Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, this is actually something we try to do about once a week, come in here and actually sort of talk about our unified theory in our office: What do we do to, basically, keep our promises?

Here is a thought experiment.

Social Security and Medicare are two of the greatest fragilities we have in our society because we are getting older very fast. Remember, we have talked about this over and over and over. In about 8\1/2\ years, 50 percent of the spending in this body, less interest, will be to those 65 and up.

How do you make the math work? And in an intellectual, lazier time, you would get some that would say: Well, we could raise taxes here or we can do entitlement reform here.

Well, it turns out that math really actually doesn't work anymore. Now, we actually have to do everything to make the math work. So we have been trying to actually sell this concept that it is economic growth, and within economic growth it is how we design our tax system, how we design trade, how we design our regulatory environment, how we actually do population

stability--and this one actually gets complicated.

You saw the article in The Wall Street Journal today about what has happened to U.S. birth rates. How do you encourage family formation, but also how do you deal with the immigration system that maximizes a talent-based immigration system to maximize that economic velocity?

Remember, this is about us having a vibrant enough economy so we can keep our promises, but within that, we also have some other issues. How do you do what we call labor force participation?

Countries like Japan and some in Western Europe are dealing with how they get those who are older, and if they are healthy and want to, how they create incentives to actually say: Are you willing to stay in or come back into the labor force?

We actually have this quirky math here in our country of millennial males. In December, we started to see this breakthrough of millennial females entering the workforce. We still actually have a whole bunch of millennial males who are missing in the workforce who should be there. How do we build a society that encourages participation in that labor force?

It turns out, if you actually look at a lot of our economic data, from the Joint Economic Committee to the Joint Committee on Taxation, when they talk about what are the barriers for us to be able to keep growing and continue this actually incredibly robust cycle we are having right now, it is capital stock.

Well, actually, the numbers since tax reform have been dramatically healthier than we modeled for, with folks having savings, and that savings actually becoming lendable capital. You actually can see that in just nationwide interest rates.

The second fragility that was being written about was labor force participation, and we now live in a society where we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs and no workers. So who would have ever thought a couple years ago you would live in a society with more job openings than available workers?

This is a wonderful problem, but it actually does genuinely become a barrier to economic growth, and it is something we have to find a way to deal with.

Part of this is actually really optimistic, though, as we started to see in the data over the last several months the number of business organizations and others who are taking a chance on people, hiring right out of correctional facilities, making accommodations for our brothers and sisters who may have a personal impairment, a personal handicap; and we actually see that in some of the Social Security disability numbers of individuals actually moving into the labor force.

So, look, this is just our unified theory.

Today, we are actually going to start to talk about technology, which is one of our five pillars, and how aggressive I believe the adoption of technology has to be to keep the economic growth going.

We have done lots of floor time over the last couple months on the healthcare technology, the revolution that I believe, our office believes, some of the people we work with believe, that is about to happen and the ability for you to take care of yourself, the wearables--the kazoo you blow into that instantly tells you if you have the flu, to the other side of the spectrum, the single shot cure for hemophilia--and how do we finance those types of disruptions.

Wouldn't it be amazing if this body were no longer having the, actually, in some ways, insane debate we have had for decades about who gets subsidized, who gets to pay in healthcare, and started actually talking about what we pay and how we are going to cure our brothers and sisters who have chronic conditions? We all know, the 5 percent of Americans with those chronic conditions are well over half of our healthcare spending.

So what happens when we actually bring cures to market? And then our obligation: How do we finance them so we roll them out as fast as possible?

But today, we are going to talk about another fixation of mine, and that is environment issues.

I wish I had a more delicate way to talk about this. Often, the discussion around here is almost Malthusian, saying the pie is only so big. If you care about global warming, if you care about greenhouse gases, we must shrink the economy; we must get individuals to drive less; we must generate less power; we must do these types of things.

And a decade or so ago, maybe that was a legitimate view, but they have missed an entire technology revolution that is going on around us, and there should be optimism in this body that, if you are someone who cares about greenhouse gases in our national and world environment, the revolution is here, and it is a technology one.

How does this body start to remove the barriers that have slowed down the adoption of this clean generation, these alternative generations that are in our marketplace? A simple thought: solar generation.

I hope I get this story, which is coming out of New Mexico, correct. They wanted to run a power line to Arizona. They have been working on the power transmission lines for a dozen years.

We have seen the discussion in the upper Midwest. I believe it is Iowa, with wind generation, finally figuring it out and saying maybe we can run the power lines in the railroad right-of-way because we want this power to make it to Illinois. That is where the demand is, and over here is where the clean generation is.

These are things we often don't think about. It is not enough to have the technology. How do you get the power to where it needs to be consumed? We have never fixed the bureaucratic barriers to moving that power.

It is like some of the discussions we have had in our office. A couple of years ago, we did a math experiment. A pipeline in west Texas, a pipeline loop that would capture methane so you didn't have to flare it off, had a really impressive calculation in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, but it requires permitting a pipeline.

I need us to remove some of our ideological blinders and think of pro-growth, pro-environment, pro-effectiveness. We have to be willing to change the permitting system and so much of the litigation and bureaucracy that slows these things down.

We are going to walk through a couple of these boards, just because I think there is incredible optimism out there.

This one I am sort of thrilled with. This is a chart that talks about battery efficiency. For those of you that geek out on this stuff with me, you probably all saw the article--I think it was April 1--on some new solid-state battery technology. It looks like they finally have a major breakthrough on what we call power density.

This chart here, do you see that coming down? That is the cost of battery storage. It is a remarkable reduction.

In Arizona, we have our largest and best utility, Arizona Public Service. When you read some of the articles that are going on right now with them, the amount of solar that is now in their portfolio, they have baseline nuclear and now the holy grail. What happens when you live in the desert Southwest as I do? I am blessed to live in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. We produce lots of solar.

Into the peak of the afternoon, California now produces so much alternative solar generation that they can't use it all. On some days, they paid Arizona to buy it off them.

What happens when a company like APS gets really creative and says: How do we have solar power at night when, if you live in the Phoenix area, you are still running your air-conditioner into the evening? It turns out the battery investment is about to bring solar generation into the hours it is dark because they will store it. If you design that type of battery storage that holds for about 4 hours, you get us through the peak.

It is referred to as the duck curve. If you see the back of a duck, we have all this production, and then it collapses. Yet, we still have all this demand. How do you cover that gap?

In the past, we used peaking power plants, fire them up to cover those few hours. Now, with what is happening with battery storage, it is here.

Our privately owned utility in Arizona, APS, recently did an RFP or RFQ. The numbers that came back

were remarkably competitive. It is happening.

When on this floor we discuss global warming, greenhouse gases, and what we are going to do in alternative generation, it is here. We just need to understand what is happening right around us.

How do you keep curves like this line continuing? When we are reading that there is a breakthrough in battery technology, how do we remove barriers so that technology rolls out and becomes part of what we do here in the United States and around the world?

Here is something else. I am blessed to be on the Ways and Means Committee. Last year, we updated a tax credit mechanism for carbon sequestration. It turns out that we have multiple facilities now that were an experiment, but they are growing. They are about to go to large-scale commercial where they capture all the carbon.

This first one, I believe this is the NET Power facility outside Houston. It is a natural gas-fired facility, so they are using a hydrocarbon and they have no smokestack. They capture not only the manmade CO2, but they even capture any other gas throw-off.

The remarkable design is that they throw a little oxygen. They heat it up, and heat it really, really hot. They use that to spin the turbines. Then they cool it down and pull out the CO2 and then use that to sell for other purposes. They don't have a smokestack.

This technology is up and running today. The proof of concept is done. Now we are heading toward, I believe, a fairly substantial expansion in the scale of the facility.

This was research that has been going on for years. Those of us here in this body, a year ago, we updated the carbon sequestration tax credits. It is paying off.

The next one is another facility that is also in Texas. This one was really an interesting experiment because, in many ways, it broke through a bit of folklore.

It sits right next to an existing coal-fired generation facility. It is a coal-fired carbon capture plant. They are spinning the turbines, burning coal, and they capture the carbon.

It was only 2 or 3 years ago when we had witnesses around here saying this sort of technology would not work. It is up and running today.

There should be joy and optimism around this place because the ability to basically say, for the hydrocarbons we have, what happens if we can use them to help us through this transition of time and we are capturing the CO2? This is wonderful.

Let's go even further. If we are going to continue the thought experiment, you have already seen the United States do some pretty remarkable reductions. Most of it has come from natural gas, but there have been some pretty remarkable reductions in our CO2 production.

A lot of the rest of the world hasn't even come close. For the number of new coal-fired plants moving in Southeast Asia, part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, they are not going to have the types of capture technology we have here in the United States.

We have to have a worldwide strategy. I am one of those who has been really excited because I have been following a facility that is going up in Canada. It looks like they have succeeded in the breakthrough of mining the air to pull CO2 out of it. Mathematically, we had lots of smart people saying this is absurd, that you are not going to be able to do it.

We had a very smart professor in Arizona at Arizona State University who had been working on sort of a carbon capture artificial tree. This technology is rolling out. It is under production right now, and they are moving up to industrial scale. The amazing thing is, they think they can do it for about $100 a ton, which is remarkable if you have actually played the math game. This is for the new facility.

What happens if they start to break that curve? If you understand that carbon that has been captured, to have the ability to refine it and do other things, even make another fuel source out of it?

The other thing is, think about the article we hopefully all saw last week about what the Dutch are doing. The Dutch are basically about to take a depleted oil field and take carbon that they have captured and shove it back in the ground and sequester it.

All of a sudden, it is a negative calculation. In this place, in a lot of the debate, for a lot of the witnesses we have had in previous years, the concept of mining and having negative emissions was considered absurd. It is here. The technology is here.

This is a facility that has, apparently, really smart, really wealthy people investing in it because they are so excited about the technology. We need to understand that there is optimism out here.

How do we get ourselves up to date on the cutting-edge technology? How do we move it forward and promote it?

We also need to understand that the theater that we engage in here often is not good math. I wish I had a more recent date, but the latest we could find is 2015 on this.

Do you see the yellow bar on the side? That is all the photovoltaic solar that rolled out in 2015. It was an impressive year. There were fairly aggressive subsidies, State, local, and Federal.

Do you see the other bar chart next to it? That was all the nuclear that went offline that year.

The reality of it is, in 2015, if you were thinking about power generation in the United States that did not produce CO2 and you were joyful that this much solar hit the grid, understand that almost the equal amount of nuclear came off the grid. We were peddling in place.

We need to be honest about the math, and we need to be honest about that baseload nuclear being really, really important if you care about this issue.

There are a couple of quirky things I wanted to throw out here. This one is just fun. It is sort of an odd thought experiment.

In the desert Southwest and mountain Southwest, uranium mining has always been a dodgy issue. We need it. We know we need it. We need it for everything from our X-rays to refining and refining and refining for a nuclear power plant.

In previous decades, we have been able to take very high grades and step it down, but that was some of the excess that was out there after the Cold War. That stock has been substantially used up. So what are we going to do?

There is a technology breakthrough of mining seawater for uranium. We should be joyful and pushing these technologies. They solve some of the moving problem of wanting nuclear generation but where are we going to get the uranium? How are we going to step it up? It turns out, even on that, the technology has moved forward.

Look at other little thought experiments. How many of us in high school with Popular Science magazine used to get excited about how you generate power from ocean waves? It turns out that a new design is rolling out. It is sort of a bobbing power generation. It exists now, and it works. It is much more robust than anything that has ever been designed.

We should be joyful and trying to promote more of this type of technology, but we have to deal with how you bring the power in from the shore. All of a sudden, you have a whole other layer of regs, rules, and permitting.

You want clean power. We all want it, but we have to deal with the bureaucratic malaise, mess, and blocks that stop us from being able to pull this type of new power generation into our communities and our country.

What is exciting about that is that is a type of power generation that, if we make it work, it can be all over the world. Being someone who, as a younger man, trekked Indonesia, Vietnam, lots of India, and Sri Lanka, think about most of the world's population living near coastal communities. Wouldn't that be exciting?

Why aren't we promoting these types of technologies? We need to get rid of this Malthusian mindset that the pie is only so big, that we can cut it only so many ways, that once you cut it those ways, there is never an opportunity for it to grow.

There are still people who believe that the 1968 book ``The Population Bomb'' was real. The only thing they got accurate was the author's name.

We need to understand there is a technology breakthrough happening around us, in particularly power generation. But if you want to have a revolution--and I am sort of banking on being one of the first people to talk

about this because this one is really disruptive, but it is worth the thought experiment.

For anyone who might be watching or having an interest in this Google, ``photosynthesis 40 percent''. Read the complete articles that have been written.

Madam Speaker, you remember your high school biology class talking about plants and plant cells having a certain inherent inefficiency, where there is a flaw that has been there for millions and millions of years where it reaches out and grabs the oxygen molecule when it should have grabbed the carbon molecule.

Through some synthetic biology they fixed the inefficiency. It now will reach over and grab the carbon molecule every time. All of a sudden it means a 40 percent efficiency in growth.

So, what happens tomorrow when crops require 40 percent less water, 40 percent less land, and 40 percent less fuel?

What does it mean to the world?

Thought experiment: I need you to take it a step further. World agriculture represents 2.2 times the total greenhouse gases of every automobile on Earth. Just adopting this plant technology in our agriculture equals removing every car off the face of the Earth.

As this rolls out, how fast would it take to change the seed stock around the world?

There are solutions, and they are not always a linear thought. They sometimes require some creativity. Let's face it. We work in a math- free zone that also lacks creativity. This exists. This is rolling out. It is a revolution.

Yes, it is going to be incredibly disruptive to agriculture around the world. It is going to be incredibly disruptive.

At the same time, what happens when you want to plant trees and you can grow them 40 percent more efficiently, and they are just little carbon capture machines?

This is here. We should be excited about it.

The last one is just more of the thought experiment of trying to say, if we really care, we need to stop the theater that seems to be what happens behind these microphones and actually understand the problem, understand the math, and then focus on that solution. Because often around here I believe a solution is a problem for us because the very thing that we got elected on, that we love coming and complaining about, oh, dear heaven, what happens if we solve it?

So let's actually talk about something that is part of our pop culture right now, but it is a real issue. For someone like myself, I grew up scuba diving. I love scuba diving, and I have been blessed to do it in a lot of really neat places. Ninety percent of the plastic in the world's oceans come from 10 rivers. Eight of these rivers are in Asia, and two of those rivers are in Africa.

Ninety percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers. If you give a darn about plastic in the ocean, banning straws in your community is theater. It is absurd math. It may make you feel better and get you in the local newspaper, but you didn't do anything.

This body here immediately should figure out what aid programs we have, what research, what we can do to go to those 10 rivers that are 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean and help, instead of complaining about it and instead of doing a nice video of going out and saying, I am going to pick up plastic off a beach.

