Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, before we begin, I actually want to yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Calvert).

Honoring the Life of Tristan Krogius

Madam Speaker, we all get behind these microphones on occasion and we want to share something. And tonight, I am going to try to stay on a theme. I am going to try to walk through one of my intense frustrations around here that we keep making public policy.

Let's be honest. We just passed--the Democrats, I don't think a single Republican voted for it--a $350 billion bill that originally was labeled as America COMPETES Act. But if you look at the math in it and the spending in it, it is functionally, hey, let's give lots of money to our special interests who actually support them politically.

So here's the theme. If I came to any Member of Congress, any one of our staff, anyone out there listening in the public and said, What makes people poor? Seriously. What makes our brothers and sisters who are working poor poor?

And you get these discussions, Oh, we don't tax rich people enough and transfer their wealth, or we don't do this, or we don't do that. And it turns out, when you actually look at the math, almost none of those things are actually true.

It is complicated. So we have been doing a project for almost a year in our office, of trying to understand what is different. So we held a hearing recently, on health disparities. Guess what?

There really are health disparities between certain urban minority populations, my Tribal communities in the Southwest. But why?

Also, take a look. There is crime, crime differential. When someone steals your stuff or breaks your bones, you're not able to go to work, you're not able to accumulate.

You actually start to look at all these things that are societal factors. You open up the border, you are competing against others with similar skill sets, labor sets.

And my argument is, over this last 12 months of unified leftist, unified Democrat control of government, we are just crushing people. We are crushing

the working poor. We are crushing the middle class. And the data--I am going to prove it.

But one of the most interesting things we have been looking at--and we have actually taken some ridicule for fixating on this, but the math is the math.

I would typically start these presentations with take a look at the accumulation of U.S. sovereign debt. It is exploding. Twenty-nine years, $12 trillion, and that is based on last year's CBO math. It is Social Security and Medicare, primarily Medicare. But 31 percent of Medicare spending and borrowing is just diabetes.

But also, that other project we have been doing of what makes certain populations poor. Well, it turns out our brothers and sisters who are often working poor or just trying to survive, have dramatically higher health problems, and it is primarily diabetes. In rural poverty, in my Tribal poverty, in my urban poverty, look at the diabetic numbers.

So wouldn't the most compassionate thing be to not do what the left keeps saying, we are going to build more clinics, help people live with their misery. But how about doing something revolutionary? How about curing, how about investing in curing our brothers and sisters who suffer?

And we are working, and it is hard, and it is difficult math. But what would happen if you got a cure to income inequality? Well, then you would have to eventually adjust for crime and open borders and all the other things that we are going to talk about.

And we have taken some ridicule saying, well, type 1, type 2 diabetes, you can't--well, it turns out we have been tracking the science. And there was a time we used to have this constant debate here where Democrats would accuse Republicans of not following the science. And we are obviously, particularly with COVID, accusing the Democrats.

But does anyone here actually have an alert on their search engines to track the news stories of some of the really amazing stuff happening?

So this is a story, functionally, from yesterday, and it is a unique approach. They are functionally doing a CRISPR-altered stem cell. And the beauty of that is, what happens if I can get your body to start producing insulin again?

And because we know type 1 diabetes, and part of type 2, is an autoimmune reaction. Your body is killing the cells that produce insulin. And so with that little bit of CRISPR technology, your body doesn't recognize it, and doesn't kill the very cell that is producing the ability to take on your glucose. It has begun. It has actually moved into type 1.

So think of this. We just spent $350 billion--well, at least the Democrats are trying to--and something like this, if you had done a version of Operation Warp Speed or call it whatever you want if that is too Trumpian for the left.

But the single biggest driver of U.S. debt is diabetes; 33 percent of all healthcare spending; 31 percent of Medicare spending. You would think this place would be almost giddy.

Now, maybe it doesn't work maybe, ultimately. But the ability to say, we are going to do something that is noble, compassionate, loving, and cure the misery instead of keeping populations sort of trapped in their misery because they are beholden to one political party's largesse.

It is beginning. This is the type of disruption--this is symbolic of the type of disruption that makes the country wealthier, more prosperous, and minimizes misery. And we have been talking about this technology coming for about a year. Why are we not doing more investing in it?

So the White House has an initiative. Wonderful, but they need to redesign--and the same thing here in the House--we need to redesign where the resources of primary research, or the incentive to bring a product to market, or the timing it takes to make it through the math of a phase one, phase two, phase three.

We do it the wrong way. Just as the Democrats' bill they just passed where it is command and control, it is almost a 5-year plan. The Federal Government will decide who gets a grant, who doesn't get a grant. You now have to come be really nice to the administration and your Member of Congress if you want money for your business.

The arrogance of this place. One of the hazards of Members of Congress--it is like that running joke: What are the two times in life you think you know everything? When you are 13 years old, and the day after you get elected to Congress.

The debate here often sounds like it is a decade out of date. But think about the board I was just showing. If there really is--and it is now in phase one trial--an ability to cure type 1 and make a dramatic difference in type 2, try to understand what that means for the financials of the country and the world, what that actually means for health and misery.

But also, what it potentially means for populations that we talk about constantly, we virtue-signal constantly, but we don't actually do something in raising their living standards, raising their economics, closing income inequality,

And instead, we are in a body right now with unified Democrat control where the solution is, send someone a check. Well, sending someone a check doesn't end the misery. Disruptive technology like this is what cures the misery that is what we should be almost evangelizing here. And I know that is hard.

So let's talk about some of the other things that make the working class poorer, the working poor substantially poorer. We saw--and I know there have been many Members here who have come and talked about inflation, but I don't think we have understood the misery it ultimately brings. And it is the slow type of misery, because every time we go to the grocery store, that piece of protein you wanted, or that milk, or something else gets a little bit more expensive. Your paycheck may have gone up, but somehow everything you are buying goes up more.

And we are going to walk through a couple of boards here, just showing the fact of the matter under Democratic unified control of government, our society has actually gotten poorer, even though we have pumped stunning amounts of money, of cash into the society, and we are going to sort of show that.

So understand, we all saw the number at the end of the year, 7 percent inflation. In my home, I am from the Phoenix area, we are approaching 9 percent, a lot of that is driven by housing. Imagine what this index did to homelessness.

We are going to see some statistics here of the narcotics and other things that have been coming across the border now that we have sort of an open border policy from the left.

And instead, I would like to talk about the economics and the misery such policies have brought and how it all ties together.

So let's go back a little more on inflation. If you think about inflation, how many times have you heard our brothers and sisters on the left get behind their microphones and talk about, it is increasing inequality?

So I thought that was the Holy Grail here. Close inequality. But yet, their policies keep growing it. We are seeing some numbers here where there is about $3,500 of additional spread of inequality, driven by a single year's worth of policies that drove up inflation.

And the solution from the left is well, we are going to send them another check, even though the check is actually what substantially drove creating inflation.

Remember, basic economics. Remember your elementary school and your high school economics class. What is inflation? It is too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. Real simple. The real world is actually a little more complicated, but that is classic.

So you have two things: You can keep jacking up interest rates to squeeze out liquidity of dollars chasing those goods or, or and, or plus, you can do the other side, like we did in 1981. They raised interest rates.

But people forget, the first year of President Reagan, even with a Democrat Congress, they adopted tax cuts and policies to make more stuff. If you have lots of dollars out that chasing things, you have got a couple of solutions. You could squeeze the dollars out of the economy to lower inflation, or you can make more stuff, because it is too many dollars chasing not enough goods.

Okay. Make more stuff. It is a classic supply-side solution. Make the tax code, the regulatory code, the incentives to make more stuff.

Instead, we just passed a $350 billion bill that functionally puts government in charge of grants and control of what they want, instead of the information part of the market, where resources, where the ability to act quickly, we should be incentivizing the animal spirits to go make more stuff as a way to lower this inflation that is crushing people. And it is a much more elegant way because it creates jobs, it creates products. But for some reason, the left is almost maniacal in a Keynesian view of the world saying, well, do lots of stimulus.

Madam Speaker, they seem unwilling to even accept the data produced by their side that says they have raised the misery of so many Americans.

Understand that the math at the end of the year was pretty simple. Inflation went up, and people's wages went up, but there is a gap. The gap keeps growing, and that gap is the fact you got poorer last year.

This is the one that I am still just shocked there is not more discussion about. If you see the percentage of monthly change in real wages--remember, you may get your paycheck. Your paycheck may go up. If your rent, your fuel, your food, everything else in your life went up more--you see how many months people got poorer.

If you look at the way we are doing policy here, it is the administration and my Democratic colleagues' willingness to continue to spend money at just stunning levels in ways that the economics say you are going to actually make people poorer. Planned economy hasn't worked particularly well anywhere in the world.

You start to see the data of the gap, and we have not tried to present this in a mean way. The fact of the matter is, the Democrat policies--remember, they took over Congress 3 years ago. They now have unified government after the last election. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is growing.

Do you remember 2018 and 2019 and the vicious rhetoric that came from our brothers and sisters on the left after we did tax reform? Yet, in modern economic times, it was the greatest success we have had in shrinking income inequality. You are going to see some boards here where food insecurity, it worked.

Our brothers and sisters on the lower quartiles--and I always hate that term. The fact of the matter is, they became dramatically less poor. Then when the Democrats take power, they abandon the very things that were working. Their policies, at some point you have to admit to everyone, because we are feeling and seeing it, you have made the rich richer; you have made the poor poorer; you have increased the misery.

Madam Speaker, we all know the saying. When something isn't working, stop it. Take a breath. Take a look at what was working. It turns out the ideological calcification that is Congress now is more important to that dogma than what actually works.

So, we sort of walk through these. I know this seems like a lot, but we keep trying to make the point over and over that the data is factual. It is not just information by virtue signaling. The data is the data is the data.

This is my comment from the quartile. So these are our brothers and sisters. We are calling them the lower 20 percent. Well, how much of their income goes to housing, transportation, food?

Now, you notice these numbers are off the chart. That is because they also receive subsidies, earned income tax credits, other things we do to try to make their life less miserable.

Somewhere along the way, this body forgot that if you are poor, I mean truly poor, that bottom 20 percent, the majority of your income goes to housing. What did the Democrats accomplish this last year? We blew up the price of rent.

There were speeches from a number of us from 1 to 2 years ago, saying you need to create the safety net. You need to create a bottom so the economy snaps back, but be careful. When you create too much liquidity, government spending, you are going to blow up the cost of everything for people. It happened.

What is the solution? The left now talks about doing another stimulus bill to make their lives even more miserable.

Maybe it is the arrogance of: These folks in the poorer quartiles, they have been indoctrinated. They are going to vote for the left. So just abuse the crap out of them. They are still going to vote for you.

The fact of the matter is, if you look at the real data of who votes for the Democrats anymore, it is the urban elite. That is who finances their campaigns. It is no longer the working men and women. They migrated much more to the Republican side.

So maybe what I am seeing is politically logical, but economically, it is brutal. The math is the math. At some point behind the math are people who are suffering.

Think about this. You just saw on the chart where the lowest couple of quartiles spend most of their money just trying to do housing. Take a look at what we have done to the housing prices. This is mostly rent. You know, when you are in that bottom third, you are a renter. How many people right now who are renting we now are responsible for economic policies, liquidity of cash, where we have blown up the cost of housing, blown up the cost of rent, that we now will have trapped so much of America into being permanent renters for the rest of their lives? They are never going to build that savings account that owning a house is and that became part of being able to retire and is part of the American Dream.

The math is the math. You look at African Americans, Latino populations, and the amount that has moved into struggling just to cover the rent, it has blown up dramatically.

This just doesn't disappear. You don't wake up tomorrow and say, hey, we decided we are going to do economic policies, regulatory policies, tax policies. So we make a lot more stuff. Yes, the Federal Reserve pulls liquidity out. It fixes inflation. Oh, isn't it neat? All the rents went back down.

It doesn't work that way. How long before these populations get their incomes back where they can actually survive, where just the cost of having a place to live isn't consuming almost every dollar of their lives?

We don't talk enough about the policies here and the misery they have created. Yet, we have pumped so much cash into the system that we take a look at State and local, and they are sitting on boatloads of cash.

There is another really interesting trend line here. How did this happen? We had the speeches here 1 year ago, 1\1/2\ years ago. The world is coming apart. The world is falling apart. Yet, somehow state and local tax receipts actually held up dramatically well. We overshot the mark.

Then what did we do? Even though we knew they were doing just fine, the actual fall in receipts, which is the proper term for tax collections, was marginal. What did the Democrat policy do? Let's send them more cash because that is their constituents.

I want to walk through some of the other aspects that we believe left policies are making the working poor, the middle class, poorer. Here is a simple concept. I have said it over and over, but you have to understand it is this layering effect.

Let's say you are that individual that didn't graduate high school. The value you bring to work is your willingness to work. So you are the person hanging drywall. You are doing labor. You are doing landscaping. Your goal is one day you hope to own the landscaping company. You hope to own the plaster company. What you sell is your labor and your willingness to work.

What are the two ways you crush that population economically? We just did the inflation. We saw how much of their income now is going to just surviving.

The second thing you do is you make them compete against millions of others with similar skill sets. So there is this great economic argument. If you want to grow American GDP, immigration is a big deal, but it has to be immigration that has a multiplier effect on everything from tax receipts to productivity. You don't import massive poverty.

It is uncomfortable to talk about it this way. The fact of the matter is,

being a border state, what is happening at our border? You are not bringing folks who grow the economy. The data says actually what you are doing is you are making the working poor poorer.

I don't know how often anyone here will talk about our crisis at the border, which is real. Come to Arizona. Go to Texas. The societal impact, when you do it this way, we can get into some of the really interesting economic data saying, hey, when populations leave this country, you have just actually wiped out the ambitious populations because these are people willing to pack up and leave. You actually hurt the departing country. The fact of the matter is, you also hurt the folks here.

The numbers at the border are just stunning. I mean, when you start thinking of, during this administration, a couple of million folks, they may be wonderful people. It is not about them. It is the impact of the very people we claim we care about, that we claim we are trying to help. We claim we are trying to close income inequality. We claim we are trying to make the poor less poor. Then we do everything we can to crush them.

It is just the economics. I just can't figure out what the left is doing intellectually. They know this number. If it was a decade, 10, 15 years ago, all the literature we keep finding, it was Democrats who were fixated on locking down the border because they knew it hurt the poor and the working poor. They used to accuse Republicans of wanting open borders to push down labor values. Do you remember? It wasn't that long ago. The argument was flipped.

There goes my theory that maybe the left truly has abandoned working men and women in this country because they are no longer their defenders. They are almost the defenders of someone who needs a cheap landscaper.

The border numbers are real. I mean, when you start seeing the data coming from the administration itself, they make it really hard to find the actual facts. When you see numbers that are 278 percent increases, you start to realize what this is going to mean.

There is a great paper. We came here and talked about it a few months ago. It is a decade old. It talks about what happens when you get these waves of illegal crossing, and they get rolled into your economy. It was talking that it would take a decade for that lower quartile, the poor middle class, the working poor, for their incomes to start to come up.

It was solely a division of a number of people with similar skill sets attacking the same types of positions and work. It was a Democrat paper. I mean, it was written by folks who made it very clear they were on the left.

Isn't it fascinating how quickly the understanding of demographics and population dynamics--what it does to the very people that our friends on that side used to say they cared about?

We do lots of virtue signaling here and lots of pretty words. The data is the data is the data. The policies are the policies. The policies are killing the middle class. They are killing the working poor.

You start to look at these things, and here is the great irony. Think of this. Last year, the last 2 years, legal visas have collapsed. At the same time, you have these huge runs at our border. Now, this probably requires a much more deep dive on economic multipliers and certain types of skill sets and those things. The fact of the matter is, these populations up here, we know we get an economic multiplier. These populations over here, it is uncomfortable, but it is the math. It becomes a contribution from society to them.

We did a presentation about a year ago and talked about if you saw what was happening in the entire industrialized world--remember, the only place in the world right now with positive fertility rates is sub- Saharan Africa. I know this is geeky, but it is important. I know it is not politics by shiny object, which is now what Congress is about. This is important. The Western world is collapsing demographically and fertility-wise.

The driver of U.S. sovereign debt is our demographics. We are getting older. Somehow Congress didn't figure out there were baby boomers until the last year or two, and now they still don't really want to talk about it; so for 65 years they just didn't know we were coming.

But what happens when you even see data--China's demographics are collapsing. Europe's we know have been collapsing. Even countries like India, we are seeing their fertility rates fall off rather dramatically.

The model basically says in the coming two, three decades, it won't be worldwide fights over hydrocarbons like we had functionally in the 1970s or rare earths. Remember how many people would come behind these mikes just a couple years ago, rare earths, we are all going to go to war over rare earths.

Turns out now that we know how to do the iron-air battery and all these other things, the rare earth consumption looks like there may be a path around the massive needs.

It turns out over the next couple decades it is going to be the battle for smart people, and that is a really interesting thing to think about.

So if we do the brilliant thing with unified leftist government, we make sure that legal visas, legal immigration crashes, but we open up our border to bring in more poverty and misery to even our own poor. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. It is just like every policy set has great headlines, great talking points, acting like you are caring, and you are completely avoiding the misery Democrat policies keep bringing to the society.

And then there are the things we sort of call second-degree, third- degree effects when you open up the border. Come to my community of Phoenix, see the dramatic increase in homelessness. Does anyone else out there care? I did a ride-along a couple weeks ago with a neighbor who is an officer, and we spent 4 or 5 hours driving around. He has been doing this, like, 28 years, and he's telling me he has never, ever seen--that the homeless population has doubled; the crime, people breaking in and stealing stuff, but they are stealing stuff from other poor people. The violence.

And then we start to see the data of my southern border in Arizona, the amount of narcotics. One of the classic--if you want to play economist, the price of drugs that are killing people has crashed. When you see the narcotics fall in price, what does that tell you? There is a hell of a lot of them.

So, okay, maybe it is leftist orthodoxy you need an open border, but did they have to flood my neighborhoods with narcotics? Did they have to spike the homelessness around the country, particularly in Phoenix? Did they have to make more people's lives miserable? Because that is what the policies of this administration and the Democrats who control this place have done. I don't think they meant to do it.

It was obvious if they thought like an economist instead of virtue signaling for policy. Remember, we make policy now around here by feelings, by what we can say behind these microphones to get someone to send us money, even if it is crap and really hurts people.

And you start to see the misery the Democrat policies have put on our streets. And of course their solution, well, we are going to send them a check. Of course, the check will also continue the cycle of inflation, making people poorer. It is just--I almost wish we could have, where there is no television cameras, no mikes, put ourselves in a room with a couple people who own calculators and say: Let's walk through what has worked in the last 25 years and the things that haven't worked.

Madam Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Then when you are done doing your ride-along with the Phoenix city policeman, he is heartbroken. He has actually even moved out of the very neighborhood that he loved, that he has patrolled because even he thinks the property crime, the violent crime, the people living in the alleys has become too much for even him and his wife.

But the other thing he talked about was how many overdose deaths, how many people--now, we need to accept, a lot of this is a combination of COVID policy, economic policy. We are hunting for the 2021 number, but everything we have gotten so far, we have created misery out there.

Go pick up your community newspaper. Do they even still talk about how many have died from overdoses or has it just become so commonplace it is not worth reporting on that type of misery anymore?

And then you start to look at the crime statistics. And, look, Democrats often accuse Republicans of talking about crime to scare people. That is not where I am at. My district is an urban-suburban district. I care about these lives, but I also am fascinated by the economics of it.

Well, it turns out we did inflation, we did housing, we did the devaluing of people's labor by opening up the border, but we almost never have the conversation of how do you move out of poverty when people keep stealing your stuff?

I have what I will call an acquaintance, he is almost a friend. As a kid I used to hang drywall. He still has the drywall business. Now he has passed it on to his kids and his grandkids, and they are really good. They can do a level 5 smooth coat. That has always been my dream to learn how to do that the right way. It is a weird hobby. And he talks about they are now not doing projects in certain areas because people keep stealing their stuff, and it is really hard to keep people employed. It is really hard to be that micro-entrepreneur where you are selling your talent, and your talent is functionally your willingness to show up and the fact you have a couple drywall spades.

So we are also working on a project now in our office to try to understand how much of income inequality, people being poor, is the fact that they live in a crime-ridden area, crime-ridden ZIP Code where people keep breaking their bones and stealing their stuff; and by stealing their stuff, they can't accumulate assets, and how much of that stuff was the very things they need for work.

And then you overlay just the incredible spike of deaths, of murders that are happening in parts of the country. Now, maybe this is a societal reaction to locking up parts of the population, idleness. I don't know. I am not a sociologist. But we have to understand, so many of our urban areas across the country, there is misery.

But there is hope. If we could get our policy sets correct around here, there is incredible hope because we do have a society that desperately, an economy that desperately, a country that desperately needs people. They need workers. You see the workforce shortage continues even with today's numbers.

We need to talk a little--I will do this; this might be a weird transition. Really good unemployment numbers today. Even though unemployment actually went up as a percentage, but the number of jobs, which that is a good sign, people being willing to take the jobs, be a little careful, we need to retake a look at what they call the labor force participation number because it has been reindexed. Every year you actually try to do a calculation.

We haven't had a chance to look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics' underlying numbers. There was a beautiful spike in labor force participation. We need to figure out how much of that, though, is they changed the numbers of the population that is available to be in the labor force. But today was a good number.

But the wage inflation number was really dangerous because we have talked about one of our models we have in the Joint Economic Committee is that if we spike much more, we are on the cusp of a wage-price spiral. And that is just a great way to create misery in the society because those are really hard to break.

Once again, we were doing, in 2018-2019--I believe much of it came because we fixed some great inequities in our Tax Code. But something, if you start to look at the data, why in this last year has there been this massive number of retirees--a million and a half more--than we ever modeled for? Why are so many people basically saying screw this, I am out of the labor market, I am disappearing?

At the very time that if we were actually doing policy where you wanted to deal with the debt, you wanted to be able to keep having enough receipts, tax revenues to be able to keep our commitments on Social Security and Medicare, if you wanted to lower the misery in the country, you would be doing policies that would be trying to get young males into the workforce--there is a weird number there where they are not showing up for the workforce--but also folks who are eligible for retirement, early retirement, to stay in the workforce.

Those are policies that I think Republicans and Democrats could agree upon, labor and business could agree upon, and yet I sometimes feel really lonely around here talking about these things. But it's the math. You see these numbers. When you are losing a million and a half folks who are choosing to retire early, you do realize the data basically says a large portion of these people in a few years, particularly if inflation continues for the next couple years, will be in poverty.

One of the greatest ways to minimize poverty for folks in their retirement years is to have them delay retirement. Something is perverse out there when we have created a society that is incentivized to go take your Social Security at 62 and take the cuts, the lower benefit. I am just really concerned about this.

And then you start to take a look at other population dynamics. And this goes back to my earlier statement that I believe in this coming decade, actually the decade we are in and the next one, the fight for smart people will be akin to the pursuit of rare earths or hydrocarbons or those things from the past.

You see it, this is happening all around us. There is a collapse in the demographics. This is China, U.S., Europe, and it is for all of us. We are less bad than some of the others, but it is miserable. And it is the great opportunity of saying if we would fix the Tax Code--and, yes, maybe it is time to look at border adjustability, so we stop having the arbitrage, and when we try to sell things there is this massive tax arbitrage of manufactured goods from the United States.

But this is our reality. And yet this place will live on being enraged over the next mask mandate or this or that. Those are big deals. But they are not what is going to wipe out this Republic. Being unwilling to deal with the fact of our math.

And so think about this. We should be ashamed--and Republicans have part of this, too, as part of our sin. A small part, but part of it. We have been trying to do the math. Take a guess how much money we handed out per family in COVID aid. It is out there. So think of this.

I just showed you a bunch of slides saying working men and women have gotten poorer in the last year, but the debt exploded in the last 2 years, and now we are doing the math, saying, do you realize we put out over $76,000 per household in cash, that was COVID cash? Over $76,000. That is our best math at this point. And we have been having to go up and down different budget reports.

But do you feel, anyone here in this room or around the country, do you feel you got $76,000 worth of value the last 18 months? But that is what we spent, and that is what we tacked onto my little girl's bonds that she gets to pay for.

Maybe the concept of throwing more and more cash and blowing up inflation and destroying the incentive to work and delinking society from the nobility of work--oh, by the way, that work actually makes them much less poor. Now you actually start to see that, over the last couple years, it made more sense not to participate in society.

This is what we did. Maybe they weren't thinking, maybe they didn't mean to, but this is what we did. So we delinked--we functionally financed staying home.

Then the last little perversity of just from today, you will hear many of the left try to tout that $350 billion bill they just passed here in the House. If you dig through it, it is like, you know, a 5- year plan, government-planned economy. It really is sort of terrifying. But there is a little gem stuck in the left's bill they just passed.

Do you realize in there you have the pandemic ending in 2025? It is not based on: Hey, we have antivirals now. Hey, we have vaccines now. Hey, we now have home PCR tests. We have all the things we said we needed. They are here, but instead, we are going to keep the pandemic going--and that is what you all just voted on--until 2025.

My argument is, it is about the money. The pandemic declaration has become a conduit to hand out cash, hand out cash to your favorite groups to make corporate America, hospitals, and others addicted to the Democratic Party because they are handing out cash. And now, we just passed a piece of legislation that says the pandemic ends in 2025.

I beg someone out there: Please listen. Turn course on the policies. Come up with a unified theory that moves prosperity because economic growth, prosperity, is moral. But almost every act moved by the Democrats this year, almost every initiative from this White House, has made America poorer. It has made America more dangerous. And now, they are passing pieces of legislation to make sure we stay in this sort of dystopian chaos for years more.

Take a breath. Look at the data. Look at the misery this place has created over the last year. And seriously, I beg of you, consider having some self-awareness and some reflection and stop it.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I may have a slightly different tone here. I was born in an unwed mother's home in downtown L.A., and so were all my siblings. In my late thirties, I got an email out of nowhere, and it said: Hi, David. I am a friend of your sister's. Here is your information. Here is your birth mother.

We had a family discussion. I sent a very carefully worded note, and a couple of weeks later, I got this phone call, this tiny voice crying--and I am crying now also on the phone. And she is saying: I go to mass almost every day. On your birthday, I am terrified. Are you having a good life? How has your world been?

And I am crying on the other side, basically saying: Look, I have had a great life. I got adopted by a family that brought me to Arizona. I get to live in the Phoenix area. I have a wonderful brother and sister, who were also born in the unwed mother's home.

It became an amazing experience. My mom, who is right here, and this is my birth mom right here, they became best of friends. I have never told this part of the story here, but my birth mom--both of them have now passed away--had an early type of Alzheimer's, a type of dementia. But my mom here had sent her all sorts of photos of me being a child. So when you go into the house that they had there in California, there would be my two 6' tall blonde half sisters and then pictures of me as a baby growing up.

In her mind, I was always there. I was always part of the family. The dear Lord does heal.

But one of her best friends at the funeral turned to me and said: David, did Mary Lynn ever tell you the story of when we were in the car on the way to Tijuana to go get an abortion?

As they got closer and closer to the border, she began to cry. Then they got closer, and she started to hyperventilate. Eventually, she became so crushed with fear and sadness and terror, the girls turned around and went back and talked to her mother. A few months later, I was born at that Holy Family Unwed Mothers Home.

Now I am this age, and I have an adopted little girl, who is the third generation adopted in our family.

For those of us who passionately care about life, I think it is important we also tell the stories of how grateful some of us are to be alive; the amazing life my little girl is having and how grateful I am to her birth mom for giving us the greatest gift my wife and I have ever had; and understanding that the ultimate definition of love is life. Maybe others out there can have the amazing experience I have had with meeting my birth family and my family and my siblings' birth families. It is just one amazing experience of joy of life.

