Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, as a mercy to the poor staff here, I am not going to use the whole half an hour. I am just going to try to run through a couple of concepts.

I did a little tripping up of some details last week, where we were trying to explain some of the things we see going on in the math. I want to walk through a concept.

We actually, right now, as a country, are remarkably blessed. The GDP growth, the economic growth, is actually well beyond almost any of what even my economists were predicting over the last year.

We are seeing some data right now--if you actually look at the Atlanta Fed, GDPNow, nowcasts, some of these--we could hit a five- handle this quarter, which is remarkable.

Looking at some of the data from the third quarter of 2025, it looks like the number of a 4.3 percent GDP growth is going to hold up.

These numbers are actually remarkable, and I want to make a point here for the annualized 2025 GDP number. I know this is geeky. There is a point I am going to come to, and that is the irony that tax collections don't look as robust as the economy. We are going to try to explain what is going on. This is why getting policy right is going to become so critical.

The first quarter of last year, so 1 year ago this quarter, we actually had negative GDP. The first quarter, when the Trump administration started, when our new Congress started, we actually had to go through 3 months of slower growth. Then, it wasn't until the second quarter, third quarter, and now we believe the fourth quarter-- we don't have that final number in yet--we finally hit the acceleration pedal.

What is going on out there? We had this irony happening where we have really actually stable and much broader economic growth than we expected. We are actually seeing some odd things.

Actually, the labor force participation is pretty flat. We had a small tick up in some of the last unemployment data. Also, if you look at this chart here, we are trying to explain the difference. Here is the number of folks who are entering the labor force. They are working. Here is the number of folks who are available for work.

When we start to get to 4 percent or 4.6 percent unemployment, we are actually, if we look at our historic average, even the last 25 years, that is almost full employment.

Do you see this curve here? It is basically starting to demonstrate the demographics of America. It is also sort of the demographics of the entire industrialized world. You have a situation where today we functionally have the same number of 18-year-olds as we had 20 years ago. Today, we also have almost double the number of our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up than 25 years ago. That is creating an interesting irony.

We actually take a look here at what we call tax receipts. Most people like to call them tax collections. If you are on Ways and Means, they are tax receipts. Look at this interesting spike here. That is actually tax receipts. That is good.

Almost every dime we see on this chart of the real growth is actually capital gains. It is those who have had assets. It is those who have sold real estate. It is those who have sold stocks.

The tax receipts really coming in from labor are good. They are stable, but they are not growing nearly in sympathy--if you can play economist words--in sympathy to the GDP growth. This is an important part of what I wanted to share. I am trying--I hate this term--to socialize the concept.

What happens when you are producing growth because we have a lot of growth policies that are right? Last summer, earlier in the year, where investment is going into plant, equipment, data centers, AI, and all of these things are happening, wage growth is actually okay. It is actually outpacing inflation now, finally, thank Heaven. Yet the real GDP growth is coming from that capital spend and not from wage and new employment and the demand for labor.

Understand why this is a problem. We are an income-tax-base country. There are income taxes on businesses, but mostly the income tax base is on working--and also FICA, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, and unemployment tax; those are taxed on your wages.

We are starting to see this irony where we are actually doing some data where we ask what happens when you hit this type of GDP growth and, at the same time, the amount of borrowing and debt in the country is still going to stay remarkably high.

We still have a model that we think will be a bit less, but we could still be approaching $2 trillion of borrowing this year. I hope we are wrong, but you have to understand that the first quarter of this fiscal year, I think we were borrowing about $90,000 a second.

So far this fiscal year--so we are, what, 3 months and 10 or 11 days into it--I think we have now borrowed $800 billion. Sometime. Maybe before this month is over, we are going to have borrowed another $1 trillion. This time, it wasn't 3 months. It might be coming in at 4 months. We shouldn't be seeing those types of borrowing with this type of economic growth.