No. If you care, it is 10 rivers, we know where the problem is. If you really want to have an impact, go where it is coming from. This is a simple example of we talk, talk, talk, talk, and talk around this place, but if we solve it, then we don't get to actually talk about it. But solving is the most ethical thing we can do as a body.

Policy that is made with math and policy that is made with facts can do amazing things for our country, my 3-year-old little girl, and for this world. Policy around here that is done by folklore, by an anecdote, and by feelings, time and time again, when we look back, it may have been well-intended, but ultimately it hurts people.

If we get our math right, if we actually understand the underlying basis of a problem, figure out an honest solution that continues to grow our economy and continues to provide opportunities instead of this sort of constant Malthusian echo around here that says that we can't grow anymore, we can't do this--they are wrong, and the folks who embrace that philosophy have been wrong for centuries now.

There are technology breakthroughs happening all around us. You actually saw the latest one on this. Finally, we have broken the code on a plastic that truly breaks down. Let's incentivize that. There are solutions. This body is an honorable body, but it needs to become one about solutions instead of theatrics.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 35 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, May 16, 2019, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, one of the things we are going to do tonight is touch on some of the numbers that have substantially come out since last Thursday and Friday, and then even more numbers that came out yesterday and today. This is sort of the continuation of the theme that we have been doing since the very beginning of the year, a theme of what do we as a society have to do to keep our promises.

The number of times--and I don't want to be too snarky--that we will have Members come behind these microphones or in our committees and want to do policy by anecdote--because telling stories is great. They make people happy. It is easy to understand. But it is not math. It is not public policy.

We have to stop trying to make public policy by feelings, by impressions, by stories, and start doing it by the numbers because the numbers ultimately make our lives better when we get it right.

The greatest fragility in our society right now, if you look, is the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. We have a moral obligation to keep our promises, but the only way mathematically we keep our promises is to do a handful of things. It turns out, by doing this handful of things, my 3\1/2\-year-old little girl has a great future, and the person who is a baby boomer who has moved into retirement also has a stable future.

We have been doing this every week, our five elements of economic growth of things that would provide population stability, dealing with the benefits and incentives to stay in the workforce, technology disruptions, how there is a revolution coming in healthcare through technology and these drugs that are curative, how we are going to finance those and bring those into society, so that we stop having the debate on who pays in healthcare but what we pay. We have this ability to have this disruption.

Then the other thing is what we do to continue the employment cycle, keeping people in the labor force, encouraging others to enter it. We are going to walk through some of those different numbers.

The crazy thing is this stuff shouldn't be Republican or Democrat. This should be society's goal, that growth is moral because it provides opportunity.

I want to walk through a couple of things that have happened in the last few days. Think about the data we received last Friday. If you love and care about people, if you go back and look at some of the economists' writings from just a couple of years ago about our brothers and sisters who didn't graduate high school, who didn't have any particular technical skill sets, we had written them off as being part of the permanent underclass in our communities and our society. Yet that is the very quartile that right now is having the fastest movement in their wages.

How do we keep that going? How do we keep that going as long as possible?

The jobs report, the unemployment reports we received, was amazing. We are hitting a trend where we are basically breaking all the rules. Those of us who grew up reading this stuff, the textbooks have to now be rewritten.

This is moral. This is something both someone on the liberal side and conservative side should have joy about the fact of the matter is that populations we had thought were going to be functionally part of the permanent underclass in our society are now seeing opportunity.

If this body was doing its actual work, we would be fixated on how we keep it going and keep it going for as long as possible.

Let's walk through some of the things this economic growth is providing. I will openly admit that this slide is out of scale because of the margin on it, but what is important is the first 6 months of 2017--and that is the fiscal year, so October on is the beginning of the fiscal year--the first 6 months of 2017 and then the first 6 months of this fiscal year, prior to tax reform, after tax reform.

One of these days, I keep being told by my staff it would be far too snarky to bring up here and just read the quotes that were said about what would happen to the economy with tax reform, to read the quotes of what would happen with employment and tax reform, what would happen to Federal receipts with tax reform.

Guess what has happened? The first 6 months of this fiscal year, the first 6 months of 2017--the reason we do 2017 is the first 6 months of the 2018 fiscal year straddled part with tax reform, part without-- revenues were up.

They are not up a lot. It is about $10 billion. But the technical term is receipts are actually up.

Do we get an apology from all those folks who basically got it wrong or just a recognition that something amazing is happening right now and we should be joyful?

So what is happening? Why revenue shortfalls compared to our spending?

If you want to dig in, a year ago, spending on defense--but also, we have to deal with the reality that, from 2008 to 2028, 91 percent of the spending increase is going to be interest, Social Security, healthcare entitlements. In 8.5 years, two workers, one retiree. In 8.5 years, 50 percent of the spending coming through this body less interest will be to those 65 and older.

Demographics are not a partisan issue. They are just math. The fastest growing population in our society is those of us getting older, and somehow this body is trying to turn it into something partisan.

The fact of the matter is, if you go back to the end of 2017, the modeling said a 0.4 percent growth in GDP over those 10 years. It would pay for itself. Yet the base, the size of the overall economy, would be dramatically larger, meaning more of our brothers and sisters having jobs, opportunities, and economic vitality.

Guess what has happened so far? The chart is a little hard to read, but if you look at the green, which is 2019, and you start to see where our mean GDP growth is, you start to understand how far we have come on that 0.4 percent economic expansion in GDP growth with the tax reform.

We are only 1.5 years into it. A year and a half isn't a complete sample size of a 10-year tax policy, but at some point, where is the joy? If you claim you care about the working men and women of the country, and you care about people's economic vitality, and you care about their economic futures, where is the joy?

Let's start to do a couple of things that should be joyful. Being from the State of Arizona, where I have a fairly substantial Latino population: lowest unemployment in modern history ever in our numbers. There is the chart. Where is the joy?

The fact of the matter is that something is working in our society right now. If you claim you love and care about people, we should be trying to figure out what we are doing right and doing more of it. It is working.

A lot of the really smart people who used to come lecture us and testify to us even a couple of years ago, they got it wrong. They are the same people we are going to invite to come testify in front of us next week, and we will never get around to asking them why they got their math so wrong.

What is the fragility? If you read the joint tax documents when tax reform was being put together, or you think about what the headwinds are, we have known our demographics, one of the biggest headwinds for our society. Within that, if you remember our five points, one of those points is population stability. That means we are going to have to deal with ways to encourage family formation and deal with immigration in a way that brings that population vitality to our society.

The two things that if you go back to the joint tax reports saying the headwinds for economic vitality to work were capital stock, money that was saved that could be loaned out to buy the capital equipment, and those things that were being incentivized, it turns out if you look at the savings rates the last 2 years after tax reform, savings rates are substantially better than anyone modeled.

It is a combination of a lot of things. It is a combination of the population getting older and getting ready for retirement, a population that we just misestimated, the number of businesses that were going to set aside cash. But remember, when those savings are set aside, they become a multiplier effect in the economy because they become lending capital.

As a simple example, take a look at interest rates. Take a look at our interest rates today compared to what was being predicted. This is one of the most unique times in modern history, where we have, functionally, a full employment economy. You all fixated on the numbers that happened today. Let me pull it up. U.S. job openings rebounded sharply in March with 364,000, seasonally adjusted, additional job openings posted up in March.

Functionally, we have a society right now with more jobs available than labor. If I had come and told you that was going to happen a couple of years ago, what would you have thought?

What this chart is basically talking about is labor force participation. As a society, how do we deal with some of that fragility? Because capital stock is working, and the numbers are working, but we are bouncing up against a fragility. That is that we have more jobs than we have available labor.

How do we encourage people to enter the labor force? Should we create certain incentives and things for those who are older to stay in the labor force?

This is one of my last slides here. We started seeing some really interesting numbers if you really break down the data. It started in December. Millennial females have started to substantially move into the workforce. Wonderful.

Why do we have such a lagging effect with millennial males? It is not Republican or Democrat. It is just that there is something we need to try to understand in how we get these populations into the labor force.

Because if we are going to keep our promises--and if you are like I am, where you believe growth is ultimately moral because it provides opportunities, stability, and the ability to plan for our future, we need this growth to continue.

What can we do to help our brothers and sisters out there that, for some barrier, are not entering the labor force?

The other thing we also saw beginning in December, which should make you joyful, is some interesting data of those who would be considered to have a type of handicap moving into the labor force, which was letting us know that businesses were finally making accommodations to draw in that population. That is wonderful.

You could see some of that about 10 days ago, 2 weeks ago. The Medicare-Social Security actuaries did one of their reports. We have a problem, but you also saw Social Security gained an entire year. That means someone out there is paying FICA revenues. But did you see the number for those of our brothers and sisters on Social Security disability?

Some of that is that we changed some rules. We tightened up some of the mechanisms. But a big chunk of that was those who have life challenges were finding opportunities to work. These are good things.

We should, once again, be joyful and figure out, in the partisan divide of this place, not to try to find excuses of, well, this belongs to so-and-so or someone gets credit, but to figure out how to do more of it. Let's do more of it. Then, during the election cycle, we will figure out who gets to take credit for it. We will all take credit for it. But let's do more of the good things.

As we start to look at some of the labor force participation, one of the other things we are also fixated on in our office is that we are trying to really drill down to try to understand some of the demographics.

I am personally fixated with the fact that demographics often have much more impact on what happens in a society's vitality than the policy we make around here.

The fact of the matter is that we have 74 million of our brothers and sisters who are baby boomers. They were born in an 18-year period. Remember, in 8.5 years, they are all 65 and older.

That bubble is the single biggest challenge to this body. How often do you have anyone get behind these microphones and talk about: What are we going to do to create as much economic vitality so we actually have the revenues, the resources, the opportunity, and the adoption of technology to keep our commitments there for those who are still vital and want to stay in the workforce--there are opportunities--and, at the same time, reaching the other direction, as we have seen this unusual number with millennial males, helping them find a path into the labor force?

I know this is a little geeky, but come back to the principle. If we as a society are going to keep our promises on Medicare and we as a society are going to keep our promises on Social Security, it turns out that economic growth--and it is one of only five things, but we are going to have to dramatically change the cost of healthcare. I believe there is technology coming that is going to be the disruption.

As I was saying before, think about the ACA. Most folks know it as ObamaCare, those of us who worked on the Republican alternative. They were debates about who got subsidized and who paid; they were about the financing.

We haven't had a debate about what we as a body are going to do to encourage the technologies and the revolution that is coming to crash the price, and here is the thought experiment.

I have already done multiple presentations here on the floor of the technology that is coming, the thing that looks like a kazoo that you can blow into and instantly tell you if you have the flu. If we will make it legal, it can bounce off the data on your phone, which is your medical records, to make sure you are not allergic to a particular antiviral and could order your antiviral that could be delivered to your house a couple of hours later. How much healthier did we make society?

The other side is that 5 percent of our population is well over 50 percent of all of our healthcare spending. How do we help that 5 percent with chronic conditions live the type of life they deserve?

When you understand that--and I am hopeful it still stays on time-- something like the concept of a single-shot cure for hemophilia, which may be available this November. Now, the shot is going to be really expensive, but a hemophiliac may be about a quarter million dollars a year in their clotting factor and other ancillary costs.

But what sort of revolution is in our society when you start to think about these biological drugs that are cures, what happens to that 5 percent of our society that have chronic conditions and we as a body start to say: Let's stop arguing about the financing side of healthcare and start having this discussion of how we are going to finance the cures that are really expensive but are revolutions to our society and our community?

We have a whole proposal we have been working on on the idea of selling a healthcare bond and then using the future savings to pay for it, but we are going to have to come up with some sort of pricing mechanism because, in many of these pharmaceuticals, it is a one and done.

Even The Wall Street Journal, today, has a discussion about a potential biological drug; $2 million is the discussion price, but it is for this tiny population of very, very young children who have this disease that wastes their body away, and they die within 2 years. It is a moral imperative we find a way to make that drug available.

But what is the economic value of curing such a thing, even though it may be a population of only a few hundred of these children in our society?

These are optimistic, joyful, and powerful opportunities, and this body needs to wake up and stop having the same debate we have been having for 20 or 30 years here because it is now the

wrong debate. It turns out technology has passed us, and so have our demographics.

So what do we do to incentive participation in the economy, particularly when you have an economy with dramatically more jobs than we have available workers?

Here is this last slide. My hat is off to millennial females. They have begun entering the workforce in terrific numbers. If any of them happen to know a millennial male, could you please grab him by the hand and drag him into the workforce.

My wife blames video games. I still haven't seen actual data on this yet.

So my reason for taking some of this time tonight, I actually think there should be some joy out there. For those of us who get behind these microphones and we claim we care about people, there are really good things happening. How do we make more of it happen? How do we make this last as long as possible? Because we as a body, Democrats and Republicans, are in uncharted territory, and we have got to be brutally honest about this. We are in uncharted territory.

If you actually read some of the financial, economic articles over this weekend, lots of really smart economists and businesspeople are talking about having this type of economy with functionally full employment, with populations moving into the labor force at the same time our available workforce is starting to bend pretty dramatically because of baby boomers turning 65, and yet, functionally, no core inflation--if there was ever a time for us to functionally go after a number of societal ills with this type of opportunity to work.

And the last anecdote I am going to give after making fun of anecdotes--well, it is more than an anecdote; it is an observation.

A few months ago, I visited the homeless shelter in Phoenix. It is actually a fairly impressive facility. Over here is St. Joseph the Worker; over here is the dental clinic; over here is where we help you get ID; here is the 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week 12-step meeting.

You walked in and saw St. Joseph the Worker. It is a Catholic charity. I believe it has been around 100-plus years. Their job is to help the most disaffected of our population, of our world find work.

There was a stack of job posts, notes, on top of the desk. Their greatest difficulty was how do they get someone from the homeless campus to that dishwashing job or to the stocking job or these things to get them back into the labor force in our society to begin that nobility of work but also as becoming part of their rehab programs.

We came up with this idea of, well, if transportation is a fragility--we all walk around with these in our pockets, and there are these buttons that you hit and a ride sharing comes up, and many of those very companies will actually provide the service at a fraction of the cost as a societal good.

We need to start thinking through the types of technology that we all use in our lives. How do we make it so that the mother who might be on a Medicaid system can get to her prenatal appointment? the person who has just gone through Goodwill's job training actually can get to their job interview? the person at the homeless campus actually can get to that job?

If you are from Phoenix, Arizona, asking someone to stand out and wait for the bus when it is 110 degrees, you start to understand that maybe we need to come up with a better solution.

I make the argument that we already know the solution. We already use it for ourselves and our children. We now need to start thinking about, if labor force participation is one of our great fragilities for future economic growth and that economic growth helps us take care of our promises, how do we get the most marginalized of our society and make sure they have the same opportunities? So this is one of those moments.

