this microphone, and we were actually trying to show something that was a bit optimistic. But like everyone else on our side, the frustration we are going through on so many of the Democrat policies that I don't think were meant to be mean-spirited or so dystopian in the damage they cause, particularly to the working poor, which is one of my fixations-- sometimes, the economics is the economics, sometimes virtue signaling over the unintended consequences.

I want to go over something and try to explain why I think this is such a big deal for both those on the left and those of us on the right. There is actually a window of optimism, but it is going to take a policy pivot.

Last week, I got up here and talked about--remember, I gave a couple of presentations last December, a major success in curing type 1 diabetes. Now, it was really only one use case where they were able to take T cells and convert them into insulin-producing cells. In that particular one, the individual would need some immunosuppressants because of the body's reaction to it.

Now, we have an organization that is doing some of the same technology with T cells, turning them into insulin-producing cells but with CRISPR as a partner. They are doing a tiny tweak. The model says the body won't recognize it as a foreign cell, and you won't need immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of your life.

Conceptually, why is this such a big, big, big deal to have a cure for type 1? If you dig through the literature, it says that, at least for people with type 2, we might have a way to get their body-- actually, we do have a way--dear Lord, let the technology be true and actually coming forward--to help individuals in type 2, their bodies to produce insulin again.

Then, we have some other big policy things we would have to do here. We would have to have an honest conversation of how we do nutrition support. We would have to have an honest conversation of what we do in the farm bill, what we encourage Americans to grow, instead of just sort of the commodity crops.

North America used to grow 3,500 different types of grains. Maybe you design a farm system that allows both regional and uniqueness for different arid climates and others, sort of a cacophony, or whatever the proper word there would be, for optionality because there is a food security issue when you only grow certain crops.

God forbid you have like what is happening in parts of Europe, where olive trees have a type of fungus. Olive trees that are hundreds and hundreds of years old are dying. We make ourselves much more fragile in food security.

I sort of say that because I actually see an elegant solution coming here if we could change the way we view public policy. It is often this right-left paradigm of the left's version of wanting to be compassionate. They are going to build more clinics for those in urban areas and Tribal communities and even certain world populations that have just stunning percentages of type 2 diabetes and the misery that comes with that. Put up more clinics. My argument is: Screw that. Let's cure it.

If we are seeing technology that may lead us to a cure, put the resources forward that create the disruption because curing a misery is so much more wonderful than helping people being able to maintain and live within their misery.

Oh, by the way, for those of us who are absolutely fixated that the debt is going to destroy this Republic, it makes a hell of a lot of difference. Let's walk through some of the math of why I wish we were having this level of optimism that the technology disruptions we have now of knowing how to cure so many diseases actually may be the path that we start to take on the crushing debt that is coming.

This is important. This is year-old data from CBO. It is a year out of date. The numbers today are much worse. In 29 years, $112 trillion of publicly borrowed debt in today's dollars; the vast majority of it is Medicare, Social Security. The rest of the budget is in balance.

Why this is so important is the political class, particularly here in Washington, we have lied for decades to our constituents.

The left will say: Oh, rich people don't pay enough. We spend too much money on defense.

Republicans say: Oh, we have to get rid of foreign aid, waste, and fraud.

Maybe those are true, but they are not the driver of the debt. The debt is demographics. We are getting old as a society. You are going to see some slides later on that really will kick you in the head on these numbers. That $112 trillion of publicly borrowed debt as projected by CBO last year--and this is a number that says there are no more pandemics and no more recessions.

How many of you want to have a secure retirement? How many of you give a darn about your kids? Well, think about one little factoid here. You just saw that Medicare was the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. What was it? $77 to $78 trillion of borrowing over the next 29 years? Thirty-one percent of Medicare is just diabetes. Now, you are seeing the tie.

If I come to you and say: I hope it works, but considering the numbers and the benefit of if it does work, why aren't we, at least the left and the right, saying let's end people's misery? Oh, by the way, by doing that, one of the greatest effects we can have on society is actually curing these diseases that make us poorer, sicker, and actually are the primary drivers of our debt.

Mr. Speaker, 31 percent of Medicare spending is just related to diabetes--33 percent of all healthcare costs. So, remember, Mr. Speaker, the problem with this place is ObamaCare, the ACA, and the Republican alternatives were finance bills. They weren't about what we spend, they were who got subsidized. That is the math. The Democrats' bill had three tiers, the Republican had four tiers, but it was who was cross-subsidizing whom and then how much was coming out of the general fund to subsidize those groups. They were spending subsidization bills. They had nothing to do with what we spend.

My argument is if we would embrace the technology, push it forward-- and we have changed a bunch of laws to legalize the very technology that will disrupt healthcare costs--then we save Medicare. But we also end a hell of a lot of misery in our society.

And is that Republican or Democrat?

I am sure at some point someone will contribute to one side or the other and we will turn it into partisan, right?

But at least between now and then it is technology.