That needs to be what, I think, we focus on. There is good here if we just change our hearts and our minds.

Madam Speaker, there are so many things we all want to talk about and share, and sometimes, as Members of Congress, we run in front of microphones and sort of do the shiny, loud object of the day because, let's face it, that gets us retweets and Facebook and those things, but they are often trite. So I have a handful of things I want to walk through, but there is going to be a constant theme here.

I am not trying to be mean, but the thing is--and my facts will back me up--that the Democrat policies, if you look at particularly the last 12 months, have made life more miserable for Americans, have made the working class and the poor working class poorer and actually are crushing hope.

I want to walk through a couple of economic things. I am blessed to be the senior Republican on the Joint Economic Committee. There is a handful of economists that work on our side, and there is a handful that work for left side. We have been digging and digging and digging, trying to understand the inflation data, the amount of cash chasing goods, and what is happening in productivity. I hope I am wrong, but I am starting to see numbers that look like we are on the cusp of a wage- price spiral.

Let's sort of walk through our basic economics. You all remember your high school economics class, particularly those of us who are old enough to have been in high school at the end of the 1970s. Businesses raise prices because their costs are going up. Typically, just like we were doing right now in the new year, people are getting their wage hikes. Most of those wage hikes are nothing more than to keep up with inflation, so you end up with this spike.

There was a handful of folks on the Democrat side that were saying to look at the December number; it wasn't spiking as much as the previous months. Wait till you see the January numbers when the wages come in, and then you end up with this world saying now businesses, organizations, government, others, have to keep raising their costs, raising their prices, raising their taxes, others, to keep up because they just had to raise wages, not for our brothers and sisters that are out there working to live better but basically just to be able to purchase the same things.

Except at the end of 2021, Americans were poorer. The fact of the matter is, the average American fell about 2.7 to 3 percent poorer because inflation grew faster than their wages did. But there are lots of things in the economic literature--and I know I am geeking out a little bit--that you start to end up in this seesaw effect, what they call a wage-price spiral. Businesses keep having to raise their costs because now they have to raise the wages, and it becomes a very, very ugly circle.

A bit of trivia. How many of you here would immediately say to go back to the 1980s, particularly the early 1980s? It was Paul Volcker jacking up interest rates to just extraordinary levels that squeezed out inflation. That is actually only part of the story. If you actually look at the math during that time, there were the Reagan tax cuts, the first round of them. They created a great spike in productivity. Because one of the things inflation is, is I have too much money chasing too few goods, so raising interest rates, making everything more expensive, still doesn't do anything to make sure you are making more goods, more services, to fill up that vacuum to remove that inflationary pressure.

You actually even see some of that data after we did tax reform here at the very, very end of 2017, when you saw the spike in productivity. You saw a pretty impressive spike for 2 years of wages and actually falling inflation. Why was that? It is because expensing and other things we did in tax reform, repatriation, getting hundreds of billions of dollars from around the world coming back into the country, actually raised productivity and lowered prices. That is the holy grail. Right now, almost every policy that the administration and, I hate to say, this body is engaging in is counter to that.

We are going to walk through a couple of things here, and our argument is really simple. Almost every major policy set being moved forward--and I don't think it is purposeful; I think it is a misunderstanding of the most basic economics--that my Democrat brothers and sisters are doing is actually making life more miserable. I don't think it is purposeful, but it is economics.

Let's walk through the facts, just the actual math. I know this is always uncomfortable, but if you actually look at the data that came in, when you look at the expenditures--because I am using this slide. This is actually a 2019 slide, but it is important to set the base. Our brothers and sisters who are in the lowest quartiles--and I hate that term, but it is what we use in economics--dramatically more of their income goes to pay for housing, dramatically more goes to pay for their transportation and food. Those in the upper incomes, that is not where they live.

Think about what has gone on in this last year. Most everyone who is in this room, probably most everyone who is watching this, we are the people who have savings. We have retirement accounts. We have 401(k)'s. Life has gotten more expensive for us, but how many of you have a home that has gone up dramatically in value? Think about those lower income quartiles, that working poor, that middle class, that lower middle class. Do they have a home? Are they renters? How much of their cost is their transportation or just trying to provide housing? What we have allowed to happen inflation-wise is just brutalizing them.

When you actually start to understand what the policies from this last year have done--and I am going to show a number of these things, showing that the left's policies are actually crushing the poor, the working poor, and the middle class.

The difference here, when you see this type of graph, is we are trying to sort of demonstrate that it is both the effects on populations where you are income-wise--if you are in this lower income, how much more the cost of your life is because of inflation. This is almost just a pure demonstration of who benefits and who doesn't benefit.

If you are a homeowner, if you are someone with lots of assets and the stock market has been really good to you, you have come out ahead. If you are like most in the middle class and lower, your standard of living has gone down.

There is this rule of thumb from the top line. What are the two things you do to make the working poor poorer? I have said this dozens of times behind this microphone. It is inflation, and it is opening up the border.

There is this economic theory--and this is actually old literature. It is like 20 years old, and it actually had a number of left groups as part of the authors who basically said if you look at the working poor, a population who probably didn't finish high school, what they sell is their labor, their willingness to work, their willingness to sweat. What happens when you flood

your society, functionally, in 1 year, with a couple of million people with similar skill sets? It is just basic math. You functionally have devalued the value of their labor. You have given them the double whammy. You have created inflation, which affects the poor and the middle class more dramatically.

You saw from the first chart how much more of their resources go to pay for housing, to pay for transportation, and to pay for food. Now you make them compete against a couple of million people with similar skill sets. These aren't IT jobs. This isn't someone who is at the top of the wage scale and creates a multiplier of productivity in society because they are inventing some new app. This is the person who is hanging drywall, working their hearts out. It is a tough job. Their back is aching at the end of the night. Now they look out and there are a couple of million other people in society with similar skill sets.

It is a level of misunderstanding. Some folks will come behind these microphones and pretend they are being compassionate, not understanding the cruelty of inflation and having an open border and how many working poor are getting crushed by this.

I want to go a bit further. As you start to look at the inflation level, you have to understand--7 percent was sort of the national number, right? In markets like mine, in the Phoenix area, we were at 9.7 percent inflation in 2021. A lot of that is because I am from a growth area. Lots of people are abandoning California and Illinois and moving into my neighborhood, so much of my inflation is actually housing.

We have already heard other people come behind the mikes, even today, and talk about the cost of housing. Well, congratulations. In other parts of the country, it is not 7 percent. In mine, it is 9.7 percent. When we look at the charts and the details, it really, really has hurt the working poor, and they are having trouble finding the most basic accommodations.

Then we start to dig in more. The economists have made it very clear that what was allowed to go on in 2021--the economics warns of inflationary inequity. The details are pretty clear. For those who have assets, you are going to do okay. If you are part of half of America who doesn't have those few thousand dollars in the bank or owns a house or has other assets, you have become poorer. The policies are making you poorer.

I know this is uncomfortable, but you can't keep campaigning and doing politics and saying, ``We care about the middle class, and we care about the working poor,'' and then keep adopting policies that make them poorer. At some point, the math always wins. Not the virtue signaling, not the rhetoric, it is the math. We are making half of our country poorer.

One of the other projects we are working on in the Joint Economic Committee, and a couple of us on the Ways and Means Committee, is also trying to understand what other attributes there are.

I can keep coming to the microphone and talking about the open border, and we have an administration that doesn't seem to give a darn because it is political. Their base has no trouble with a couple of million undocumented folks coming into the country.

Inflation is really, really ugly because the math is brutal. Do you have any sense how high interest rates have to go to squeeze out this inflation? I think there is this fantasy that four marginal rate increases this year somehow are going to tap down inflation.

I will make you a crazy--actually, it is not crazy; it is based on math. At the final quarter of this year, you may be seeing 10 percent inflation. I hope I am wrong. But I was in front of this mike a year ago saying I think we will be close to 7, and I actually underestimated it.

Going back to my opening comments, I really, really, really see in the numbers that we are on the cusp of a wage-price spiral, and four marginal quarter-point increases in interest rates ain't going to cut it unless Congress dramatically starts to think about policies that spike productivity. Except you have a left that now has an article of faith that tax reform, that expensing, these things we did in the tax code to bring hundreds of billions of dollars back into the country to get organizations to invest in plants and equipment to make workers more productive so they could be paid more--well, we can't do that. Except even the liberal economists agree it worked. It turns out, you need to be doing things like that.

The left's Build Back Better social spending bill, because it delinks money, transfer payments from work, every dataset basically says it will continue to spike inflation. At the end of 10 years--I came here with the paper. It makes it very clear. At the end of 10 years, the working poor are poorer because of the way the left has designed these transfer payments without an expectation of participation in society and work. I thought we learned this 25 years ago, but somehow math is heresy.

So let's go. What are some of the other attributes that make our brothers and sisters in that lower middle class, working poor, in many of our neighborhoods, what else makes them poor?

We have touched on inflation. We have touched on flooding society with millions of people with similar skill sets. When was the last time we had someone remind us about the concentration of crime?

For most of the Members in this body, we don't live in neighborhoods that are going to be subject to crime. How many Members here live behind a gate? How many Members here have security?

I did a ride-along for 4 hours on Monday through north central Phoenix in neighborhood after neighborhood after neighborhood. The officer I rode with had almost 28 years on the city of Phoenix police force, and the most disadvantaged neighborhoods had the most crime.

Okay. There is an assault here. You see the person in that apartment, he is a drug dealer. You are realizing, it is the folks living in poverty who are in the core of the crime. And then the left takes a position of basically having verbal violence toward law enforcement.

But we know the data says, if you look at the concentrations of poverty, one of the attributes that makes someone poor is when someone comes and steals their stuff. You are trying to work; someone steals your tools. You are trying to survive; someone breaks into your car or steals your automobile. It is another attribute that once again the left's policies are this constant economic violence on the poor.

And then you start to go on another thing we are working on. This one is much more complex, but it is starting to prove the theory is true. How many of you have ever heard the discussion about health disparities? Urban poor, my Native American populations, even rural poor, there are health disparities, and it is absolutely true.

Our brothers and sisters with renal failure, diabetes, these things, who are concentrated, we can almost draw data circles around them and say, look at the income inequality of this neighborhood to a neighborhood that might be just down the street.

We have been trying to understand what the attributes are. Oddly enough, some of the attributes aren't race. They are health. They are crime. They are education. But the one that no one here has focused on is actually health.

If you ever get a chance--and this is for anyone who is listening-- try to find the data of those who are suffering type 2 diabetes and the concentration. Go find a heat map. It becomes a really interesting discussion because what I am making as my fourth attribute is our brothers and sisters who are sicker.

So the left's attitude is, well, it is good politics, we will just put up a bunch more clinics. We will help them manage their diabetes. Okay. That is an honorable thing. Wouldn't it be much more compassionate to cure, to disrupt?

So we do know, because it came out a year ago, but it is as if no one actually read it. We actually have the paper that was put together, a working paper series from the Congressional Budget Office. It was functionally some of the data within the Democrats' H.R. 3. If you actually dig through the numbers within their working paper, it makes it clear that the Democrats--it is great politics--hey, we are going to lower drug prices. But the way they go about doing it a decade from now, so many

cures don't come. And as the paper talks about, it is the very cures for things like potentially diabetes and other ailments that are concentrated in our poor population.

So it is functionally the left's policy on something like H.R. 3-- because if you think about their pricing mechanism where if a drug costs more than this amount of money, you can't have it. It is once again policy that says, we are going to find a way for you to live with your misery, but we are going to make living with your misery a little cheaper. Then I think the thing that is loving and more compassionate is we are going to find a way to cure it. It really is a different mindset, and that isn't Republican or Democrat. It is just compassion.

But it may not be great politics because the fact of the matter is, if you look at the mechanics within H.R. 3, the Democrats actually make Big Pharma more profitable and bigger and more powerful, and they wipe out the disrupters, the small biologics, the small pharma that is actual chewing away their book of business because they are curing the disease whereas Big Pharma over here is just maintaining it.

It is the classic economic irony of this place acts like a protection racket. We give great speeches about how we are going to do this, and then--wink, wink, nod, nod--what actually is happening is you are locking in someone's oligopoly.

Once again, if you go through the paper, it makes it really clear that the first couple of years there is not much difference because it is what is already in the disruptive pharmaceutical pipeline. And we have done presentations here of 100 new are-under-research and only a few actually succeed. But in about 5 or 6 years you start to see a collapse of those cures. Welcome to Democrat policy once again.

We have come to the floor multiple times with H.R. 3. We have made a number of people very angry by referring to it as the Big Pharma protection act. But the math is the math. And now you still have additional CBO studies that make it clear we are telling the truth. It is what it is.

We have actually made proposals to our brothers and sisters on the left saying, we both are enraged at the price of pharmaceuticals. Believe it or not there are other ways to get there, and one of the most magical things we could do for society are also some of the kickers to make sure there are capital stacks and these other things that are a little geeky, but ways that that investment goes into the cures.

So when you have things like a single-shot cure for hemophilia--I did this presentation back in December. We have a proof of concept of a cure for type 1 diabetes. Starting out, these are going to be really expensive, they are going to be really difficult until we functionally turn it into a biofoundry, and you build the capital stack, the Tax Code, the incentives to do lots of that. But I can show you in chart after chart, it saves society, it saves taxpayers a fortune in the future.

Remember, last year's CBO math said in 29 years we are $112 trillion in debt in publicly borrowed money in today's dollars. So that is inflation-adjusted dollars. And we know that number is going to spike once we get the math from this last fiscal year plugged in there. About 75 percent of that spending is just Medicare, that debt is Medicare. The other 25 percent is Social Security.

The most powerful thing you can do for U.S. sovereign debt is disrupt the price of healthcare, and our argument is, the greatest elegance is actually doing it by making people healthier.

There is one other thing I want to throw in my frustration of Democrat policy. My expertise is more Arizona and not the rest of the country. We have seen the debate around here, lots of flowery words, and almost no detail of the reality of what is underlying the piece of legislation.

Our friends on the left will come behind the microphones and say it is a Voting Rights Act. Okay. How is giving a politician six to one--so you give me $200, and the Treasury is going to multiply it by six times--defending democracy? Or is that, once again, the left being so much smarter than Republicans are on how to try to stay in power?

How about some of the other things that are in the Democrats' H.R. 1 and H.R. 4, their Federal election bill?

My theory is a little different than other folks. It is just a blatant power grab. It is not a power grab for the Federal Government, which it is that, but it is much more than that. It is a power grab by a party that basically is trying to design the election code to fit their fund-raising model, their campaign model.

It does other things. Like down here, my State for functionally 18 years has had voter ID laws. Every dataset out there says you can't find a differential of populations not being able to vote. Matter of fact, I think in my State some of the underlying data is African- American females have the highest participation. It is actually White males, particularly White rural males that have some of the lowest participation and some of my Native Americans. But that doesn't meet the folklore that we get from our brothers and sisters on the left.

Think about this--and this is the circle I want folks who are paying attention to get their heads around--how it works. So the Democrats push a voting rights bill, but it is really about voting mechanics. And what they do is they say, Hey, we are going to have same-day, automatic registration, and then we are going to legalize, industrialize ballot harvesting, and then at the same time we are going to do this they also are allowed to have, if you give them money, they get six to one. So why would you do that?

Well, first off, as in California, the Democrats have built a huge infrastructure. If you run for Congress, you actually take a substantial portion of your campaign money and hire firms that go knock on doors and harvest ballots. It is now a campaign mechanic.

Well, what happens if you hire lots of people to go walk through that massive apartment building or this and that and knock on the door and say, Hey, I will register you right here, let's do your ballot. That is functionally what they are doing in this legislation.

And the beauty of it, it will ultimately be taxpayers who will be financing it because the left, to their credit, has spent about the last 15, 20 years building an online contribution system. And here is the kicker. That online contribution system has trained contributors to the left, contributors to Democrats who say, don't give one person this much money, give 10 people this much. And it is as if it has always been laid out the same, and--wink, wink, nod, nod--one day we are going to set up a public funding system so your $25 contribution or $200 contribution gets multiplied six times.

You have got to give the left, the Democrats credit for their, just, audacity. And then to call it a civil rights voting bill when, when you break through its mechanics, it is about power, it is about power and control. That is what this is.

The other beauty is handing the bureaucracy here in Washington, D.C., the functionality of saying they can tell my State of Arizona what is allowed and what isn't allowed.

We have a family saying that goes, money, power, vanity, but most of the time it is about the money. In this case, I have got to give the left credit. They hit all three in the same piece of legislation. It becomes about the money, it becomes about them keeping the power, but reality has almost nothing to do with fairness. It is about the fear that the public understands how much of the left's policies have been crappy to them, their families, this country. The mechanism they are going to try to keep in power is to functionally have us finance their elections and allow them to industrialize the very bad acts that so many of us worry about.

Madam Speaker, I think I feel a little better getting some of that out of my system. I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, it is always impressive to hear Whip Clyburn speak.

Madam Speaker, I am going to try something. We talked about this over our Christmas break, that the first floor speech should be one that would be a bit more positive. As we started to work through the story, we wanted to tell and show some of the good things happening in the country, I came to a conclusion that I am going to have to, on a number of these, walk through how I believe the left's policies--maybe not intentionally--but are actually really causing harm to things that are really good for America, good for the world, good for everyone here.

So one of the things I am going to do is sort of walk through some really neat technologies and things that accomplish much of the good we want, and then sort of talk through a little bit of the policies that are being adopted here or promoted here that were actually screwed up.

Just before the Christmas break, we did a floor presentation because there was an article out that there substantially had been a cure--it was only one individual--but it was a proof-of-concept cure for type 1 diabetes. They basically took a stem cell, turned it into an islet cell, reinjected the islet--islet cells produce insulin--and it worked.

Obviously, we have all had our hearts broken over the years when we think there is a medical breakthrough, but this one has been being worked on for a decade.

I found another article, another research team, which actually took blood and then, using some hormones, took those blood cells and drove them back to functionally being a T cell, and then took the T cell being an islet cell--an insulin-producing cell. Why is this important?

That first article we talked about, saying this is a miracle, we now know how to cure type 1 diabetes. The problem was that one was going to require anti-rejection drugs. This methodology doesn't. You can cure type 1 diabetes and the individual because you did it from their blood. This is wonderful.

My reason for starting with this is if you dig through the paper and some of the comments and some of the smart people that fixate on this, they start to say this is also a path for many of our brothers and sisters who suffer from type 2 diabetes.

Why do we care so much about ultimately curing type 2 diabetes? First off, this is actually a separation. I think it is more because no one has really presented this to my brothers and sisters on the left. We had the discussion in the Ways and Means Committee about how to help populations, the Tribal populations. Many Members here, they have urban minority populations that have overwhelmingly suffered with diabetes. There becomes this conversation that we are going to build more medical clinics.

When you head in that direction, what you are basically selling is that you are going to help Americans live with their misery. What I am trying to drill into this place is let's move to cures because the cure is the most honorable, loving, caring, and also the most effective thing we can do.

Remember--it is going to be in my last couple boards--in about 29 years, the CBO says we are going to have $112 trillion of borrowed money, and that was on last year's calculation, in current dollars publicly borrowed, $112 trillion of borrowing. About 75 percent of that borrowing was just the shortfall in Medicare.

We know 31 percent of Medicare spending is diabetes. Cure diabetes and type 2--it is complex. You have to be willing to actually change incentives on what we eat, what we grow, what is produced in food, how we deliver nutritional support.

Now that we actually have a way--or, it looks like we are going to have a way to help our brothers and sisters deal with their autoimmune rejection and go back to producing insulin again.

It turns out, if it is true, that that path could be one of the most effective things ever in actually U.S. sovereign debt but also ending misery. We have a small problem, and we are going to get to that.

I am going to show you as we walk through this where Democrat policies will actually stillborn many of these technologies that end this suffering and also have these amazing impacts of making people's lives better, healthier, and actually having a real effect on this crazy amount of borrowing.

My calculation from last month is we are actually borrowing about $47,000 every second. As the next decade comes, that number goes up dramatically. If you care about people's retirement security, my little girl's economic future, that should be the fixation here. You can take it on by doing good things. It is not cutting and slashing programs. It is dealing with the drivers of that debt. It turns out healthcare costs are the primary driver of that debt.

I did this slide just because, A, I thought it was cute, but it also helps us sort of think where we are technology-wise. Yes, that is a group of kittens in a Starlink dish because it was warm, and everybody likes pictures of kittens.

More to the point, today I believe there was another Falcon 9 rocket sent up to space to distribute a bunch more of these low Earth-orbiting WiFi satellites--broadband satellites. If you take a step backward and look at the budget that the Democrats promulgated for broadband and then take a realization--hey, all of North America actually has broadband. The difference is it is not a wire; it is a satellite dish. Yes, the kittens are cute.

So my Tribal communities in Arizona that may be in the middle of nowhere, you know, a chapter house up in the Navajo reservation, they have broadband. They have been waiting for that broadband for decades, and this place keeps promising that we are going to run a piece of fiber, a piece of wire out there. Forgive my language, screw that. Put up the satellite dish--the small satellite dishes that are just a little larger than some of the big dinner plates. They have broadband. It would cost a fraction of what we are spending.

That would be actually having this place read about technology, encouraging our staff to pay attention to what is happening in the scientific world instead of this place sounding like we are debating from the 1990s. How much of what goes behind these microphones is functioning decades out of date, rhetorically, technology-wise? It is just very, very frustrating.

So one of my personal fixations--and we are going to talk about things like the Democrats' H.R. 3 and their approach to healthcare. There is a revolution happening, and it is called personalized medicine. We are about to--not about to. It has happened. I beg people to sort of think about this conceptionally. Disease is about to become a software program. Stop and think about that.

What we have learned on stem cells, messenger RNA, and some of the derivatives of messenger RNA, the fact of the matter is the cancer you have, the heart disease you have, the virus you have, even now the bacteria you may have in your bloodstream, by using the new technology, we are turning cures, but cures are functionally almost a software problem. We code it; we understand the DNA; we produce a cure.

Yet, the vision of the legislation where the left says, well, we are going to control pharmaceutical prices, crushes the very innovation that is about to cure people. It turns out those cures are the thing that crashes the price of healthcare because 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who have chronic conditions, chronic diseases, chronic ailments are the majority of our healthcare spending.

What the left has proposed is great politics. It is brilliant politics. Hey, we are going to go and functionally nationalize the pricing mechanisms by referring to Europe, and that is how we are going to price drugs. Yes, the economists who do pharmaceutical research say all these new innovative drugs are going to disappear, and we basically make Big Pharma bigger.

What you have done is you have crushed the capital for the innovative cures, and you take those that are the maintenance drugs, the things that maintain our misery, and you incentivize them just to make tweaks to maybe make them a little better and extend their patents. That is actually the outcome of the left's approach on healthcare.

I don't think it is done maliciously. I think it is just one of those occasions that you are going to see multiple times on these boards. Good intentions aren't necessarily good outcome. Virtue signaling doesn't mean that it worked. It just means that the left gets

judged on good intentions, not on the outcomes.

Even in the new papers that are out in the last month or two talking about CAR-T, which is a derivative of functionally messenger RNA being used on heart disease--remember, heart disease is the number one killer as we get through this pandemic time.

What happens if that back-to-healthcare disease is substantially a software problem? We actually have a way to have an incredible impact on the number one killer in our Nation. This is a wonderful thing. This is a really good thing. This does not happen quickly under the left's H.R. 3 mechanisms. They will stillborn much of this technology, the investment in it, and the ability to bring it to market.

If the left and the right, if we actually give a darn, what we should be looking at here are the things that are disruptive that cure and what we do to get these technologies to our brothers and sisters as fast as possible. If it is true--and there now has been multiple research papers on this, and they are trying to now commercialize it, the ability for this to deal with the proteins that cause some of the heart damage, allowing the heart to heal, that it is really incredibly effective. This is wonderful because we did not have this a year ago, even conceptually, and it is here.

What happens if I come to you and say: Well, we have just learned how to do editing of small snippets of genetic code. We can end sickle cell anemia.

This is working. It is back to my constant of trying to pitch this concept of cure the disease, end the misery, don't do what is the rhetorical method around this place, saying it is great politics for me to offer more healthcare clinics because that way it looks like I just did something, and it helps my reelection. Yes, getting the actual cure to market might take a little bit longer.

Do you remember at the beginning of the pandemic when we talked about getting a vaccine and this concept where we would get a vaccine in less than a year? The debates we were having here were that, oh, that is pie in the sky, that is a fantasy, but it happened. It took a bunch of money. It took unleashing a lot of resources and freaky smart people and pushing the bureaucracy to become more efficient. But it happened.

Madam Speaker, could you imagine if we had that same type of passion to cure diseases? We know how to cure now sickle cell anemia. How do we get this to our brothers and sisters who are suffering instead of trying to come up with another way to just do the maintenance?

My argument behind this microphone right now is that these are wonderful things that are happening.

How do we keep the Democrats', the left's, policies from destroying this progress?

This is a little board that basically talks about the Democrats' H.R. 3--wonderful rhetoric. Every voter, right and left, Republican and Democrat, is frustrated with pharmaceutical prices. Okay, but do they understand that the mechanism being proposed by the left--basically, the economists tell us that there are dozens and dozens of cures that are real expensive.

Remember, many of these cures take billions and billions and billions of dollars of research just to get them to market, and a substantial number of them, a majority, fail. A lot of those costs are our fault. The bureaucratic mechanisms--and a couple of us have ideas on how to streamline that process and reduce that cost to get these revolutionary pharmaceuticals that cure to market. But this is really important.

There is one other thing on this board that needs to be understood. The left's pharmaceutical pricing proposal does something called reference pricing. They reach over to Europe, take a handful of countries there that actually have what they--think of it as a formula that says quality life years. So if this drug costs more than a certain amount of money for an additional quality life year, they don't buy it. There are countries over there that have pricing like I think in Great Britain was equivalent to 38,000 USD, that if the drug costs more than that, you can't get it. That will reduce drug prices. It will also kill a whole bunch of people, and it will end the resources for the cures that come in the future.

There are other ways to get there without crushing small pharma. That is basically the way that you make Big Pharma less big because you cure the very disease that the book of business over here makes money on by maintaining. This isn't hard economics. It is just math. And I accept this place is a math-free zone, but the math is the math.

There are good things happening. We just have to stop much of the Democrats' policies, which are crushing these opportunities because, look, it is great politics. The rhetoric is great politics. It is crappy economics.

I want to give you another simple example, Madam Speaker, and this one is more maybe closer to home, being from Arizona. A couple weeks ago, a big rig tractor-trailer--I believe it was on I-10 in Arizona-- drove a fairly substantial distance completely autonomously. No driver at all, completely autonomously.

Well, think about that. Let's take a step.

Didn't we hear President Biden--what was it, a few weeks ago?--talk about the supply chain: We don't have enough truck drivers. We are going to fix this. We are going to make it so goods can make it to the warehouses where they can be value added, the manufacturing, the store shelves.

This was part of it because the United States, one of our greatest difficulties is our demographics. The reality is we are getting much older very fast. I mean, what is it? The mean truck driver is somewhere in the mid-fifties. This is part of the solution. Okay. This is wonderful.

How much of this place is really fixated on the combination of resources, but it is also the regulatory, the litigation, and the liability standards to make this happen so it helps solve the transportation of goods here in the country?

It is wonderful, except one small problem. The Democrats, in their infrastructure bill, slipped in a wonderful little section. Because, remember, this is a supply chain. So the container comes off the ship, goes to the stack, goes to the truck, the truck we just saw we now have the autonomous technology that is starting to work. So what did the Democrats slip into their infrastructure bill? Making it so you can't automate the port.