I know I have covered a lot of things, but I get to come behind the microphone. Even with all the sourness that happens around this place, I think there should be some joy because we are seeing our brothers and sisters who had a really tough decade back with some optimism and some options and some hope. Our ethical obligation, I think, is: How do we do more of it?

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

Mr. Chairman, I am probably going to be a little different than some of the folks you are going to have come speak from our side. I actually, though, like the goal that we agreed to, or the President agreed to in 2015.

I believe it is an abdication, though, of our responsibility to actually build what the plan is--we will call it the smorgasbord of options out there--because, if you think about it, once again, it is Congress passing the buck saying, well, here's the goal; let someone else take the blows of it.

So if we are going to have an honest conversation, let's say I am a State that uses heating oil. Heating oil is functionally filthy. Okay. Are you willing to encourage that community, that State, to allow more natural gas extraction, more pipelines so we can actually hit the numbers? Or is it easier passing it on to the White House to let them take the slings and arrows of what it takes policy-wise?

If you actually look at the reality, 2015, the year that President Obama agreed to this, that year, every functioning benefit from all of the solar that was adopted in 2015 was removed because of the amount of nuclear that went offline that year. Are we ready here to step up and say, hey, if we want baseload, clean, non-CO, non-greenhouse emitting, we are going to step up and get this nuclear back online, because it is a type--just that 1 year of the number of nuclear facilities that closed equaled every solar panel in the country that was added.

Are we willing to continue to do as we did in Ways and Means last year, moving forward with carbon sequestration tax credits?

Turns out there is some new amazing technology of mining CO2 right out of the air. There is a utility scale, industrial scale facility going up in Canada now that has broken the Holy Grail on the code on how to do it. These are pro-growth policies that we, as this body, should be adopting, not passing it off to the bureaucracy and the administration to make the hard choices.

Understand, we did some math a couple of years ago that, if we would do a pipeline loop in West Texas to capture methane flare-off, capture that gas and make it--utilize it, it had a huge effect in getting us, like right now, that last 13 points of gap that we have to get in the next 7 years.

How many of my brothers and sisters on the other side are ready to stand up and promote more natural gas, more pipelines, more tax credit mechanisms for carbon sequestration? Those are policy decisions. That is our job here in the House.

Mr. Speaker, let me take a quick moment and sort of get adjusted here.

We are going to spend a couple of minutes walking through some things that I think are exciting, hopeful, and worth getting our heads around.

Every week, I try to come to this microphone when we are here to talk about what I believe makes the future really bright for all of us, everyone from my 3-year-old--or 3\1/2\-year-old, as she corrects me-- little girl to someone who is moving into their retirement years.

Once again, what is the greatest fragility in our society? This is one that is hard for us to get our heads around or even talk about. It is our demographics.

Whether we like it or not, baby boomers are retiring, and we have 74 million baby boomers. The last baby boomer will hit 65 in about 8\1/2\ years.

In 8\1/2\ years, two workers, one retiree. In 8\1/2\ years, 50 percent of our spending from this body, less interest, will be to those 65 and up.

It is demographics. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is demographics.

At the same time, we have a substantial collapse, fall, in our birthrates. As you know, our birthrates now are well below the replacement rates.

What do you do as a society? What do you do as a government? What do we do as a body here that is making public policy to make the future bright?

We keep coming to the floor and talking about that we believe there are, functionally, five elements. It is the adoption of technology. It is the adoption of economic policies that maximize economic growth through tax policy that creates investment in new technology for productivity; immigration policy that maximizes new Americans having talents that help us grow the economy; regulatory policy that uses technology and information to regulate instead of bureaucratic filing in file cabinets, functionally; incentives to stay in the workforce and incentives to enter the workforce.

As we have seen recently, millennial females are moving into the workforce. We still have a problem with millennial males.

How about someone who is older? Can we do certain incentives in Social Security, Medicare, and other earned benefits to encourage staying in the workforce or even creating a second career? We are going to have to redesign a bit of those incentives that are in the current earned benefits.

Can you create some incentives on Social Security, saying, ``If you will continue to work, we are going to do these things?'' Because that labor force participation is so important.

We have worked through these. Now we try to come in and show what we see working in our society. Then, I want to talk a little bit about one of these things, and that is the adoption of technology.

This week, the majority, the Democrats, will have a resolution on the floor about the Paris climate accords. I want to walk a bit through how technology, pro-growth technology, is the solution. I am going to show you some of the really optimistic things happening out there.

Let's start swapping a couple of these boards. First, I apologize for the first slide. The scale is a little off, but it is basically to make a simple point.

I am blessed to be on the Ways and Means Committee. We had the debate in December 2017. Over here, I was hearing how the world was coming to an end, how revenues were going to collapse. It turns out that now we at least have a good, comparable dataset. What is the term? ``Ceteris paribus,'' where you can equal to equal.

In 2017, before there was tax reform, the first 6 months, and now we have the 2019 first 6 months. Guess what? Revenues are up, even though we are already in the tax reform environment.

I was waved off by some much more sensitive staffers. We had a list of quotes from the majority, things they said, their predictions, what their economists said. I am not going to read them.

But do understand, think about some of the crazy things we heard about what tax reform was going to do to the revenues of the country, what it was going to do to the economy, what it was going to do to employment, what it was going to do to labor force participation.

They were all wrong. It is working. Take a look at our economic growth. Take a look at unemployment.

If I had come to you a couple of years ago before tax reform and said our society is going to have more jobs than we have available workers, what would you have said?

But it is reality. It is happening. We are seeing data within what they call the U-6, the underlying parts of the unemployment statistics of our brothers and sisters who have handicaps, who have been long-term unemployed, who have other life difficulties, moving into the labor force.

There should be joy in this body and also joy for the fact that all the predictions were wrong, that revenues are--or ``receipts'' is the proper term. Receipts are up. These 6 months with tax reform compared to the 6 months where we didn't have tax reform, we are taking in more money.

Will we ever get an apology from all those who predicted doom and gloom? Of course not. But could we just have a little bit of joy that they were wrong, that the math is good, that good things are happening in this society?

We need to do more of it because, without the growth, there is no way we will keep our promises on Social Security and Medicare and so many other things. We must have economic growth.

This slide right here I am going to leave here for just a second, this slide here, 2017. We don't use, really, the 2018 fiscal year because the first 6 months had part of it within tax reform, without tax reform. But then the gray you see up here is the 2019 first 6 months. That is what that is.

I know I get teased a lot about the slides, but at some point, if you are talking about math--and substantially, for all of us who are Members here, we work in a math-free zone. It is a sin of both parties because we often try to make public policy by our feelings instead of by our facts.

When we do public policy by feelings, I will make the argument that we hurt people because we intended good stuff, but we just got our facts wrong. Could you imagine if we did more like this where we looked at the real math and the real facts?

This is a month-to-month comparison. It shows you some months it has been a little more, some months it has been a little less. But, overall, $10 billion over 2017. The first 6 months, when you compare them, it is working. It is working.

When you start to look at the revenues that are coming in, in what we call FICA taxes--Social Security, unemployment, Medicare--good things are happening.

You saw it 10 days ago when the Social Security actuaries put out their report. You saw things like Social Security disability go from being incredibly fragile, within just a couple of years of running out of money, to gaining 20 years of actuarial life. Some of that was public policy. Some of that is the fact that people are working.

You see other parts of the program gaining a year's worth of life. That is a big deal when you consider the types of numbers we are talking about. It is working. The growth is providing us, as a body, an opportunity to do positive things for our community, for our country, for our States. Instead, we just seem to banter around here, doing crazy.

Let's walk around a couple of other things. Do you remember the predictions? This was the long-term, freaky-smart economists, particularly on the left but even some of ours on the right, who were predicting before tax reform that the baseline economic growth on the horizon was about 1.9, 1.8. That is where we were going to grow. Also, the math that, over the 10 years, if you wanted to pay for tax reform, we only needed a 0.4 percent growth.

Well, guess what? If you look at this chart and realize, since tax reform, what has happened in the GDP expansion, we are blowing through those numbers.

Now, it is too early to ever make a prediction like, well, the additional productivity, the additional number of folks working, the less demand on social entitlements because there is work, the number of Americans who now have healthcare because they are working and all these good things that are happening in our society.

But the fact of the matter is, if you look at this chart and look at the growth in the size of our economy--and this is a big economy, so when it grows 3 percent, it is a tremendous amount of economic expansion--we are seeing numbers that, once again, these really smart economists were telling us we could not hit.

Where is the joy around here? Whether you are on the left or the right, if you care about people, if you claim you truly love and care about people, the fact is that so many of them have work now and their wages are going up, particularly for our brothers and sisters who are-- sorry to use the geeky term--at the lowest quartiles.

Do you remember the discussions only a couple of years ago that, if someone hadn't finished high school, they were destined to spend their lives on the edge of poverty?

What have we seen in the last dozen months? That that is the quartile having the fastest movement in their wages.

There should be joy that something is breaking out, that something is happening out there when you see another 400,000 manufacturing jobs coming back to the United States.

Remember ``manufacturing is dead''? Except it isn't. We did tax policy that encouraged investment in plants and equipment to raise productivity.

Why is that so important? When someone gets a wage increase, when you pay an American more money, what is the classic economic formula? It is inflation plus an improvement in productivity. Wages go up according to inflation and productivity.

What happens when American businesses, particularly in the manufacturing side, across the country are buying new plants and equipment because of the incentives in tax reform? All of a sudden, we are starting to see it is working. Spiking of productivity is happening.

We have a labor shortage. Wages are going up. Shouldn't there be joy that the brothers and sisters out there who were being written off by the really smart economists just a couple of years ago are back and good things are happening?

To be a little bit gratuitous, I know these are hard to read, but if you just look at the trend lines on the employment chart and think about some of the other different quartiles, when we geek out on the Joint Economic Committee, and those of our brothers and sisters who are Hispanic or African American or females or other quartiles, where we try to break down and see what is happening in employment statistics, we are hitting numbers that we have never hit before in our society. Something is working.

How much happy talk have you heard around here? In many ways, is it just the nature of this institution is just the rage-based politics that we bathe in today? There are good things happening. We should be working on public policy to make more of this happen and more of this so this continues, so we are a society of opportunity.

So this one is just sort of looking at--I want to double-check myself. This one I put up just because it was a fascinating breakout, and this was actually more from last December and then looking at what is happening.

We had actually been having something called a labor force participation issue. It is sort of a geeky way of saying, for a society to grow, you often need two components.

You need capital stock. You need money that people can borrow to invest and to plant in equipment. Well, it turns out the predictions that were happening about tax reform, that capital stock was going to dry up, that everyone was going to go out and spend the money and this and that, it turns out savings, we have plenty of capital. Savings rates went up.

The second part was labor supply, and that one we have; we have a real issue. What do you do to encourage Americans who are not in the labor pool to enter it?

Then last December, we had this unusual thing. All of a sudden, the numbers within what we call millennials, millennial females started entering the labor force, and all of a sudden, we went over the 60-- what? We had 62 or, I think, 62.3 percent labor force participation--I am doing it from memory--a

number that lots of those smart economists just a couple years ago told us we were not going to see again for another 30 years. It has happened.

Maybe it is time we as a body have an honest conversation that a lot of the economists who have been advising us are wrong, and the spirit of entrepreneurism, of capitalism, those things are actually working in our society and providing real benefits.

Look, as a guy coming to the microphone with lots of charts, but the math is the math. Even though we work in a math-free zone on occasion, there are really good numbers in this.

So I want to actually sort of touch on something else as we look at our pillars of the future of economic growth in our society.

You have heard discussions of the Green New Deal or environmental protection as almost a Malthusian concept that the economy must shrink to meet these numbers. We want to argue that is absolutely wrong.

The basic math set: Why has the United States done so phenomenally well in removing ACO2, a man-made CO2, from the environment? It is because of our migration to natural gas. We have gotten dramatically more clean, efficient in our energy production in the last decade, decade and a half because of natural gas.

Well, in that case we should produce more natural gas, right? It is working. But there are actually other disruptions of technology, and we are just going to throw a couple of them up just for the thought experiment, to understand.

If this were, once again, a couple years ago, the concept of pulling CO2 out of the air was almost considered absurd--except for the fact it is happening. It is actually in Canada, but there is actually a facility that is going to be going online to almost, say, what you would call an industrial scale that will pull CO2 out of the air incredibly efficiently.

It is a crazy concept, just crazy, except it works. The technology is out there.

How many of us, as we are debating meeting the Paris accord numbers, are saying here are actually things we can do to get us to the Paris accord commitments, which we are going to come really close. If we would adopt certain technologies, we get there.

I am going to ask you to reverse some of those slides so we actually talk about the nuclear power first. No, that is carbon capture. Yes.

Sorry. We were running late, so we ran up here with the boards.

This is just a quick thought experiment for folks to understand for clean power generation, and this is a couple years old. I think this slide is based on 2015 numbers.

Do you see the yellow side? That is all the solar that was new generation capacity in the entire country in 2015.

The other side, the multicolored over here, was the amount of absolutely clean nuclear power generation that went off-line. So even though 2015 was a remarkable year of new, clean solar generation, we actually didn't really gain that much because clean nuclear power generation went off-line.

So this is the occasion of it is great to be joyful about one, but you need to make sure you have your math understanding what is going on.

Now, for us in Arizona, there is often this debate, the discussion of uranium. I don't want to geek out too much, but over the last 15 years or so, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and world energy markets on the nuclear side, there was high-grade uranium, almost weapons- grade, that was being stepped down to go into reactors. Most of that now has been used up.

So, actually, that slide. This is carbon capture. So what would happen to you if I came to you today and said it looks like our national labs have actually had a technology breakthrough that is stunning?

So, instead of us who are not too far from the Grand Canyon where we do the drilling to pull uranium out of the ground, which is always controversial because you worry about water supplies, but we need the uranium for all sorts of things in our society, what happens if there is never another land uranium mine again? Because we worked out the technology to pull uranium out of seawater. It has happened. It has happened.

Where is the joy around this place that technology is breaking through and providing us this sort of clean energy future in things that were just sort of academic fantasies just a few years ago and the technology is breaking through? This is wonderful. It is exciting, and there should be joy on all sides.

So let's actually go to this next one, and I am sorry for bouncing you back and forth.

Outside Houston is an experimental natural gas generation facility. It doesn't have a smokestack. It basically actually uses the CO2 to spin the turbines. No smokestack. They capture every bit of the CO2, and they are actually apparently going to go from, I think it is--forgive me if I got my math wrong--30 megawatts to 300. They are going to go to an industrial- or utility-grade scale.

But the fact of the matter is they are generating power without a smokestack, and they capture every bit of the CO2 and can sell it, convert it into other products. We have the technology. It is up and running right now. They worked it out.