The point I am going to make is: Why is the borrowing going up? Look at the spending data. I didn't bring all of those charts because they are exhausting, but if you take a look at interest, remember that we have to refinance $10 trillion or maybe $11 trillion this year. That means that the bonds that were sold in the past have to come back to market, refinance, and they are being refinanced, for many of them, at much higher interest rates.

The other thing is healthcare, but it is healthcare, Medicare. We have a model that says that now, in less than 6\1/2\ to 7 years, Medicare will go from $1 trillion to $2 trillion. Also, in 7 years, Medicare is gone.

Excuse me. Let me rephrase that. The Medicare trust fund is gone, and that will result in around an 11 percent cut, particularly to hospitals.

It is demographics. Baby boomers are moving into their peak utilization years of these benefits. We are functioning, I think in the last 3 years or 4 years of baby boomers moving into the age of 65 and getting their earned benefits, so you see the shift in the labor market.

What happens if the formulas that I had come behind these microphones for years and said: That if we could grow another point of GDP, it is this many hundreds of billions of dollars of tax receipts, and now it isn't.

I know this is geeky, but it is really, really important because it means many of the budget documents that the brain trust around here talk about, we may be getting wrong--many of the solutions we have had for taking on debt and deficits.

There is a piece of legislation. I am absolutely elated. I am trying to get on it. It basically says: Look, let's do a debt and deficit commission, like we did BRAC many, many years ago to close excess military bases, and let's go for 3 percent of GDP growth.

Madam Speaker, there is a problem with that number. Just our interest coverage is over 3 percent of our economy. So we are going to take spending and get it down to 3 percent. Great. So we are going to stop borrowing so much, except just the interest we pay is bigger than that.

Does anyone see the math problem? So this is actually the punch line I have been trying to head toward. This is a chart that sort of shows labor as a percentage of income.

I am sorry, but this is actually really important when you are trying to design how you finance your government. We are hitting a time way down here. This is 2024 because that is the last sort of good data point that I have. We actually believe it has actually fallen further. For years, 64 percent, and there may have been times when we crossed over to 66 percent of our income basically came from labor that financed the government.

Today, we are down to touching--actually, we may be as low as 53 percent. That is a huge difference, and it is going to force us--those who care about the economics, those of us on the Ways and Means Committee who actually have to do tax policy, those who actually are paying attention to our bonds and our promise to pay back $30 trillion- plus of publicly sold debt, and another $8.5 trillion that we have borrowed internally. How do we pay it back?

We are going to have to start thinking about the taxation on labor. It is going to become a problem. I want to bounce around a little bit because, a couple of days ago, we got some of the inflation data, but with that also came some of the State and localized inflation data. I thought this one was interesting. I am going to be a little caustic on it, but I haven't had as much coffee today, so I am not wound up as tight, so at least I am not speaking like a machine gun.

We thought this was interesting. Increase in monthly costs in Arizona, and we thought we would do a snapshot. I am blessed that I represent the Phoenix, Scottsdale area. So between January 2021 to September 2021, so we are actually doing the same snapshot of time, if you lived in the Phoenix area, you functionally lost $1,597 to inflation. That is for the average family.

Now we come here to 2025. It is still not as good as we demand that we get it to, but it is now $944, a $653 savings.

That is 1 year of the success of Republicans lowering inflation. We have to get it further, but we actually see how bad it was before because this was the inflation that was handed to this country during Biden's first year, and then we start to take a look at the progress. We are making progress. It is not as good as I want, but understand this is the reality of the math.

Madam Speaker, I have a fixation that we tell the truth and sort of get an understanding of some of the math. One of the most difficult things is that we have been trying to figure out how do we make sure we preserve our promises.

We owe a promise for Medicare. We owe a promise for Social Security. We have to deal with the reality that, in less than 3 years, over half of everything that this Congress will spend--so over half of everything that the Federal Government will spend--will go to people who are 65 and up.

Why that is just an amazing thing to think about. In the 1970s, for every dollar that went to those who were 65 and up, there were $6 to $7 spent for those who were 18 and younger. Today, that is flipped.