So they, once again, sold out to the union because, well, that is who writes them checks. But you can't have it both ways. You can't have a President get behind the microphone and say: I am working on this; I am going to help solve the supply chain problem, wink, wink, nod, nod. I am going to hide it in the infrastructure legislation where the vast majority of the money did not go to actually infrastructure, and then put in things in there saying: But we are going to also make sure you can't automate the ports.

This is special interest legislation because Congress has become a protection racket. You are this union. You come in. You have enough friends here. They will actually do something that protects that book of business against what was good for the entire country.

So all of this technology that is about to help us deal with our worker shortage, our supply chain shortage, actually gets stymied because the left basically says the union is more important than the rest of the country. Let's make sure you make it so we can't make our ports more efficient.

That is a classic example of good things were happening. And the technology isn't Republican or Democrat, but you have to make it so it comes together.

The left constantly selling out to their special interests basically crushes the very things that create the productivity that we desperately need for the future of this country because, remember, growth is moral. Growth makes the poor a lot less poor. And then to do these backdoor little deals that actually crush the efficiencies and the productivity that make the society wealthier, it is a wink, wink, nod, nod. It may be great politics, but it is really crappy economics.

So let's actually talk about another thing that is happening. How many speeches have we been giving about global warming here? A lot of our brothers and sisters care passionately about this. And then on the other side

of the very beginning of the Biden administration with the help of many of my Democrat colleagues here, they basically trumped down on permitting, regulations, accessibility, pipelines, those things for natural gas, even though we know over the previous decade and a half natural gas was the substantial, by far, driver of the reduction of North America's greenhouse gases because it burned so much more efficiently. Because accessibility had become so available, the price of natural gas had come down so much that facility after facility that were generating electricity had switched to natural gas away from coal.

So what did the Democrats do this last year? They made natural gas substantially more expensive. Well, what did they think was going to happen?

Congratulations to my brothers and sisters on the left, which I believe they have increased coal usage by 23 percent last year over where the Trump administration was, which was accused of being too friendly to coal by the environmental left had, because of the productivity and accessibility to natural gas, natural gas prices fell, and use of coal went down dramatically. The left comes in and starts to do all sorts of regulations, permitting, restrictions, those things for natural gas, and natural gas prices go up. Those facilities converted back to coal. Congratulations. Twenty-three percent more coal got burnt.

It is just, once again, a simple example of if you don't do basic math. It is great rhetoric: come behind the microphones, tell us about how much you care about the environment, and then screw up the economics so much that this Nation actually over the next few years, greenhouse gas-wise, is about to get dirtier.

You have seen my slides I have brought to the floor before on how much of our baseload nuclear is about to come off line. There will be more baseload nuclear about to come off line than every bit of photovoltaic that has been put into this entire Nation.

It is math. It is not hard. But we don't seem to reward facts around here. What we reward is brilliant virtue signaling, pretty words, and not the final outcome.

Having had a conversation with a couple of my friends who are good people--they are on the left. They care passionately about greenhouse gases. I asked them about this natural gas.

Why do you go so anti-natural gas even though it was responsible for the vast majority of the reduction of U.S. greenhouse gases?

Well, I don't like methane.

Okay, that is fair. May I suggest actually purchasing a scientific journal subscription or two and read because a couple of weeks ago some of these articles came out about a dramatically, dramatically less expensive way to capture methane? It is functionally clay with a slight alteration. I think it is called copper oxide, added. It is functionally kitty litter.

Do you see a theme, Madam Speaker, kitties in the Starlink satellite?

This is functionally an MIT paper saying: Hey, we found a really inexpensive way to capture the methane. So if you are worried about wellhead bleed-off or interconnection bleed-off or these things, apparently the model even works for ambient capture.

So instead of going anti-natural gas and making everyone's life more miserable and more expensive and then pushing manufacturers of ions, electric generation, back to coal, get your head right. Learn the economics and say: There is technology out there that we can capture the thing you say you are worried about very inexpensively, put your resources, put the regulatory push behind a solution.

It is a little harder to explain in front of your environmentalist townhall, but they are facts. There are wonderful things happening. There are solutions, and solutions that don't bankrupt the American people. It just requires this place stop sounding like it is the 1990s policywise.

Understand, this is one of my biggest frustrations around here. We need a moment of honesty. The policies pushed by the administration and my brothers and sisters on the left here have made America poorer. They have made the working men and women poor and the working poor poorer.

Here is the chart. The facts are the facts are the facts are the facts. Wages have gone up. They were also going up dramatically in 2018, 2019, and in the very beginning of 2020 with no inflation.

Our problem right now is the classic problem between sort of the Keynesian, stimulus, consumption side of economics and those of us who are more on the supply side where you make more product and, by doing that, you raise wages because you become more efficient. You incentivize productivity, and that productivity makes it so you can pay people more.

We did just the opposite: push cash after cash after cash in society, push up inflation, and Americans got poorer. You saw the inflation data the last couple days, Madam Speaker. So all the nice speeches around here about Republicans did this, Republicans did that, moment of clarity, honesty--and it is math--Democrat policies made the working poor poorer this last year. And it is math.

What are the two things you do most that create the most economic violence to the working poor? I really wish I had someone here who was willing to answer that. It is real simple: Open up the border so you create a flood of individuals who have similar skill sets. My drywaller or my gardener or whoever these people are, they sell their labors. They sell their willingness to work their hearts out. When you flood the market with people with similar skill sets, then you crush their wages and then, at the same time, create inflation on top of that.

From an economic standpoint, if you want to commit economic violence on the poor, do exactly what the left is doing right now: open up the borders and incentivize inflation.

A tough part with both of these is that it is not a switch you can just turn off. The labor availability for those who sell their labor, they sell it because they didn't graduate high school and didn't have some of the benefits many of us did, but their wages were going up dramatically in 2018, 2019. In the beginning of 2020, a new regime comes in, the border is opened up, we are in the middle of a pandemic, there are lots of other things going on, and there are numbers out there that are really difficult because you have to adjust for the amount of cash that was pushed into society. But when you start to try to normalize that, I think when we look back there is going to be an understanding of just how brutal the policies of opening up the border and inflation were to the very people we talk about and claim we care about.

My fear is that brutality economically looks like it is going to be with us for about a decade. It may take 10 years to squeeze out what we have done in our population dynamics and inflation.

I hope this place is willing--and when I talk to some of my Democrat colleagues and I walk them through the numbers, they just stare at me angrily and say, well, we are going to just send them more money, not understanding that just sets off the cycle even more.

I threw this one in because I think this is actually something, we should all just be hopeful. We now have, actually, an antiviral in the pandemic. We have the Pfizer pill. I believe Merck has one, but the Pfizer is remarkably effective.

So if you have a home COVID test and can actually take an antiviral pill at home--you've got to take a number of them--should you still have a declaration of a pandemic?

And my reason is, go back to the discussions we had when this began, when the pandemic was declared. This has been a miserable thing for everyone to go through. But it was always we are doing this because our emergency rooms are going to be full. We won't have enough ventilators. We don't have therapeutics.

Well, now we have therapeutics where you can take it at home. You can identify the virus at home.

Is it time for us to actually step in and say, this is something we are going to live with? We now have the tools to take care of it. If you happen to be in one of--where you have a compromised immune system, you have other sorts of co-morbidities--which I still hate that word-- yes, there are different protocols.

For the vast majority of our Nation, this is what we had said a couple of years ago; when we get this, we don't

need to have a declaration of a pandemic because you can test at home and take a pill at home--well, a number of pills--and it is an antiviral that is incredibly effective.

Is it time we start having the conversation that the declaration of a pandemic has outlived its welcome, and we start now figuring out we have methods to help our brothers and sisters who are suffering take care of themselves and do it from home? They don't have to be in the urgent care centers. They don't have to be in our emergency rooms, our hospitals. This is hopeful, and it is here.

Now, of course, you already saw an earlier debate, I believe, between our leaders discussing about the Biden administration's failure to properly pre-order and those things. I will let others who specialize in this have that debate.

But that should be considered hopeful, and it is time, and we are already starting to see some movement with our brothers and sisters on the left starting to understand that this is something that we are going to live with.

All right. This one is uncomfortable, but it is math. The University of Chicago, four Ph.D. economists were looking at parts of the Build Back Better, the social entitlement spending bill, and the childcare tax credit. And it turns out, because the left insists on de-linking the money from getting job training, from learning skills, from actually pursuing work, from taking work, economists basically say, once again, the left's great rhetoric of how they are going to help working men and women who have children, actually, the data says they are going to make them poorer.

So what we have proposed over and over and over to the left is: Okay, if you intend to do this, could we put in a component that says we need you to gain skills? We want you to be part of the economy. We want you to be part of society. We would like you to work.

And the reaction--we actually had testimony in the Joint Economic Committee from a leftist Democrat witness who basically said, why should people have to work? Even a couple of the Democrats on the dais, you know, their jaws are dropping saying, well, that is your witness.

But then the economists turn to you and say, the way you are designing your legislation you are hurting working poor people. You have already done it with opening the border. You have already done it with inflation. Now you are going to make sure it sticks.

These are just crappy economics. And they know better. It is just the politics of this craziness right now.

So let's actually go on to something else that I am hoping will make some sense. I did this board specifically for someone who will probably never see this moment of the speech. So, last week, we sent out, you know, a postcard saying it is about to become a new year. Tell us what issues you care about. And someone on the left stuck one in my mailbox, and the first thing said, rich people need to pay more.

Okay. It would have been nice if this individual had actually had the fortitude to actually give me their name or phone number so I could talk to them and walk them through the numbers. Because you hear the left's folklore all the time. Well, the tax reform, it was for rich people. No, it wasn't.

Once again, the data makes it very clear, the wealthy, after tax reform, are paying a higher percentage of the Federal income tax. Understand, one more time. The tax code got more progressive after tax reform. So the math is the truth.

How many times do you hear it?

I remember last year, I did a presentation, Speaker Pelosi came in on it, and then Speaker Pelosi talks in the mike and says, 82 percent of the benefits went to the rich people. And even the Democrats who were on Ways and Means, their jaws are dropping, and they are looking down at the floor.

But this place makes math up. It makes crap up because we are about virtue signaling, not the facts. The tax code we are under today is more progressive. The rich pay a higher percentage of the Federal income tax burden than before tax reform.

But back to the rhetoric and that postcard that was in my mailbox saying rich people need to pay more taxes. Okay. Maybe the left should stop trying to subsidize them.

In the left's Build Back Better, their social entitlement spending plan, the amount of tax cuts that are functionally designed into that, tax credits, money transfer--you do understand, two-thirds of millionaires get a tax cut under the Democrats Build Back Better.

It is, once again, the rhetoric versus the math; the virtue signaling versus owning a calculator. The analysis says the Democrats are, once again--talk a great game. The wealthy need to pay their fair share. And then they turn around and do legislation that actually subsidizes the rich.

A few months ago, we did a presentation here and said, if society, if government really needs another trillion dollars--okay, if that is the argument coming from the left, stop subsidizing the rich.

We came here with a series of boards that showed almost $1.4 trillion over 10 years--and I am talking the really rich, you know, the subsidies that are built in. And you could just hear--what is the colloquialism--crickets. Because if you actually look at the wealthiest ZIP codes in the Nation, they are actually represented by people on the left.

So just a couple more of these to sort of help walk us through.

We all know the Democrats' passion for State and local tax deductions, and it goes up and down in their negotiations. But once again--and to Bernie Sanders' credit, he actually told the truth on this. It is a tax cut for the really, really, really rich, when the vast majority of the money goes to people making $1 million or more.

But how many times have we read in the political press that a number of our Democrat brothers and sisters here won't let the legislation become law unless they get these tax cuts for their rich taxpayers?

Okay. Then stop sticking a postcard in my mailbox without your name on it saying tax the rich more, and being part of, obviously, a political party that wants to either subsidize the rich, hand them tax credits, or hand them money. You can't--it is just fascinating. We work in a place that the words don't match the facts.

And this was one of my favorite things. In Ways and Means, when we were grinding through the Democrats' Build Back Better bill, we actually did some simple math. Once again, we actually tried to read part of it.

So you make $800,000 a year. Your family makes $800,000 a year. Built into that legislation was $118,000 of tax credits for a family making $800,000 a year. Buy the right Tesla; buy the battery wall; buy the right solar panels.

That is their version of taxing the rich, getting the wealthy to pay their fair share? Or is it their version of, hey, we are going to subsidize the people that finance our campaigns. And, oh, by the way, these are their constituents.

So back once again, what is the greatest threat to our Republic? Besides all the craziness here and the shiny objects and the debate of the day that will change tomorrow, the sense of indignation, people will walk behind these microphones--I am going to argue it is the next two boards. This year, 77 percent of all the spending is mandatory. It is functionally a formula. It is Social Security. It is Medicare. Ten percent is defense, 13 percent is everything else.

When you and I go home, and if I am in front of a Republican audience, it is often, oh, you have got to get rid of waste and fraud. You have got to get rid of foreign aid. In front of a leftist audience, well, it is defense.

But, no, it is demographics. The vast majority of this here is functionally demographics. Demographics, getting old, is not Republican or Democrat.

But yet, even last night, you saw more legislation being pushed by the Democrats that expands these mandatory portions, and this is based on a CBO report from a year ago.

But functioning 29 years, you have $112 trillion of publicly borrowed money, so that is not borrowing from trust funds, and it is on today's dollars. This isn't inflated dollars in the future. That is like 205 percent of projected GDP. The majority of it is the shortfalls in Medicare, then Social Security. The rest of the budget is in balance.

If you have made a commitment, you are an elected official here and you made a commitment that you are going to protect Social Security; you

are going to protect Medicare; you are going to protect retirement security; start telling the truth about the math. And understand, those previous slides I showed, that there is a miracle of wonderful things that are going to cure misery, cure diseases.

Why isn't that the fixation here, that we are going to actually fix the things that create this incredible amount of debt? Instead, we have a body that doesn't do math, and is rewarded for absolutely absurd virtue signaling.

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

Mr. Speaker, forgive me for taking a moment to sort of get organized. That is the hazard when you use far too many boards.

I want to do a couple of things this evening. First, I am going to offer a solution because I believe particularly my brothers and sisters on the left and the administration are in a very bad place on one issue, and I think there is a genuine solution coming maybe within the next couple of weeks.

Then we are going to spend some time talking about something that is often uncomfortable around here, and that is the debt ceiling and the reality of the math and why it is a sin that we are not going to actually engage in the stressor and use that stressor, which is the debt ceiling, to make a couple steps toward reality on what the math looks like.

First off, a little of this is going to come across as a bit sarcastic because I mean it to. But what happened? A year and a half ago, 2 years ago, when COVID came to our shores, came to the world, we had discussions here, often on Zoom. We were going to do the science. We were going to follow the facts and also accept that what we know today will be different tomorrow. We were going to slow down the spread not because we thought we could avoid the virus but because we were worried about emergency rooms and others being overflowed with our brothers and sisters who were sick.

Here we are, approaching almost 2 years later. We have multiple vaccines. We have antibodies. You saw the data, particularly on the Pfizer antiviral therapeutic pill. There is a pill coming--if the data is real, if what we read is real--that is about 89 percent effective. Now, it is a lot of pills you have to take over 5 days, but there is a therapeutic coming that you can take at home. And we have home test kits.

If you will go back to our own rhetoric and the conversations with the scientists and experts, it was always: We don't have a therapeutic.

If it is true, in about 3 weeks, we are going to have a protease inhibitor. If you read the science on it, it is really neat how it snips the protein, keeps it from attaching to the cell. It is remarkable science. It is also going to help us on all sorts of other future viruses. But the ultimate antiviral is almost here.

If this is almost here, why isn't it time to have a simple policy discussion saying: Wasn't this the standard that we were all hoping and waiting for, the technology, the belief in science that would allow us to declare the pandemic over?

By doing that, the dystopian sort of fight that is going on in our society, where the Senate yesterday said no vaccine mandates--what is it now? Five different Federal courts have said it is unconstitutional. Brother after brother, sister after sister, neighbor after neighbor, Republican v. Democrat, where now we have turned it into an article of faith.

The left lives in a ball of fear over the disease, and the right lives in frustration and anger that they believe freedoms are being stripped away in the country.

How about we embrace science? The fact of the matter is, go back a year and a half ago. This was the miracle we were waiting for. It is almost here. Why wouldn't we pass a simple piece of legislation that functionally says: Hey, when the FDA says that we have a successful therapeutic, an antiviral that is really effective, let's declare the pandemic over. Let's get ourselves away from this dystopian polarization that is not based on science anymore.

We have turned it into a religion.

I think we are better than this. The fact of the matter is, we dropped a piece of legislation weeks ago that basically said that. It basically said, when science is victorious, we will embrace the science, declare the pandemic over.

Now, it doesn't mean the virus goes away. It doesn't mean some of our brothers and sisters aren't going to get sick. But the fact of the matter is, the math is the math. We have had more of our brothers and sisters die this year than we did last year.

Do you remember the political rhetoric? Maybe I shouldn't go there. But maybe it really is the moment to consider this, to my brothers and sisters on the left. I am extending you a lifeline. I am giving you a chance to back away from a society of fear and hate to a society that says we conquered.

Please, for anyone who is listening, for my brothers and sisters here in Congress, Mr. Speaker, yourself, give it consideration. Has science won? And if it has, let's embrace it. Let's declare this pandemic over because it stops the cascade effect of removing troops that want to serve to the chaos around here of, you know, we play this fake virtue- signaling game where there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of us sitting here for hours. We are wearing our little masks, but we are all sitting right next to each other talking, and then pulling our masks down to have a drink of water. Come on, it is theater. Let's get back to science.

A few years ago, I remember being here on the floor, and the then Democrat leader got behind the microphone and basically called those of us, who made it very clear we would not vote for a clean debt ceiling, arsonists. And that has bothered me ever since. Because I think actually, in many ways, those of us who did not believe in a clean debt ceiling, raising the debt ceiling once again without some attempt to slow the chaos, slow the spending down, I actually think those of us who wanted to bend the debt curve, we weren't the arsonists. We were actually in some ways the fire prevention crew. We were trying to save the country, save the society.

So first off, does everyone understand how bad the math is? We are functionally borrowing $47,000 every second. We borrow $2,841,000 a minute. Okay. I am going to speak for, what, a half an hour. $2,800,000 is $84 million in the half an hour I am going to speak will be borrowed. $84 million will be borrowed during the half an hour that I speak. But we are functionally borrowing over $4 billion every single day. And we are not heading towards ever paying this off.

And the perverse thing is: Do you understand in a decade that number almost doubles? It almost doubles.

And back to the rhetoric of arson, let's go back over our history over the last 50 years. The only times--well, except for one where, God bless them, in the eighties, they actually took on the shortfalls in Social Security--but you look at the different deals that have been made to bend the debt curve, almost every single one was associated with a debt ceiling. It was that one stressor.

We have all heard over and over, Congress will not do something unless they feel the pressure, unless they feel there is a crisis, unless they are up against the wall. And the game that was played here saying, oh, let's just change the rules for the Senate. Let's make it so they can do it with 50 votes and that way we can just pass this. We won't have to deal with the reality of burying people's future retirements and destroying my little girl's future in debt. We can just avoid it and go home and have a nice Christmas.

But the fact of the matter is, almost every agreement we have had has been associated with the stressor that was brought on by a debt ceiling.

Gramm-Rudman, 1985 and functionally again in 1987. Debt limit increase associated with it. Deficit reduction and automatic spending and budget triggers.

Paygo. I can't tell you how many times the Democrats here preach paygo to me, except for the fraud that paygo really is, where on the fifth year we will just pretend it no longer costs anything, therefore, it doesn't fall under the paygo rules. But the paygo rules functionally every time--four times was associated with changing the borrowing limits of the country, the debt ceiling. It was supposed to create deficit reduction, and it did create some. Spending increases must be offset, and that is the ultimate cultural change that paygo produced. But remember, it came about because of a debt ceiling fight, multiple debt ceiling fights.

Budget Control Act. Do you remember how controversial this one was? We actually had a government shutdown and other things associated with this. But the Budget Control Act, the sequestration that came with that, if you look at it, it was the most successful in modern times of bending the spending curve. The problem is it is all on discretionary. And we all know the fraud around here is discretionary is now down to, what? 10 percent or so. Actually, no. Fifteen percent of what we actually spend, if you strip military out.

Military is now 10 percent. The rest of discretionary is 15 percent. The other 70-plus percent is functionally on autopilot.

But this is the truth. Democrats have control of this place. They control the White House. They control the Senate. They control the House. Okay. Bless their precious hearts. But we could have used this as a stressor, and there have been lots of, oh, my hair is on fire. The world is coming to an end. I am worried about the stock market, oh, wink, wink, nod, nod. And the stock market just goes on because they know we will fix something. But used it as an excuse, even if we have to tell our constituents why we are trying to do something tough. Because remember, the lobbyists here in this town aren't here to help us reduce spending. They are here with their hands out wanting more spending.

This place is functionally, structurally designed to get everything you can, and hell be damned one day when we hit that failed bond auction. And you all saw today, it wasn't a big deal, but today's bond auction was slightly undersubscribed when U.S. sovereign debt was being sold. I am not saying it is a canary in a coal mine, but the canary did have a little cough.

And so here is what we are going to do today. I think the Senate may be voting at this moment. We are just functionally going to do a debt increase, probably we come back on Tuesday, we still don't know what the number is going to be or maybe we do the fraud of just do it to a date. Will there be any deficit reduction? Any attempt, any anything to force some rational math of what is going on?

No. Because it is uncomfortable because we have to tell the truth about the drivers of our debt.

And what are the drivers of our debt? Okay. I have said this over and over, but we need to be honest. The left will say, oh, it is military, it is rich people not paying enough taxes. The right, we have our sins, too. We will say, oh, it is foreign aid, oh, it is waste and fraud.

No, it is not.

The primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is, we are getting old. It is demographics. And demographics aren't Republican or Democrat, it is math. And you have got to understand how sharp this curve is.

We are functionally right here. So here is 2022. Functionally 17 percent of our population is over 65 today. You do see how fast we start getting up to close to 22 percent of our population being over 65. This is the driver of our debt.

Remember the math. And I am going to do it a couple of times here. And I am sorry this upsets people because they don't want us to tell the truth.

The primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is Medicare. Simply Medicare. And then Social Security. And the rest of the budget actually is in balance. So the next 30 years the rest of the budget is actually in balance. It is demographics.

If you made a pledge when you ran for office around here that you were going to protect people's retirement, you were going to protect Social Security, you were going to protect Medicare, letting it be buried in debt, how is that protecting it? Tell the truth.

And there are solutions. I have come behind this mike so many times and said: There is technology out there. There are things we can do to crash the price of healthcare. There are policies we can do to grow the economy. Everything should be fixated on what maximizes economic growth.

And then the left moves something, Build Back Better, their social entitlement spending that the data says it slows down the economy. We will be poorer and smaller, and the working poor will be poorer at the end of the decade because of the way they designed their social entitlement spending legislation.

We are doing everything half-assed backwards. If you lay out, sort of the holistic theory, sort of the integrated model, yes, you have to fix immigration, but you focus on immigration being about maximizing economic expansion, not importing poverty; adoption of technology that maximizes people being healthy, and cures.

Remember last week, we came here and talked about the miracle from last week that we have cured someone of type 1 diabetes? Because remember, 31 percent of all our spending in Medicare is just on type 2 diabetes. What happens if you do cures and end people's misery? Oh, by the way, you get amazing benefits on our debt.

The immediate reaction you will get from people on the left is, well, Schweikert got behind the mike and wanted to cut entitlements. No, I am trying to find a way to save them. But you save them by changing the cost curve. You save them by having a moment.

Pretend you are at a 12-step group. Isn't the first step to admit you have a problem? This place can't make it to step one.

So let's do a little math.

And I am sorry, I do this over and over, but I continue to be just shocked at the number of staff around here who will grab me in the elevator and say, Is that number real? Is this real? And you say this is the single biggest issue policywise facing Washington, facing this country? And we will chase shiny objects because shiny objects don't make your brain hurt. We will have asinine discussions about, oh, there is a vaccine database, there is this, there is that, and you realize it is a con. That is part of the scam this place does is look at the shiny object. We chase that because this hurts.

Reality. And this number is worse today. This is based on last year's math. $112 trillion inflation-adjusted public borrowing in 29 years. $112 trillion of borrowing will be our publicly held debt in 29 years, 77.7 of that is just Medicare, 34.8 is Social Security, the rest of the Federal budget is in balance.

This is just demographics. The cure is economic growth and crashing the price of healthcare. This will drive every bit of public policy, and it is coming very fast.

If you look at our borrowing curve, in a decade we go from what is projected these days where we are going to be borrowing a trillion dollars a year to a couple trillion dollars a year. The debt will and the borrowing will and the interest will drive all policy. And this place right now the policy is worrying about how to get reelected than saving the country and the future.

Do you understand, a 2-point increase in interest rates from nominal interest rates that have been projected, if we go up just 2 percent-- and that is getting us actually closer to what the historic mean is--in 2051, 100 percent of revenues go just to pay interest. How come this isn't the number one discussion here?

Now the left may have different ways to approach it than those of us on the right, but you would think this would be all we could talk about. And it is avoided around here like a virus, except we haven't figured out how to put a mask on it and give it social distancing, have we?

And for my brothers and sisters on the left, the number of times I will try to sit down in working groups with my Democratic colleagues-- and I believe their heart may be in the right place, they don't own a calculator, their math isn't there, but we make public policy by our feelings in this place. We make public policy because it feels good, it has a great title. We get judged by our intentions, not by our outcomes. And that is incredibly dangerous.

So think about some of the rhetoric. And I have done presentations here where I walk through every single revenue, the proper term is receipts generating proposal from the left. And if you did all of them and pretended they had no economic effects, no secondary effects--all of them--you still can't come close to raising enough revenues. Even a 100 percent tax rate on small businesses and upper-income families could not come close to balancing the long-term budget. You can take all the rich people's money and all the revenues from those small businesses that they own. You can take every dime.

This is a percentage of the GDP number. When you get into these sorts of numbers, you start doing the percentage to GDP. We are heading towards 15 percent of GDP functionally being borrowing. And if you take every dime, you only get about 5 percent to GDP.

We are screwed. And I am sorry, I know that is crass, but I just don't know how to get folks to want to pay attention to it. This is the single-most important thing going on here. If you care about education, if you care about health, if you care about science, if you care about space, if you care about

equality, if you care about these things, when there is no more money, when every dime of resources goes, so we survive and do our best to avoid that failed bond auction--which God forbid, if it does and interest rates spike, do you have any idea how fragile we have made our society?

And this isn't often the future. This is today. We will kiss up close to, what is it, $30 trillion in borrowing, probably in the next few months. These are unthinkable numbers, and it is here.

And you have got to understand, these projections are based on this concept, a really simple one: There is going to be no more wars. There is not going to be another pandemic. There is not going to be an economic collapse. There is not going to be a mortgage collapse.

We have done this to ourselves. And then the left comes here and we do things like the Build Back Better, the social spending bill, which ultimately--and we have different numbers because God knows what the Senate is going to do--but the simple scoring from CBO basically said at year 5 it has borrowed another $800 billion.

Oh, by the way, wink wink, nod nod, after year 5, we will actually stop all these programs and we will start to raise revenues to pay it off. We are functionally going to add another $4 trillion-plus from borrowing.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining?

Mr. Speaker, the social spending bill, at the end of the decade, you realize the economy will have missed tremendous amounts of economic growth, some of the best models coming from the Tax Foundation. We are actually making ourselves poorer because of the design of the spending. When you tell people, I am going to send you a check but you don't have to work. When I am putting money into things that don't actually create productivity.

Remember, what are the two ways you pay people more money? Inflation. Well, that doesn't get you anywhere. Or productivity. That was one of the miracles at the end of the 2017 tax reform, is the resources that went for companies to buy equipment to be more productive so they could pay their workers more. And you saw it. You saw a miracle of employment and wage growth.