This should be joyful. If you want to actually have a bright powered future that provides the energy for the economy so the economy grows so we can keep our financial commitments but we want to protect the environment, we need to be talking about how we are going to bring more of this type of technology into our communities instead of sort of the Malthusian craziness of things that are in things like the Green New Deal, where we are going shut down this, shut down that, shut down this. There is a progrowth way to get there.

Those of us on the Ways and Means Committee even a year ago, Republicans and Democrats, we actually passed some more tax credit incentives for when you produce the CO2, where do you put it? Well, you actually can get a little bit of credit if you put it in plastic or cement or put it in the curb that is being put into your neighborhood or actually put it into the ground to do recovery to bring up more hydrocarbons.

It is actually just really exciting, and the technology is working. We need to be talking about technology and its future and the disruption it is bringing and the bright, cleaner future environment it brings with it.

I brought this slide up because it is part of the thought experiment on this theme. Who here is concerned about plastic in the ocean? I mean, look, the Speaker is a good guy. He understands. I was a big scuba diver before I got this job. Now there is never time.

Ninety percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers, 8 of them in Southeast Asia, 2 in Africa. It is not the straw that you are going to not be allowed to use here in D.C. It is not the plastics in the United States. It is that 10 rivers bring 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean.

If we actually cared about plastic in the ocean, wouldn't we actually take our foreign aid, our environmental aid, our technology aid and say: ``We know where the plastic in the ocean is coming from. Let's go help those 10 rivers, 8 of them in Asia, 2 in Africa. Let's help them get cleaner''?

That is Republican, Democrat, we want clean oceans. If you care about the plastic issue, doing crazy things like: ``Well, I am going to actually affirm that I am a good person and I care by banning straws in my community even though it will have absolutely zero effect of making the oceans cleaner''--because, in the United States, our plastic substantially does not end up in the ocean. Let's stop the theater and do things that actually provide solutions.

This one just drives me insane because I care a lot about it. And it could be from the Foreign Affairs Committee to Natural Resources to Energy and Commerce, they should all say: ``Hey, what do we do to help other countries not pump plastic into our oceans from those 10 rivers?'' And if you did that, instantly, you just stopped 90 percent of the plastic waste going into the ocean.

That is a solution, but that is actually using--what is that crazy thing? Oh, yes--math to do public policy instead of feelings. But instead, around here, we get rewarded for doing theatrics.

Now, the next board we are going to put up is the great thought experiment, and this one actually is the ultimate disruption that I think may even happen in my lifetime, and I may lack some of the elegance or eloquence--excuse me--on how to describe it.

You all remember your high school or college botany biology class. You know, a plant cell from a couple million years ago, it has a certain issue of it wants to grow and it grabs an oxygen cell when it meant to grab a carbon molecule. Sorry. And then it spends lots of energy purging that one because ``I don't want the oxygen molecule; I want the carbon molecule to grow.''

Okay. I don't mean to geek out, but it is a big deal. It is an inherent inefficiency in our plants that is a couple million years old.

It turns out, United States Government and a couple of university labs may have broken the code on the Holy Grail of plant biology, and with a tweak in the genetic code, a 40 percent improvement in growth.

Do the thought experiment with me. What happens tomorrow if, on the same piece of land you are growing soybeans or corn or cotton or grass in your yard, you have a 40 percent improvement in efficiency? How much less water are you using? How much less fertilizer are you using? How much less fuel? How much less land?

It also means, mathematically, you also feed the world for the next couple hundred years.

World agriculture, if you wanted to do part of the thought experiment, world agriculture produces 2.2 times the amount of greenhouse gasses as every car on Earth. Think about that. So world agriculture, the math is you produce about 2.2 times more greenhouse gasses than every car on Earth. The adoption of this genetic change in our agriculture around the world would be as if you removed every single car off the face of the Earth. That is a disruption.

Now, it is going to also have implications on what agricultural land is worth. I mean, it will have a huge disruption across the world. But if you truly claim you care about the environment, and someone like me who does taxes and financial and economic growth as their specialty here in Congress reads articles like this and sees the disruption in the future for the environment, why isn't this the discussion here?

If this is real, and we all know in seed stock, you can roll it out in just a few years. What would happen if in just a few years, it would be like you removed every single car off the face of the Earth? That is what something like this equals.

We should be joyful here. We live in a time where technology is moving so fast it is presenting us solutions, and we need to stop the debates around this place that sound like we are all still in the 1990s.

The solutions are all around us, they are rolling out of our labs, they are rolling out of actually people's garages. Smart people all around us and around the world are producing the solutions. We need to embrace and move those forward, or we can do what we are doing here so far this year, and that is engage in the political theater of rage and completely avoid the optimism of the solutions that are at our doorstep.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 4 o'clock and 16 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, May 1, 2019, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman said another one from Arizona.

Mr. Speaker, I want to sort of echo what you have heard, and that is a certain happiness that we were all able to move this forward together. I appreciate the chairman, but I also want to be someone who adds a little bit of a caveat that we understand the work isn't done, particularly for those of us in Arizona.

I hate to admit how old I am, but in the early nineties, I was one of those who worked on what we called our groundwater recharge district in Maricopa County. When we had excess water, particularly from the Central Arizona Project in those years, we stored it. As we look back, now 25-some years, that was somewhat revolutionary and visionary.

We will have to do things like that to meet our requirements that are part of this legislation. This legislation does not lay out every last step that those of us in Arizona must do. We are going to have to step up and meet our obligations. I think it is important that we understand there is still much more work to be done.

As that moves forward, I am going to ask that all of us, particularly those who are supporting this drought contingency plan, think creatively. Are there technologies, and are there encouragements of farming techniques, as we are doing urban construction and types of plants in our communities?

We need to now go to the next step and think what this brings our communities, particularly for those of us in the Phoenix metropolitan area who live in the desert Southwest.

I hope we get a resounding vote of approval a little while from now, and I also hope that this is the right direction. We have to keep focused. Just because we have had a big hydrological year doesn't mean that we are not going to be back having this conversation a year or 2 years from now.

Mr. Speaker, I promise not to go 60 minutes.

Continuing the series we have been trying to do on a much more, shall we call it, wholistic policy of how to get a sort of unified theory of what will make America's economy, opportunity, our ability to pay for our promises, particularly over the next 30-some years, when our baby boomers are in their retirement years.

This is, actually, sort of just another module on trying to help sell, educate, convince, cajole, on that idea.

We always start with this particular poster now that our belief is you sort of have five pillars on what we must do

almost immediately to have the economic growth and the mechanics to be able to keep our promises.

Remember, basic math: We have 74 million baby boomers. We are now about halfway through that 18-year cycle turning 65.

In 8\1/2\ years is the final portion of the baby boom turning 65. In 8\1/2\ years, half the spending, less interest, coming out of this body, so 50 percent of the spending will be to those 65 and older. In 8\1/2\ years, there will be two workers for every one person in retirement.

Understand what this means: If we don't have substantial economic growth, substantial incentives to stay in the workplace, and also a really disruptive cost curve in parts of healthcare, I defy you to make the math work.

So we have actually sort of laid out five principles of policy, and within those policies, there are lots of moving parts. We are going to talk a little bit more of sort of the technology disruption, but we are going to talk the other half of it from what we did 2 weeks ago.

But economic growth: What do you do in a tax system? What do you do with trade? What do you do with smart regulations?

I have done presentations here about crowdsourcing data as a much more elegant way to regulate; using block chain to collect data in financial markets so you could actually have a much more rational, much more reactive, much faster regulatory environment.

We also have on here, I use the term, ``population stability.'' Remember what has happened to the United States birth rates and where we are going and where we are predicted to go.

In the last 10 years, there are 4 million children that we expected who are not here. That is functionally 4 full years of immigration in 10. Are we willing to actually say it is time to go to a talent-based immigration system with some flexibility in there to maximize population stability? And on the other end, are we willing to also adopt public policy that encourages family formation?

It is math, and it is math about the economic robustness of this society.

Earned benefits: We are going to have to find ways that, as we keep our promises on Social Security, if we keep our promises on Medicare, are there inducements, incentives we can produce to say: Are you willing to stay in the workforce longer, part-time? If you are healthy, happy, capable, we want you. It makes a difference.

Are we able to give you certain incentives to postpone taking benefits to actually help yourself, but also help the programs as they function?

And then the last one under our five pillars is employment. How do we maximize, as a society, participation in the workforce?

You know, we still have some data issues on millennial males. What can we do to help them get into the workforce?

As you know, last December, we finally had a real breakthrough in some of the data--we call it the U-6--employment data on millennial females moving into the workforce. That is part of it.

We also want to encourage older Americans to stay in the workforce if that is their choice.

But we also are starting to see something that is really exciting in the labor statistics--I am sorry I am geeking out, and I know I am sounding like an accountant on steroids, but these things are really important--is our handicapped brothers and sisters. People who have actually had substance abuse and other types of issues are actually moving back into the workforce.

Behind this microphone I have talked about even the things going on in Arizona right now, where we actually have private, paid-for job training in our prisons because there is such a labor shortage, there is such a skilled labor shortage in our community. That is actually wonderful.

I mean, if you care about people, where we are at right now, our ability to draw our brothers and sisters into the labor force for that honor of work is an amazing thing.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Stivers).

Honoring the Life and Service of United States Army Sergeant Joseph P.

Collette

Mr. Speaker, look, those are always hard to do, particularly, you know, when you want to reach out to the families in your community and deal with those really difficult moments. So I appreciate the gentleman, and I am always happy to yield. He has always been very kind to me here.

All right. Back on to trying to help do our theme here. And I know it is a little sarcastic, but it is sort of meant to have a little impact. We often joke that we are operating in a math-free zone, and it is a great frustration.

One of the neat things that has happened over these first couple of months as we have been doing this sort of unified theory pitch--and we keep trying to say it is not Republican or Democrat. It is math. A number of my friends from the left have actually started to stop by the office, particularly on the technology, which I am very excited, because there is a revolution happening around us.

So let's actually sort of move on to one or two more boards just to make sure that we have built the argument.

On this particular board--and I have shown this; I am going to keep showing it--2008 to 2028, 91 percent of the increased spending--so when you see that curve going up between that 2008 and 2028, 91 percent, Social Security, healthcare entitlements, and interest.

Social Security, the healthcare entitlements, and interest--91 percent of the growth in spending for those 20 years.

So when we get here behind these microphones and we are often talking about this or that, understand the vast majority of what is driving our spending are our demographics. Our demographics are what drives Social Security, Medicare, and the borrowing within those drives a tremendous amount of the percentage of the debt.

So how do you build a robust enough economy and then enough optionality in that growth with technology to also bend the cost on healthcare?

So this particular slide is really important for us to get our heads around, and this is the other side.

In the previous couple of weeks, we have done a series of presentations here on the floor about the technology that is coming on everything from wearables to autonomous healthcare to being able to instantly have your flu diagnosed, and can we build a system, if we would take down some of the legal barriers, where almost instantly your antivirals can be delivered to you.

Think about blowing into something that looks like a flu kazoo. It diagnoses you. It pings off your personal medical records and instantly can order those antivirals.

How much healthier, how much more time do you have for your life, for your family?

These are the types of disruptions we as a body--and it is not Republican or Democrat. It is where technology is leading us, to make our lives more convenient. That precious commodity of time is given back to you, and we become healthier as a society while bending our healthcare costs.

Well, this particular slide makes it very clear that we actually believe about 75 percent of all of our spending--and we get this, I believe, from the Centers for Disease Control. Seventy-five percent of our healthcare spending is for chronic conditions.

Okay. So we actually know where our spending concentration is. So how do we start to have a disruption in that?

And if you actually look at the growth of healthcare, this is basically our spending in 2001 to 2017. But you see that line just growing and growing and growing.

Well, a lot of that, we will immediately get people who say: Well, that is pharmaceutical prices. Well, that is this. That is this.

It is substantially our demographics and then the procedures that come along with that aging in society.

We will actually, in the future, if there is a request for it, we will bring some of those boards and actually do more breakdown. But it is just understanding we cannot survive if this line continues to grow in that fashion.

Additionally, and just understanding these categories--and I am going to push this back just a little bit because this particular board may be unreadable from a distance, but it is really important.

What we are trying to explain here is, the green bars, the small bars, think of these as chronic conditions that have never been diagnosed; the blue are where they have been diagnosed; and the total cost in our society.

When you look at this, what would happen if I could come to you and say, for a number of these, there are ways to manage hypertension. There are ways for someone like myself that is a pretty severe asthmatic to manage my asthma. There may be cures on the very short horizon coming for many of the diseases we consider chronic conditions.

Part of what I want to talk about tonight is the second half: How do we finance the miracles that this body in previous years, when we did the CURES Act, when we actually did the specialty, the financing, the research resources for orphan diseases--it is starting to pay off. Many of the policies, actually, the Republican Members here did in previous years with the previous President are starting to pay off.

So think about this--and I may have my date wrong; I am desperately hoping it is by the end of this year--a single-shot cure for hemophilia A. So our brothers and sisters, and there are only about 8,000 in the United States who have hemophilia, but it is a population that is very expensive for the blood clotting factor, for the other medical maintenance for that population, for our brothers and sisters.

How about a single shot that cures? What would we, as a society, be willing to pay for that curative?

How do we finance it? What if it is a $1.5 million a shot? Let's just sort of theorize here.

But in about a 5-, 6-year period of time, it has actually more than paid for itself. Just, you know, the tyranny of basic accounting: How do we say today we want a system where we can finance these disruptive pharmaceuticals so we can start to change parts of these chronic populations so we do something that is curative?

One of the discussions we have been working on in our office for almost 2 or 3 years now is the concept of, we will call it a healthcare bond that says we are going to reach out, do a census of the populations of, hey, these many individuals with this particular disease that this pharmaceutical would cure or dramatically improve their lives--some are on Medicare; some are on Medicaid; some are on private insurance; some are at the VA. We need to do that census and then do sort of an assessment over time to have what would have been their normal cost pay back that bond.

The trickier policy set here--let's go back to our hemophilia example: 8,000 population, a single shot cures the disease. How do you price it?

This is going to be an intellectually robust discussion we are going to have to have. We have other things in our society we price. A baseball player who is phenomenal, you would do certain types of arbitration.

We could actually take a look at everything from the research costs, to the future benefits, to the incentives to continue this type of research, to the health benefits of having that population cured.

There has got to be a formula we can come up with as a society where we continue to encourage these incredible miracle disruptions that are on the horizon. We need more of them because they start to solve this chart's problem.

Remember the previous one, the pie chart. Seventy-five percent of our spending, functionally, is within those chronic conditions. What happens if we start to cure them, or at least a portion of them?

It is time this body stops having the crazy debate we have had here for the last 10 years, which is the ACA. It is even our Republican alternative, which I believe had some great things in it.