And, once again, I fixate on this also: 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who have multiple chronic conditions are the majority of our healthcare spending.

If you say you care about healthcare, Mr. Speaker, is it nationalizing health care?

Well, once again, nationalizing health care, the Medicare for All, doesn't remove any costs. It just collectivizes how you can ration.

If you want to reduce costs, cure people, and end the misery, once again, 5 percent of our brothers and sisters are the majority of our healthcare spending.

You already see what is going on right now, Mr. Speaker, with some of the messenger RNA, some of the new stem cell therapies, the number of diseases we are curing. We now have a cure for hemophilia. We are about to have trials for sickle cell. You already see in so many diseases we are taking on, so many of the blood cancers today, we can cure. But the 10,000-pound gorilla is diabetes.

Maybe it is a little bit utopianism, but we have seen a perfect example of this.

Do you remember this body just a decade or so ago, Mr. Speaker?

We were having a real stressor. We were having to have conversations with State Medicaid systems on how we were going to pay for all these liver transplants for those people who may have had too good a time in the seventies. Remember, we had hundreds of thousands of individuals in the United States that we thought were having failing livers from hepatitis C. Liver transplant clinics were being funded and organized all over the country, and then, suddenly--I think the first drug out was Sovaldi--we figured out how to cure it. And the drug was outrageously expensive, it was something like $88,000, but it was a fraction of the cost of a liver transplant and then someone spending the rest of their life on anti-rejection drugs.

And then another drug came to market with a slightly different technology. The price crashed and saved a fortune and ended lots of future misery.

We lived in the last decade an example of what I am talking about.

But I beg of my friends on the Democrat side: Think about your legislation like H.R. 3. We know H.R. 3 functionally makes Big Pharma bigger because it incentivizes them to take their current portfolio of pharmaceuticals, make little tweaks, and keep them. But the capital staff for the small biotechs that are disruptive is crushed. There are good articles out there, and there are good economic papers that make it very clear.

If the Democrats get their way, it is great politics. It is absolutely brilliant politics. Talk about drug prices, how outraged we are. We are outraged.

But, Mr. Speaker, are we outraged to the point that you are going to kill the next generation because they don't get the next pharmaceutical that is curative?

We need to think maybe more with a calculator like economists, maybe economists with a soul and a heart rather than: Hey, this is brilliant for the next election cycle.

Back again, think about the body, the place we work in. We go home, we campaign, and we say all the wonderful things we are going to do. But the fact of the matter is, this last fiscal year, 77 percent of all the spending here was on autopilot. It is what we call mandatory.

Ten percent was defense. Thirteen percent was everything else. We act as if we are here doing something when if you put defense and say we are just going to keep the baseline where it is at and the 77 percent is mandatory--Social Security and Medicare, you fall under a certain income, you are part of a certain ethnic or tribal group or you hit a certain age--it is automatic. It is formulaic.

This is all we get to focus on. This is what all the theater here is about. And one of the reasons I think the theater has gotten so hyperbolic is we know this is what wipes us out, and not one person here has actually voted on this. It has been, except for the last handful of votes the Democrats moved forward, we were adding, like we just did today, in a piece of legislation that actually added to mandatory spending because it is easy. It makes you look like a hero. Hey, all we protected is there.

But we don't have the resources to pay for it.

To give you an idea, Mr. Speaker, of how crappy the last fiscal year was and how much we borrowed, these slides are all out of date now. The numbers are much worse. One of the reasons I grabbed this one is, take a look here. This was 2030. We are going to hit $30 trillion of borrowing. Well, we hit that last week.

Think about what we have done. And there was a time here a couple of decades ago the discussion was: Well, are you willing to do entitlement reform?

Take that off the table. I know it is great political rhetoric, but it is too late. The vast majority of baby boomers are already in their retirement age. We missed the window. The window was a quarter century ago if we were going to do entitlement reform.

Other than the things we have come here and talked about, the massive subsidies that we give actually to really, really, really rich people, when it is their third home on Martha's Vineyard and we give them subsidized flood insurance, or the Democrats' Build Back Better bill which if you would be making $400,000 or $800,000 a year and you were going to get--what is it, $125,000 in tax credits if you bought the right electric vehicle, the right solar panel. At some point we need to have an honest conversation. We calculated over the next 10 years there are $1.4 trillion of subsidies for really rich people.

So instead of the constant rhetoric of let's tax rich people more and make them pay their fair share, maybe we should just stop subsidizing them because the subsidies create distortions.

So back to the thing we don't do here called math, the 2050 number, we were saying we were going to be at 195 percent of GDP. That number, the best calculation as of today is 15 points higher than that. We will be well over 200. And that is a baseline, not another pandemic, not another war, and not another major recession.