And then the cynicism that when two-thirds of millionaires get tax cuts under the Democrat's build back better plan. So you tell us the rich need to pay their fair share and then you design pieces of legislation that give hundreds of billions of dollars to rich people. And then you tell us, oh, by the way, we should put State and local back into it, but most of it goes to really rich people.

You want revenues. We did a whole presentation here a few months ago that said we can show you over 10 years $1.4 trillion you can get. Stop subsidizing really really rich people. Instead, the left does a piece of legislation to subsidize them more. I guess my intense frustration is we are heading--it may not be the bubble where the economy blows up--but we are heading to a type of rot because so much of this Nation's resources will be used to survive the amount of debt we have piled up. And then we are adopting policies that don't create any type of escape philosophy of, we are curing diseases that drive the debt because most of the debt is driven by healthcare. We are doing investments in things that grow the economy. We are getting immigration codes and regulatory codes and other things. We are modernizing them so they maximize economic opportunity because we actually give a darn about poor people. We give a darn about the working poor. We give a darn about people who are heading toward retirement. We give a darn about young people having a future. And not one of those things is actually in the math; it is in the rhetoric. People spin some great stories here but it is not in the math. It is just not in the math. It is not in the economic analysis.

The universities that have looked at what is going on right now tell us that at the end of the decade, the poor are going to be poorer. Come on. What type of economic violence is this place willing to subject the working poor, the middle class to? We are better than this. And there is a path.

Mr. Speaker, you are not going to pay off the debt, but we could adopt enough policies to flatten the curve that my 6-year-old daughter actually has a future. And doesn't she deserve one.

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

Would the gentleman yield?

Brilliant question. And I cannot actually think of something that was substantive, where there was a collective idea from my brothers and sisters on the left or the right that there was actual intellectual battle here where we made something better.

This place is functionally an intellectual dictatorship.

Would the gentleman yield to allow me just a quick colloquy with him?

The process is broken. It is why I come here almost every week--and you do, too--and we try to just focus on what is ahead of us. I just spent a half an hour sort of focusing on debt and deficit. That is not Republican or Democrat, it is what is ahead of us.

You have been here a few years. How many actual real discussions-- other than theater of, We should do a study commission. We should write a strongly worded memo; the theater of this place--instead of doing what is really hard, and understand, you can't just do one thing. That is the great fraud now. We have gotten ourselves in such a difficult position, it has got to be everything.

A couple years ago I came here, and we brought in 19 attributes that you had to do almost at the exact same time to maximize enough economic growth, enough technology disruption, all the things to make it work. You actually helped me on some of that. But my fear, those are really uncomfortable, and you will have an army of lobbyists really unhappy with you when you tell the truth about the math.

The gentleman knows in many quarters I am a bit of a heretic on this. I actually believe we are on the cusp of miracles, if it is true that we just found a cure for Type 1 diabetes. If the math is true, about one-third of all U.S. healthcare spending is just Type 2 diabetes--for my Native American populations, for my urban poor, for my rural Anglo poor--the amount of diabetes, the misery, the suffering, wouldn't it be one of the most elegant, noble things we can do is say, screw this noise we are doing, we are going to do our Operation Warp Speed.

Now we see there is a stem cell to the islet-producing insulin. There is a path, but it requires intellectual discipline, telling the truth, and saying no to a lot of people who are going to be upset because a cure ends the misery. It also ends the manipulation.

Chip, you are a heretic.

Before I leave you, I am still hopeful. I think there is a path that saves us, but the window for that escape is getting very narrow.

The speed of debt accumulation, the unwillingness to deal with complex problems with complex solutions--because that is reality--is closing fast on us. And the number of Members who are like you, who are willing to come to the floor and say very difficult things that are truthful, they are becoming rare. I thank the gentleman for the colloquy.

Madam Speaker, tonight we are going to try to do sort an of an extension of the last couple of times I have been behind this microphone and have a discussion about what is actually going on with the big fiscal picture of our country.

I am going to be a little mean to some of the Democratic policies, but I am going to show factually how I think it actually hurts, but there is actually something that happened this last week that we should actually be almost giddy about if it ultimately proves out, a major breakthrough on one of the things that creates misery around the world, let alone our own country, but also has real fiscal impacts.

So, let's actually sort of start with some of the basics. How much do you think we borrowed every single day last year? We were playing with the math a little while ago. We were borrowing about $3.8 billion every single day. Break that down, do that math, an it is $160 million an hour.

I know every time I get behind this mic and start talking numbers, people just glaze over, but it is important because if you are someone who says I really care about investments in the environment, I really care about investments in healthcare, I really care about investments in education, where do you think the money is going to come from?

If we continue policywise the avoidance of the drivers of our debt, we continue doing public policy by feelings. One of the things that enrages me around here is we have entire conversations, entire speeches behind these microphones, and then we make public policy by our emotions, by our feelings, but not by a calculator.

And I know the calculator sounds cold, and as Republicans, we sound like accountants on steroids, but at some point the math is important. But also, what happens when I can show you that getting the math right means you don't hurt people?

We saw in the Democrat social spending bill, their Build Back Better, multiple university papers coming out saying, Hey, we are looking at this and we believe the working poor will be poorer at the end of the decade. The disassociation of the value of your labors to money coming in, the other social policies that were driven in that piece of legislation, they may be great politics,

and they are really crappy for the society, and they are really crappy for the very people that the left claims they care about.

So let's pull it back and just deal with where we are at right now. Now, this board here is from math from a year ago. And once again, we are not going to talk about 1965, but I start with this over and over because I can't tell you how many people will come up to me at Costco, and they will walk up and say, David, if you would just cut back on that foreign aid. David, if you would just get rid of waste and fraud. Or if they are liberals, Hey, if you cut back on defense spending.

Well, we have a reality problem. You see this red area? That is mandatory spending. That is functionally, Social Security, Medicare-- the primary drivers.

The green area over here is what we get to vote on. The little blue area, that is defense. The green is all domestic. It is down to 13 percent of what we, as Members of Congress, vote on is the non-defense spending around here. And that is today. This gets dramatically worse. And you know what makes it worse? We are getting old as a society.

Demographics. Demographics are actually what primarily drive the U.S. sovereign debt. And yet, how many times--for anyone that is crazy enough to watch C-SPAN, or even our fellow Members or staff--do we talk about where we are going to be in just a few years.

And I thought I would also just sort of start with some of the folklore. You will hear the speeches here of: Rich people need to pay their fair share. They sure do.

A couple months ago we made a whole presentation here on the floor begging our Democrat colleagues, saying instead of doing policy where you are going to go--say, we are going to raise taxes on small businesses. We are going to go raise taxes on individuals. How about just stop subsidizing them?

We came in and showed almost $1.4 trillion over 10 years that the policies of this place subsidize the rich. And I am talking the really rich. So the Democrats did their build back better social spending bill. If you look at it, it now substantially subsidizes the really rich even more.

The other perversity in that piece of legislation, if you get to year five, you do realize you have driven almost another $800 billion of borrowing. Then we play this pretend game around here and say, Oh, then we are going to make these programs disappear, and then we are going to keep the taxes going for the rest of the decade. And that is how we only end up with about $400 billion of borrowing.

I mean, no wonder those in the public who pay attention to Congress in Washington, D.C., just realize we treat the public like fools. These are people who are just trying to survive. They are trying to take care of their kids. They are trying to get ready for retirement. And this place is basically getting ready to destroy the next couple decades. And the scale of debt is off the charts and it will drive every bit of policy around here, instead of the fraud that is going on so far this year where it looks more like trying to buy votes than save the future of this country.

So let's take a quick look. Even 100 percent tax rate on small businesses and upper-income families, if you took 100 percent of it, you can't get close to covering where we are spending-wise. It is just math. And I know this is a math-free zone, but at some point the math will always win.

So take a look here. If you took every dime of people that make over $500,000, and with that, every dime of the small business earnings, you get about 5.5 percent of GDP. This is the most elegant way to do the math. But in 2030, just the borrowing will be 6.3 percent of GDP. And 29 years from now, it is 15.1. You don't get close to it. You can take every dime of $500,000 and up and every dime from small business, and where are we 29 years from now? You hit a third of the revenues necessary.

We are living in just an absolute economic fraud. The share of Federal tax revenue spent on interest--and this is one of those that scares me to death. Let's see if I can try to explain this.

What happens to a country when you have borrowed and borrowed and borrowed and borrowed and borrowed, and you put yourself right up against the edge. And then you have a new virus and all of a sudden you need to stabilize the economy. Or God forbid, there is a military conflict or some other tragedy in your country, you have made yourself very, very fragile as a country.

It is the concept of, we all have this occasion where we live a little too close to the fire and that one time there is a traffic accident, that one time something happens and we miss our airplane. We understand the consequences of what they call fragility. We are doing that to this country.

This board here is really simple. If we had a 2 percent increase in interest rates, by the time we get to that 29 years from now, 100 percent of all the tax revenues, 100 percent of the tax revenues go just to pay the interest payments. You start to think about that, hell, just a 1 percent rise in interest from the CBO's baseline is 70 percent of all tax revenues will be consumed just making our interest payments.

Is this the future you plan for your children? I mean, is this the future this place plans for your own retirement? You think you are going to continue to still get all the benefits you have earned when your government, 100 percent of its income is going just to cover the borrowing interest? This is where we are at. And this is last year's math. This is before the huge amount of borrowing that has already happened this year.

So now the most difficult part of when you get behind this conversation, for those who come behind these microphones, this is the part that my brothers and sisters around here on the left--and even a number on the right--don't want to have.

What is the primary driver of the U.S. sovereign debt? Two things: Remember how I said demographics? It is the fact we are getting older. You have got to understand, 29 years from now--and this was actually, this math was done before the massive amount of spending this last year--we will be at $112 trillion of borrowed money in 29 years. And that is inflation-adjusted, so today's dollars, $112 trillion of borrowed money, most of it is Medicare.

If you are like I am, and you believe Medicare is a societal promise we made, how do you plan to keep paying for it? Social Security is the rest of the balance. The rest of the budget is actually in balance. As a matter of fact, the latest math actually says the rest of the budget actually has a small positive balance in 29, 30 years.

How many times today behind my Democratic microphones--or even the Republican microphones--did we tell the public the truth? That if we don't get our act together and find a way to disrupt the cost of healthcare, we have just--and it is a technical economic term for the future--we have screwed our kids and our own retirements. I am sorry to be crass, but I don't know how to get anyone here to listen.

It is math. It is demographics. It is not Republican or Democrats. Getting older is not Republican or Democrat. It is not partisan. It is math.

And the solution so far this year is, Well, let's just spend a hell of a lot more money right now, let's pay for it with a bunch of fake accounting. And maybe it is enough spending where we can buy enough votes, we will survive another election, but the country will be in an incredible amount of trouble.

So what is the solution? Well, let's first, what is the primary driver? You just saw the slide. The primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is Medicare.

So let's break it down. Five percent of our Nation's population, our brothers and sisters who have really tough lives--they have chronic conditions, they have diabetes, they will have other comorbidities, as you have heard over and over during the pandemic--well, they are a majority of our healthcare spending. If you actually love and care for people, why not go and do your very best to help these poor people that are suffering? Oh, by the way, you also get an amazing economic value for it.

Go help our brothers and sisters who are sick, who are suffering. It is not putting up a bunch more clinics. It is investing in the disruptive technologies that are around us right now that are curing people.

I beg this place to think like disruptors. Because good politics are, Oh, we are going to go spend a bunch of

money; we are going to put up a bunch more diabetes clinics in my district, and I will look like a hero. Yeah, maybe that is great politics, but you just functionally patched over the misery, the suffering. Go put the resources in a cure.

I did a presentation back in March or April here, talking about a cure for Type 1 diabetes and how it also means part of that will translate to Type 2. I saved some of the really nasty emails I got saying, Oh, that isn't true; it can't happen.

Wait until the last board here. Guess what? There are miracles happening around us. Do you remember a couple weeks here I did a little presentation on messenger RNA? We now have a vaccine.

Now, it is not 100 percent effective. It is only mildly effective. It has to be used for malaria. It looks like we are about to have a vaccine for so many other diseases that plague us. Why aren't we putting our resources into something of that nature? Because if it is 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who are suffering, who are the majority of our healthcare spending--and healthcare spending is what is bankrupting the country--putting up a bunch more clinics doesn't solve the problem.

Also the other absurdity, I will have liberal friends who will say, Well, we did the ACA, known as Obamacare. That was a financing bill. It basically just moved around who got subsidized and who had to pay. It didn't change the price of healthcare. And I hate to say, the Republican alternative did the same thing. We just moved around who got subsidized, who had to pay. I think we did some more things to create some creativity and competitiveness, but that bill died in the Senate. We did pass it out of the House.

But then you will get some that say, Well, how about Medicare for all. Medicare for all doesn't save a dime. Model after model after model says it doesn't save a dime unless you begin rationing--and even then it really doesn't save much.

So what do you do? What are the actual drivers?

You remember that Medicare number that is the primary driver of our debt? Remember on that chart, it was $77 trillion over the next 29 years. And after this year's binge spending, God knows what the new numbers are. Thirty-one percent of Medicare spending is just diabetes, so almost a third of overall healthcare spending is just diabetes.

Take a step and think about it. For someone like myself, who is terrified of that failed bond auction because we have built up so much more debt, and the public--and internationally--they just don't have an appetite for our debt anymore, that becomes the cascade of hell.

If I came to you, and said, Why don't we focus on how to help people not have such misery, and also it would have incredible effects on our fiscal situation.

Madam Speaker, 31 percent of just Medicare is diabetes. So why aren't we doing something like an operation warp speed on diabetes, instead of social spending where we can buy another election with taxpayers' money and then borrow and borrow and borrow, and then use absolute fraud as the pretense of how it is going to be paid for? Or we could do something where we end people's misery, and the future looks brighter and optimistic.

This slide here, I think I brought to the floor in April, and I did a whole little thing about the concept of the technology being developed, and it is really impressive. They have worked on it for years, taking stem cells and adjusting the DNA there to make it--and forgive me if I mispronounce these things--an islet cell and their ability to produce insulin.

I showed this slide--and I still have a few of those emails of folks saying, Stop making things up. This technology can't work. You can't cure diabetes. Well, a couple great articles this weekend--and this is where the optimism is. This is a place of optimism. We live in an amazing country. We have suffered and done great things, and yet we seem to roll in misery these days instead of the fact that we are on the cusp of ending so many individuals' misery, sickness, and maybe even changing the world.

I only did this just so people could visualize. Imagine the concept of grabbing some stem cells. You can grab them now from skin--we have learned all sorts of things. The ability to program them, and then functionally you can teach them to grow into what you need.

If we have that technology, just imagine the diseases, the illnesses, the misery--so you have messenger RNA that now we are about to know how to take on so many viruses, so many other types of diseases. We are now about to have the technology--we actually now do have the technology-- to actually take on other types of diseases where it is failures of certain organs.

Now, I am going to give you one other one, just as part of the thought experiment, before we do the closing board that I am most excited about.

If Congress wanted to have an impact on healthcare costs, what is something we could do in 1 year? What is something we could do-- Republicans and Democrats could do in 1 year? If I came to you right now, and said, In 1 year, you are not going to get all of it, but 16 percent of healthcare spending turns out to be people not taking their pharmaceuticals as they should. You realize that is well over a half a trillion dollars a year.

A half a trillion dollars a year in spending because someone didn't take their high blood pressure pill and they have their stroke. They had trouble and they didn't take their insulin; they didn't do this and that. What if I came to you right now, and said, Instead of nationalizing healthcare and doing this and that, why don't we promote subsidized--make it part of CMS--the technology where the pill bottle cap beeps at grandma when she didn't take her meds?

For someone like myself with high blood pressure--I take my pill religiously--but if I didn't, my phone would beep at me, and say: David, we don't want you to have a stroke. Please take your medicine because we know it works. We know the same thing. How many people do we know who have had clogged arteries, and if they had just taken their statins?

Madam Speaker, 16 percent of all healthcare spending relates back to people not taking their meds. That is $528 billion a year.

There are disruptions. If you take that and then put it into what we already know about the messenger RNA and the fact that there are so many illnesses and diseases--if you read anything, you have to have seen the articles that believe that we are close to a vaccine for HIV, close to a vaccine for herpes. Now you see the vaccine out there for malaria. There are so many amazing things happening, you saw it two boards back.

When I came to this mike back last March and we talked about, Hey, there is maybe this stem cell therapy that is going to turn how to make islet cells that actually could be injected back into someone, and it could be at least the cure for type 1 diabetes.

How many of you saw the articles this weekend? It was only one person; it was the first person they tried it on. Guess what? It works. They have successfully cured someone with type 1 diabetes. That is a million and a half of our brothers and sisters in this Nation.

What are we willing to do to find a way to almost put that type of technology--let's have it be proofed. Are we willing to put it on a production line, just like we have done, messenger RNA on a production line? And now can we also make the really tough policy decisions, are we willing to change the farm bill, nutrition, some of the inputs into type 2 diabetes? And if we can fix those, the articles and papers are saying the same ability to fix the body's ability to make insulin again may be a path to cure type 2 diabetes. If that is true, think about it.

You just saw, the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is healthcare costs, Medicare.

Madam Speaker, 31 percent of Medicare spending is just diabetes. Why wouldn't this place take on something that is that obvious, that is loving and compassionate, and also really makes a big difference to our future, both economically and just from a moral health standpoint of loving and caring for our brothers and sisters?

The last thing I will throw out--we are working on a little project in my

office and the math is really hard. If you care about things like income inequality and you look at the differentials of our brothers and sisters, like Tribal communities out West, other people that may have urban minority communities that are suffering from type 2 diabetes, we are trying to figure out what would the math look like if those populations had this disease cured?

What would their economics be? Would we actually see so many others able to come back into society, back into the economy, back into trying to develop a life in the middle class?

The crazy thing is our preliminary math--it may turn out that curing a big portion of our population where we see the huge income inequality and helping them get back into society and the economy may be one of the most powerful things, if not maybe the single largest thing, we could do to actually take on income inequality in this country.

Who would have ever thought? It is the math. I want to make the argument that people here who want to make policy by their feelings are crushing individuals, crushing families, crushing the country. People are willing to see love and compassion through actual facts or how we do what is moral and do what is right and also do what makes this country as great as can be.

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

Madam Speaker, we are going to do a couple of things tonight. Most of it is going to be economic heavy. We are going to actually go over the Democrat's social spending bill and its economic effects.

First, I wanted to touch on something that I am somewhat hopeful that the left and the right could embrace. I am thinking of what we have gone through for almost 2 years now, and that is the pandemic. If I came to you tomorrow and said: Okay. We have vaccinations, but we are about to have therapeutics.

Think about this. You have all seen the news that we now have a second drug company. The Wall Street Journal today has an amazing, wonderful article on protease inhibitors and their effectiveness. The fact that Pfizer has publicly said their antiviral medication is up around 89 percent effective, it is a lot of pills that may need to be taken with a second pharmaceutical, but isn't this the holy grail?

We have talked about this over and over, saying you now have home COVID tests. Now you can take your antiviral at home. And you start to understand the elegance of how this type of antiviral works in sort of snipping the proteins and making them so they don't grow or they can't attach to the cell walls.

So if this exists technology-wise, and one of the antivirals is already in front of the FDA today. I think we saw a news clip this afternoon that the second one may be presented on Tuesday. The Pfizer pharmaceutical will be presented to the FDA, but it may take a month or so.

If we are in a world now where we have multiple vaccines, we actually now have therapeutics and antiviral home testing kits--you can take the antiviral at home--it is time, once these are approved, to declare the pandemic over.

Why is this really important? Think of the societal friction, the battles we have created by mask mandates, by vaccine mandates. We now see the data of how, in our labor supply, folks are saying: No, I believe in body autonomy. I am not taking the vaccine or doing this or doing that.

The reality of it is, we have been so successful as a country, as a society, in believing in science. Remember, how many times did we hear that, believing in science?

If the FDA approves, which we are hopeful maybe it happens in the next month, the antivirals--and the press releases from the pharmaceutical companies are that there will be a couple hundred thousand sets by the end of this year and apparently millions available starting in the new year--it is time to declare the pandemic over.

Our office has put together a piece of legislation, and we are going to put it in circulation once we have sort of vetted it in the next couple of days. I would encourage any of my brothers and sisters on the left and the right that, if you believe in science and you really want a solution, it is time to embrace the fact of how far we have come and the solution is here.

We are going to do a little bit of basic economics and try to tap some of the discussion that I think has been missed on the left's social spending bill.

First, let's have an honest conversation on where we are economically right now and what our world looks like. If any of you are planning on having a retirement, if any of you have children or grandchildren and you actually give a darn about them, first understand how much trouble we are in immediately, right now, today.

The CBO numbers, in 29 years, we are at $112 trillion of borrowed money. That is inflation adjusted, 112 trillion public dollars. This isn't borrowing where we take credit for borrowing from trust funds. This is publicly borrowed, inflation-adjusted. Functionally, in 29 budget years, we are at $112 trillion. That is the CBO estimate.

If you are a young person--and you want to be honest with them--your economic future is about to be brutalized.

The reality of it is, I have done this on the floor multiple times. It is fascinating how many on the left, and

even the right, when you start to walk through what drives U.S. sovereign debt, it is a very uncomfortable conversation.

The fact of the matter is, Medicare is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. Social Security is second. The rest of the budget is in balance.

At the end of the 30-year model, right now, according to the CBO, the rest of the budget, if you strip Medicare and if you strip Social Security out, the budget actually has a positive balance.

If you believe it is a moral obligation for us to keep our promises that Medicare will be there, that Social Security will be there, why isn't this what we work on every day instead of discussions about how we can spend a whole bunch more money, take over a whole bunch more of the economy, slow the economy down and make this Nation poorer?

What we are going to show is the economic models that show the Democrats' spending bill actually crushes poor people. It actually makes the working poor poorer. It makes society poor. I don't believe that is the intention, but it is the economics.

Sometimes, when you get your math wrong, it is a level of cruelty.

A simple thought experiment: What are the two things that you do to crush the working poor? Inflation.

Well, we are doing a great job on that, aren't we? The fact of the matter is, what inflation does to the working poor is economic cruelty.

The second thing, you open your borders up, adding millions of individuals with similar skill sets. Say you are that individual that didn't finish high school, but you are out there hanging drywall. You have a family. You are getting good at your profession. You are trying to learn how to move up. Then you flood the market with people with similar skill sets.

There are great peer-reviewed papers out there that talk about just what we have done at the border. A decade from now, you made the working poor poorer and now overlay what all this spending has done inflation-wise.

If we, as Members of Congress, give a darn about the working poor, the economic violence that is being committed right now by the policies coming out of this Congress, it is time to step up and deal with the reality.

The problem is, the working poor aren't our contributors. They are not the ones showing up here lobbying us. They are the individuals we have a moral obligation to do good things for, and that is not what is happening.

We are going to walk through some of where we are today. You have to understand that the national debt right now is projected to leap to 200 percent in 2050, so, functionally, 29 budget cycles from now. If the Biden proposals--these are the ones that were proposed during the election, and I have to accept a bunch of that has been trimmed back in the debate, not as much as you might think. We are going to go over that.

You go, functionally, from 200 percent of debt to GDP--meaning the borrowed money will be 200 times bigger than the GDP. If you add it all up, in 29 budget years, you are over 328 percent of debt to GDP.

If any of you are thinking about having a retirement, if you are thinking about your kids, your grandkids, this is what wipes us out as a society. It is terrifying to talk about because it is hard. It requires lots of levers.

You have to get immigration right. You have to get finance right. You have to get spending right. You have to get tax policy right. You have to do everything that maximizes economic expansion. Then the holy grail: You are going to have to crash the price of healthcare, not shift around who pays for it.

Remember, the ACA, many of you know it as ObamaCare, the Republican alternative, Medicare for All, in many ways it is about who pays and who gets subsidized. It is not about what we pay.

I cannot tell you how many times I have come to this floor and tried to drill that into the way we think. But instead, the scam here is we talk about: Well, you are going to get subsidized.

But we did nothing to what we pay. The difference is we just borrow money--that is, the Federal Government--and pay for it that way.

Even a 100 percent tax rate on small businesses, upper-class families--so a 100 percent tax rate and you are taking every single dollar, you can't even come close to balancing the budget and balancing it long term. The numbers are this ugly.

When you take a look, it is not that hard. The 2050 number, if you take every dime even of folks who make $1 million or $500,000, if you take every dime, you don't get close. The numbers are this ugly. The share of Federal tax revenue spent on interest in the national debt is projected to surge.

But here is the number that terrifies me: If we move up 2 points--2 points--functionally at the 2050, 2051 mark, 100 percent of revenues-- 100 percent of revenues--in that 30-year budget window, move up 2 points from where we are right now, our baseline, 100 percent of tax revenues will be just covering the interest costs.

So is anyone familiar with a book that was called ``The Black Swan''? Okay, Taleb also wrote another book. And I understand, there are economists out there, Gilder and others, who disagree with parts of the model. But there was one concept of making yourself fragile. A simple example is you go to the airport 10 times; you know if you leave at exactly this moment you can get to the airport exactly as your flight is getting ready to board; and the first time there is a car accident, you miss your flight. We are doing that type of thing to our entire country, to my 6-year-old daughter, and to anyone else out there.

We are living on a razor's edge.

Madam Speaker, you saw that last slide, 2 points moving back to what would be closer to normality interest-rate wise. In the 30-year budget window, 100 percent of revenues, receipts if you want to use the technical term, will go just to cover the interest.

Madam Speaker, do you understand how fragile we have made the economics of this country?

And then the debate here is how to spend more money. I understand money gets you reelected, and promising things gets you reelected. It gets nice contributions, and it is absolutely perverse when you think about where we are at.

So now let's talk about the budget gimmicks. Many of you are going to refer to this as the Build Back Better plan. In our office we are calling it the social spending plan because that is what it is. It is laced with gimmicks. It is going to be fascinating come Friday to see how CBO ultimately scores these. I'm a little disappointed on what we have seen from the Joint Committee on Taxation and some of the others. I don't think we are getting actual quality, dynamic scoring, but that is hard. It takes time. You have to lay it out, break it apart, and try to understand what the economic effects are.

But you walk through the gimmicks, Madam Speaker, and a simple example is the White House has estimated $400 billion in some of the Joint Committee on Taxation scores from IRS collecting more money. But CBO came out and said: No, it is not $400 billion; it is 120.

Then you start to realize, Madam Speaker, the debates you are hearing on the floor here are completely stacked with absolutely fraudulent numbers.

I remember how hard--when we did tax reform--we had to work to justify dynamic scoring and make the math as honest as possible to work, and it was our brothers and sisters on the left who absolutely were insistent. Today they would never hold themselves to the same standard that they demanded from us just a couple of years ago.

So let's walk through an example of one of the absolute frauds that the left is using. So President Trump had a drug rebate. This is a little geeky, but it is important to understand. Ultimately, the rebate was going to be to the consumer. So you are on Medicare, you are in line at the pharmacy, the rebate that would have gone into the backside of the provider, the acquirer, think of it as the wholesaler of the pharmaceutical, that rebate now comes to you at the counter. It means the consumer would get the value, but it would mean the costs of pharmaceuticals would go up for government because the government isn't ultimately getting that value.

So here are sort of the steps of the Trump administration's rebate rule: it was estimated to cost about $150 billion over 10 years.

Speaker Pelosi said: It will never happen.

Democratic leadership here said: It will never happen.

Democrat leadership in the Senate said: Unacceptable, it will never happen.

This was never, ever, ever, ever going to happen.

This was the whole system of how the consumer would have gotten the benefit of those rebates, but it would have cost the Federal Government $150 billion over 10 years, but it was never going to happen unless, of course, you are a Democrat looking for money to spend on their social entitlement bill, all of a sudden saying: Hey, this is never going to happen, but we can score it in, so we are going to use it.