But we have been having this debate about who gets to pay. We have not been having the discussion, the intellectually honest discussion of what do we do to pay less and provide more?

That is my goal here. If these miracle biologicals, if these miracle genetic treatments, are coming, how do we get them adopted into our society as fast as possible?

In many ways, as we saw in the first phase of the hep C cure--what was the drug, Sovaldi? In that first year, year and a half, it cost $84,000, I believe, but it cured hepatitis C, meaning you did not need a liver transplant. But what happened? We had a number of our State Medicaid systems that were on the verge of going bankrupt.

The difference in that sort of pharmaceutical is you had time before someone became symptomatic where liver transplant was indicated. And then we knew there was a second pharmaceutical with some of the same efficacy coming.

What happens when there is not going to be a second drug, because it is a small population or it had such stunning research costs?

We need to think through how we finance disruptions of those pharmaceuticals and how we also get a fair pricing so the research continues. We incentivize that, but also a fair pricing to society, which is willing to put on debt for a quick adoption and then use the future savings.

So understand, what is neat about this, if you actually look at these diagnoses with serious chronic conditions, a number of them can be partially benefited by technology.

Once again, I am a pretty severe asthmatic. We have played with a couple of contraptions that help me manage my blood oxygen.

What happens if that contraption can talk to my phone and say: ``Hey, David, this morning, you really need to take two puffs of your inhaled steroid.''

``Hey, David, we are doing some calculations. Today, you don't.''

As you have already seen, you may even have family members who are now reading off their phones about their diabetes, because they have a port that is reading their blood glucose.

Technology can help us manage a number of these chronic conditions to make them so they don't crash, so they are not catastrophic for the individual and not expensive for society.

If you have hypertension, how many of you may have an arrhythmia that you now have a watch that will help you manage? Those are on the technology side.

On some of these, it is the curative that I really wanted to get into our understanding, the other half of the miracle disruption that is coming in healthcare.

We need, as policymakers, to understand these are the benefits we are now yielding because of a lot of really good policy decisions this body made over the last few years.

Let's move on to a couple more boards to try to help this argument become a little more robust.

This was the best one I had, but let's go back to the hemophilia discussion. Can we use this example that is on our immediate horizon?

I believe they are already well in or through their phase III. They have had,

apparently, just from even the latest article I pulled up a couple days ago, amazing efficacy. It is curative for the vast majority of the population, something we never really thought of.

Are we ready as a society to say: Can we build the box of how we finance these disruptions?

Let's walk through a couple others.

How many of you have heard of some of the gene therapies where we can turn on your immune system, but we turn it on in such a way--well, the medical researchers, by understanding the type of cancer you have, looking at that cancer and saying, hey, here are the receptors that your immune system would do the most efficient--how do I describe it?-- the most efficient method of killing those cancers. What if that costs $250,000, $500,000, but it cures?

How about in some of these cases? Now we are looking at this particular one. This is from earlier in the year or late last year, a pharmaceutical biological that changes a genetic form of blindness. You are born with this blindness on your DNA, and it recodes your DNA and brings back a substantial portion of your sight. What is the value of that?

There are some unique things. I believe it may be within this gene editing. Actually, it is really expensive. I think it may have been $400,000 or $500,000 for a certain number of the patients. It was almost you only paid if we hit a certain level of returning your sight.

What happens when we are able to do more of this, that it is more than just a disease you have developed, and we are actually recoding parts of your own personal genome to deal with a genetic blindness that you were born with? How much does this help society? How much, as a society, are we willing to pay?

When we pay it, is there a way we can have a financing mechanism that the adoption of such miracles happen quickly, and we can reap the benefits in future time? That is the concept for the healthcare bond.

Let's take one that actually is near and dear to me. I am from the desert Southwest. I am from the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. I live in a little community called Fountain Hills, a wonderful part of the country. I am incredibly blessed for the community I get to represent and live in.

But from the desert areas of California through Maricopa County, Phoenix, Pinal, all the way down to the Tucson area, we have fungi in the soil. We call it Valley Fever.

We believe one out of three people who go to a hospital believing they have pneumonia actually have the fungi, have Valley Fever in their lungs.

For a small fraction of the population, they don't just feel like they have pneumonia for a week or 2 or 3. They get something, I believe the term is ``undifferentiated,'' where it breaks out and ends up in your bones.

I have a neighbor, a former Vietnam helicopter pilot, one of the greatest human beings you can ever meet. His hands have been carved up from when they have had to go in and remove the fungi that is growing in his bones.

Leader McCarthy, Kevin McCarthy, because of the community he represents, and myself in the Scottsdale-Phoenix area, a few years ago, we started a Valley Fever Caucus for those of us who live in the desert Southwest. We have had some amazing success.

We have been able to move some resources. We have gotten the folks back East here to understand this very unique regional disease we have. We were able to move some money, and all of a sudden, we now are hearing that we may be 3 years from a vaccine for animals.

This particular disease killed my dog, Charlie, a few years ago.

But after the vaccine for our canines and our pets, it is only a short time after that, maybe just a handful of years, that we will collect enough data that we will have fungi vaccine for something called Valley Fever for those of us who live in the desert Southwest.

These are examples. We believe a disease like that ultimately costs billions in our communities for hospital visits, for sick days, for all the things that go with that.

What is the value of a vaccine that is being developed for an orphan disease like that that most folks back East have never even heard of?

We have succeeded at moving the resources around here in Congress over the last few years to start these miracles of the genomic and the other types of research that are bringing these miracles here.

Back to our primary conversation. As we age as a society, our biggest cost driver, particularly over the next 30 years, is healthcare. We have done presentations here the last few weeks on the technology miracles that are coming, where you can manage your own health. You don't have to be part of the collective. You can manage your own health and have incredible data. But we are going to have to break down some of the old silos, some of the old legislative barriers, some of the barriers to entry.

The other half of that is how we continue to encourage these disruptive biologicals, these disruptive genomics, these disruptive drugs that are curative.

The one that was in our office a couple weeks ago, talking about ALS, it is probably going to be a couple shots a year, but it will freeze. You will hold steady. So it is not curative, but it stops the regression and the progression of the disease. What is the value to that in our society?

These are big deals. As I reach out to my Republican brothers and sisters and my Democrats, help those of us who understand these cures are not Republican or Democrat. We as a society must come up with the mechanisms that bring them out, finance them, and then understand the debate here must be about what we are doing to change the price curve of healthcare at the same time our demographics are getting much older very, very, very fast. We can do that.

It is a much more elegant discussion than the absolutely ridiculous discussion that continues to go on here because it works in our partisan format where everything here has been weaponized now politically of let's have a fine debate on who gets to pay, how much government subsidy should you receive.

Let's do something really creative. Let's start lowering the price by bringing technology, by bringing other channels of exciting new pharmaceuticals, and even down to things that are affecting the folks in my neighborhood, a disease like Valley Fever, where I now get to go home and say we worked on it a few years ago. We were not optimistic, but we kept working and we kept working and we kept working. There are brilliant people down at the University of Arizona Center for Excellence on Valley Fever. There are researchers at NAU. There are researchers in California who are now almost there.

There should be joy in this body when you start to think about the cusp we are on. Will Congress be looked at by someone 10, 20 years from now, saying they did policy that actually made these things happen faster? Or will we continue to exist in a world where the way we reimburse, the way we finance, the way we regulate, the barriers to entry of the technology, we slowed down the disruption that could have helped us lower healthcare costs?

These are the things we are fixated on, because remember our five points: We must have the robust economic growth. We must have the labor force participation. We must do the incentives to, if someone wishes to stay in the labor force and delay parts of their retirement, how do we reward that? We must do these others, but we also must push these technologies, because our biggest fragility is the healthcare costs.

I think there are some great things about to happen. Look, that is a portion of the presentation. Hopefully, in a couple weeks, we are going to come back and we are going to do something much more technical--I am sorry; I know that is really exciting--on some of those incentives to stay in the workforce. But we need to understand, if you have a complicated problem and someone walks up to you and gives you a really simple solution, it is absolutely wrong, because complicated problems require complicated solutions.

That is where we are headed.

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

Mr. Speaker, I was absent from the House floor during today's rollcall vote on H. Con. Res. 24. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on rollcall No. 125.

Madam Speaker, what we are going to do right now is, and we are going to hopefully only take about a half an hour, actually walk through sort of the continuing theme of how at least our math--and particularly in our office, we have been trying to put together sort of a unified theory of how do we deal with the reality of what is happening in our country with our demographics. We are getting older much faster, and our birthrate has fallen dramatically.

Repeatedly, we have come up here with other boards that basically show, over the next 30 years, the greatest threat to our economy, to our society, to our country's priorities, is the fact that our interest, Social Security, Medicare, healthcare entitlement costs consume everything. The rest of the budget is functionally imbalanced.

I know this is uncomfortable because it is one of those things that is hard for us to talk about. It is not Republican or Democratic. It is demographics. It is math.

Part of that baseline, to understand 2008 to 2028, take those 20 years, 91 percent of the spending increase here in Washington, if you remove interest, 91 percent of the spending increase is--actually, I think it does include interest--interest, Social Security, healthcare entitlements.

We need to understand the basic math. And now, how do you actually deal with it?

How do you maximize economic growth?

How do you maximize labor force participation?

How do you encourage people, if we built the incentives, to actually stay in the labor force longer?

How do you actually embrace technology, particularly disruptive technology that crashes the prices and makes our society healthier and more efficient?

And then, how do we have an honest conversation of those earned benefits and build them so they have incentives in there that, if you are fit and healthy and happy, you are willing to stay in the labor force longer? Are there certain spiffs and benefits we can design into these?

So those are sort of our five pillars.

Today, we are going to do something that is fun.

We just grabbed a handful of concepts that are about technology, and the tough part--when you start talking about disruptive technology--it makes you sort of giddy for what the future is and the opportunities.

But there is this thing we call incumbency, particularly in economics--incumbency: the incumbent business; the incumbent medical provider; the incumbent over here.

These technologies are going to be a real challenge.

The running joke in our office is how many of us went to Blockbuster Video last weekend. We sort of woke up one night and all decided to go home and hit a button called HBO Go, Netflix, those things. We no longer stood in line and got movie suggestions and went home with a little shiny disc.

We are going to walk through, first, some of the healthcare IT and why this is so important. I want you to first think about some of the technologies that are starting to roll out.

If you got to take home or had in the back of the office or we had on the back of the floor here something that looked like a gigantic kazoo that you could blow into and it told you whether you had the flu or whether you had a bacterial infection and, instantly, it could ping your medical records that you are carrying around both on your phone or in the cloud and instantly order your antivirals and they were delivered to your house, did we just crash parts of the price of healthcare? Of course we did.

Did we just make a lot of incumbent businesses? We are challenging part of their business model because you used this technology instead of going to the urgent care center or going to the emergency room or going to the hospital or even going to the pharmacy. But we have to be willing to think about these things. These types of technologies are rolling out all around us.

An Israeli company--the picture over in the far corner--actually has, and I guess it is being certified all across Europe right now, a desktop blood test that actually does a whole plethora of different blood tests with just a few drops. Remember, we talked about this 10 years ago. It turns out the technology now actually exists.

In a couple of blog posts, even the concept of going into an autonomous healthcare center--and we actually have about 10 of these up in the Phoenix area where you go in and sign up on an iPad. You take a picture of your driver's license and a picture of your insurance card.

You go into a booth alone. You put your arm in this thing. It does blood pressure and does a number of readings. You pick up this particular tool, and an avatar on the screen says: Can you shine this down your throat? Can you bend? Can you turn? Now do your ears, your eyes. It actually does algorithmic healthcare.

What if that few-drop blood test--actually, as a couple of blog posts talked about, you put your hand on something and it pricks your finger. It takes the blood test right there, and before you walk out the door, 5 minutes later, it is giving you a full blood workup.

What did you just do using technology to disrupt parts of healthcare costs?

These things are real. They are rolling out right now. There are amazing technologies in almost everything you can think of. But we are going to have to think about both the ecosystem and the complications of how it is paid

for--are these things that Medicare, Medicaid, and other insurers will pay for?--and how we do it.

Also, the data. What happens in a society where you are now going to be walking around with certain wearables?

You have the fancy watch that helps you manage your hypertension, the patch that does your blood oxygen, the port that helps you actually manage your blood sugar. There is lots of data coming off of those wearables. We, in our office, call them digiceuticals. How does that all tie into the rest of the ecosystem?

And that data, how do you actually get that data so a doctor or the algorithm can see, when you open your pill bottle--because the pill bottle has a sensor in it, we know when you took your pill, and 15 minutes later we see this on your EKG that is coming from your watch, we see this reaction, can that data become incredibly usable? Can that data be blinded from your own personal information and help all of society get healthier because we gained more data in those algorithms?

This is cutting edge, but it is not utopianism. We actually have those things right now today.

If you start to think about it, you can actually go to Amazon, or I am sure others online, and see that it exists today. For under a couple of thousand dollars, you can buy a handheld ultrasound. Think about that.

Apparently, there are other versions, faster, better, even ones coming in the future where the algorithm will actually read the ultrasound. You hold it up on your iPhone, and as you are using this handheld ultrasound to look at the picture, the algorithm is also going to help you interpret it.

What did an ultrasound system cost a few years ago? You can buy this online today. It exists, and we are doing experiments with it right now in a VA, I believe, just right here in Maryland. Apparently, they are having terrific outcomes because the doctor can walk up and check something.

These technologies exist. How do we start to have these technologies start to disrupt the price of healthcare? Because to be absolutely intellectually honest, if you actually look at the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare, or Republican alternatives, we have spent a couple of decades in this body having a debate on who pays, not how to disrupt.

With the ACA, we are going to have government pay a lot more. Over here, in our version, we are going to try to create incentives to have individuals actually get market competition.

They have been debates on paying. We have almost never stepped up and said: What are our barriers at the State level? What are our barriers at the regulatory level? What are the barriers at the HHS levels that actually prevent the adoption of disruptive technologies?

These things do exist today. We need to actually embrace the concept of rapid disruptive adoption of these technologies because, remember our five pillars, if we do not have a disruption in the cost of healthcare as we are getting older very quickly as a society, remember, in only 9 years, we have two workers for every one person in retirement.

In 9 years, if you pull interest out, half the spending here coming out of Washington, D.C., will be to those 65 and older, and it is, substantially, healthcare.

We all carry around these smartphones. Should our health records be on those? Of course they should be, because they should be portable with us because health data, health records are going to become something dramatically different than the record that is sitting there at the hospital. It is going to be living.

How many of you ever use something like Waze or a crowdsource on your phone? You are going to be having these things on your body, or the pill bottle that knows when you opened it. That data should be living with you so you are constantly managing.

There is a debate going on with those folks who build these algorithms. The fact that you had a surgery 7 years ago that is sitting on your health record or the health data that is coming off your wearables from the last 48 hours, which one is actually more valuable to your healthcare? The living data has incredible value in keeping you healthy. We need to find a way to embrace this and build this ecosystem.