Then we start to deal with our newest reality, and I should have grabbed the slide, but you see part of it here. There is a model put out by CBO that says that if interest rates over the time of that 29- year period, if the baseline borrowing costs of the United States was 2 points higher in that 25 year, then every dime--every dime--of tax receipts will go just to pay interest. We have made ourselves that fragile, that if the cost of borrowing money goes up by 2 points on U.S. sovereign debts over the baseline, then every dime in the future just goes solely to cover the interest costs.

We have lost our minds. And yet, think of the crazy stuff we debate here. It is as if we are desperate to debate the shiny objects, the stupid, little indignation of the day, and at the same time we are borrowing $47,000 every second--$47,000 every second.

That is why I keep coming behind these mikes saying that it doesn't have to be this sort of dystopian, crushing future. I need the majority to think differently, and I need my minority over here to think differently. Because here are some of the drivers, and this is really uncomfortable. I have been booed in front of audiences when I have given this presentation, but the math is the math, and the math always wins.

We can virtue signal, we can tell anecdotal stories, and we can talk about how compassionate we are. But at some point, the math will win.

This is important because I am going to show you the sister slide to this in a couple of moments, and you need to get your heads around this. The money you put in taxes, into Social Security, and the money you are going to get out of Social Security are pretty close to each other. You actually get a little bit more out. It is a fairly even deal. But that chart you were seeing, Mr. Speaker, is substantially driven by this. So the average couple--and this is someone who is retiring right about now--has put in about $161,000 into Medicare, and they are getting $522,000 out. And those are adjusted dollars. So, ceteris paribus, whatever the fancy term is, that gap there is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt.

So, Mr. Speaker, what happens when you talk to millennials?

We all have in our offices over here kids born in 1985, and they just think they are never going to see any of this. These are actual surveys where they already see themselves in enough financial pain, and they are worried. Then they have people like me get behind the microphone and show them the slides and basically say: If we don't do something about this, your retirement--and this is a technical economic term--you are screwed. We need to start using language like that around here because somehow the fancy language doesn't seem to sink into the thick skulls here.

Do you care about this generation?

These 25-year-olds we have in our offices who are freaky smart, they are working their hearts out, and they look at the numbers saying, Oh, my God, when they start getting near their retirement age, the United States will have a couple hundred percent of debt to GDP, and if interest rates are up, if interest rates are up--I didn't bring the slide--there is one model that says that 2 percent higher baseline borrowing costs, we go from that 210 percent debt to GDP in 29 years to about 300, 320 percent because of the multiplying effect because we never pay anything off.

The model as it is as of today says that millennial, that person born in 1985, they are going to put $236,000 into Medicare. And if we don't do something to disrupt the cost of healthcare, then they are going to take out over $1.2 million, and this makes the curve steepen. When you see the CBO curve, you wonder why it starts to steepen. It is this delta there.

There is a hope. There is a path, but it needs to be everything. I have my healthcare disruptions, but I have also come here and talked about how you can change the immigration system to maximize economic growth and not crush the working poor. When we open up the borders--we have brought the papers here--we crush the working poor because we flood the country with people with similar skill sets.

Mr. Speaker, in the last year and a half, we are what, 1.7 million behind in legal immigration. The kid who just got the Ph.D. from Arizona State University and we are sending him home. You have seen the healthcare. If you care about the environment, the concept of radically changing the way we look at regulation using crowdsourcing and data instead of the 1938 model of stick paper in file cabinets, a Tax Code that maximizes economic growth.

Are we willing to have really disruptive conversations, or should we go to a border adjustability model, so you don't have a tax arbitrage for around the world to move products to the United States instead of making them here?

There are ways, and the trick is, the model says you have got to do all of it almost at the same time. And this place can barely agree on what time of day it is. Then we have seen policies around here that when so many of our brothers and sisters who are older, are basically saying it is the rational decision: I am leaving the labor force.

One of the other parts of that growth model is everyone is needed. Every American is needed. We need your talents. We need your labor, particularly if you are older. Would this place be willing to provide certain incentives? So you are 65, you don't need to retire. But we are going to fix parts of the way we tax your benefits to incentivize you to stay in the labor force.

There are ideas that work that basically make the future something optimistic. My wife and I joke about this, and I have said it behind this microphone a bunch of times. We are both 59 years old and I have a 6-year-old daughter. You know you are pathologically optimistic when you are 59 years old and you have a 6-year-old daughter. But darn it, doesn't she have the right, doesn't the kid that is growing up in a neighborhood of poverty have the right, doesn't the person who is older have the right to have a decent retirement?

Don't we have the right to be in a nation of optimism where we told the truth about the math and our demographics, and then we provided an optimistic vision that gets us there instead of the crazy stuff that has been posed this last 12 months that we keep showing economists after economists--and these are not conservative economists. Many of them are from liberal groups saying: You do realize that Build Back Better by the end of the decade make people poorer?

But it was great politics. Stop the crazy. Buy a calculator, and then if we do it by math, I think you could actually see this body work together because an optimistic vision can be ours if we just fixate on the disruptions that make the future great.

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