It is just another gimmick, it is a con, and it is a fraud. If we were doing this, we would be ashamed of ourselves and should be. But this is actually the scam that now is Democrat leadership.

So you take a look at the budget gimmicks that are already built into here, Madam Speaker, and you start to realize the left's social spending bill is like a house of cards. Now, they may get some scoring. Like the last one I was just showing you, Madam Speaker, CBO will give them that $150 billion. There will be a nice little footnote saying that this was never really going to become policy but because it was a proposal and they are canceling the proposal, we are going to give them the 150 or maybe $145 billion worth of credit.

But the public needs to understand those trillions and trillions and trillions--$112 trillion in the baseline as it is right now in 29 budget years--that is how you get there.

The left will say: This is paid for.

No. It is not. And they know that. They are not dumb. They are manipulative, but they are not dumb. When you start to look at just the games being done, Madam Speaker, and then the spending--and that is the other thing we are going to work through here is how much of this spending do they really plan to cancel in year 2?

So, Madam Speaker, you are seeing some spending scoring saying that we estimate this is $1\3/4\ trillion, wink, wink, nod, nod, but when it becomes a 10-year instead of disappearing in the second year, you are 4\1/2\ plus trillion dollars of new obligations.

Look up and down the different budget gimmicks. One of the reasons I did this slide is because it is a little more of an economically difficult concept. So you actually have in there an adjusted gross income surcharge on the top income earners.

Madam Speaker, you know the Democrats' proposal is to do a very similar thing on corporations. The alternative minimum tax that is also being put on corporations; we are just now starting to model how much it actually will slow down the economy.

Here is why: You have this thing we call expensing. It was one of the great economic drivers particularly in 2018 and 2019. Do you remember we far exceeded revenue projections, Madam Speaker, income inequality truly shrank, poverty shrank, and food insecurity shrank? The poor got dramatically less poor. They were 2 amazing years. It is a great model to demonstrate what supply-side economics really does.

But a lot of the economic expansion was because of something called expensing. So you buy a piece of equipment, it makes your company more productive, and you are able to pay people more. It moves technology and moves business production forward into the next century.

If you do a minimum alternative tax at a corporate level, then you no longer get the economic value of that expensing. I know this is really geeky, but it is really important to understand. We are just now starting to model this thing saying: Oh, heavens, so the Democrats are doing the wink, wink, nod, nod con of they are not taking away the expensing which is the primary driver that we saw in productivity from the last 2 years since tax reform, but by doing this alternative minimum tax calculation, you don't get the value of that depreciation. All of a sudden, the investment in capital products--capital goods and capital equipment--will disappear. It is another example of a really bad understanding of the most basic economics.

I can understand why the left wants to do this. It is the number of new IRS agents, the number of agencies that will have potentially hundreds of thousands of new employees. Remember, one of the models was 80,000 new IRS employees. Well, okay, maybe it makes sense if I was on the Democrat side or I represented northern Virginia or areas like that where I have lots of unionized government-working constituents. But we need to be honest about that, the build back better, the social spending bill on the left, massively increases the bureaucracy.

You start to look at the hundreds of millions that are being put in to expand the size of the national bureaucracy. It is not like we are doing the leap of technology saying that with the investment it is going to make society more productive. It is like our argument of air quality and environmental quality, using technology is the way to make us healthier. Instead, the left designs it in ways where there are new armies of public employees.

I have to congratulate the left. Madam Speaker, you are going to see some slides here. We are going to be number one. Yes. The United States will be absolutely number one in the highest tax rates on income in the entire industrialized world.

But we are starting to see if you are a resident of California, you are going to be about 64.7 percent for top income earners and high income earners. Fine.

If you are in Arizona you are going to be at 55.9.

New York gets the prize. They are going to be over 66 percent for top income earners when you do the Federal, the surcharges, State, and local taxes.

Don't we have lots of data already in the economic literature of what happens when we start to hit these confiscatory levels of tax on income?

What do people do?

You start to realize saying, okay, I can work and get this tax rate, or I can take my resources and put them in other types of things-- municipal bonds, other types of things--and reap the rewards from that because if more than half of the upper income now goes to government, then we have just created an incentive not to invest and not to take risks but just take the money, put it in safe places, and don't play anymore.

I am frustrated because I know the Tax Foundation has been trying to model the taxes but we don't have good data yet on what does this mean in future GDP growth.

Back to the very first board we held up: our society is heading towards a debt cliff. The baseline as it is today from CBO in 29 budget years, we are at $112 trillion in borrowed money in today's dollars, and that is where policy is today.

When you start to do this, and economic growth slows, then you functionally bring the financial apocalypse a lot sooner.

So let's actually also talk through a couple other duplicities that are in the Democrats' build back better social spending bill. They sure do like rich people.

Two-thirds of the millionaires get a tax cut under the build back better, and if we take the folks getting over $1 million, 66 percent of them actually benefit. And this is one of the things we have come to the floor now for almost a year talking about instead of raising taxes--and the rhetoric that we hear over and over from the left where the rich need to pay their fair share--maybe we should just stop subsidizing them.

We have come to the floor over and over and shown that almost $1.4 trillion of subsidies go to the very top, top, top income earners. If you stop the subsidy, Madam Speaker, then you don't create the economic distortions.

So this is the great scam: Democrats are saying, We are going to raise the taxes, these surcharges, but then we are going to turn around, and as long as these rich people do what we ask them to do-- they buy the right type of solar panels, the right type of electric car--then we are going to turn around and hand them cash.

Now that is something that the vast majority of Americans will never be able to afford, but you will be happy to know that the Democrats' plan is to subsidize the rich. And it gets even darker.

So now the Democrats are going to put in SALT, State and Local Tax deduction. And the great thing is, if you make $1 million a year, it looks like you are going to get the vast majority,

you are going to get the highest amount of this money. But for the population that is $400,000 and up, they get the majority of the SALT. It is, once again, the Democrats subsidizing the rich and the really rich.

And for everyone else who is functionally making $150,000 and less, you don't get anything. You don't get any value here. How can this be?

I mean, am I living in a parallel universe where the rhetoric from the left is, tax rich people; wink, wink, nod, nod. Not only do we subsidize them when they buy the things we want them to buy; but then we are going to give them additional tax benefits. We are going to make additional things they spend money on deductible; and the rest of the population just be screwed.

I grabbed this one, it substantially basically makes some other points. So think of this: In the Democrats' social spending bill, best as I can identify it, there is about $100 billion to finance amnesty. Okay. So it functionally gives a 5-year visa to millions of folks who are here undocumented illegally.

But you remember our earlier discussion? What are the two things you do to create economic violence to the working poor? Inflation. Well, too many--remember our elementary school economics class? Too many dollars chasing too few goods.

So the left put out lots and lots and lots of money to people's bank accounts because that is great politics; instead of using those resources to say we are going to make our society more efficient, more clean, more productive. And that productivity means you can pay people more, and you have a society that grows, and then maybe we can take on our debt problem.

But we did it just backwards. So now you get to see what Keynesian economics looks like. And are you enjoying the inflation yet? Because it looks like it is going to continue to pop. And then, flooding society with lots of other low-skilled workers.

Okay. Well, it will be interesting to see how long it is before the left actually has to come in here and say we need to do additional subsidies to the working poor because we stuck it to them.

And look; if anyone has a question, we have multiple papers, university peer-reviewed papers talking about how the Democrats' plan actually will make the poor poorer by the end of the decade. University of Chicago, four Ph.D. economists published a paper a couple of weeks ago showing that the lowest quartile of income--and I despise the term quartiles, but that is what economists use--will be poorer at the end of the decade.

Now, a lot of that is because of the Democrats' unwillingness to attach the benefits to learning job skills, to actually working. They have severed those. You would have thought we learned that during the Clinton years, when you rewarded work, rewarded going and gaining job skills--we are going back to the bad old days of saying, if you want to just not work, you will be happy. As long as you vote for the right party, we are going to send you a check.

Does anyone see the cruelty here?

Now, there are some things in this spending that look--endangered plants, okay, it is $4.9 million. Desert fish, okay, $4.9 million. Fresh water mussels, which are actually a real problem, but it is $19 million. And everyone understands the difference between $1 million and billions.

So $100 billion for amnesty, but $19 million for functionally--we will call it invasive species and protecting others. It is like the drop of a bucket in an ocean wave. But it gives you a sense where--so the Democrats get a nice talking point, but the math is absolutely perverse.

Ultimately, over the next decade, you have got to deal with this one way or the other. Either what the left is doing is when--you are going to see the scoring this Friday of how many programs saying, well, we are going to spend all this money on a transfer payment, European style transfer payment, but it is only for 2 years; wink, wink, nod, nod. A future Congress won't continue it.

You all remember the fraud of the last time we had--Speaker Pelosi a decade ago--and there were multiple spending bills, where the way they fit into something called PAYGO is, we are going to spend this much, this much, but on the fifth year we are going to just pretend the program no longer spends any money.

Well, this is now the more modern version of that fraud that was committed financially, budgetarily, is we are going to spend the money for a year or two, and then we are going to pretend it stops; and that way we hit certain budget boxes to meet the reconciliation; wink, wink, nod, nod. Will the voters be paying attention to it?

But let's say they are honest. It is not likely, but let's say that honestly that is not the scam; that they fully intend to spend all this money, get themselves through the next election, and then stop the spending.

Well, in that case, the taxes are permanent because the taxes don't expire, even though, what we can tell best from the revenues, they don't come close to covering all the spending.

And if the spending is made permanent, the social entitlement transfers, over the 10 years, this is trillions and trillions of dollars out of balance.

I understand--and, look, this is one of my great sins, and I think a lot of us on the conservative side, we sound like accountants on steroids.

You know, we come and talk about GDP and workforce, labor force participation. But the fact of the matter is, if you care for people, if you believe growth, economic growth is moral; that it provides opportunities; that that is how you save for retirement; that is how you help your child go to college; that is how you have a better house, a better life; it is the opportunities that growth creates. So when you see someone like me come behind the microphone and talk about GDP and the benefits it brings, it is a number. It is classical economics. It is also that poor family that is trying to be less poor.

And the tax foundation has done a bunch of modeling that makes it pretty darn clear that the left social spending bill is going to make our entire society poorer. When you start to look at these numbers over the decade, and at the end of decade, we won't have grown as much.

We are going to be missing--I mean, in a decade, we are missing a half a trillion dollars of economic growth, of GDP.

You remember our very first board? What is--for my little girl, for everyone else out there, this is what wipes us out as a society. This is the thing that this body is terrified to talk about. And this is already the baseline.

The baseline from CBO already says, in 29 budget years, we are $112 trillion of borrowed money, and that is assuming really stable interest rates. That is assuming no more wars. It is assuming no more major recessions.

We were doing one attempt to try to calculate these numbers. So the Penn Wharton model, that was published actually today, where they were trying to figure out how much more it would add to the debt. So the Penn Wharton model said, if the spending is continued, which is the obvious thing that is going to happen, it adds 24.4 percent to the debt. Okay. Now we didn't have enough time to break through all their tables, and we will work through that.

But just off the top of your head, $112 trillion, if you added 24.4 percent on it, that is close to $140 trillion of borrowed money; 139 something.

You have got to understand, this is what the left is leading us to, instead of coming in and saying, we are going to protect Medicare by investing in things that cure.

Remember, this Medicare dollar? You know, $77 trillion plus of borrowing in the next 29 years, just to cover the Medicare portion shortfall? 31 percent of that is just diabetes.

You could have a connection here between the left and the right saying, we are going to do an operation warp speed and go at diabetes because it turns out by curing the misery you also have a major effect on the debt. That is creativity, that is being rational. Instead of trying to buy your next election, and pretending to finance it with a whole bunch of gimmicks that don't really create revenues; that are going to create borrowed money.

And it is not CBO, it is not me. It is the outside groups that play it straight. Tell Penn Wharton and others that they are lying, because they have done the--I think they underscore economic growth on some things.

But the fact of the matter is, if the left is about to pass a piece of legislation at the end of this week that looks like it is likely to add another 24.4 percent to the debt, does anyone see the level of immorality in wiping out economic growth and the opportunity?

And we had a couple of years there where it was working. The fact of the matter is 2018, 2019 were Goldilocks, and it was done because we invested in the things that create opportunity and growth, instead of the model right now, where the left is going to invest in things that functionally slow economic growth down; make individuals dependent on the Federal Government; disincentivize participating in the economy?

And if any of you have ever read any of your textbooks from what the world looked like in the 70s, where the last time the left did something very similar to this, the societal breakdowns, the inflation, the misery. Once again, we are about to see the financing of misery instead of investing in the things that actually would create opportunity and growth. We are better than this.

I know it would take someone on the Democrats' side. They would have to stand up to their base and explain basic economics. But there is a path that works. And if you give a darn about the poor, the working poor, the middle class, ultimately, the data says, at the end of the decade if the left passes their Build Back Better social entitlement spending bill, they are going to be poorer. That is what we are about to do to this country, and this place should be ashamed.

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

Madam Speaker, as we get ourselves sort of organized, last Monday, I did an entire hour here on the floor--55 minutes--and we actually did a presentation up and down the budget. Not this budget cycle, but basically what does our country look like over the next 30 years? What is driving the projections of $112 trillion of debt 29 years from now?

Look, it is one of those presentations that is rather uncomfortable for most of us because the punch line is demographics, and that is not what we typically do here. But the reality is, we have a real issue. We are getting old very fast as a society.

Let's do a bit of a reminder here and actually look at the math. We are going to walk through a couple of these that are the same as last week, but the difference tonight is we are going to try to talk about a handful of solutions. There is a big package of solutions, and most of them are really hard and are really going to be cantankerous around here, but there are solutions to deal with.

Let's actually first walk through where we are at today. Once again, I won't worry about 1965 in the mix. It is important that anyone watching this, fellow Members of Congress, understand.

Today, 2021, 77 percent of all the spending that will come from Washington is mandatory. Only 10 percent is defense; 13 percent is functionally what we vote on. I think there is a huge misunderstanding in the public that we march off to Congress and are voting on these $4 trillion budgets. We are not. We are functionally voting on this little green wedge here that is discretionary spending.

So if I came to you right now and said, okay, what is driving the debt over the next 30 years? I am going to show you a number of slides that are going to show the budget is in balance except for two things-- Social Security and Medicare. And it is mostly Medicare.

Social Security is actually quite fixable. There is a number of levers. None of the levers will make anyone particularly excited or happy, but we once calculated we had 24, 26 different levers to make Social Security solvent and keep our promises.

Remember, Social Security and Medicare are earned benefits. It is a societal contract. We have an obligation to be there.

But Medicare is a really tough one, and we need to actually go back to having the honest conversation about what drives much of this debt. Well, if you see here, this is taxes paid in, benefits out for Social Security. You notice they are pretty much in balance. Social Security is a fairly square deal. You get a little bit of a SPIF, on average, for the average American.

Where the numbers get really difficult is the average American couple is going to put in about $161,000 into the part A Medicare, which is only the trust fund for just the hospital portion. The pharmaceuticals, the other doctor visits, the other things are general fund. So when you are paying your FICA tax, you are paying this here.

But that average couple is going to get $522,000 in benefits. So the differential from $161,000 to $522,000 is the driver of the vast majority of U.S. sovereign debt over the next 30 years. It is this differential here. It is not that complicated.

One of the great frustrations here is my brothers and sisters on the left will come behind the microphone and say things like: Well, if we had Medicare for All, or we expanded the ACA, ObamaCare. That is not true. If anyone just takes a quick breath and steps back--and, look, Republicans are guilty on part of this, too. Those are financing bills. The ACA was financing it, who got subsidized and who has to pay. Medicare for All is just a change of who pays. None of that is about what we pay. And the Republican alternative was the same. It was about who got subsidized and who had to pay.

So what we are going to talk about are some of the revolutions in what we pay, changing the cost of healthcare. But we first need to understand the scale of these. Look, this is functionally the same size as we just had, but it is important to understand that for every dollar in, particularly on Medicare, we get $3 in benefits back. And now you start to do that with the demographics of the country.

This is just a graphic. So you see the orange here. That is us just getting old. That is just simply us moving into our benefit years. The green is healthcare costs. We have known people were going to turn 65 for how many years in this country? And we are still avoiding the issue.

But you start to see, when you start to get into the 2050s, this here, your country has $112 trillion of publicly borrowed debt, and 78 percent of that is just Medicare.

This is one of the slides that I actually see in my dreams because, if you understand math, if you are willing to own a calculator, this slide should scare you to death. The purple is functionally the borrowing of Social Security and the interest on it. This is the spending of Medicare and the interest on that.

You will notice in this board here $112 trillion of borrowing, and it is mostly the cost of Medicare and the financing of that. The rest of the budget, if you remove Social Security and Medicare, is actually in balance.

Just a quick aside before the next board. How many times today behind these microphones did anyone come up and say that functionally the greatest threat to the stability of the country is the fact that we have waited so long? We are well into the baby boom moving into retirement, and you start to see the debt curve just explode on us.

So take a look at this board. Now, if you remove the pandemic years here and just functionally look at this 10-year cycle, why this is important--I know there are a lot of numbers and a lot of colors here. This board is basically saying one very simple thing. The vast majority, matter of fact, almost the entire debt for this decade and the decade after that and the decade after that, but for this decade is driven solely by Social Security and Medicare.

Think of that. In functionally 9 budget years, your country is scheduled to have functionally about $2.2 trillion of borrowing, just borrowing every year, and almost all of that just came from Social Security and Medicare.

And look, dear Lord, please don't let interest rates move against us, but you start to actually see the Medicare outlays, the Medicare revenues, and then you get these arguments saying, well, if you would adjust defense. Well, defense is lying down here, and you start to realize--excuse me, the Medicare taxes and those are down here. You start to look at these gaps. This is where we are at.

Sorry, I was skipping ahead a board. If you were to eliminate the entire defense budget--so let's just wipe out the defense budget--you realize it buys you a year or two, but that is about it because this is the projected defense line, and this is Social Security and Medicare where we are going.

You would think, Members of Congress, if you actually cared about keeping our promises that we are going to protect Social Security, we are going to protect Medicare, how come every Member of Congress isn't walking behind this microphone holding up these boards and saying we are going to work on a solution to this? Instead, this is almost toxic around here.

I can't tell you how many Members I run into who say, David, I want to talk about the debt and deficits, too, and the fact that as we grab all the capital stock of the country, and maybe the world, that we are going to slow down the economy, that we are going to be poorer. Poor people will be poorer; rich people will be poorer. The country's productivity will be crushed. Oh, but I can't actually talk about the drivers of the debt.

I am going to actually say there are solutions. There is a way to actually start to take a step back and say, if we are willing to have an honest moment and say, okay, because the vast majority of Medicare is a general fund expenditure, what do we do? It is complicated. There are lots of parts of it.

But let's first understand. There is a rule about healthcare, and this is not only Medicare, Medicaid, VA, and Indian Health Services, but everything. Five percent of the population is over 50 percent of the spending. So if you love and care about people, but you also care about spending and healthcare costs, we need to understand the 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who drive most of our spending but also are the folks often living in absolute misery.

It turns out if you are willing to spend and invest to end people's misery, it ends up being a way you can actually also take on that debt and deficit.

Look, Republicans often come behind these microphones, and we have all sorts of ideas. My suggestion is we do all of them, but we need to be realistic.

Just as some of my Democratic colleagues will walk behind a microphone and say, well, if we had Medicare for All--back to the comment before, it is a financing bill. It doesn't actually change the cost of procedures. Unless they are willing to ratchet down and go into rationing, which they swear they won't, it is just an alternative way of paying for it.

Then we have Republicans who will come here and say, well, price transparency, I love price transparency. But the best peer-reviewed academic studies out there, it is only 0.1 to 0.7 percent improvement on price for healthcare costs.

Now, you still should do it, but if you really want to start thinking about things that drive healthcare costs, what would happen if I came to you and said--you saw in that previous board--what?--it was about $78 trillion of borrowing, just borrowing is Medicare over the next 29, 30 years.

Thirty-one percent of Medicare is just diabetes. Thirty-one percent of Medicare cost is diabetes, and that is just Medicare. We haven't done the math for Medicaid, for Indian Health Services, for VA, for just the general populations.

But it helps you start to think about, okay, we know chronic conditions, 5 percent is over 50 percent of spending. We know in Medicare 31 percent is just diabetes. Maybe we are starting to understand the drivers of what actually consumes our healthcare costs.

My proposal to anyone that is willing to hear is let's actually do something fairly radical--the concept of stepping up and legalizing technology in healthcare but also investing in disruption.

Right now, the left actually has some proposals that would functionally do some weird, quirky things such as, as soon as a drug comes off exclusivity, they are going to start to tax it, and hopefully that taxing actually starts now to move to create generics or force the one over here to become less expensive now because it is all functionally exclusivity off-patent, and I would like radically different thinking.

How about investing in absolutely curative disrupting research in drugs but also technology?

Let's actually walk through something that I find fascinating--and this board is a little hard because there is a lot of noise on it--but 16 percent of U.S. healthcare expenses is people not taking their drug appropriately. Think of that. That is like $550 billion a year. So over half a trillion dollars a year is when someone doesn't take their hypertension medicine and then they have a stroke.

It turns out the fastest thing you can do tomorrow is the technology that actually helps people know that they should have taken their hypertension pill or their insulin at a certain time, the technology-- because this is 16 percent of all healthcare.

If tomorrow you could remind grandma to take her medicines at the proper times during the day, someone with hypertension that they took their pills so they don't have a stroke, 16 percent of healthcare. And we have real simple technologies out there. We have the pill bottle cap that talks to you and reminds you that says, hey, you didn't open me today.

For someone that may have multiple pills at certain times of the day, you actually now have--and there are apparently all sorts of versions of this now--that drop the pill in the bottle and send you a text message, sends your grandkids a text message also to know that the pills are there.

The technology is here, and almost no one ever thinks about personal technology like this as a way to crash the price in healthcare. But it is 16 percent. It is $550 billion in a single year, not 10 years, in a single year. So over half a trillion dollars a year you can strip out of healthcare costs if you could just get our brothers and sisters to take their pharmaceuticals in a way that keeps them healthy.

Now for some more radical proposals, so far this year, there are two papers out, one U.S.-based and actually one Taiwanese-based, but both from very prestigious universities. They appear to be peer-reviewed. We have been reading through them multiple times. We are trying to get other comments.

They talk about, hey, there may be a cure for type 1 diabetes. There may be a cure, still has a long way to go, but there actually appears to be some in-lab breakthroughs on type 2 diabetes.

Wouldn't you and I, the left, the right, stop some of the monkey business around here and say if we know 31 percent of Medicare cost-- and we know Medicare is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. It is time for an Operation Warp Speed for diabetes. You don't have to call it ``Operation Warp Speed'' because I know that triggers some folks on the left, but the fact of the matter is a concentration of bringing disruption to cure people to end misery because we have to stop this thought process here of saying the way we are going to end people's misery is we are going to build more clinics so you have more access to a doctor.

My argument is to have the revolution because the revolution is here. Just think, a couple of years ago, we were dealing with the cost of liver transplants for hepatitis C, and then we came up with a cure. We can do this.

Now you start to understand there are clinical trials out there for some new types of stem cell therapy. I read this paper multiple times because it was complicated and fascinating. Stem cell therapy, they worked through the rejection problem, and it appears--at least the early paper--to be a cure for type 1. There is a derivative paper that is out there actually from a Taiwanese university talking about their success in type 2.

It is a different thought process. One of the greatest things we can do for U.S. sovereign debt and not collapsing this society and destroying my 6-year-old daughter's economic future, as well as anyone that is heading toward retirement, is actually how we invest our money today in things that end people's misery, and by ending that misery, all of society as well as those individuals' benefit.

The amusing part is I have been on this floor for several years talking about messenger RNA. Back when we used to call it CAR-T and you heard the stories about taking someone who functionally their immune system, the cancer they had, doing functionally what we now know as mRNA. Well, it looks like the breakthroughs and the fact that we have now turned much of what are diseases into software problems, and this is hard for a lot of folks to think through, particularly in the time where we have those who are very virus and vaccine conscious, but there is incredible hope here.

As you all know, right now going into the field is functionally a vaccine for malaria. Now, it is only about 30 percent, is the data, effective, but when teamed up with some other pharmaceutical, it is like 70 percent. It will change misery around the world.

Well, it turns out, that same messenger RNA goes far beyond COVID. We actually now are starting to understand malaria, a whole bunch of cancers. Do you know one of the published papers from early this summer looks like they think they actually have a cure for HIV? Influenza, heart disease, it is fascinating. But helping the body, actually its immune system, work and rehab the heart. There are some amazing things. You saw the papers earlier this year about cystic fibrosis and thinking we are almost there for a cure.

Remember, 5 percent is 50 percent of our healthcare spending. Maybe it is time to rethink about the world and the fact that we are going to invest in the disruption that is cures that end the misery instead of financing a country where we might actually lower drug costs, but the disruptions, the cures that could come in the future don't show up.

We can show you, in lots of studies, there are multiples out there when we are looking at the Democrats' H.R. 3 that by the end of the decade you actually saw the curve actually go up in healthcare costs because the cures didn't show up.

The other thing, and this is not a particularly great slide, and it is getting a little old, but we have a whole binder in the office of articles talking about algorithms and, in this case, AI being able now to detect cancers very early, and the fact of doing that with this type of technology and technology that you can have at home. You can actually almost have it wearable. You can have it in your own medicine cabinet. Using those types of technologies is also part of our path to crash the price of healthcare.

Remember, we are not going to change the United States getting older fast, the graying of America. But where we can bend the curve, bend misery and also bend the threat of the incredible amount of debt we are building up every single day, it is saying we are all in. We are going to do wearables. We are going to legalize technology. We are going to actually invest.

The fact of the matter is it is happening right now where we are actually seeing countries around the world realizing how big of a problem diabetes is. Now there are awards going out saying, wow, we actually now have lines of research that look like we can finally disrupt the disease.

So, this was sort of the follow-up on last week where we did the whole slide chart of what is actually happening in U.S. sovereign debt and how much trouble we are really in and how fast it is building.

You have to do a whole series of things. You have to grow the economy consistently. You have to manage tax policy. You have to manage regulatory policy in a way that is for maximizing economic expansion. You actually have to deal with immigration in a way that maximizes economic growth. Opening up your border, importing massive amounts of-- let's be brutal about this--poverty where that poverty and inflation are crushing the working poor in this country. The working poor will be substantially poorer at the end of this decade because of these policies. That is cruel.

How about if we had growth? Because growth is moral. So you do these things of tax policy, regulatory policy, immigration policy, and then the financing and tax incentives and the encouragement to do things that disrupt because you could actually do it in both healthcare; you can do it in energy; you can do it in transportation where we can make the future actually pretty darn amazing and actually end a lot of suffering and turns out it is the path that actually bends that debt curve that wipes us out as a society if we don't actually start to tell the truth and deal with it.

There is a path. There is optimism. Every day this place squanders working on the real problems and instead of the insanity of some of the policies that are being proposed today that the economists on both sides say will make the country poorer by the end of the decade, we are going the wrong direction.

Madam Speaker, I hope at least someone out there hears the message that there is a path. It is just getting harder and harder to get there because every day we fall further in debt.

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

Madam Speaker, I am going to try something for the next hour, and it is going to be one of those presentations that is always a little on the difficult side because we are going to talk about things a lot of this place and a lot of the country doesn't want to hear, but we call it math.

The first premise, I need to ask all of us, if I were to walk into a room of Democrats, people on the left, or people on the right, and say, ``What is the biggest threat over the next couple of decades that is facing your country?'' you would hear all sorts of things.