This next one I put up, even though there are a dozen, we are going to show a couple of versions of this just for the fun of it. Think about the debates we are having here in Washington, D.C., and for those of us on the Ways and Means Committee in regard to drug pricing.

We need to fix many of the incentives. We need to actually deal with the fact that some of the games that are played on patents and other things--okay. That is an honest debate. But understand, the data says that half the pharmaceuticals that will be picked up at pharmacies today or delivered in the mail today, half of them will either not be used or will not be used properly.

Think about that just conceptually. Half of the pharmaceuticals that will be taken home today aren't going to be used properly. Is there a data solution?

We have everything from just the pill bottle top that lets us know that you opened it and when it opened and would tag your healthcare record, hopefully, be portable with you on your phone so we know that you actually took it, to actually, now, for those who may be on the severely mentally ill side who have certain maintenance medications that are providing miracles--they actually have a super small tiny chip that is actually in the pill itself that we can actually read that we know you are digesting it, that we know you took your meds.

Think about it. We need to embrace these types of technologies, even down to this type of pill dispenser for someone who may have a little more complicated issue where they take some of their pharmaceuticals either at multiple times during the day or they have certain complications.

Here is one that was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas about 6 weeks ago. You put your cup under it and it automatically dispenses at a certain time and tells us what pharmaceuticals were delivered to you. It is technology dealing with the fact that we have documented that half the pharmaceuticals aren't properly used or used at all.

It turns out the data that will flow off of these things actually will help us. When you have a wisdom tooth taken out, do you really need 30 pills or do you need 3? It turns out, the data from this may actually help us dramatically change the way we do prescriptions in the first place.

So I am making the argument, it turns out that data and technology are also one of the solutions as we talk about pharmaceutical pricing.

Now we are actually going to move on to something else we, as a body--and this is going to take my brothers and sisters on the Democratic side and Republican side. We need to have a very, hopefully, math-based, honest conversation about how we are going to finance miracles that are coming, and some of them are going to be here before the end of this year.

We just put up this slide as part of the thought experiment. In America, we have about 8,000 Americans who have hemophilia A. The price range, we have actually found some documents that say the blood clotting factors and those things may be a half million dollars a year to keep that American stable.

What happens this November or December--which we are actually very hopeful is about to happen--when a single shot cures hemophilia A? How do we pay for it? What are we willing to pay for it? How do you value that in society? It is a single shot of a very small population so it is not like the next day there is going to be a competitor drug in the pipeline like we had with other drugs. In this case, it is a single- shot cure.

But we actually know that over 50 percent of all of our healthcare expense is to 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who have chronic conditions. What happens when we start having miracle drugs like a genomic biological like this that is curing diseases that are part of our brothers and sisters, that 5 percent who actually have the chronic conditions that consume over half of our healthcare dollars?

We are actually, as an office, proposing ideas of a type of healthcare bond so you can actually finance the adoption of the distribution of these disruptive, revolutionary drugs and then pay for it using some of what

would have been the future costs, pull those forward so you get the disruption of the future savings.

These individuals are out of that chronic condition, but we are going to have to have a very tricky conversation. How do you price it? What is the value of a pharmaceutical that is functionally a miracle that cures something like hemophilia A? How do you price it? There is only going to be one producer of it, would be my guess, because there is such a small population. There are only 8,000 Americans with hemophilia A. Is it worth $1.5 million an injection?

There is actually a math way to get there dealing with the reality of this is a population that costs us a quarter of a million dollars a year to keep them healthy, and this is the life expectancy. What was the research cost, because we want these miracle drugs as part of our society to help us have that disruption as part of the holistic theory of technology, these new miracle drugs that are coming, to disrupt the future healthcare costs.

Now, I want you to take this concept a bit further and spread it beyond healthcare. Think of some of the crazy debates we have actually had here on the floor in regards to--forgive me--environment. I want to argue with you that there is a technology disruption that can make our environment cleaner but we don't actually hurt the economy. We can actually help it grow.

So here is my first thought experiment. This has been a fixation of mine for a few years here.

Think of the community you live in. What if tomorrow, instead of today's current model--you want to open up a paint shop or you want to open up a bakery or this and that. You go out and fill out forms. You send them down to the local environmental regulator. You may also file them with the State. If you are doing certain types of volatile organics, you may have to file with the EPA. You are basically filling up file cabinets. Do filled-up file cabinets make the environment, the air quality in your community cleaner?

It is an honest concept because we functionally have a 1938 regulatory model of file--lots and lots of paper--maybe even do quarterly audits, maybe annual audits, fill out more paper, and fill up file cabinets full of paper that functionally a lawyer gets to come and look at a couple years later.

Does that make the environment in your community cleaner?

What would happen if you had a few hundred or a few thousand people traveling around in your community that actually just had the little sensor traveling with them that they were collecting data on hydrocarbons, on volatile organics, and on ozone, and you could actually see the map of your community? If all of a sudden you had a hot spot over here because you find out you have clowns painting cars in the backyard of their house, you would know about it instantly, and the environmental regulator, instead of putting paper in file cabinets, they would get in, hopefully, their electric vehicle, and go over and actually stop the clowns from painting cars in their backyard.

Which made the environment cleaner?

The trade-off here is actually very elegant because I don't need you to file lots of paperwork. I don't need you to actually be doing quarterlies and annuals because if you screw up, we catch you instantly.

What made the economy grow, what reduced the bureaucratic burden in our society, and what actually made our communities healthier and cleaner?

It is just technology.

I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Will the gentleman enter into a colloquy?

The gentleman is one of my buddies from Florida. He actually gets this, but he also knows I actually love the technology disruptions, because none of us has figured out if it is Republican or Democrat yet, which actually makes it possible for us to do it. Now, eventually, we will break it into partisan because everything has become weaponized and partisan around this body.

But, right now, think of this: this is a natural gas electric facility. It can power 5,000 homes. It is up and running outside Houston. It doesn't have a smokestack. All the ACO2, so all the carbon is captured. They actually came up with this brilliant technology that the carbon actually flows through. My understanding of the engineering is it helps spin the turbines, and then the excess carbon that is generated is safe and sold.

We actually have a tax credit that we adjusted that hopefully made it more robust as we did tax reform that if you want to take some of that carbon you can put it in concrete, or a piece of plastic, or do it for certain types of oil recovery.

It is actually a tax credit according to the amount of tonnage you produce of ACO2.

Yes. But the beauty of it is that model has said that we have actually already created a value on this carbon, and if you don't put it into the environment but actually use it for other things as a filler in plastics, as a filler in concrete, in putting it back in to the ground to enhance recovery, we are already doing it. This technology isn't utopianism, it exists. It is already running.

How many times around here have we talked about that we can actually have a hydrocarbon generation without a smokestack?

The technology exists. If we are going to talk about a green agenda, then we actually all need to sit down and actually meet with the really smart researchers and scientists and actually understand the math and science. That science is way ahead of where our heads are.

The gentleman from Florida has some amazing technologies coming out of his State right now on everything from biogeneration to the ways to manage the environment.

That is actually a brilliant way to phrase it.

My continuing thought experiment, and this is a little beyond where we were going, but it makes the point, visit Washington, D.C., or a bunch of other locations now. They are not going to give you a straw or they are going to give you a paper straw.

The math is--and this actually, I believe, comes from the United Nations--90 percent of all the plastic in the ocean--and, look, it is a big deal. I am looking at my data here, roughly 8 million tons a year of plastic goes in to the ocean. The gentleman is from a coastal State--comes from 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia, two of them in Africa.

If you actually really cared about plastic in the ocean, that 8 million tons, we would actually take our environmental policy, our trade policy, and

our foreign aid policy and say that we are going to actually help these 10 rivers that are responsible for 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean and work on those. But instead we do these feel-good, absurd, theatrical things of ``my community isn't going to do straws, don't we feel better that we did something for plastic in the ocean?''

It had nothing to do with plastic in the ocean. It is these 10 rivers. Let's grow up and stop the political theater.

I knew you were going to say virtue signaling.

This is a little bit sarcastic, and I mean it to be slightly on the humor side, one of the first things every Member of Congress should put into their budgets is the ownership of a calculator, because we functionally work in a math-free zone where our feelings become public policy instead of the baseline data where we can actually have an impact of making our society and the world healthier and more economically prosperous. If you actually, genuinely cared about plastic in the ocean, we have 10 rivers, 90 percent of the plastic, we know exactly where they are; focus there, instead of the absurdity of the straw at your local whatever.

Coming from Arizona we have sort of this utopian view that one day Arizona may become a coastal State.

Or an earthquake.

You are very kind, and I thank you for the colloquy.

Look, many of us just want to solve the problems. I have the best little girl in the world sitting in the back right now. She is 3 years old.

What does her future get to be like?

We have a demographic crisis. It is just math. We are getting older very quickly. If we don't grow the economy, if we don't have lots of labor force participation, and if we don't use trade and tax policy and innovation, we need these things to grow.

But instead, Madam Speaker, if you listen to the speeches that often end up behind these microphones, it is an absurdity that is partisan because we care about power more than actually doing those things that are so important for our future of this society.

So I want to give you one last, ultimate thought experiment. I am still just stunned this article hasn't gotten more coverage around the country, but it is going to require many of us to actually deal with some of our political constituencies that have lots of folklore built into their belief systems.

About 6 weeks ago, an article came out. University of Illinois U.S. Agricultural Research Service published a paper saying--now, you all remember your high school or your first botany class or when you were actually learning about cell biology--there is actually a weird inefficiency in plant cells on how they grab a carbon molecule or oxygen molecule--we won't geek out too much--but they found a way through a bit of genetic engineering to make the cell wall superefficient.

They basically believe that they have broken the Holy Grail that plants, commodity crops--right now they did it on tobacco plants, because the reason they do research on tobacco plants is we have known the genome of tobacco plants for quite a while now--40 percent increase in efficiency.

We have got to think this through. Now, there is a really disruptive side of that. Forty percent, tomorrow if you could plant a corn seed or wheat or something else, and it had 40 percent more yield, what does that mean to feeding the world 50 years from now?

Yay.

What does that mean to commodity prices?

Scary.

But you need functionally now 40 percent less land, 40 percent less water, 40 percent less fuel, and we actually have some data here from the IPCC 2014 report which is from the United Nations that just a little under one-quarter of all the human emissions, functionally greenhouse gases, come from agriculture.

If you do the math--think about this--this 40 percent increase in yield for agriculture would functionally equal removing every car off the face of the Earth.

Think about the conversations we have here talking about the environment. Here is a miracle. And the reality we know from other disruptions in seeds that it can be rolled into society very quickly as these new seed stocks, except we are going to have to deal with our brothers and sisters saying: well, that is a genetically modified seed.

Yes, but it has this amazing disruption in the world. If you truly care about greenhouse gases, if that is your fixation, just moving to this new disruptive technology that I hope is real, I hope the research continues to demonstrate a 40 percent production increase, this here could be the fastest, biggest disruption in greenhouse gases in the world because you could actually adopt these seed crops within just a few years.

That is an example of technology not just bringing a small improvement or even a disruption, in many ways it is a major disruption, but you have to deal with the politics of belief systems. It is genetically modified, but it is not a genetically modified seed stock to deal with pests or this and that, they just dealt with the inefficiency of the cell wall. It is a miracle. If it is true, it is a miracle. Think about it, though, but understand the disruptions that are going to roll through our society.

What happens to the value of agricultural land?

What happens to the ability of nations to ultimately feed themselves if all of a sudden they had a 40 percent increase in productivity?

But also what happens in our world if I come to you right now, Madam Speaker, and say that agriculture produces functionally, by my math, a bit more than 2\1/2\ times the amount of emissions of every car on the Earth?

So this technology would be as if you just removed every car off the Earth.

How come we don't have these types of conversations here on the floor?

It is because it doesn't fit our political folklore model of what has become just a stunningly partisan gotcha weaponized body.

As we go through our five pillars for the future one more time, the reason for the fixation on this, we have 74 million of our brothers and sisters who are baby boomers, the last baby boomer hits 65 in 9 years, many of the things we should have done we should have done a decade or two decades ago, and we didn't have the political appetite. We have to deal with the reality that we have this population bubble that is getting older and our birthrates have substantially collapsed.

If we are going to keep our promises to those folks who have worked their entire lives who will be moving into their benefit years, we have to think disruptively. We have to be willing to do everything from tax policy, trade policy, and regulatory policy that we have talked about here using technology, to labor force participation, encouraging people all up and down the spectrum to actually enter the labor force.

We have to be willing to talk about redesigning some of the programs to incentivize, if you wish to work, you get to work. We are going to have to actually also embrace the miracle of these disruptive technologies and not be scared of them.

But this body is going to also have to deal with something that is very difficult for a political body, and that is a lot of our friends are going to either have to change their economic models and a lot of our States are going to

have to change their regulatory models just as we will. But it is these disruptions that give us the economic robustness to actually keep our promises over the next 30 years.

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

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, having read over the amendment, there are a couple of concerns I want to walk you through. And please understand, I am one of those--I co-chair the Blockchain Caucus. I have a fascination with could we ever move to encrypted blockchain security of these levels of information.

But if you actually walk through this amendment, it is a little hollow in its details. The executive director gets to appoint a 15- member, we will call it, committee. Tell me that those 15 members in this amendment can't have relationships with a certain security firm, or with a certain vendor, or with certain things. I will argue that you are creating now functionally a fourth committee within the commission and handing an awful lot of power to the executive director without a lot of guidelines, that should actually, in many ways, make both Democrats and Republicans a bit nervous.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate and I love the concepts of technology. I am really concerned. This should actually be a bipartisan concern, because at some point is that executive director going to be one party or another, or demonstrate certain political bias?

But if you hand sole authority to the executive director to appoint a 15-member commission that is going to establish saying, here is how we are going to review these grants and what sort of grants and direction, I am sorry, but you are creating all sorts of both policy leakage here, potentially a favoritism to certain either technologies or securities or firms.

I don't have a problem with the attention. I think it is actually an authority that should have been given to one of the other committees instead of creating a fourth one, because we have this tendency, as Members of Congress, to sort of create bureaucracies on top of bureaucracies.

But please understand--and I am being as genuine as I can--I fear that it may not happen now, it may not happen for a few years, but you are creating, as technology changes, as there will be a time in our future where I may be voting through a blockchain technology on my phone, have you just created the very commission that actually said: Hey, here is the security mechanics. Oh, by the way, our security mechanics favor the seven people who actually have a relationship to this particular security encryption who have a friend who is a friend? I am sorry; it is just not designed with enough comfort when this is about our voting system.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Chairman, having been here for a little while, be careful--good intentions--and when people often bring those issues and bring those--be careful. You may have good intentions. And the intentions of often those who bring us a thought or an issue, until we have vetted whether they have particular potential economic interests-- I am just sharing my concern--the amendment, just as it is designed right now, our side is going to have to vote no because we create a fourth level. We don't create enough definitions. We hand so much power to the executive director.