It is just demographics. It is not some evil plot. It is a combination of the baby boomers, a big population bubble, and healthcare got dramatically more expensive.

Last week, I did a presentation here and basically showed where Democrats are turning healthcare into financial engineering instead of the incentives to do it better, faster, and cheaper.

We have turned healthcare into--remember the whole debate here on subsidies on top of subsidies? When you turn healthcare into financing instead of helping people be healthier, you have screwed up the economics and the incentives, and we start to look at charts like this.

Now, this is Medicare Advantage. I am actually a big fan of what you call Medicare part C, Medicare Advantage. The chart is a little bit distorted because it doesn't really give you the population statistics, but we believe that this year, 55 percent of the population of this country that are in Medicare is going to choose a Medicare Advantage plan.

Okay. But we aren't telling the truth about the math. There is this thing that is called the MedPAC reports. They are big orange reports like this, hundreds and hundreds of pages. If we go through them, there will be this section in there that says that it turns out Medicare Advantage is coming in, according to the MedPAC report--and this is the roomful of people that specialize in this and, I hate to say, my own joint economic economist, the CMS data and HHS data, and The Wall Street Journal, everyone else looks into this--it is coming in at 120 percent of fee for service.

Why this is a big deal is when Medicare Advantage was designed--it really came into effect in 2005--Senator Frist, who is a doctor--they put together a plan with this idea that we are going to do managed care. The insurance companies, which are going to be basically the gatekeeper, are going to make profit by helping our brothers and sisters on the program be healthier. The model was it was going to come in at 95 percent of fee for service.

Today, it comes in at 120 percent of fee for service. That 25 percent, Madam Speaker, over 10 years is $2 trillion. When we show a chart like this of the transition that has been happening for traditional fee for service Medicare to now Medicare Advantage, fine, but we are going to have to have the honest discussion of how do we get the incentives lined up.

I saw what Senator Grassley published yesterday--and I was going to bring the report out here and use it as a prop and show it to you, but it is like this. It basically talks about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.

Look, the report, I am only a third through it, but it is example after example of Medicare Advantage insurers signing either having companies or their own folks go out and knock on grandma's door and score them as sicker and, therefore, getting bonuses for having a sicker population.

The Wall Street Journal almost 2 years ago did a major expose on a person. I think they were in Sun City, Arizona, and the insurance company had scored them I think as having HIV, except the problem is this person didn't have that. They had never been tested for it. However, the insurance company was getting a bonus for that. It is called risk scoring.

We are going to have to consider moving to a model that says we are not going to let you go and score people differently. We want to create a model where it is put in the initial pricing of the program, and then you make money by helping the senior population be healthier.

There are so many miracles right now, the technology can be worn, the ways you can keep track, the ways of telehealth, digital health, all these other things. We want a system that incentivizes investing in people's health instead of profiting from claiming they are sicker.

People have got to understand, there is actually a piece of legislation to do this. Preliminary scores, $1.84 trillion of savings. We are going to fight, knife fight, complain, cry, and fuss at each other over things that are absolutely tiny.

We have been told this piece of legislation actually is the biggest savings bill in U.S. history. I beg of anyone that actually cares about these subjects of taking on debt and deficits, help us. Help us explain it to our brothers and sisters. Help us take on what will be, let's be honest, a barrage of hate from the brokers, from the insurance companies that don't want a system that lines up the incentives properly.

These were the incentives of the original design of Medicare Advantage, and it got perverse by ObamaCare. They changed parts of the quality ratings that created another bonus system that could be manipulated.

Congress can fix things like this, but are we allowed to actually say: We are going to fix something on Medicare. So often, that sets off fear.

Did I mention in the beginning here, you have got less than 7 years and the Medicare trust fund is gone. If we are going to preserve these earned entitlements--these are earned programs. You worked for years. You earned this. This was part of the societal contract. People like me here, we have got to figure out how to finance this, keep it going. Yet it is almost a sin around here to talk about the problems, the fact we are hemorrhaging cash, we are borrowing. This year, for every dollar we take in in tax receipts, we are going to spend $1.43. The Moody's model says in 8 years interest will consume 30 percent of all of our tax receipts.