You know, a couple of years ago, with the Democrats, it was Russia, Russia. Today, it may be this and that. I am going to argue it is demographics. And you go, huh?

We are going to do almost 38 boards here, walking through the national debt, deficit spending, spending priorities, and the reality on where there are revenues, taxes, what we call receipts. Then you have to ask yourself, does the next generation, and the generation after that, and the generation after that, do they have the right to live in a country where there is some prosperity, or has Washington, D.C., decided to just destroy those who are heading toward retirement, those who are heading toward elementary school and their future?

Let's actually sort of walk through some of the realities of the math. And I am not going to even bother with 1965 and what the mix was.

You have to understand, in 2021, 77 percent of all the spending in this place, 77 percent of all the spending, was what we called mandatory, formula, Social Security, Medicare, formulas. Only 10 percent was defense, and 13 percent was everything else in government.

If you like to think that, well, you have lots of prodefense Democrats and, obviously, prodefense Republicans, then mandatory is a formula that you don't even vote on here. You are electing Members of Congress to come and vote on 13 percent of the spending in this budget cycle. This is how out of whack it is. And we are going to walk through how much of this mandatory is demographics.

Look, getting older is not Republican or Democrat, but it is math. It is going to happen. So let's actually walk through a couple of the realities here.

I just threw this chart together. I know it is impossible to read on camera and those things. But the point is simple. Today, Social Security is 23 percent of all the spending; national defense is 15; Medicare is 14. In a couple of years, all those change. I could even

show you some charts that, if interest rates tick up even a little bit, defense actually starts to fall to fourth very, very soon.

To give you an idea, when you actually get up in front of audiences-- and for conservative audiences, the folklore a decade ago was, well, waste and fraud, foreign aid, and then you would pull out this chart and show that it is a fraction of a percent.

Fine, maybe we should do something different in foreign aid. Yes, the spending from this year has massive fraud in it. But the long-term impact of those is nothing compared to the fact--and I am going to have to be honest and have a conversation about how we save, how we protect Medicare and Social Security, because what is going on around this place--you get politician after politician behind these microphones and saying, I am going to protect Medicare, and I am going to protect your Social Security, while they are driving it into the ground.

So let's actually start to walk through how fast it is eroding. From 2019 to 2031--and 2031 is what? How many years from now? It is functionally nine budget cycles from now. We will have doubled debt. You have to understand how fast this is eroding from us.

The more current numbers, because this slide was done about a year or two ago, it is actually much worse with the spending during the pandemic. So let's actually start to also walk through what we need to understand. Social Security, healthcare, entitlements, and interest costs drive 90 percent of the 2008 to 2031 spending hikes.

Let's back that up. If you take a look at Social Security, Medicare, and then the interest attached to those, that is what drives the deficit.

Remember our earlier comment: It is our demographics. And this place is unwilling to actually have honest conversations of how we are going to protect access to those earned benefits because the numbers are so big and so scary.

What do you have? What do you have here even today? Member after Member running to the microphones talking about how we are going to functionally give away more.

But if you are under 50, we are about to make your future--as a matter of fact, it is already baked into the cake. Your future is really dangerous right now.

So let's actually walk a little bit more through what the slides look like. Rising Social Security and Medicare shortfalls drive nearly entire 2019 to 2031 nonpandemic--so this is before the pandemic--and you start to understand that this is before the pandemic calculations. We were heading towards about $2.2 trillion a year in borrowing before the pandemic. That is the baseline number.

When you actually start to really understand that--this is the general revenues. And when you start to add up all the shortfalls, you are heading towards a time where functionally a 30-year government is living on borrowed money.

So let's actually do a little bit more. You have all seen this slide. Lots of people like to use it. You know, the national debt is set to match the World War II peak within a decade. Well, guess what? We are pretty much there. We have pretty much now have hit what they call the percentage of GDP.

Why do we use that? Because there is this theory that says the size of the economy is what allows you to borrow money, and as long as you don't borrow too much money where the interest costs start to burden the availability of what they call capital stock, for an economy to grow, the economy to have new investments.

The fear is--remember, it wasn't that long ago we used to talk about, well, when we hit 100 percent of GDP, that means the borrowing, the publicly borrowed money will be the size of the economy. Guess what? We have already surpassed that. We have done it.

You are going to see some boards here that should terrify you.

Long-term baseline. Now, I have got to give credit where credit is due. Manhattan Institute, Brian Riedl, basically what he does is take the CBO numbers, and I think some from Joint Tax, and tries to make them digestible. He also lays out what the short-term, which is 10- year, 20-year, and 30-year layouts are. You can go right now to that website and download these same charts for yourself.

But the long-term baseline shows absolutely unsustainable debt; and this side has gotten worse since last year when we printed it, because it actually had in 2050. So functionally in less than 30 years, we were approaching up to 195 percent of debt, borrowed money, the size of the total economy, so functionally twice the size of the economy. That number has actually now gotten much worse because of what we have done in the pandemic financing and a whole bunch of the other promises that have come in and the other spending that has happened during unified government from the left.

So once again, trying to actually demonstrate, it is not falling revenues. We have dozens of charts--and I only brought a couple of them--on the slide deck that make it very clear, when you look at--and this redline is what in Ways and Means we would call receipts. Most people think of it as tax revenues. It is basically where it has always been.

If you actually go back to the 1960s and 1970s, it was about 17.3 percent of GDP came in as revenues, as taxes. Now, we are actually heading towards a time where it is about 18.5 percent. So it is actually higher. But what is this line here? You see this? Okay, that is the pandemic.

But then you get back to the trend line. Why is the trend line exploding in that direction with 31.8 percent more spending than revenues? It is demographics, healthcare costs.

So let's actually do another one. Medicare part A and Social Security trust funds face bankruptcy. The Medicare trust fund is gone in about 6 years. Remember, post tax cuts and reform, you know, when we reformed the tax code, because the economy was growing so fast and so many people were working, we actually at that time went from 4 years left in the part A trust fund of Medicare--remember, only the hospital portion of Medicare has a trust fund. Everything else comes out of the general fund. We actually added a couple of years, because there were so many people working and, therefore, paying their FICA taxes.

But does this concern anyone that the Social Security trust fund is gone? The Medicare, the hospital portion of the trust fund, is gone in functionally 5 years. Is anyone paying attention? Or, once again, will we try to manage this by crisis? But the scale of these numbers is just stunning, and then we live in this financial fantasy world in this place.

Here is the slide. I have done a version of this slide for a decade now, and I have been booed in front of audiences for telling them the truth. There is something wrong in our psyche when we are so used to politicians lying to us that we almost want them to not tell us the truth; it hurts too much.

Now, I have been on this floor dozens and dozens and dozens of time saying there is a path. The future doesn't have to be this dystopian, debt-laden financial collapse. There is a path. But you have to have a revolution in the cost of healthcare and economic growth. There is a series of things, and you have to do all of them together.

The thing that terrifies me the most is how many times do you have anyone come behind these microphones and talk about the scale of the debt that is coming or solutions to it.

The fact of the matter is, I don't know if our public votes on this. God knows, you don't raise money telling people the truth about what is going on. But I have a 6-year-old daughter. Doesn't she deserve to live in a prosperous country? Because this is going to crush prosperity for everyone, and it is going to wipe out lots of people in retirement.

Once again, you have got to understand, this chart, this is Congressional Budget Office numbers, which say in about 29 years, we have $112 trillion of borrowing, debt. This is an inflation adjusted number, so this is in constant dollars.

You are going to notice, the entire 30-year debt comes from Medicare and then Social Security. The rest of the budget is actually in balance.

If this place isn't willing to have a revolution in the cost of delivering healthcare to our brothers and sisters and our seniors, our future is really ugly.

You have got to understand. There is a fraud around here. You will get people from the left saying, well, we should do Medicare for all. Medicare for all is a financing bill. It does nothing to the cost of healthcare. ObamaCare, the ACA, was a financing bill. It was about who got subsidized and who had to pay. The Republican alternative was a financing bill. It was about who had to pay and who got subsidized. None of them are doing things that change the cost of healthcare.

I didn't bring the slide here, because I did it just 2 weeks ago, that shows 31 percent of Medicare spending is just diabetes. The single most powerful thing you could do to help the United States in its sovereign debt and to end misery in our minority communities and my Tribal communities out in Arizona is do an operation warp speed, go after type 2 diabetes. Isn't that something Republicans and Democrats could agree upon? And guess what? It has amazing economic impact.

We are working on a math problem right now. We actually believe solving diabetes could be one of the single biggest things you could do to income inequality, because you take a look at some of our urban minority populations that suffer from diabetes and some of my Tribal communities out west, and if you normalize, saying, what would happen-- what would this population's income and prosperity look like if you cured diabetes, that income inequality number shrinks dramatically. It is not a bunch of transfer payments; it is solving people's misery. But it is a little hard campaigning on something that is complicated, isn't it?

So this is the slide, out of everything I am going to show, that I actually see in my dreams. It really, really bothers me, because I don't have really elegant ways to explain how dystopian this number is.

Projected 2051 budget deficits are entirely driven by Social Security and Medicare. But do you see this number here? It is basically saying almost 21 percent of the entire GDP will be outlays for Social Security and Medicare, but revenues will only be 6 percent. This gap here is solely living on borrowed money. This over here is the rest of the budget. Turns out that for the rest of the budget, revenues are outpacing the spending. That is all other government. That is defense, that is environment, that is everything, including education. But this gap right here is what brings us to that $112 trillion of borrowing in the next 29 years.

You have got to get your head around this. That is assuming the CBO numbers, that there are no recessions, there are no economic slowdowns, there are no major terrorists attacks that slow down the economy, and there is not another pandemic. That is a baseline number. Do you understand how fragile we have made this economy because we are unwilling to tell the truth about these numbers?

I had a political consultant once tell me: Schweikert, you can't tell the truth about the debt and financing, because it will get you unelected. I am incredibly blessed. I represent North Maricopa County, so Scottsdale, Carefree, Cave Creek, Paradise Valley, Fountain Hills. I represent a bunch of really smart people, and they are not happy when I show them this, but they understand it is math.

I don't get my head around how this becomes partisan, because you are going to see, if you take a look at the pieces of legislation the left drops, they are trying to expand the programs at the same time they are collapsing. I mean, the lunacy.

So let's take a look, do the same thing, trying to get our heads around this. Remember, this slide was done before the pandemic scale of borrowing, which we are going to be paying interest on that for decades and decades and decades, because we never pay it off.

Social Security faces functionally a $35 trillion shortfall over the next 30 years. Now, it is 29 years. $32 trillion, if you include the trust fund balance. So functionally just Social Security has a $32 trillion shortfall over the next 29 years, okay?

Oddly enough, we could sit down around the table, and that $32 trillion shortfall on Social Security, we can figure that out, because being a defined benefit system as it is, the math, you have about a dozen or two dozen levers where you can say we are going to stop subsidizing really, really, really rich people, we are going to do this, we are going to do that. There are to deal with that.

The one that is just brutal, math-wise, is this one. So Social Security is $32 trillion short. Medicare is $78 trillion short. And this one is much more difficult. Yet, the solution around here is, well, we will just subsidize more people and borrow the money.

There is a path, but you have got to be willing to functionally legalize technology and disrupt the cost of healthcare.

And there are some amazingly good things happening. Actually, with the messenger RNA, there are so many diseases that, if we invest in, we could actually cure misery today and reap the benefits in the future. And I have only come to the floor dozens of times trying to share that math.

So once again, let's take a look. This is also something that is disharmonious to what a lot of people believe. The typical retiring couple--and this is before the pandemic--will receive $3 in Medicare for every dollar they paid in.

Now, Social Security, you functionally get really close to what you put into it. Social Security is a fairly square deal. Medicare, we have a problem.

That typical retiring couple, 2 years ago, when Brian Riedl was doing this math, would put in about $161,000 in a lifetime, and they were taking out, or receiving benefits, of about $522,000. That gap right there is almost the sole primary driver of most of the U.S. sovereign debt over the next 30 years.

If we are willing to actually have an honest conversation of what do we do to keep our brothers and sisters healthy, to provide access and resources, but do it in a modern way and could we bend this cost differential here? Because if we do that--remember, we were just talking a moment ago. Thirty-one percent of this is just diabetes in our seniors. If you took that on, that is the single greatest thing you could do to bending this curve and saving the economic future of this society.

We also need to deal with a bit of the folklore. Now, this is folklore that comes from the left. You do realize the Tax Code has already been getting more progressive. You do realize the 2017 tax reform was more progressive than the Tax Code before 2017.

And look, when you actually go back to the 1980s, 1990s, the top 20 percent at that time were all paying about 60 percent of all income taxes. Today, they are paying 70 percent. This is the top 20 percent.

So it is folklore. Now, it is good political folklore. It is good campaign folklore. We are going to make the rich pay their fair share. Fine, stop subsidizing them.

We have already done a demonstration here repeatedly that we come up with a trillion, a trillion-four over 10 years of direct subsidies to the really, really, really rich. So the absurdity that is in the current tax plan being offered by the Democrats is: Let's do this. Let's raise their taxes. Oh, by the way, wink, wink, nod, nod, you make $800,000 a year, we are going to give you tax credits of $118,000 if you buy what Democrats tell you to buy.

Okay. Why not go further? Why not remove the trillion, trillion-four in direct subsidies that we give to the rich and then put that toward balancing some of these--well, actually slowing the erosion? Because you are not going to balance this.

Any politician that gets up and says we are going to balance the budget; we are going to pay off the debt and deficits isn't being forthright. Our job is just to stabilize it at this point because the numbers are so large. If you get someone that comes behind these microphones and throws out the rhetoric of, well, it is foreign aid, it is waste and fraud. Well, we are going to balance the budget by doing this. Buy them batteries for their calculator because they obviously don't have them.

This comes back to dealing with the reality. No defense cuts, taxing millionaires cannot finance current deficits. The progressive wish list. The proposals that the left has proposed this year functionally-- the free college, the job guarantees, the Medicare for all--you start to add that up, and if you start to wipe out everything else, you functionally have just blown up the deficit by another 34 percent. The math just doesn't work.

So let's actually sort of walk through this. It is important. President Biden promised in his campaign $11 trillion of new spending over 10 years. $11 trillion in new spending. And look, they are all cited. They are either CBO or Committee for a Responsible Budget. But you start to look at it, this is just the campaign promises of $11 trillion of new spending on top of what is the $4-plus trillion baseline budget, plus the couple trillion additional we did over the last two years.

Now you have, what was it, the original scoring of the Build Back Better plan was, what? They claimed $3\1/2\--but it really scored out to $5, $5\1/2\ trillion. This is the lunacy we are at.

And, yet, if you come and add up every potential tax hike the left talks about--you know, get rid of any changes we did in tax reform that created the great growth--you actually start to take all income over $200,000 and just take 50 percent of it. Hey, you make $200,000, we take 50 percent of it. You do all the tax hikes that are on the entire list of the Democrats. Over a decade, you functionally raise $12 trillion. Okay. The deficit already projected before the pandemic was going to be over $13 trillion at that time. And that is not assuming you just blew up the economy, you slowed down growth.

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

Madam Speaker, I know this is a lot of boards, but in some ways you need it to try to drill in. We hate talking about this around here. I can't tell you--I will start to do these presentations even with some of my conservative brothers and sisters, and they run away from me. But it is the math.

The progressive programs overwhelmingly benefit the rich. This is one of my fixations here because I think this is something the left and those of us on the right could actually come to an agreement on. Let's stop subsidizing the rich. The things we provide to families with high incomes, and you actually walk through the amount--we actually brought a presentation to the floor a couple weeks ago and showed a trillion, a trillion-four-hundred-thousand dollars that goes to the very top quartile. That is the lunacy that is going on around here, we want to tax the rich, but we are going to turn around and hand it back to them. You know, if it is my fourth house and I happen to buy it on a beach, should I be getting subsidized flood insurance?

The Biden budget proposals would add $8.8 trillion in debt over the next decade, and that is with the Biden tax hikes. How often are we talking about that around here? That is how CBO scores it.

Even eliminating all defense spending doesn't get you close to actually making a difference in the long-term debt.

Think of this. This is the defense line. And the baseline is basically projected to sit about now for the future decades at about 3\1/2\ to 4 percent of GDP. But you start taking a look and go out to that 2050 number, we are at almost 16 percent of GDP. The size of the economy will just be the spending on Social Security and Medicare. Does anyone sort of see a difference, hey, 4 to 16?

This is the reality, but yet, we will get people who will come behind these microphones, Members, and say, if we would cut defense, if we would do this, we will balance it. No, you won't. That is not the math, and you know it is not the math. We need to stop misinforming--my wife would refer to it as lying--the public and start telling the truth and treat them like adults about what is going on.

Remember, the problem ultimately isn't Republican or Democrat. It is demographics. We as a society have made lots of promises, and if we are going to keep them, we need to tell the truth about the math.

It turns out the growth in the economy is crucial, even with my most optimistic math. When we have come here and said we can have a revolution in the cost of delivering healthcare, we can do all these things, the linchpin of it is you must have the economic growth.

You actually take a look during when President Obama oversaw about half a trillion of new taxes, and we functionally lost $3.2 trillion of economic expansion. If we are going to raise taxes, you have got to think it through in a way that what is the economic growth effect at the end of the decade, the next decade, and the decade after that. Because if we don't keep growing the size of this economy, that ratio of borrowing--because the borrowing is exploding. If you aren't growing the economy as fast, there is a technical economic term for it. It is called ``We are screwed.''

Even a 100 percent tax rate on small businesses and upper-income families could not come close to balancing the long-term budget. Take everything. Take all the money from upper income. Take all the money from small businesses, and you still don't get close to balancing.

We all know this. Why is this place so incapable of telling the truth? I mean, are we that addicted to the spending? Our constituents, our voters, our contributors, are they that addicted to us handing them checks?

But this is the basic chart. It makes it very, very clear. You can't solve the long-term budget even if you go out and confiscate 100 percent of small businesses' wealth and the upper income's wealth.

Here's where the reality should be terrifying you. National debt is projected to leap from 200 percent to 328 percent of GDP, depending on if those Biden proposals pass and if there are any interest rate changes. So you start taking a look at this. When you start to see $328 trillion of spending in 28 years, 29 years, you get this sort of number, if the Biden proposals pass and interest rates go up by 1 percent. You have got to understand how fragile we are.

Is there anyone around here that is a fan of Taleb, the guy that wrote ``Black Swan?'' In ``Antifragile'', he talks about how you can see these things coming, do things not to make yourself--because there are going to be other economic black swans. We have made this country incredibly, economically fragile because these numbers are coming.

Now, this one happens to come if the Biden administration and the Democrats here get their proposals. But even if they don't, you are still well over 200 percent of debt-to-GDP as the baseline.

The share of Federal tax revenues spent on interest on the national debt is projected to surge. Okay.

Here's a simple thought experiment. Today interest, with our incredibly low interest rates, is about 9 percent of GDP. If we get two points of an interest rate hike, in 2051, 100 percent of GDP is just interest.

Doesn't this terrify anyone else? I can't be alone in looking at these numbers and just panicked for my society, for my country, my daughter.

Since 1990, nondefense discretionary spending has grown four times faster than defense. This is important because we keep seeing people come behind these microphones talking about the skyrocketing cost of defense. Nondiscretionary is growing four times faster. Over the last 20 years, four times faster. And you saw it in the opening slide that basically said 70 percent of all of our spending is mandatory today, 10 percent is defense, and everything else is what we really get to vote on.

Coronavirus legislation--and we are all guilty on this; Democrats substantially more guilty, but we are all guilty--pushed the 2020 and 2021 Federal spending past $50,000 per household. So if you are a household out there during this pandemic cycle, do you feel you got $50,000 worth of value? Because you are going to pay for it for the rest of your lives, the rest of your kids' lives, the rest of your grandkids' lives with lots of interest. Functionally, this spike you see here was $50,000 per household. That is what we did during the pandemic.

And you have got to understand, we have had an incredible free ride the last couple years. The Federal Reserve has functionally financed our debt. And now we are financing our own inflation.

I am sure some of you have been to a grocery store, filled up your gas tank. Welcome to what happens when you do Keynesian economics.

Here's the reality: Do you see the little line down here? This is China. This is Japan. This is the rest of the world. This is the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is functionally about five

times more financing our debt than China and Japan together. We are playing a shell game ourselves. We are financing our own debt. And then you wonder why you have inflation.

And we have all been in this body, and I know there is always angst when we get near the debt ceiling, but the fact of the matter is if you take a look at the last 40 years, almost the only times we have actually had any attempt to bend the spending curve, bend the borrowing curve, bend the debt curve have been out of negotiations to raise the debt ceiling.

Budget deals, we have had a number of them. Remember the Budget Control Act and some of the others?

Now, the problem is, we have had some of these where we set base lines and they were actually sort of working, and then this place all runs away from them. But there is a fraud in those, and that was they were always tied to discretionary spending, not the mandatory that is functionally driving the debt.

Some of my brothers and sisters on the left have said, well, it was tax reform. That is just not true. If you actually look at the contributor debt, if everything from tax reform was extended permanently, it is a tiny fraction, and that is assuming without CBO-- remember CBO wasn't giving us the value for all the economic growth we particularly had in 2018 and 2019. But that is not the math.

And the six major deficit reduction deals that we have had since 1983, if you take a look at them, almost all of it was under discretionary. It saved us some money in interest. We did raise some more taxes. We did a little bit in the early eighties under Ronald Reagan on mandatory Social Security, but you take a look at them, and they had a pretty darn impressive effect. Remember the surpluses in the late nineties? But today we have let it get away from us.

And you take a look at what became of the $1.7 billion in promised-- remember 2013 until this year there was supposed to be about $1.7 trillion in functional reductions in spending? Do you remember the Budget Control Act? Except what happened?

Well, time after time both Republicans and Democrats came here and whittled it away because we wanted to spend more money, and we lost much of the value. So we did gain about a trillion dollars of savings over those 10 years. It could have been double that if we hadn't whittled it away.

The last thing, and I hope our brothers and sisters on the left will actually step up and help us on this one. The current number is actually substantially higher than this because this slide now is a couple months old, but we think we have identified over $200 billion in functionally missed and fraudulent claims and payments during the pandemic. You have seen some of the crazy stories of how much fraud there has been in unemployment in California.

We need to tell the truth about the healthcare costs, Medicare driving our debt. But I believe in a holistic theory. You need to go after everything. You need to go after what we know is the fraud from the last 2 years. We also need to tell the truth about bending the curve on delivering healthcare. And there are ways to do it. This place just needs to stop being so fearful of telling the truth about the debt and deficits because if we don't grow up and take this head on it is going to take our head off.

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

Madam Speaker, I promise I am not trying to go for the record of the most boring for half an hour, but if I make it, bless us all.

Madam Speaker, over the next half hour, I am going to try to walk through--and a lot of this is just sort of the boiling frustration that we all go through around here. We are frustrated because I believe a lot of our brothers and sisters on the left mean well. They say warm, fuzzy things. They say things that actually should make you feel good. And then you actually deal with the reality of what is happening in our economy and around us.

We are going to blast through a bunch of these and see if I can sort of explain our frustration as conservatives but also as Americans. So just one quick point. Do you remember all of the rhetoric from the last election from our Democrat colleagues about how they are going to actually do all of these things in regard to greenhouse gases, but we will still have a healthy economy? Well, this is the chart before President Biden took office, and you see GDP was truly growing and greenhouse gases had actually made quite a bend and change.

But now, we actually also have some other little facts we are going to have to deal with. Think about this: The attacks that happened on President Trump, but in those 4 years, my understanding is use of coal actually fell 30 percent.

Well, I have to congratulate the Democrats. It looks like this year's coal usage will go up 23 percent. One more time: Coal usage will now go up almost 23 percent this year because they have so screwed up the energy economy.

When you block pipelines, when you block the movement of natural gas, when you block the much cleaner fuel and you need to produce ions, called electricity, where do you go? So, congratulations to the Democrats. They actually took a trend--where they said they wanted this--and have absolutely reversed it.

It is sort of an amazing thought, isn't it, that the Biden administration and Democrats did more in the last 9 months for coal production than the previous President did in 4 years? It is a fascinating but good example when you don't own a calculator and don't do economics.

Let's actually walk through a couple of other things. You have also seen the reports and the analysis of how many poor people are going to absolutely suffer this winter. Have you seen what energy prices look like? If your household that uses heating oil--I am sorry, for those of us in the desert, we don't know what heating oil is, but we are told it is getting really expensive. Have you seen the numbers of what is predicted to be paid in cold parts of this country?

If you are angry about it, go talk to your Democrat Representative because

they are the ones that basically, through their arrogance and not owning a calculator, not understanding basic economics, have just, in many areas of the country, will have doubled, doubled your heating bill this winter.

But this is what crappy economics looks like. And you start to walk through it. How about if you are in one of those neighborhoods where crime is an issue? Well, you have to thank the Democrats once again. You can see that homicides are up 16 percent in the first 6 months of this year.

We chose not to use it, but if you actually look at the concentration of where these homicides are, people of color are the victims here.

You know, once again, we hear these beautiful speeches behind these microphones of how they are going to help and protect and do this, except they are killing them. At some point, the math is the math. This is sort of the Democrat destruction in just the first 9 months, 10 months of this year. And the math is the math. The facts are the facts.

The air is getting dirtier; the power bills have gone up; you are less safe. But let's keep walking through more of the damage that is being done to our country, the society.

In my State, we have a little problem. We are a border State. The number of adult males that are crossing our border has skyrocketed. If you actually start to walk through what that actually means--let's actually take a look.

Oh, but what about the fentanyl and who is that killing? When you take a look at the pounds--tonnage, actually--of dangerous narcotics, particularly fentanyl, that is crossing my border in Arizona, thank you for the absurd policies that have been adopted by the Democrats and this President.

Is it that you want to kill people? I can't believe that is in your hearts, but that is what you have allowed to happen.

Let's actually talk about the other side, the economic side, of what the Democrats have done in regards to the border. Why some of this is important is I need you to double it up. We are going to come back to the inflation here in a second.

What are the two things you do in a society if you want to destroy the working poor? You make the value of their labor less. And unlike 2018 and 2019, which we had records in this country, where if you are part of the working poor, you are someone that didn't finish high school and what you sell is your labor, you were getting dramatically less poor. We know income and equality, wages, were all going the right direction.

Now, the Democrats take over, and you flood the society with--what was today's final number, 1.7 million, heading towards 2 million-- people of moderate to low skill, and do you understand the economic effects of what you just did to the working poor in this country?

We have some data that we did a couple weeks ago on the floor that showed that by the end of the decade, you will have made the working poor poorer in this country, substantially, because of opening the border. Now, add in inflation.

If you actually take a look at the real earnings, the real earnings, they are negative. People in this country, the working poor, the middle class, they are getting poorer. Do we care? Because it is the math.

It is nice to give these beautiful speeches about how we care, but then when you so screw up the basic economics of society, when you have now devalued their labor by flooding the market with similar skill sets, and now you have so monetized the society that you have cash chasing products and goods, and then you screw up the incentives to work, what did you think was going to happen?

You wonder where is the compassion around here? The working class, that middle class, and the working poor are getting poorer every day in this country because of Democrat policies.

It is a level of cruelty. Can we stop the hemorrhaging? Can we stop the cruelty to these populations? It is not enough to give pretty speeches that you care.

When you start to look at this, when you realize the skyrocketing inflation--yeah, it is the highest in 13 years. But if you do some of the core goods, that if you are on that--I hate the term--lower quartile, where substantial portions of your income go to transportation, food, and rent, it is even higher than this.

Now, we understand from the economists, it is no longer considered transitory. This is Democrat policies at work.

A couple weeks ago we tried to do a simple explanation of supply side, where you use resources, whether they be tax cuts or incentives or getting regulations right to encourage production, and by encouraging production, you make people's labor more valuable and they get paid more. But the society has more goods and products and services to buy, so you don't set off inflation.