Mr. Chairman, I would love to talk to the gentlewoman about election encryption and my personal fixation on blockchain technology. But for this one, I think we may miss the mark.

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

Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chair, I actually appreciate the study mechanisms, but this is actually one a little bit broader.

How many of us are from States that have actually had public funding or public matching of our State legislatures?

I am from Arizona; I have actually lived this experience. And do understand, we used to--in Arizona--refer to it as the ``no new moderates'' piece of legislation.

If you actually look at what happened to Arizona--and my understanding is this happened in other States--personal experience: I was 28 years old when I got elected to the Arizona Legislature.

I was there. You had to go knock on a door. You had to ask someone for a couple hundred dollars. You had to listen to them. They would look you in the eye, and if they thought you weren't worthy, you walked out the door without anything. It turns out asking for money is part of the vetting process.

Well, a few years later--so we have had it for 25 years in Arizona-- here is what happened:

You are part of the group over here on the right or you are part of this group on the left. In Arizona, you get a couple hundred people to write you a $5 contribution, and you get elected. Within two election cycles, we wiped out half of Democrats, half of Republicans, maybe one- third of the body who were in the moderates.

So when I was in that State legislature for 4 years, half the Republicans were conservatives, half the Republicans were moderate; same thing on the Democratic side. After just functionally 4 years of public funding or public match, they were gone.

I appreciate the study of saying: Hey, this amendment is really about knowing, you know, do the dollars match, do the mechanisms match? And I don't know if the FEC is the right place to go to say: Are we about to try to finance the bipolar--the extremisms on both ends?

In many ways, this piece of legislation--at least this mechanic right here--you have got to understand what you are doing. You are going to wipe out the middle.

This is, in many ways, the ``no new moderates'' piece of legislation.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, how much time is remaining?

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I accept this as--and I don't mean this in a mean fashion, but I accept this as one of the tenets of faith on the Democratic side.

The gentleman from Maryland--wonderfully articulate--that isn't what happened. I mean, you have 25 years in other States and other communities, particularly in legislative bodies. I thought the same thing.

But the fact of the matter is, what you do in this fashion is the person who is part of a certain leftist group, right group: I just need these folks to write me enough checks so that I get enough matching, or a good direct mail vendor who hits the ideological extreme so I get those dollars.

Those aren't the facts. And on occasion, we have to take a step back and take a look at sort of the incubators of democracy and experience, which is our State legislatures, and understand the reality of what has happened.

I am a conservative. It worked out fine for my view of the world, but understand--at least in my State legislature--within 4 years, this type of plan completely changed the character of the population that was representing the people in Arizona.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, wishes and hopes and optimism are not public policy. Be careful what you are asking for here. There are real- life examples across our country with what this did to our democracy. Understand the damage you are about to do.

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

Madam Speaker, and to my friend, thank you for stalling.

What we are doing tonight--and we will try to do it somewhat efficiently so you don't have to spend too much time in the Chair--is every week we have been taking a half an hour or so--tonight we may do something less--and sort of walking through what we believe is actually an idea that actually saves this country. And not to be too melodramatic, but let's actually walk through some of the mathematical realities.

We have 74 million baby boomers moving into retirement. The peak of the baby boom is just a couple years away from retirement. So baby boom, 74 million over an 18-year period.

If you look at Federal spending, the growth in Federal spending from 2008 to 2028 as CBO has calculated--2008 to 2028--91 percent of all the growth in Federal spending is interest, Social Security, healthcare entitlement.

I know this doesn't sort of fit the mantra that you so often hear around here from Republicans and Democrats, but it is math.

We have a demographic issue. We are getting old much faster than almost anytime--anytime, I think--in our society, and our birth rates have substantially collapsed.

So one of the things we have come to is saying: How do you maximize economic vitality in our society so we can keep our promises, those promises of earned benefits like Social Security or promises such as earned benefits of Medicare?

We believe we have five pillars, so we always start with this chart, and you can do them in any fashion you want.

Last week, we actually did 30 minutes--which I am sure was riveting for anyone who was willing to watch--on labor force participation, but it is important.

If you go back over the last couple years and look at some of the CBO reports, repeatedly there are sections in there that talk about: What is the barrier to economic expansion in our country?

They will often talk about two things: capital stock, basically, savings rates, money to be lent into the economy to multiply, to build things, to grow things; and the second thing is population, labor force availability.

Well, it turns out, since tax reform, the capital stock numbers have been much better than almost any of us had expected in the modeling. So our restraint on economic expansion turns out to be substantially labor force.

Okay. So that is what we talked about last week. How do you draw in millennial males? How do you add incentives to those who are older to stay in the labor force? So that was last week.

We have also actually talked about what we will have to do--and every week we are going to do one of these--dealing with the earned benefits. Are there things we can do in those earned benefits to add some competition for when someone is buying their medical benefits through Medicare? Can we add certain incentives?

Say I am healthy. I wish to work longer. Can we give you certain incentives to either of those programs in the Tax Code to stay in the labor force as long as you are healthy?

And we actually see other societies around the world--you know, look at Japan and others--who are actually having to work through this concept as their demographics get older. How do they actually keep as much of their population still within the labor force so the economy continues to stay stable and grow?

Economic growth, we are going to do a whole presentation on everything you do from designing a Tax Code that stays competitive in the world, somewhat like we did a year-plus ago, that incentivizes capital formation, incentivizes investment in plant and equipment and technology, because we had gone functionally almost two decades with very little productivity growth.

Do you want to pay Americans more? Well, what is the formula? Do we all remember our high school economics class? What are the two elements that go into typical growth in someone's salary? Well, it is inflation. If you get an inflation adjustment, you are not getting any further ahead. You are just sort of holding steady. It is productivity.

When we look at the formulas that end up organically, systematically thought through, when businesses pay their workers more, here is the inflation adjustment. By the way, we bought a new plant; we bought new equipment; we bought new technology. We are able to make this many more widgets now. Our productivity has gone up. We can pay more. That is the key reason.

We functionally have gone a couple decades with very little wage growth because we didn't have productivity growth.

As we start to talk about economic growth, it is going to be everything from designing a Tax Code that maximizes that type of growth, to trade policy that maximizes economic expansion in our country, all the way down to how you design a rational regulatory environment.

Some people like to come behind these microphones and talk about deregulation or re-regulation. I want to make the argument that we should be, as a society, talking about smart regulation.

You have a supercomputer in your pocket or your purse, that phone you have. Why aren't we using much more technology to be the driver of our regulatory environment?

A simple example: What would happen if you could crowd source data on the environment? You could have a few thousand people. If you are in a large urban area or other areas that have a sensor on your phone that says, hey, I am going to help crowd source ozone,

or crowd source volatile organics, or whatever, our environmental regulator is no longer a file cabinet of paperwork where we put paper and document more, document more. Instead, it is almost like a quick reaction for us of: Hey, the sensors are saying there is a hotspot over here. Let's go deal with it.

I think it is time we revolutionize what we consider financial, environmental, health types of regulations, realizing we have technology today that would make us healthier, more prosperous, our financial markets much more stable, and the time between a bad act and something getting fixed could be minutes, not years.

An example is, if you had certain types of technology, a Bernie Madoff could never happen because you would instantly know his accounts don't match his bank accounts.

The other one we are going to do next week is technology disruption. What happens if you could go home and, at home, you have this thing that looks like a large kazoo? You could blow into it, and it instantly tells you if you have the flu or not and then instantly could order your antivirals. A couple hours later, those antivirals could be delivered to your home. How much healthier would you be?

We are going to bring in a whole series of healthcare technologies that is a true disruption because, remember, part of our premise is, if you look at the cost curves, so much of it is Medicare. The fact is, we do not have the resources set aside to keep our promises right now.

That technology, if we do the adoption, if we remove the barriers, could be an amazing disruption in the price of healthcare because this body--let's be brutally honest--for a decade, we have been having the wrong debate. We have the ACA over here, which, functionally, just moved around who got to pay. We had many of our Republican alternatives that we believed would add some competition and those things, but it was, substantially, who got to pay.

It is time the Republicans and Democrats got together to understand there is a technology revolution out there that could be, that can be, that will be the price disrupter on healthcare, if this body is willing to remove those barriers to that technology.

Imagine being able to have certain wearables, whether you are the type of person who walks around with a smartwatch or the type of person who has the patch that can read your blood oxygen and these types of things, or the autonomous healthcare clinics that are being experimented with in the Phoenix-Scottsdale market.

There is a revolution happening out there. We need more of it. We need to adopt it faster. We need to remove the barriers and stop having these crazy conversations of little, incremental changes. We need the disruption.

As we walk through, part of the premise is, if you look at this slide, and I brought this slide in previous discussions, 91 percent of the spending growth between 2008 and 2028, interest, Social Security, healthcare, and functionally the healthcare entitlements.

When you look at that, you start to realize these other colors you see here are functionally the other portions of the budget. Nondefense is green. Yellow is defense. Their percentage of the growth and spending is substantially flat. A little growth here, a little growth there, but the explosion in the curve, where you see those lines going up, is interest, Social Security, and healthcare entitlements.

Why doesn't this place, why don't we as Members of Congress, have the honest conversation that, if you care about the debt, if you care about retirement security, if you care about these things, this is the honest conversation?

Take a look at this slide. Between 2018 and 2048, a 30-year period, and this slide is not adjusted for inflation, you see the little green bar on the far end? That is the rest of the Federal budget. That is the non-Social Security, non-Medicare. It is actually $16 trillion to the positive. How do you end up with $84 trillion in the negative over those 30 years?

It is functionally the interest and the spending on Social Security, the interest and the spending on Medicare. I believe we have a moral obligation to protect these earned entitlements. But you aren't protecting them by avoiding the subject, and that is what this place has become famous for doing.

Let's talk about this concept we refer to in our office as sort of population stability. Remember, this is just one of our five pillars. In 9 years, our society, and its driven by demographics, will have two workers for every one person in retirement. Think about that for a moment.

Programs like Social Security and Medicare, there were four or five, five-plus workers for every one in their benefits. In 9 years, we moved 2-to-1. What also happens in 9 years? It is the end of the baby-boom cycle, so the end of the spiked years.

If this slide doesn't make you go ``wow, maybe we should take this seriously,'' because we should have taken it seriously a couple of decades ago because we knew people were going to turn 65 from the baby boom for how many years? Nine years, two workers, one person in retirement. This is absolutely critical, and this is what is coming to us.

What are the solutions on this particular pillar we call population stability? We need to be honest and work hard for policies that maximize family formation. I don't even know if I have them here--I hope I do--some of the charts that show you what is happening in the birth rates around the country.

You do understand, as a nation, we are now well below replacement rates in our population. This one I particularly like because it is from my home State of Arizona, but the trendline is almost identical. We will go through some of that.

If I asked you right now which State had the largest fall in birth rates, how many of you would have said Arizona? It turns out Arizona had the largest fall in birth rates. It is a little complicated. You have to read through the data, but Native Americans and Hispanics, their birth rates fell substantially and are looking much more like the mean of the rest of our society.

Apparently, the demographers say, that is wonderful. What it means is, even though this place sometimes spends a lot of our politics keeping us apart, the actual demographics say, when we are all having babies like each other, it is a symbol that the melting pot is working, that we are all starting to have similar education, live in the same neighborhoods, have similar job descriptions. Now our family formations are starting to look very, very similar.

That is wonderful. The melting pot is working. But understand what that means in the future, having enough workers to participate in keeping the economy growing and stable.

These pay-as-you-go programs, which are Social Security and Medicare, have that vitality, and this is a real threat when you start to see these sorts of numbers and understand what that means.

How do you reach a level of population stability? This is a brand-new slide for us. We are going to do a little more on what is happening population-wise. Once you substantially look at, we will call it the green line, the second one down, do you see that precipitous fall?

If we are right here, that was sort of our last time of being in the positive, a bit before 2010. Since then, we have continued to fall, and fall, and fall. Now our demographers are coming back and saying, yeah, this is sort of the new normal, because it is not just the United States.

Apparently, this trend is all over the industrialized world. A lot of the great writers and thinkers on demographics are saying the next prized asset in the world isn't going to be lithium for batteries or petroleum products. It is going to be people, smart people.

You are starting to see that around the world where other countries right now are even starting to change some of their immigration rules to say, if you have talent, you are given a much faster path to enter our country. We are going to have to have that very honest conversation of a major change in our immigration system.

The last slide here, and then we are going to talk about some of the solutions in this, this is just sort of fun to understand that it is a trend. We have one or two States that are still bucking the trend of having positive population growth, and that is through birth rates. But the rest of the country is substantially collapsing.

What do you do for population stability? Okay, back to family formation. Are there things we can do that will work? We have spent about a year in our office reading literature from around the world, what they have done in Scandinavia, what they are doing right now in Hungary, what has been done in a province in Canada, trying to promote native births. Small, incremental changes--no one has found the magic formula.

Maybe we as a society have to have this discussion. What works? What can we do? Is it something you do in the Tax Code? Is it something you do in family friendly policies? What do we do to maximize family formation in our country?

Right now, when you start to look at the cost, I have only one beautiful little girl, and you realize, children are the greatest thing that ever happened to my wife and I, but it is expensive.

The second part of that population stability discussion is, if you are over here working on family formation and making sure society understands the blessing of children in our society, are there immigration policies that if you are bringing in populations into the United States that maximize the economic vitality?

So part of this thought experiment, based on the actual numbers in the last 10 years, the U.S. fall in birthrates functionally equals 4 million children that we expected that with the fallen birthrates will not be part of our society. You do realize that over 10 years that is functionally 4 full years of legal immigration.

So let's say we actually were effective in being serious about family formation here, and we actually started to have an honest discussion of as a society do we start to do the things such as New Zealand, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and others are doing where substantially it is a talent-based immigration system?

Why do you want to fixate on that?

It is an immigration system that actually has the elegance of we don't care about your gender, we don't care about your religion, and we don't care about your race. But what we care about as a society is we care about the vitality, the energy, and the talent you bring to our society to maximize the economic growth so we can keep our promises, particularly on Social Security and Medicare.

Remember, demographics are really the biggest issue we as a society are facing, except it is really hard to talk about it because the math is complex.

So are we as a body willing to take on complex issues and understand you can't just do one of them?

There was a time here a decade ago or so people would come to the microphone and say: Well, if we do entitlement reform, then we get this.

We have missed that window.

Now my argument to this country, to my brothers and sisters here in Congress, is we have to actually reach out to at least the five pillars we have laid out of maximizing economic growth, and that is everything from tax policy to trade policy to regulatory policy, and labor force participation.