This isn't a game. We have got to stop the juvenile discussions we have around here and start facing the really big, difficult things ahead of us.

This is us. It may look like a chart with a handful of different blues on it, but this is actually us as a people. What this chart is telling us is that in less than 3 years, over half of all of our spending in this government will go to our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up.

If that is the societal deal we made, we made it; but we have an obligation as Members of Congress to make it work. If we know there is hundreds of billions of dollars--let's not use the word ``fraud''-- being misallocated--let's get fancy on the language, we will call it misallocated--why wouldn't everyone line up with us?

I would argue the army of lobbyists outside our doors here who lose their mind every time I talk about this, who scare the crap out of us, we have still got to do the right thing. Someone running for the United States Senate today, in your first term--if you are blessed enough to win--you are going to have to deal with the fact the Social Security trust fund is gone, the Medicare trust fund is gone. Our preliminary math says in 2033, the first year that those trust funds are gone, it is $638 billion just to make up that shortfall.

This isn't a game. These are numbers that should terrify you. Yet for anyone who is crazy enough to be watching C-SPAN, how many times have you seen this week, last week, the week before that Members come behind these mikes and talk to you about the real issues that will change this Republic, or have we just decided we are going to let the bond market basically run this country, and we are going to just keep pretending we can keep spending like this?

Much of that spending is not Democrat policy, Republican policy. Look, I think much of the Democrat policy is absolutely absurd, but much of it is demographics. In the early 1990s, and even going back further, we have had dramatically fewer children.

Remember, Madam Speaker pro tempore, we model--the United States will be close to almost zero population growth this year. If you have a Pay- As-You-Go system, it is really hard to make that math work. Do you still let the scams, the misalignments, the taking advantage of these systems, the fraud go on? It means we are going to have to talk about it. We are going to have to dive into it. We are going to have to take on an army of lobbyists. They are probably going to run nasty ads against all of us because it is so much money.

Let's step up and do the hard things. Let's step up and do the right things.

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 9 o'clock and 28 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, January 14, 2026, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I was actually going to come here and do some things on demographics and some things that are optimistic, but I actually think we should first jump into the fact that we work in a math-free zone.

If you listen to the people coming behind the microphones, particularly today, it is as if they have read none of the CBO reports, none of the HHS reports, or the other things, particularly in regard to the ACA, which are subsidies. They are subsidies on top of subsidies to insurance companies.

Did you read the reports? Last year, 41 percent of those subsidies on subsidies of the people that had the enhanced subsidies paid no premium, so they had no skin in the game, which is not what we were promised when ObamaCare came into existence a dozen years ago.

We actually showed an economic report. I did entire floor speeches on it showing that only a third of that $35 billion, $40 billion a year subsidy on top of the subsidies actually goes to healthcare.

We also showed that a third of the folks never made a claim because now we are finding rampant fraud of people who were signed up because if they don't have a premium to pay, they had brokers signing them up, and they had no idea they had coverage.

Where is the passion to actually deal with the fact that particularly the left--and I have got to blame my brothers and sisters on the Republican side, we have done the same. We have turned healthcare into financial engineering, instead of having it be about the cost, access, and delivery of having our brothers and sisters get healthier.

Is it you have sold your soul to the insurance companies? Remember, the ACA model is an insurance company model. You promised them rates of return, you promised them a market, so this is 7 percent of the healthcare market, and 94 percent of that 7 percent gets a subsidy.

Let's actually do math because you have been listening to--oh, yeah, there has been actually no math today as people talked about subsidies on top of subsidies. The CBO report that updated yesterday--and I can do this off the top of my head--basically said the 3 years cost $80 billion.

The reason it is lower than my $105 billion is because they made an assumption that this year, if the Senate were to pass these, that there will be a delayed sign-up, so there will be half a year or so where people--but if they did a claw back, the actual number on these subsidies is about $105 billion.