You are now living the Democrat stimulus Keynesian model of throw lots and lots and lots of cash at it, but you did nothing to stimulate production. We have lots of cash chasing goods now, but at the same time, all of that cash also encourages people, saying: Hey, maybe I don't really have to work right now.

So you have a fall in labor force participation, you have lots of cash to go buy things, and then you wonder how the supply chains get screwed up. You wonder how you have inflation set off.

We are reliving the 1970s. Did anyone actually buy a textbook? Seriously. If you actually loved and cared for the working class, for the working poor, you would have been embracing 2018 and 2019, which were miracles of no inflation and dramatic wage growth.

Yes, the pandemic has been miserable, but much of this did not have to happen. But it is that arrogance, once again, of Democrat policies. And is it the darkness of, hey, if we send out lots and lots of money in checks, if we are--as the Democrats so-called Build Back Better plan, which is to take the majority of our society and put them on transfer payments--maybe it is great politics. Maybe that is how you become the majority party forever. It is really crappy economics.

So if you start to take a look at just the last 6 months--you remember a couple months ago: This is transitory; it is going to stop? Not stopping, not stopping. Even the Federal Reserve now has updated their numbers. So the talking heads were saying, oh, it is transitory, give the administration a pass. Turns out, we have so structurally screwed up the labor markets, we have so structurally failed to provide the incentives to produce things in our own country and massive amounts of this liquidity are functionally now financing the rest of the world and particularly China. So congratulations once again.

If you actually start to look--and we are going to put up all of these slides on our website so folks can actually have a chance to sort of dive into them--but how prices have changed in a year. When you start to understand--that is gasoline. This is your fuel oil, as we were just talking about; cars. But you start to go over the things that are sort of the bare necessities for so much of our community. We are just kicking them in the head.

Then the arrogance coming out of the White House saying, well, these are sort of, what was it, high-class problems? Come on. Is that really where the heads of the left are? Their excuse is, well--because the basic economics are, if you are a person with assets, you have a house, you have retirement accounts, you own gold, you own other things, you are getting richer. Now, your purchasing power is eroding. But if you don't hold assets or you are a saver, someone trying to save for retirement, these policies are just destroying your economic future.

So let's continue down the line of misery that the Democrats have brought us. If you actually take a look at where we were going after the Tax Cut and Jobs Act and you started to realize what had happened in wages, particularly for female participation, we had the highest female labor force participation in U.S. history. It was off the charts, and their wages had begun to skyrocket.

Do we see anything in the Democrat proposals that will ever bring us back to that? Actually, no. It is actually just the opposite. The University of Chicago study now makes it look like they will incentivize those numbers to continue to go the other direction.

Let's actually take a look--and we started to touch on this. If you are part of that working poor, and you start to understand that what happens on--if you start to break out the world by education level--and I know sometimes this is uncomfortable, because you sort of segment your society. But the reality of it is we actually saw amazing wage growth, just amazing wage growth in 2018, 2019--21-plus percent. And that is the very population that the pandemic smashed into a wall. Now the Democrat policies of inflation, opening up the borders, incentivizing people functionally not to participate in the labor market, they are going to destroy--as a matter of fact, they have already begun to destroy.

Let's look also at the brilliance of the left's proposals of functionally: Let's throw lots and lots and lots of cash at the problem and then try to figure out why that cash functionally is on its way to China to buy things. It was not designed to create a robust manufacturing backbone in this country. You actually incentivize people, saying, well, go out and buy lots of things, engage in consumer--oh, by the way, we did nothing in those policies to have that become the new backbone of productivity and opportunity and jobs in our own country.

The simple proof of this is--have you seen the pictures of the container ships lined up at the port of Long Beach? What do you think is in those? I mean, we are living it; we are looking at it. Yet the talking heads are incapable of trying something new around here, and that would be tell the truth.

So let's do something that is even a little more uncomfortable to talk about. Remember when Vice President Biden was running for President, and repeatedly we were told how if we just had a Democrat Presidency and Democrat unified government, we would see the deaths-- and the deaths are miserable and horrible. I have had a couple friends die of COVID--but they would come to an end and the world would be better.

So we have a new President. He is handed multiple vaccines. But how is it possible? How is it possible to have vaccines available to this administration, functionally financed and brought in policy-wise by the previous administration, and then there are more deaths this year than there were last year? Are the Democrats ready to stand up and say: We lied. We made crap up. And the results of not telling the truth and the way they have approached the American people about the vaccines? Are they going to take responsibility for the deaths? Because they sure beat the crap out of Republicans and the last President over this. Should they live by their own words?

Let's talk about the Democrats' tax policy now. We need to tax the rich, right? We have done multiple presentations here on the floor saying maybe we should stop subsidizing the rich. We showed a couple months ago $1.4 trillion over the next 10 years of subsidies that go to the rich. In this case, Democrats actually have something brilliant, saying--this is a great scam--we are going to tax the wealthy, but wink, wink, nod, nod, we are going to actually hand it back to the wealthy in tax credits and subsidies.

Here is a simple example of a family that makes $800,000 a year. The Democrats' tax bill, tax proposal, will hand them $118,000 in tax credits, if you just buy the right electric vehicle and the right solar panels and these things.

This is absurd. You are taking the wealthy in society, you are actually blaming them for not paying their fair share, even though you already saw--I am sure if anyone is literate around here, you saw today's Wall Street Journal talk about you are not actually even getting to the super rich; you are actually attacking the high-income earning rich, because we tax income; we don't tax wealth. But in this case, we are going to build a tax bill saying we are going to raise your taxes, but wink, wink, nod, nod, we are going to hand it back to you in tax credits, as long as you buy what the Democrats tell you to buy.

Yet, if you actually look at what the design of the Democrats' tax plan is, you must understand by the end of the decade, we are all poorer. The society is poorer. The working poor are poorer. The middle class is poorer.

We now have multiple studies--and we are going to talk about these on a number of the slides--where the size of the economy actually shrinks. The number of people working actually shrinks. If you understand our debt problem, if we do not have an incredibly robust economic expansion, we are in real trouble. Yet, this is sort of the dystopian future the Democrats are planning for my 6-year-old daughter and for every American.

You understand, when you add in the spending proposals, in less than 10 years, we are going to be running $2.6 trillion of borrowing every single year. So think of that. Nine years from now when we are working on the budget, just the borrowing package--so in 9 years, the borrowing package, just to finance the spending of baseline government, the entitlements, and the expansion of entitlements, we will be borrowing $2.6-plus trillion every single year. This is the healthy economy we were promised?

So, understand what that means is, in less than 9 years, if the Democrats get their way, we are at 129 percent of debt to GDP, and that is publicly held debt.

Now, you all understand why that number is so incredibly important. When you strip capital out of society, how does the small business get a loan? How does the entrepreneur here get a loan? How about the person who just has a dream and wants to start a business in their garage? They have to compete with government.

Is there this bizarre fantasy that somehow we are going to monetize it? Maybe the fantasy of modern monetary theory, which, as you understand, has been tried many, many, many, many times over history, and it has always ended up very badly.

Do you remember the inflation numbers a few boards ago? Welcome to the dystopian future that the left is bringing us. Look, the baseline number was already crappy. It was over 106 percent of GDP. With the Democrats' additional proposal, it goes from about 106 to 129 percent. This is a miserable future for this country, and this is being brought to you by Joe Biden and our beloved Democrat friends.

I know they mean well; at least, I like to believe they do. But they have to see these same numbers. Most of these are based on CBO projections. You start to see other things happening in society because of Democrat policies that really, really are starting to take effect right now. We are seeing some numbers that we need to understand between now and the end of the year. There are some economic numbers from us on the Joint Economic Committee that are becoming incredibly uncomfortable.

This is sort of an odd one that popped up the other day. It turns out, we are having this sudden huge spike of individuals dropping out of the labor force. But what happens when you have a substantial spike of folks who are just saying, ``I am going to retire''?

One of the miracles of 2018, 2019 is we saw our brothers and sisters coming back into the labor force because wages were going up, and there were so many opportunities. How can there be a world right now where we say we have over 10 million open jobs, yet we are seeing huge dropouts of the labor market?

This is a chart that basically says we had, what is it, 1\1/2\ million-plus older Americans decide, ``I am going to take early retirement.'' What is so dark about this number is a huge, huge, huge portion of those have almost no savings.

They are taking early retirement, going to live on Social Security instead of what we were seeing in 2018, 2019 as the economy grew. We were actually seeing poverty of seniors falling because many of them had taken part-time or had taken some work. Now the reverse trend has happened.

What has happened in the psyche of Americans, of our brothers and sisters out there? We are already seeing millions of Americans of traditional working age disappearing from the labor pool, so they are not counted in unemployment because they are not looking. But they are in that baseline number we call labor force participation. I know this is geeky, but it is really important.

You cannot have a growing, healthy, prosperous society if you build so many disincentives in your public policy that not working or dropping out or retiring early is where your head is at.

According to the University of Chicago, the Democrats' plan to expand the child tax credit would cause a million and a half workers to exit the labor force. On the conservative side, we have actually made multiple proposals of how to do some creative things with the earned income tax credit so you actually help the working poor and you make working more valuable, more attractive.

But the Democrats' proposal is now to delink a monthly check from participating in society, participating in the economy, building skill sets, building an economic future for yourself, your retirement, for your children.

And now we actually start to see the academic studies coming in that we are going to lose a million and a half workers just on this one line item.

It truly is almost dystopian that the left can get behind the microphones, say these warm, fuzzy things, but the economists are sitting there shaking in their boots, saying we tried versions of this in the 1970s, and it did not work well. And now we are doing it in a time where our demographics are a real headwind and our debt load is crushing.

We actually have some proof that also demonstrates that the President and the Democrats said a lot of things that just weren't true because the data now is in on the States that ended the early, we will call it the SPIF on unemployment. It turns out they represent a small portion of this country's population because I think there was only, what, 13 States that did it, and there are like 20, 23, whatever they are, a small percentage of the Nation's population, but they are over half the job growth.

The data is absolutely clear. The States that actually ended the unemployment SPIF, the enhanced unemployment, had dramatically better economic growth, job growth.

Once again, is having a job, is economic prosperity, is economic growth moral? Because if it is, then what the Democrats are doing is absolutely immoral.

You start to see the Byzantine structure of all the tax hikes that the left is proposing, and we may do some of this next week. What is so crushing about this is to even get close to their spending requirements, it doesn't produce enough revenues.

I keep getting asked over and over, and saying okay, the Democrats aren't dumb. There are probably a few of them that actually do own calculators. They have to understand that their spending proposal in this environment will be incredibly destructive to opportunity in society.

We have lots of charts. You need to go through these other studies that basically show the transfer payment model the Democrats are pushing ends social mobility in this country. If you are poor, you are going to stay poor. If you are middle class, you stay middle class.

In this country, do you really think our societal social fabric is going to hold when you have no opportunity to move upward and sometimes even downward, that we are going to basically become a European transfer payment, socialist society; that the class you are born into is where you stay, no matter how hard you work, the schooling you go to, because that stagnation is what every study says?

The other part that is also perverse is the Democrats have to also understand the receipts, revenues, that would be produced by all these taxes don't come close to covering all their spending.

It is obvious. They are setting up our country to actually have to do other layers of taxes. Are they going to sweep retirement accounts? Well, that is where a bunch of the cash is. Are we basically going to move to a VAT, a value-added tax, so each step of production we tax? Are you going to have to add some sort of tariff or border tax? Because right now, none of this works. None of the math works.

The final slide here is a congratulations to President Biden and the Democrats' policies because they did something none of us thought was possible. Remember when we started this year in January, this was going to be one of the most robust economic growth years in history? There were discussions that we were going to be 6-plus percent GDP growth.

As of yesterday, GDP growth from the Atlanta Fed calculator is 0.5. One-half of one percent is our economic GDP projection for this quarter, proving at some point policies really do matter, the people you elect really do matter, and the amount of pain this is going to cause to so many people because the opportunity, the growth in their wages has now been crushed by these policies.

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

Madam Speaker, this is one of those moments I am actually behind the microphone to say thank you. I was born in an unwed mother's home--so was my brother; so was my sister--and you have all met my little girl, as she is here, that came to us as a gift out of nowhere.

But when I was 38 years old, through a series of accidents, I got the phone number from my birth mother, and I called her. The first words were just through the tears and this high-pitched almost--she was struggling; you could hear her almost hyperventilating. ``I pray for you every morning. Are you okay? Are you healthy? Are you happy?'' I am crying on my side, saying: ``I have a great life. Thank you for letting me live.''

Today in the Schweikert family and the Hoyle family, and all of our families together--my little girl is third-generation adopted now. Maybe we are doing something wrong in the family. We would get together with our birth moms and our moms. The amazing thing is my mom became best of friends with my birth mom.

This is the American family of today. Let's love it and respect it.

Mr. Speaker, to my friend Louie, it is always interesting listening to you. People know how freaky smart you are.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do something for the next half an hour, and I don't want to sound like a jerk when I do some of it. Some of it I am sincerely trying to find a way to talk about something that is of intense concern to me. But it is also going to be a pretty direct assault on a lot of the left's policy right now. I am hoping there will be some hearts that will listen to the concern and to the solutions.

Mr. Speaker, if I came to you right now and said: What is the single most economically violent thing you could do to someone that is in the working poor, those brothers and sisters who didn't graduate high school, who basically the economic value they sell is their labor, their work talent? We are talking 25 million to 40 million Americans who functionally are in that category. They are hardworking, lower middle class.

What we have allowed to happen so far this year, the brutality to their family's ability to survive, to economically exist--I want to walk through some of the math, and then I want to talk about why the left believes a series of transfer payments is the way to make their life better, unlike when we actually had the data from 2017, 2018, when we saw the working poor get dramatically less poor because their labor became more valuable.

What is the number one thing you do, the first thing you do, to crush people in that lower end of the scale who are out there busting their backside trying to survive? You open up the border.

We have really good data here, and we are going to talk about a couple of our slides, but there are lots of studies. The amusing thing, some of the older studies were actually promoted by liberal think tanks that actually thought that the exploitation of cheap labor coming across the border was actually a thing to crush the poor in the United States.

We all forget, a decade, decade-and-a-half ago, it was the left who believed in securing the border to protect working men and women, and the right was the one that was accused of saying we want cheap labor for our business colleagues. It is amazing how the ideology has flipped.

But we actually have a couple of studies that basically come back-- and these are tough because we are going to talk some pretty aggressive math. If you take a family that you and I would designate as the working poor today and you flood society with 1 million, 2 million in, functionally, a 12-month, 24-month period of time, you have just lowered their future earning power.

In one of the studies, it is about 6.2 percent, which is a stunning amount to think that, at the end of a decade, their wages are going to be over 6 percent less. They didn't participate in the growth of the value of their labor going up.

I will argue that we are missing one of the most critical parts of discussing what is happening in the southern border of our country. And being from Arizona, we are seeing it.

If we love and care about the people that struggle in our country, then why would we allow a policy--and I hear on occasion, well, we are being compassionate. You damn well are not being compassionate to the people that are already here.

We can demonstrate in study after study--and these aren't conservative studies; they are academic. Some of them when we went back, we went back 10 to 15 years and found some that talked about that they were going after President Bush's policy of immigration reform and what it was going to do to working men and women, particularly on, we will call it, the working poor categories.

It just breaks my heart that, on occasion, we are going to have the immigration conversation of the chaos that is going on at the border. Could we actually demonstrate some love and caring for those working families, for those working individuals on the lower income end?

Mr. Speaker, this isn't comfortable coming from someone that looks like me from Scottsdale. But if you actually see the stratification on the numbers, you take urban African Americans and we are kicking their head in economically, more than just over the next year, but over the next decade.

I have a fixation that economic expansion, you know, economic growth, is moral. Particularly what we saw in 2018 and 2019, before COVID, we saw this amazing thing where income inequality was shrinking at the fastest ever in modern economic history, that the working poor were getting dramatically less poor. The rich were getting richer, but not as fast as the poor were getting less poor. That has to be the goal.

What is the other thing you also do to absolutely crush the working poor? You open up the borders and devalue their labor, and then you allow an inflationary cycle right now.

I have been there. I mean, God knows, I lived in a little, tiny room behind a garage for years just trying to economically survive. I got very lucky.

But to someone that that is their life, when the rent goes up, when fuel goes up, when food goes up, all these things where, for someone that is in the working poor, the percentage of their wages, their income, maybe even their transfer payments gets chewed up by inflation. And at the same time, you are lowering the value of their wages.

Why would we do this? Do my brothers and sisters on the left actually have any labor economists who are willing to tell the truth, that at the end of this year, the very population that both sides here claim we care about will be poorer? Their lives will be more miserable.

We are better than this. I am frustrated because I understand the left's solution is, well, we are going to stack them up with transfer payments. Okay. We are going to talk about how that gives you a nice pop.

By the end of the decade, you could have gone with the conservative model, which is economic vitality, growth, make the wages more valuable, those things, a supply-side model where things get cheaper because you have incentivized productivity and production, those things.

Remember the rule of thumb. What are the two ways you pay someone more? Inflation, which means you raise their wages, but they didn't get anything more for it because it is just chasing the costs, or productivity where you are able to pay people more because we built a tax and regulatory code that encouraged investment in pieces of equipment, in training that made that worker more valuable, and, therefore, they get paid more without setting off inflation. We were living that just about a year and a half ago. That is what we were seeing in 2018 to 2019.

Look, there is another study out there that just talks about the decrease in wages that is now happening. When you start to increase the labor supply--and believe it or not, this one shows 10 percent. But remember, it is 10 percent within that subcategory.

If the border crossing numbers stay where they are, that is what we are going to hit for the next decade. That study says over 6 percent, and this one says almost immediately we are going to take the working poor and not see their wages go up. This study says they are going to go down 3 percent almost immediately because that is what happens when you raise the labor pool of people with similar skill sets. It is a type of cruelty.

If I came to you and said that we both care about the working middle class, the hardworking middle class, and we both particularly care about the working poor in the country because we believe that by making their lives more economically viable and prosperous, our society, our country, gets better, healthier, and we don't tear at each other.

The left talks a lot about income inequality, and I actually agree with that. I believe the stratification. But you don't do it by kicking one quartile in the head. You do it by lifting up the mass and making their labor much more valuable.

But what happens when we start to actually say the way the left is going to do it is, we are going to do trillions of dollars of transfer payments. We will see childhood poverty. Families with children who are in poverty is unacceptable where it is at. There is a handful of things that we would all agree to do to help that population.

But are you really going to do transfer payments for folks with kids up into the $400,000-a-year income? Because that is what the legislation says. Is that really helping children that are growing up in poverty households?

I think one of the numbers is it caps out, for a couple with kids, mid-$400s. That is really the left's definition of struggling families? Or is it actually a level of, sort of, dark political gamesmanship, saying: We are not only going to take care of the population that we agree we must find a way to make them more prosperous, but we are going to take the rest, the most of our society, and we are going to make sure they are addicted to a monthly transfer payment because they will be beholden to one political party.

If that is so, be honest about it. It is brilliant politics. It is devastatingly horrible economics.

As you can start to see with this chart I am holding, by the end of the decade, we are going to be much poorer as a country, much poorer as a society. The size of our economy will actually be smaller because of the way we are doing this.

I am going to have to do this on the floor next week because I wanted to make sure I got my math absolutely correct because it is a hard dataset. By the end of the decade, you can do the Democrat's transfer payment model or our model to help those who are most in need, and then an aggressive economic growth model. You would have a dramatically bigger, healthier economy in the Republican model. Wages would be at a point where you would actually have almost the same poverty statistic.

The difference is the left's version of a transfer payment model to help the poor, and now the craziness of taking it up to people making $400,000-some on that child credit. You create a world, at the end of the decade, where these populations, their wages are worth less, their work opportunities are worth less, their ability to save for retirement is worth less. Their future prospects are basically beholden to the Democrats sending more money.

With the Republican model, you don't get the same political credit, and you don't get the same political loyalty to your party, but they have an economic future. Their savings, their future wages, their ability to save for retirement are dramatically different.

Yes, those people are free to actually go wherever they want, ideologically. But it is a better economic model for our society. We are seeing datasets after datasets. What the Democrats are about to do in their $3.5 trillion--no matter where it ultimately goes, they are going to make our society poorer. They are going to make those working people poorer.

The Tax Foundation just published, and I have only done the first skim of it, but they are looking at a horizon. They are saying, look, revenues are only coming in at a fraction of what the Democrats are scoring over time because of the shrinkage of the size of the economy.

They may get a trillion dollars of new revenues, but long-run GDP, wages, jobs are all smaller, and fairly dramatically smaller over time. There will be 300,000 of our brothers and sisters who no longer have job prospects. The size of the economy will be smaller.

It is sort of a dark way for those who care a lot about prosperity in our society. How can you engage in a political plan, saying, well, we are going to do these types of redesigning the economy, redesigning our society, basically becoming a European transfer income socialist society, which that is the model, without admitting, oh, by the way, at the end of the decade, if you were to take away the transfer payments, the society is much poorer. With the transfer payments, the future of our society, the future of these workers, the future of the working poor, their prospects are much, much less.

This is a pretty dark thing I believe the Democrats are doing. I think a lot of them have never had an economist sit down and walk them through the math, saying: You are going to get a nice little sugar high for a while, but by the end of the decade, you are going to have a fairly stagnant and almost no economic growth. And people are going to be getting poorer every single day.

I refuse to be like some of my colleagues out there who believe that is actually a mission of the Democrats, to make more of the society addicted to their largesse. I believe that we both love and care about people, and we want them to prosper. I just need someone to buy my brothers and sisters on the left a calculator so they can see what they are about to do.

This isn't all of them. We can actually keep finding more. This is just the list we have as of right now of all the tax hikes. There seems to be this scam going around here of, well, we are only going to tax the rich.

Now, we all know that is a fraud, and I am going to show you how. If they really wanted to transfer wealth from very wealthy people, it is not about taxing them because when you do that, you distort economic decisions. Stop subsidizing them.

You do understand--I actually came to the Ways and Means Committee and presented it multiple times here on the floor--we can come up with, in 10 years, $1.4 trillion that the Democrats subsidized the rich. So it is this amazing economic fraud.

We are going to tax them this much money, and then they are going to turn around and subsidize those people, which is brilliant politically. You show up and lobby me, maybe write me campaign checks and those things on the tax side so I don't make that too burdensome. Then you come and lobby me and campaign and help me and write me checks, and I hand you subsidies.

But when you start to read through all the tax hikes that are part of the Democrat legislation, it is not just the line saying we are going to raise taxes on really rich people. It is dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of different tax hikes, which will kick the middle class in the head because you just raised their costs. You have just shot up their inflation, and you have just made it expensive for them to live.

But for a lot of folks here, they don't understand the basics of the number of excise taxes. I know the people who are probably watching this or listening, you are freaky smart. You understand the concept of a value-added tax like it is in Europe and parts of Asia, where, during the production cycle, you keep adding. That is essentially what an excise tax is.

If you think about it, we tax it at the manufacturer; we tax it at the distributor; we tax again at the retailer. But there seems to be a misunderstanding that what you are doing to the base affects many products and commodities, and in that list are a number of excise taxes. The chart here is just trying to understand what you are doing to the prices of products.

Then they have the gall to come behind these microphones and say: We are not going to raise the taxes on poor people. We are not going to raise taxes on the middle class.

Come on. Buy a calculator. At least have some level of intellectual honesty. Say you believe a society that is addicted to transfer payments and entitlements is the Democrat vision and the right's vision is economic growth and prosperity. I am willing to have that debate.

I believe the math on my calculator--for my 5-year-old daughter--that a model with a society from top to bottom is wealthier, more prosperous, is so much more egalitarian and so much more elegant, instead of a command and control where the party in power can dial up and dial down whom they want to punish and whom they want to reward according to how they participated for that party in the last election. That is how cynical this place has now become.

So let's actually walk through a little bit of my argument that if the Democrats really gave a damn about getting revenues, then they would stop subsidizing the rich. Because you understand, Mr. Speaker, when you go and raise the taxes on capital gains and say: Oh, rich people are going to pay those, then you have just distorted their investments in things that make us more productive as a society and as an economy.

Remember that earlier part of the conversation, productivity is what makes it so we can pay people more.

But here is how dark the Democrats' bill is. Let's just use this as an example, Mr. Speaker. You have a family making $800,000 a year.

Are they rich?

I would say so. That is in the very top strata of income across this country. The Democrats' bill, as it was given to the Ways and Means Committee last week, when you add up all the tax credits and subsidies, Mr. Speaker, they intend to give that $800,000-a-year-family over $118,000 in credits. Not taxes--credits. Direct cash.

Then they will come behind the microphone and say: But we are going to tax rich people to make them pay to help out society.

I am willing to have that. I am someone who does believe in a progressive tax system. But it is pretty perverse when you say, I am going to raise the taxes and then not mention that you are turning around, Mr. Speaker, and handing over $100,000 to that very family that you are trying to claim you raised their taxes. Yes, you raised it, and then you gave them back more money after you raised it. This is the perversity that is going on here. It is never getting any press because it would require a calculator, and reporters don't own calculators.

But there are land mines that are getting no press because, Mr. Speaker, you handed us thousands of pages of tax-and-spend policy in the Ways and Means Committee. The day before we were supposed to debate it, we offered 57 amendments--many of them were actually derivatives of Democratic amendments--but not one was accepted because the Ways and Means Committee did not write this legislation. It came from the Speaker's Office.

Now, every single day we are discovering little land mines that are hidden in here.

So think about this: My State does not recognize public employee unions. I am from Arizona. So my school district, my county, my city, and my State offer really good benefits: here is your pension, here is your health, here is your family medical leave. To be able to continue to offer that family medical leave in the State of Arizona, they have to recognize unions now. That is hidden. It was brilliantly written. A nonlawyer found it because the

staff was just trying to deal with the perversities of what was going on in the way some of the tax definitions were written and where it seems to help certain groups and crush other groups.

Think about this: If you want your electric vehicle, Mr. Speaker--so you are that $800,000 person and you are getting your electric vehicle--if you want the full tax credit, the car had to be made in a unionized plant.

Mr. Speaker, can you tell me how many minutes are remaining?

Forgive me. I have had a lot of coffee today. I am a nondrinking Catholic, but I believe if you are not walking around with expresso, you are just not trying.

Mr. Speaker, I am dead serious about this. It is more than just the debate you and I are willing to have on raising taxes over here and spending it over there, becoming more egalitarian in a society. This bill is truly designed to redesign society.

So, Mr. Speaker, now you have the forced unionization of all government workers up and down the tree for the majority of States that are right-to-work States. Okay. Fine.

Shouldn't you actually have told someone that instead of trying to hide it in the legislation?

We keep coming up with more and more of these little backdoor things.

So, Mr. Speaker, if you have union representation, you are going to get to deduct your union fee. But if I am a nonunion worker, I am in a State that provides either optionality or they don't recognize it in my State, but I do have some group over here who does collective bargaining or negotiations, if I'm a union member I get to deduct my fees. So we are using, once again, spending through the Tax Code to backdoor subsidized unions because unions write huge checks and donate stunning amounts of money to Democrat campaigns. But if, on the other side of the equation, I am not one of those union members, I don't get to deduct.

Come on. Is this really where the left has gone that every policy, every design, and every little land mine that can be hidden in the language of the few thousand-page bill isn't necessarily to make the working poor less poor and isn't necessarily designed to make our society grow and provide opportunity?

It is designed for power.

We saw a number of things in that piece of legislation in the Ways and Means Committee when we started to lay it out. I have to admire the audacity of the left and what they are trying to do right now. I just have to genuflect at one level and say that the gall is so over the top it belongs almost being in a movie if someone actually cared about math.