How do you design programs, everything from Social Security Disability to TANF to food stamps to this and that, saying we want you in the labor force?

What can we do so you have your safety net, but we have got to get you into the labor force?

What do you do for population stability as we have talked about right now?

What do you do for dramatic disruptive technology adoption, particularly for healthcare, but it can also be for environment?

We are going to actually do that in the coming weeks.

Then we will have to step up and have an honest conversation of as the promised earned benefits, we call entitlements, how can we adjust and refine them so they incentivize to stay in the labor force, but they incentivize efficiencies of how healthcare is purchased?

We need to do this as an entire society. Once again, remember, in 9 years, two workers, one person in retirement, one person 65. Over the 20-year period, 2008 to 2028, 91 percent of all the growth in spending will be interest, Social Security, and healthcare entitlements. In 9 years--the CBO report that came out last month has a beautiful graph in there--in 9 years, 50 percent of all the noninterest spending coming from Washington, D.C. will be for those who are 65 and older.

So if you care about keeping our promises, if you care about this country being able to maintain its place in the world, it is math. It is demographics. There is a path for us to succeed, but it no longer works. The math no longer works by just doing one thing or these little, incremental, petty things I see happening around here on this floor where it is political power grabs instead of the things that stabilize and grow our country and protect my 3-year-old daughter and her economic future and her opportunity to actually live the American Dream.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 19 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, March 7, 2019, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Madam Speaker, many of us really appreciate when you stay here and listen to us because we know a lot of folks out there don't appreciate it. It is sort of a gift of your time to be with us. When we were in the majority, I spent much of my freshman term sitting in that chair.

What we are going to do tonight is this sort of a continuation of a theme. We have already heard tonight, and over the last couple weeks, discussions of debt, discussions of what is happening in Medicare, and, actually, I want to come here behind this microphone and talk about what I believe is a solution.

I genuinely believe over the last few years, we have put together at least the backbone of enough math to talk about the reality. But let's first sort of set up the discussion if you haven't watched some of our other floor presentations since the beginning of this session.

Every week, every other week, we try to take a half an hour and walk through our five pillars of what we believe saves us. Understand, in 9 years, 50 percent of all of the noninterest spending that this Congress will do will be to those 65 and over.

Understand, in 9 years, the 74 million baby boomers will actually be in their benefit cycle. They will be 65 and up.

In 9 years, two workers for one retiree. And when you start to look at the future of our debt, understand--and this is hard because so many don't want to hear it, and it is not Republican or Democrat, it is demographics. If you look at our society, we are getting older very fast; our birth rates have substantially collapsed. Family formation, we have some real issues out there.

So what do you do as a society? We have promises that have been made, earned entitlements out there, your Social Security, your Medicare, and you have earned those. That is part of your societal contract with this government, but we don't have the cash to pay over the next 30 years.

How do we get there? I am going to tell you. I am still optimistic there is a path. I see some of these slides and these boards through the eyes of my daughter. I have a 3-year-old daughter. Best little girl ever. We actually have a coffee mug at home that says that.

Doesn't she have the right to live as well as the generations that have gone before her? Doesn't she have the right to have that sort of optimistic opportunity? I actually believe that is not lost in our society. But as you even saw on the floor today, we do political theater here because complex policy is hard. It actually requires math, and Congress is substantially a math-free zone.

So we always start with this chart. Understand, I believe there are five pillars, and you can mix them up any way you want to.

Immigration. How do you design an immigration system in the future that maximizes talent importation to the Nation? Because you need to maximize economic philosophy as soon as possible. That is what the rest of the world has done. Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Canada have moved to talent-based systems because they figured out that there is something elegant about that model.

Now, let's be honest. I don't care what gender you are. I don't care your religion. I don't care your race. I don't care who you cuddle with. I don't care about those things. We care about the talent you bring to our society to maximize economic growth. I actually think it is a much more elegant model than we use today in immigration.

Economic growth. We must hunker down and embrace tax policy, regulatory policy, and trade policy that maximizes economic vitality. The velocity of the size of this economy must continue to grow, and grow at a fairly substantial rate. If you look at the data, 91 percent of the spending increases from this government from 2008 to 2028 are functionally three things: interest, Social Security, and healthcare entitlements.

So we are all going to talk about debt. It is a threat to our society. When we are going to have the honest conversation, it is substantially driven by our demographics and our healthcare costs.

The next one we are going to talk about is labor force participation. We are going to spend time tonight on that. I know it is a dry subject, but this is actually trying to be intellectually honest. This is a moment where if you are going to call our office and say we want solutions, we are working through it. But it is not trite.

My father used to have a saying. We were just talking about it over in the corner. For every complex problem, there is a simple solution that is absolutely wrong. It turns out, complex problems require complex solutions.

We are going to talk tonight about labor force participation. How do we get as many Americans across the board to participate in the economic vitality? It turns out that has an amazing effect; everything from our healthcare costs, to tax collections, to just the economic growth.

The next two, there is a technology revolution about to happen in healthcare. It is also happening in environment. In the next couple of weeks we are going to come here and show some of the amazing technologies that are out there that actually make some of the environmental discussion seem sort of passe when you understand the technology that is on the cusp of rolling out.

Let's talk about healthcare right now. I have come here to the floor over the last couple of weeks and shown things like--we nicknamed it in our office the flu kazoo--something a material science professor has developed; you blow into it, and it instantly tells you if you have a viral infection, and in the backbone, it could automatically order your antivirals. Start thinking about the revolution that would happen in the cost curve of healthcare if we had substantial change in autonomous healthcare.

In the Phoenix area, we have an organization that now, I believe, has seven of these autonomous healthcare clinics where you go in, you sign up on an iPad, you take a picture of your insurance card, your driver's license, you go in and you put your arm in, you pick this up, you shine it in your throat, your ear, and your nose, and the algorithm is able to do amazingly accurate calculations of your health.

Think about that type of technology when it is in your pocket. You have all seen the pocket size, the size of your

smartphone that is now an ultrasound. It is completely portable. We must, as a body--and this is at our State legislature, but particularly this body--we must break down these barriers to the technology disruption that could be a revolution in lowering healthcare costs.

You have got to be intellectually honest. The ACA, the Republican alternatives, in much of the discussion, we are not actually having a discussion about lowering healthcare costs. We are having discussions about who gets to pay.

It is time that we embrace and truly draw in the technology that can be that very disruption. We have a running joke in our office: Did you go to Blockbuster Video last weekend? We all live it. It is now time that we understand that our future healthcare costs are an Achilles' heel to this society because of our demographics and just where the costs are going.

There is another part of that. We are going to actually do a floor presentation, probably at the end of the month. There are incredible disrupters coming in the pharmaceutical world. We just had some information and we think, actually by the end of this year, there may be a single shot cure for hemophilia A. That is only about 8,000 of our brothers and sisters in the country, and it is going to be really expensive, but it cures.

What happens as we continue to see these biological, genomic pharmaceuticals rolling out that actually cure? Or the one that we were reading about today, that stabilizes our populations who have ALS?

What does that mean to the cost curve of the 50 percent of healthcare spending that is to the 5 percent of our population that have chronic conditions?

The last one I am going to give you is, it is time to rethink the incentives--and this one will always be tough--in Social Security, in Medicare. How do we encourage an individual to stay in the labor force? Are there things we can do to encourage waiting to take benefits? And these are math. It is just actuarial science.

So today we are going to talk about labor force participation. Isn't that exciting? The first slide I have already mentioned, this is from the CBO report 3 weeks ago, and I was shocked it didn't get much press or discussion in this body because it is math.

But if you look at this chart, what it is trying to say is, in functionally 9 years, half of the spending of this body--if you remove interest--half of the spending will be to those 65 and older.

It is just demographics. We got older as a society. In 9 years it is the end of the baby boomers, because they have moved into being 65 and older.

But if you had seen this chart and then matched it up to where you start to see the debt and spending curves move up, you understand they are in sync: if you care about the debt, if you care about spending, if you care about opportunity in our society, understand the demographic headwinds and what we must do to face that.

So one of the reasons for this slide, and I know these are a little tough to watch, but what I want you to sort of see is this is 2000. At that time, actually over 67 percent of our population was in the labor force. It functionally collapsed after 2008 and never returned.

The blessing is this last year we have had a little bit of a blip. There were these really smart economists who said: Hey, you are never going to get back up to 62, 63 percent of labor force participation. I believe we are now around 61 or 62. We actually need to find a way to get back to that 67 percent of our brothers and sisters all up and down our society being in the labor force, having the honor, the elegance of working.

There were some amazing numbers last December, if you actually broke into what was in those statistics, of the number of organizations, the number of companies that were actually reaching out to the handicapped community and making accommodations and hiring.

There are actually--and we are going to touch on this--some parts of our society are moving into the labor force, particularly in the millennials, and we are seeing parts that are not. Countries like Japan that actually have faced this, are facing it, have actually been trying to design incentives and programs for even those who are older, who are healthy, who are capable, who are desirous to be welcomed to stay or enter back into the labor force.

It is a barbell. We have a problem with part of our younger population, and then, obviously, our older population--which we have so much talent--that are retiring. We are going to have to have an honest incentives discussion design to maintain this labor force philosophy.

If you actually look at what is going on in our society right now, if I had come to you 2 years ago and said: Hey, we are going to see all sorts of quartiles in our society have some of the lowest unemployment in modern history, I think I would have just gotten blank stares. But it is happening. And with that incredible, almost full-employment society, we are actually seeing--and particularly in markets like Arizona--we are actually now seeing wages really starting to move. This is wonderful. This is something we needed, functionally, for a decade or two.

We can do a much more complicated discussion of some of the incentives that were built in the tax reform last year that encouraged investment in plant and equipment to push up productivity. Productivity allows you to be able to pay people more. But those are the sorts of things you talk about. How do you maintain economic vitality?

When we actually look at some of the unemployment numbers, there is something missing. Understand, when we look at unemployment numbers, we are looking at people who are actively looking, actively searching for employment. We actually have a real problem in parts of millennial males and others, so how do we reach out and design incentives to stay in?

We are also going to go to some of the other tougher questions, and that is: Is it time to rethink things like Social Security disability and say, hey, if you earn $24,000, or you hit this point, you hit a cliff. Your benefits disappear. If you are on other safety-net programs, if you earn a certain amount, you hit a cliff, and it disappears.

We need to have a brutally honest conversation of, is that incentive of that cliff an incentive not to enter the labor force? What would happen if we would work out the math so it was a much more gradual glide slope to draw those individuals into labor participation? Because if we are almost a full-employment society but we still had millions and millions of Americans who are choosing not to participate in the economy and we really need them in our economy, we have got to look to what are the disincentives.

It is about time that we actually start to have those social entitlement conversations. I know for both Republicans and Democrats, these are tough because it requires math. It requires us to work through certain ideological folklore. But if you want the wholistic solution to make it through the next 30 years, this labor force participation is one of those five pillars.

The reason I actually did this slide is--this one is a little geeky-- but it is actually trying to walk through what has been happening. I am not going to walk through all the detail, but we recently had this wonderful pop of sort of in the population of 25 to 34 females entering the workforce. That was one of the great things that we actually saw last December. Great.

We need to understand why millennial women are entering the workforce in these sorts of numbers, what we learn from that, and what we do now for the millions of millennial males who are still dramatically underrepresented in the economy.

Data shows millennial women dominating the current job market. Look at this separation right here and why this is so important. Remember how I was just saying something has been happening in the last couple quarters where millennial females are entering, but millennial males is the lower line. This is a conceptual problem, but it is real math.

Remember we talked about our barbell? We have those who are older. How do we create incentives to enter and stay in the labor force? How do we reach out to our younger population, get them, incentivize them, and work with them to get them into the labor force? Functionally, we just do not have a choice.

Let me grab another slide. We will put these up in our office. Remember, this sort of presentation is for those who really care about digging in to the actual math of policy. So often, what we end up doing on the floor is political theater and folklore.

If you look at some of these lines--and I know this is a long time ago--but if you and I were to step back to 1967 and look at the data for males, we had 97 percent of working-age males in the labor force. Today, if we did that same thing, I think we are at about 88. It falls, 87, 88.

One of the big things that helped us grow the economy is female participation in the economy. But we need to find a way to get this back up. We are just talking a few points, but those few points of a few more million stepping back into the labor market have substantial economic impact.

I want to talk about a story from Arizona. I have had this discussion with a couple of my Democratic friends. Within that, we have talked about incarceration rates and some of the other things that end up becoming impairments for young males to be in the labor force.

In Arizona right now, we have such a shortage of skilled trades-- electricians and carpenters--that a number of the businesses in Arizona--actually, I approached our Governor, Governor Ducey, and said: Help us. We are willing to take our own money and go into Arizona correctional facilities and do a training program that is, when someone is going to be on parole in just a few months, we will train them, and we will guarantee that we will hire them. It doesn't mean a guarantee that they will keep them.

So last year, we brought this young man out from Arizona. We brought him to the Ways and Means Committee. He sat down in this beautiful room. The Ways and Means Committee room, it is just very big and very ornate. He didn't look like our typical witness, with a number of piercings and a number of tattoos around the neck. He looked up when it was his turn to tell his story, and he hesitated for a moment and started with: I am a three-time convicted felon.

He went on to tell his story of how he was an addict and the other times he had gotten out of prison, he had relapsed. He had lost his family. He had lost everything. He had lost contact with his child.

He was a few months from his opportunity to go on probation and leave the correctional facility, and he saw this flyer that said: We are doing training for electricians. We guarantee we will hire you--it doesn't mean we are going to keep you--if you pass this very basic course.

He said: Why not?

He took this electrician course while in prison, while it was paid for by private industry because the job market is so tight they are willing to take risks on all sorts of populations to get them back into the work environment.

He graduated. He started at just a little over minimum wage. A year later, he was making, I think, $23-something an hour. He said he hadn't relapsed because he is working too much. He said he is back with his family. He gets to see his child. There are these incredibly human stories.

If we are in a society right now that is almost at full employment for those looking for employment, how do we reach out to those whom our society gave up on or who gave up on themselves? How do we as policymakers design those incentives, design the social entitlement programs, and design our society where we want everyone to have this opportunity within our communities and our society?

It was one of the most touching and amazing hearings, because when you looked at those of us sitting up on the dais, there were actually tears hearing his story and realizing there is hope, that this economic vitality provides opportunity and hope.

We turn it into a political football because it is not our side that wants to get credit, or their side wants to get credit. We need to get beyond that, because if we don't get this math right, my 3-year-old little girl won't have the same type of future I have had.

There is a path to make this work and continue to have an economy, a nation, that grows and provides opportunities. Understand, when the United States grows, the world benefits.

But we have those five pillars. Is this body capable of stepping up and doing things that are complex without a simple solution?

Madam Speaker, I so desperately hope so. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 38 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, February 27, 2019, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.