But the forced unionization, the level of transfer payments, and the level of basically making the majority of society, people up to--what was our math--$440,000 a year getting functionally child support payments and child tax credits--direct payments for them, then out the other side of the mouth saying: We are helping the working poor.

No, you are not, Mr. Speaker.

If you and I were helping the working poor, we would have done something dramatically different on the saver's credit and how we do earned income tax credits, those things, and we would actually have an honest conversation that the miracle of growth we had in 2018 and 2019 was one of the most egalitarian and successful in closing income inequality and in closing nutrition stress.

Mr. Speaker, when you saw that nutrition stress shrank to its lowest level and poverty rates shrank to their lowest level--there is a model out there--put it under a Democrat label. I don't care.

I know it irks people on the left to say: Well, regulatory and tax reform created a vibrant economy at a time when our demographics are moving against us.

What makes some of those numbers so difficult--and everyone here knows it, and no one will talk about it--one of the greatest headwinds we have as a society is, we are getting old very fast. Our demographics are really, really tough.

The only way we are ever going to make our debt obligations in a couple decades and the only way my 5-year-old is going to be able to live as well as I did, is not functionally turning the economy into a European-style transfer entitlement economy which is what the legislation does.

It has got to be an economic velocity of takeoff, of adopting a disruptive technology, and of providing where investments are in productivity, so everyone is able to be paid more, make the wages, and make their labors much more valuable. We actually know how to do it now.

For my last couple of moments here, I can't count the number of times I will see Democrats get up and spout about supply-side economics and then you talk to them, Mr. Speaker, and they have no idea what supply- side economics is. You are living in it, Mr. Speaker.

When you see the shortages, when you see the ability to have supply chains work, and when you see the cost of everything going up around it, Mr. Speaker, then you have just seen the Democrat version of subsidized Keynesian, put money into consumption but don't build and put incentives into the production, because the production creates the wealth, creates the jobs, creates the productivity, and keeps the prices low. So even if you subsidize me, if I had to pay higher prices, then I didn't live any better.

The fact of the matter is, you are living the ultimate experience right now, Mr. Speaker, and I truly wish the 1970s could have their economics back.

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

Madam Speaker, this is a moment where I am hoping our friends on the left will keep a certain promise that many of you have made, Madam Speaker, because we have a long list of the promises from the President to leadership and to others promising that this spending will be 100 percent paid for.

You already know we are going to have probably a continuing resolution with the omnibus. There is a trillion dollars of structural debt there. Okay. And the $1.2 trillion so-called bipartisan-- bipartisan in the Senate.

Okay, when we actually do the honest math, it is not a quarter trillion of borrowing; it is about $500 billion of borrowing because a bunch of the pay-fors are fake.

When we start looking at what Senate Finance and others--where are you getting the other $1.7 trillion on your $3.5 trillion of spending?

Look, I am just asking you to keep a promise because when you add up all the new revenues, all the new receipts, all the new tax hikes, the corporate tax hikes that unemployed some million Americans in 24 months, the capital gains tax that loses money, where are you going to get all this cash that you have promised will be 100 percent paid for?

Mr. Speaker, yes, it is one of those last names. I have family members that have trouble pronouncing it.

Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. Speaker, may I make a quick parliamentary inquiry?

Mr. Speaker, my question is, just because the Democrat leadership here changed the rules sometime last night, do I have to wear this thing while standing here alone during my 1-hour Special Order? May I take it off when I am at the mike?

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the clarification. I know we are all trying to get our heads around it because things keep changing around here.

Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from Oklahoma had a couple of things she wanted to share tonight. This is the first time she and I have had a chance to talk. She is really smart and incredibly charming.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Oklahoma (Mrs. Bice).

Mr. Speaker, to the gentlewoman from Oklahoma, I only got this in an alert just about 2 hours ago, and I will send her a copy of it.

Apparently, we now have a whistleblower, a formal whistleblower complaint. They were there to help take care of these children, and they were instructed not to disclose how many of these people in the housing unit had COVID.

If that is true, once again, we are back to the duplicity of what has been going on at the border.

As we talk about just what this is doing, the impact to the country-- and I am going to talk a little bit about what it does to the working poor--that might be a really interesting thing, because you touched on it, this whistleblower complaint that may expose that they are being told not to disclose the level of COVID that is in this population crossing the border illegally.

It is a great irony, isn't it?

What do you think the likelihood is that the Democrat majority here, in their constitutional oversight responsibility, will take that whistleblower complaint seriously and look into the fact that, if it is true, we have been lied to?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman and wish her a great evening.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to do a couple of things this evening, and I am going to try to tie it together. Hopefully, some of this makes sense. I am going to start off with just a one-off.

Last week, I had a gentleman knock on my front door of my home. For all of us who are elected in this sort of time where things are a little anxious, you always stand up a bit when someone you don't know is at your front door.

Turns out, it is a really smart gentleman. He has a Ph.D. in amphibians and lives down the street from me. He had something he wanted to share, and this was something I didn't expect. It was a complete one-off.

He told me the story of what had happened just a couple of weeks earlier. He had this beloved dog. I am going to screw up the breed. I think it was some type of malamute, just this big, beautiful, fuzzy white dog. Apparently, the canine had gotten his wife's purse and chewed up some gum.

I know this seems like a weird thing to do on the floor of the House, but it killed the dog. I think the more technical term is a sugar alcohol that is used. It is pronounced xylitol, which we see in certain gum products and candy products. It is an artificial sweetener. Apparently, it kills our canines.

We have drafted a letter to the FDA and the appropriate agencies, asking if there is knowledge of this. If there is also knowledge of this, should there at least be some warning put on these packages? Because I had never heard of this.

Then, when I went to the internet and looked, there was story after story after story after story of just heartbreak about people with their puppies getting some gum, getting one of these artificially sweetened candies, and dying. I guess it shuts down the liver incredibly aggressively.

As almost a public service announcement, but also I am hoping that my colleagues on the left and right--if the FDA, if the bureaucracy doesn't really respond to us--would be willing to do a piece of legislation creating a directive that there needs to be some sort of warning on these products that if your puppy gets loose with this, it may lose its life.

That is a little different than talking about economics, but the gentleman was just heartbroken because this dog was truly one of his best friends, a really important family member. To go from being out there playing to, several hours later, having him pass away, I think all of us would understand the impact of that.

I had not heard about this. I think if we have gum with that sweetener sitting around our house--and I have a puppy coonhound that will munch on anything. We quickly got that in the shelves, away from the dog.

For all of us, it is something that we are thinking. Hopefully, the FDA and others will do the right thing.

Mr. Speaker, let's talk about what is going on in our Nation. We are going to touch a little bit--and it is going to be a little sarcastic and a little cranky. I am sorry about that, but I don't know another way to try to tell the story of just the absurdity of what is going on in some of our tax policy and economic policy.

Mr. Speaker, the theme I really want to try to weave through today is not

being understood, I don't think, by either Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives.

So much of the public policy that is being pushed right now is just crushing to the working poor. We are going to do some really crappy things to the working poor, and it is not necessary.

There is rational economic policy. You don't cater to certain of your activist constituencies as much, but it is much more effective to helping those we say we care about here in our society.

I do this slide as often as I can. What is the greatest threat in this country right now to my 5-year-old daughter, to your retirement?

The fact of the matter is our demographics. This slide is before all the crazy spending proposals that have been produced so far this year. This is where we are structurally.

And the fact of the matter is, as a society, we are getting old really fast. So think of this in 30 years in today's dollars. So I will adjust for inflation. In today's dollars, we will be $101 trillion in publicly borrowed money. Only about $3 trillion of that is what you would think of as general spending. All the rest of it is purely Social Security and Medicare.

Medicare is about $71 trillion of borrowed money. The spend is much, much, much, much larger than that, but that is how much we are going to have to borrow to finance the shortfall.

Because, once again, for those who don't pay attention to this, Medicare is a promise. We have made that promise to American workers and American retirees. But only part A, which is the hospital portion, is actually the trust fund. And the trust fund is gone in 3 to 5 years, we wiped out that money.

The rest of Medicare spending, when you see the doctor, when you get a pharmaceutical, those things come right out of the general fund. There is no trust fund for that spend.

If we don't get serious about sort of the holistic theory of how you save this country, and it turns out really aggressive economic growth, you have got to embrace technologies and new methods to crash the price of healthcare, these sorts of things. If we don't have that type of vision, these numbers become what drives all policy.

If you care about the environment, if you care about education, if you care about this, there will be no money because we will spend every dime we have just financing the retirement promise that we have made as a government, as a society to each other. But yet this isn't particularly sexy. It is really scary. It is really hard. It requires a calculator. And God knows, we all work in a place that doesn't own calculators.

So let's walk through a little bit of the reality that part of the solution to what we are doing to the working poor, part of the solution to what we are doing to these massive, massive unfunded promises is economic growth.

And one of my intense frustrations is the amount this place is willing to, what do you call it, oh, yeah, lie, about basic revenues. We call them receipts in Ways and Means, tax revenues, and these things. Remember, post tax reform a number of my brothers and sisters on the left got up behind these microphones and told stories: We are going to go into massive recession, the revenues are going to collapse, this is going to happen.

Well, what ended up happening?

Remember 2018--because remember we passed tax reform at the end of 2017--2018 and 2019 were the second and third highest, adjusted for inflation, so we are talking real math, receipts, tax collections in U.S. history. But what was more phenomenal about it is it created such an economic lift. So many of our brothers and sisters were working, particularly from the working poor. We saw things--and we are going to look at a couple of those boards--where the working poor became dramatically less poor. And because they are working, the trust funds we were just touching on, what we showed for Social Security and Medicare, their longevity revenues, because people were working, their lives got longer. This was actually, I thought, the Holy Grail for both those on the left and the right, we were going to try to find a way to mathematically make the numbers work so we can keep our promises.

Well, it turns out, post tax reform, the receipts were incredibly robust, and they were the second and third highest in U.S. history. And the only reason they weren't number one, by a sliver, was in 2015 we had some really unusual, what they call, timing effects, when certain things happened just before the end of the fiscal year that were posted in a certain fiscal year. So I won't geek out too much on that.

But often you will hear Members of the majority party here get behind the microphone, and say, well, the tax scam. It is really actually a pretty dark thing to say, because those couple of years before the pandemic were some of the most robust--actually, the most robust years in modern economic times for the poor in this country. The working poor became dramatically less poor.

But there are those that will stand behind the microphone and call it a tax scam. And the willingness to keep lying--and I am sorry, I know that is a crappy word to use, but I am so frustrated because they can't seem to stop. A couple of Members, just this last week, once again, got behind these microphones, and said: Well, 83 percent goes to the top 1 percent. That is a lie.

As a matter of fact, even the Washington Post--which is not really particularly friendly to those of us on the free market economic side-- has gotten so frustrated with Democrats getting behind microphones and lying. They are even now saying, the zombie claim that 2017 tax cuts gave 83 percent to the top 1 percent. Even the leftist newspapers are just bewildered with the left not telling the truth. I don't mind having policy arguments, but don't make crap up, over and over and over.

We see now even the left-wing media is having to correct the Democrats, saying, no, it turns out post tax reform that 2018 and 2019 were sort of miracle years; incredible wage growth, incredible productivity growth, savings growth, and particularly for the populations that we claim we care about.

Remember, they were the first 2 years in modern economic history where income inequality really shrank, and I thought that was the Holy Grail, that the wealthy got wealthier, but the poor got much less poor much faster, actually closing the income differential gaps and the wealth gaps. I always thought that that was the Holy Grail around here.

And when it happened--but it didn't happen with social engineering, it didn't happen with big spending programs that you get to basically extort votes with. It happened by opening up the economy and creating investment in productivity that made it so you could pay people more. It gets vilified with misinformation. It is just real hard to make honest government public policy when one side won't actually own a calculator.

So to beat this a little bit more, you take a look at what happened to, particularly, working, unmarried women. The wage growth was remarkable. Just remarkable. I think it was in 2019, we had African- American females, I think, who were having like a 7-8 percent growth in wages in a single year in a time with almost no inflation. Some of these numbers were remarkable.

And if the goal here is to make the poor less poor, I actually believe those who were on the free market side have demonstrated there is a path where it works, and it is sustainable. And we are going to come back to that theme, because this year we will probably see income and equality shrink, but it is going to shrink in a way--because we have pumped so much cash out the door--it is not sustainable. As soon as that money goes away, we go back to the bad old days and the really crappy policies of the previous decade.

So let's actually walk through something that we started to touch on when we opened this up. The violence--and I am going to use the term, economic violence--that we are committing to the working poor in this country seems to get no press. I mean, if you read some of the really geeky economic journals, they are shaking their heads trying to get their heads around why the left is doing what they are doing.

But if I came to you tomorrow and said, tell me the number one policy sin that is going on right now that crushes the working poor. The classic definition of the working poor is they may not have finished high school. That is

their labor is their value, it is what they sell.

It turns out, when you open up the borders--we have some amazingly detailed studies, and these are studies from years ago, back when Democrats actually believed in locking down the borders to protect working men and women. Remember these days, it was only like a decade and a half ago, where Republicans were accused of being owned by the Chamber of Commerce and wanting cheap labor, and Democrats were going to protect working men and women? Until all of a sudden it seems to reverse.

And I just desperately wish this place actually used basic economic theory to create policies instead of sort of having a meeting and saying, okay, this year you guys take that side, we will take this side. It is just absurd what is going on.

We have a number of studies that talk about when you flood the market with folks with similar skill sets. So you basically--if you are part of the working poor, what do you sell? You sell your labor. And this is the right board, sorry.

When you open up the border, we are actually looking at a reduction in wages by 6.2 percent. But why this is so harsh is some of the papers say it is going to last for a decade. What is going on at the U.S. border right now is, you are kicking the heads in of the working poor in this country for the next decade.

I know that doesn't fit the talking heads' language that you see on cable television or the rhetoric around here, but you can't sort of give speeches and say you care and then engage in policies that crush the value of their labor because you make them compete against potentially millions of those with similar skill sets.

And you start to take a look at what we did this last year, where there was peak unemployment for those skill sets. Now, if you happen to be a computer programmer this last crappy year, actually you did just fine. If you are someone who your skill set was you could work from home, you survived.

If you happened to be part of the population that you had not finished high school, you were in the 21-plus-percent unemployment area. It turns out the very populations that were most crushed by the pandemic are the very ones we are turning around and kicking their heads in again by opening up the border.

Is it compassionate? Is it truly loving?

When I hear speeches from my friends on the left saying, well, we are opening up the borders to be compassionate. How about the millions and millions and millions of our brothers and sisters here who may not have had the opportunities that those in this body have had? And we are going to make them compete with similar skill sets and millions of new arrivals.

And it turns out, if you actually look at the math, it is African Americans, particularly in urban areas, that you have just--that this body has just--by this President's policies, have crushed their future earning power, have made the value of their labor much less and it is not short term.

If you read the studies, we have a whole decade now of loss from where we were in 2018 and 2019, we have just wiped out that progress and the previous several years of progress. You would think this place would actually care about things like that.

No. Because what is going to happen is the left's economic policies aren't, hey, we need revenues for this spending, and being extra creative with where those revenues come from.

Remember, I have come to this floor multiple times and said, if we need a trillion dollars for infrastructure, I can show you where you can cut a trillion dollars in spending, stop subsidizing the rich.

Stop subsidizing the very top 1 percent. Stop subsidizing their flood insurance on their third home on the beach. Stop buying them subsidies for their Teslas, for their electric car, and for their solar panels.

If you take a look, Mr. Speaker, this is one of the great perversities we have here in policy, is the left wants to raise taxes on the rich and then on the other hand, hand it back to them in subsidies for other things they buy. I assume this is purely political.

This is, hey, I am giving you something, vote for me. Then you are able to tell your base, hey, look here, I went out and taxed the rich.

But from an economic standpoint, this is an absurd thing to do. This is economically distorting, and this is almost a type of political exploitation.

Why don't you just go straight, Mr. Speaker?

Don't do the economic extortions. Stop subsidizing, and stop sending the money out the door.

What is fascinating is I have done that speech now three times on the floor. I have sat down with a couple of my Ways and Means Democrat friends, walked them through the binder on all the things we do to subsidize the wealthy, and they just look at me, shrug, and say, Well, I don't know how we would sell that.

It is crazy. But it shows you, Mr. Speaker, the perversity of policy here.

So this becomes the policy being offered by the left: Let's raise corporate taxes.

Okay. Well, besides the international tax that we seem to be signing onto that is going to make the United States one of the most uncompetitive nations in the world, we are also about to do something where raising the corporate tax in the first 24 months we lose 1 million jobs.

So, Mr. Speaker, do you remember how we were talking about we need that robust economy and we need the robust labor market, but Democrats get their tax policies, just the corporate tax will unemploy in the first 24 months 1 million Americans.

So we start to take a look at--and this is a little complex to try to show on a board, we are going to have to spend more time on it to try to explain. But this is a whole bunch of the revenue side that the Democrats are proposing, and this is the spending.

The problem is much of the revenue here is a fraud. It is not real. So, Mr. Speaker, you start looking at the tax compliance. We can give you some proposals, and we have been trying for years, saying use data. You can cover much that of that tax gap by using data, not hiring 80,000--think of that, 80,000, that is twice as many as the entire Coast Guard--80,000 new unionized IRS employees to go out and chase people for the taxes when it turns out we have these supercomputers in your pocket, and there is data out there that would let you match instantly saying: Is this person telling us the truth?

It would be dramatically less intrusive, because for this to work, the Democrats actually have a proposal where you are going to turn every bank account into an IRS employee. Mr. Speaker, you do understand, if you look at the Democrats' revenue proposal, my transactions, my bank balances, my ins and outs, go to the IRS.

This march towards totalitarianism is on every one of these aspects. So it is not enough to just make up fake numbers of what the revenues are going to be. It is inherently intrusive, and it won't work. You will get lots of data, Mr. Speaker, that you can functionally use against the American people, but it is not the data that is actually going to get you the revenues, because for these who are really rich, tomorrow they will just move their money or their currency, they will do a crypto, they will do that type of token type of transaction, and it will be the rest of the American public that just gets crushed by this intrusion.

So let's actually sort of dig a little bit more into this so it is understood. Lots and lots of the experts out there, many are just the columnists. If you take a look, Mr. Speaker, some of them who are actually on the left are making it very clear that the Democrats' revenue proposals are a fraud. They are making things up.

These are just some snippets of many of the articles that are out there, and they are calling it bipartisan. But there was a promise.

Do you remember? The big promise from the President and Speaker Pelosi is: We are going to pay for these things.

No, they are not. Let me show you, Mr. Speaker, how devious this stuff is. So President Trump a couple years ago--and many of us weren't thrilled with the model--proposed a rebate back to the consumers.

So you buy a pharmaceutical, the purchasing managers in the background who buy it from the manufacturer and get it to your pharmacy get a rebate. They take that rebate and use part of it to buy down the price of the drug. Then it is sold at the retail counter, and you get a lower price.

President Trump's proposal was to take that and not buy down the price of the drug; therefore, it would actually raise the drug cost a little bit to Government, but the consumer would get that rebate at the retail counter. This is the simplest way to describe it. It is a little complex.

This is the way it works over here. The Democrats said: Oh, no. We hate this.

I have a whole list of quotes from Speaker Pelosi and the Biden team saying that this will never become policy and this will never become law.

Well, if it was never going to become law, how can the Democrats turn around and tell us that they are going to use the money from that program as one of their pay-fors?

It was like $180 billion. This is not law, and it is not policy. It was a proposal. But somehow if you look at the list of the pay-fors from the left, Mr. Speaker, they put $180 billion and say: Hey, we will just take this fake, magical money and use that to buy our friends.

Is this the new and improved way?

Mr. Speaker, you wonder why the American people when they start to understand the scam that are so many of these spending tax proposals why they are becoming so cynical.

I put up this board, because I want to call it the cliff that it is. Here is one of the other great scams that is in the Democrats spending proposals, how they get the scores to work.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask for my time.

I am sorry if I sound a little cranky, but I have had a lot of coffee. As you know, Mr. Speaker, at a certain point when you start to stack this stuff up it just breaks your heart, because we are better than the games we are playing right now. Please trust me, if Republicans were doing this, I would be, and I have been, when we have tried doing these sorts of things I have been every bit as aggressive.

So here is the scam so the public understands this: There are things like PAYGO where, hey, if a program goes more than 5 years, it has to be paid for.

So, Mr. Speaker, what if you create a multi-multi-multibillion dollar program, and then on the fifth year you just pretend it comes to an end?

Hey, we are just going to drop it. It doesn't really exist. Wink, wink, nod, nod.

We know a future Congress will have to extend it, because it have will have a constituency, but that way when it is scored, it scores within--and we don't have to pretend that we just created another program that has no funding and, therefore, continues to explode that debt.

This is actually what the Democrats are doing, and much of the spending is the creating games.

So earlier this year we created things like the childcare tax credit extension. Republicans really want to work on this, because particularly if we can target it to help the working poor there is a much more uncomfortable conversation, but we need to have it because, as you know, Mr. Speaker, the United States has a collapsing fertility rate. We actually now functionally don't have enough children to cover our debts. Oddly enough, that has a huge impact on future economic robustness.

How do we make it so you can afford to have a family?

So the left has actually created a thing here where it costs functionally $100 billion this year. In the proposal, it would cost $1.3 trillion to do this the way the Democrats are spending money over the 10 years.

So how do they make that score work?

How do they not have to say: Well, just the childcare credit is $1.3 trillion of spending over 10 years. They just pretend it stops. They get a few years out, and then they just drop it.

You are really going to take the populace of the United States, start sending them a check every month, and then pretend it is going to stop?

That is the example. There are bunches of these examples. As a matter of fact, they did it with SCHIP years ago where on the sixth year the program was just supposed to disappear, and that is how they were so giddy they could get it to work with PAYGO.

You wonder why the public realizes this place is almost operating like scam artists. If we allowed someone outside this building to do things like that, we would put them in jail.

Mr. Speaker, there are a couple of other things here. There are ways to find revenues to cover the infrastructure spending. I believe those of us on the more conservative side, we can show you places to cut spending and, therefore, not create the distortions.

You all saw the report, though I am sure my brothers and sisters on the left will avoid ever saying it out loud, that the actual capital gains tax hike on its own loses $33 billion in the 10 years, that it is not until you start to play games with something called bases.

Well, Mr. Speaker, have you ever thought about what a capital gains tax actually is? Okay. We are going to tax you for the gain you have in your value, the profit you made. What happens when the house you have, the piece of real estate, the other things you own--it is not appreciation. It is called inflation.

You do realize that is one of the great scams going on at this moment. As your house goes up in value, as other things go up in value, and we are going to get this much larger capital gains tax, then we are going to remove a bunch of what they call the bases. We are going to cap what you can subject to the lower tax rate.

You do realize that we are going to tax Americans on the higher price from inflation, not the actual purchasing power of it getting more valuable.

Let's do an example of your home. Now, you are a single person. You own a home, and it goes up by half a million dollars. You have just done incredibly well. That first $250,000 of gain--it is called once in a lifetime though you get to use it, I think, every 5 years--is exempt. But that other $250,000, you will have to pay capital gains tax on.

How much of that gain is appreciation? You bought a house in the right neighborhood. You exploded in value. But the next house you are going to buy, didn't it also go up similar in value, similar in cost? Was it inflation?

You will pay tax and now extraordinarily high tax rates, if the Democrats get their proposal, on that gain. It is a certain level of cruelty.

The last thing I want to touch on is, if our body here really wants to have an honest discussion about infrastructure and its true needs in our society--I have not seen the details of the so-called bipartisan agreement in the Senate, but the devil is always in the details.

I have a couple of examples here. If we are really going to do this, we need to sort of figure out if the Democrats really want infrastructure, particularly even green infrastructure. Do we really want it, or do we just want to put up a whole lot of cash that, ultimately, basically goes to environmental groups and that, ultimately, just goes to lawyers?

Let me give you an example. For us out in the Southwest, there is this area of New Mexico--I guess the way it is phrased is that they have this tremendous wind asset. It is one of the greatest wind production areas in all of North America.

Fifteen years ago, California said, hey, we really want some of that clean energy from that wind area in New Mexico. We will help invest in it. We will buy a forward on it. We will contract to buy this. We are at 15 years now, and the power line still isn't permitted because of all the environmental reviews, all the different jurisdictions.

If you are really trying to decarbonize the power grid, are the Democrats willing to stop funding the lawyers and the environmental groups that make their living off the litigation and NEPA study after NEPA study? Those are environmental studies.

We have a case here. It is referred to as SunZia power line. You can go online and look it up. It started in 2006, and some of the documents out there say they will finally get their permits in 2023 or 2025.

This isn't unique. There are lots of occasions like this where an area where you want to build wind, solar, even some geothermal, you can't get it permitted.

Don't you see the absurdity? We are going to put up all this money for infrastructure, particularly even from the Democrats, the green infrastructure, but we are not going to change the laws because the left is the beneficiaries of so much money from the environmental left and the trial lawyers and the lawyers that sue on this stuff.

We need to put a clock on this. Look, I know this hits a little close to home for some of our East Coast folks. But when it becomes an upheaval over doing ocean-based windmills off part of the East Coast here--and a lot of the very, very wealthy leftists are the very ones who cry and complain, saying you can't put this in part of our view, which really isn't part the view if you actually looked at the data.

We have to decide. Things like this Vineyard Wind project, which, I guess, is--actually, I am embarrassed to say that I have the map on my wall. I guess it is off the coast of Rhode Island. They have been fussing over that for a decade now.

Do the Democrats truly want this clean energy? For us in the desert Southwest, in the afternoons, because of our photovoltaic inventory, we produce too much power. We are now having to have really creative discussions of, in the afternoon, when power rates crash to almost nothing, should we convert it into hydrogen and make that storage?

You all saw the incredible article last week in The Wall Street Journal about the new iron to rust batteries. They are very, very heavy, so they don't work in vehicles but could be incredibly inexpensive, efficient storage. This is wonderful. But that is for those of us who live in the desert, where we have lots of sunshine and photovoltaic is pretty efficient.

But if you want to transmit that power someplace, are the Democrats going to step up and help someone like myself, who is just trying to do a piece of legislation that would put this permitting on a clock for it to get capital, for you to raise money, for investors to participate, for you to plan the power grid?

You can't have it where the power line for that wind farm you wanted takes 15 to 20 years to get the power.

I guess my little passion here is I am incredibly skeptical on the pay-fors. Even if it passes, unless we are willing to change the bureaucratic bottlenecks that have been created, you are not seeing much of this change in the power grid for a couple of decades.

Do we continue to tell the public the fantasy? Or do you step up and say: Hey, I am going to do the hard things. I am going to change these timelines. I am going to have to say no to some of my trial lawyer contributors. I am going to have to put this on a clock so everyone gets a chance to share their concerns for it to be properly environmentally reviewed.

It doesn't take 20 years to do a line siting. If the left is willing to do that, then they will get some credibility that they really are serious. If they are not willing to do that, then you understand much of the talk about the green revolution and the energy base is a fraud. It is theater. It is pandering because we will say: Hey, look at all this money, but you can't move the generation.

It is real, and we have example after example after example.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate you tolerating a bit of my tirade tonight. As we often joke to whoever is in the chair, I used to get put in that chair when I made John Boehner mad, so I got to be in the chair a lot at night.

But the things I shared tonight, they don't need to necessarily be partisan. They are math. They are process. They are the bottlenecks that keep many of the things we actually can agree upon from happening.

But this place is so weaponized right now that if I say it is black, the other side has to say it is white. It has just become a dysfunctional body.

If our goal is to make the working poor less poor, if it is to make our society much more prosperous, if it is to provide optionality in our energy, we know it has to be done, but we have to be willing, not to necessarily engage in the theater side but maybe actually engage in the proof we have of what has worked and what hasn't.

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