Okay. Even if you do the CBO's number of $80 billion for 3 years of subsidies on top of subsidies, and then you put in the 10 years of interest, you know, because of the interest window, this costs $111 billion.

Understand what the left is telling you. They are basically saying they don't give a damn about healthcare. It is financing. If we wanted to change the price of healthcare, we would actually be looking at the innovations that are going on and start to legalize them, but there are too many damn lobbyists walking up and down our hallways here trying to stop us.

Look, here is an article from 2 days ago. Bless the State of Utah. If you are like me--I have hypertension. Can you imagine that? I have had it since I was a teenager. I take a calcium inhibitor. It lowers my blood pressure. Hopefully, I don't pop an aneurysm, but every 90 days, I have to pick up the phone to renew a doctor's prescription or go visit the doctor, even though it is the same prescription I have had for decades.

Utah just created AI that will take my data and renew my prescription. It will save a fortune for the people of Utah--cost, access, not subsidies.

Stanford medical reviewed basically being able to use certain wearables. Their new AI model predicts disease risk as you sleep from over 100 health conditions. They take some data as you are sleeping off your wearables, and boom, basically you are wearing a medical lab. Except the problem is, it is not allowed to prescribe. That would be illegal because that would require us to actually do things, modernize access to healthcare, use the technology to crash--oh, we can't use technology to crash the price. It would really annoy a whole bunch of the lobbyists. People are lined up at our doors. People would show up at our fundraisers.

OpenAI chat health to connect data from health apps medical records-- there is a revolution coming where we as people of America can stay dramatically healthier.

Why aren't we doing the discussion of what to do to lower the price of healthcare instead of having debates of another $100 billion that goes on the very credit cards of the people who get--the insurance companies that get the subsidy that only as--our model is 38 percent of that subsidy actually ends up going into healthcare. We are still trying to figure out where the hell the rest of the money went.

Have we lost our minds? Why is it so much easier to just keep borrowing money and borrowing money and borrowing money and say: I am giving you something, but I am putting it on your credit card. It is like we are engaging in a level of financial lunacy here.

Now, let's actually go on to the even more difficult part of this discussion. I am doing this because I want us to start to have a benchmark. If there is anyone out there listening that has ever had to tolerate--because I have been doing these for a decade, and I am just exhausted. I am frustrated. I am angry.

My brothers and sisters here, Democrat and Republican, I like most of these people, and I am crushed. I am just absolutely intellectually, emotionally, even physically crushed at the inability to tell the truth. We don't want to tell the truth because our constituents get pissed off at us when we walk them through the math. The constituents look back and say, so you have been lying or the politicians have been lying to us for decades. The answer is yes, but it is not Democratic. It is not Republican. Much of the crisis that we are facing is demographic.

I am not going to explain all of this chart, but I am basically going to tell you, if you look at the financial lines on this chart, Mr. Speaker, it basically says, in 3 years, over half the money this Federal Government spends will go to those 65 and up. In 3 years, half the money we spend will go to those 65 and up.

Now, I need you to work through something with me. I have already presented the Moody's Analytics report that is saying, in 8 years from now, 30 percent of our spending, 30 percent of tax collections, will go just to interest. You are now seeing, in 3 years, the majority of our spending will actually go to benefits here. We have a math problem. Today, we have fewer 18 year olds than we had 20 years ago, but we have double the number of 65 year olds.

We can sit here and blame each other, but it is just demographics. It is happening over the entire industrialized world, but we are not allowed to actually have an honest discussion about it because the moment you say something, the other side is writing political commercials to rip your face off

because you told the truth about math and demographics.

It is real simple. Mr. Speaker, you are going to run for U.S. Senate. In your next term, the Medicare trust fund is empty. The Social Security trust fund is empty. It takes that first year, 2033, to just cover that shortfall that is over $638 billion. If you don't fix it, you double senior poverty. You double the number of baby boomers who will live on the street, and everyone's Social Security check has a 24 percent cut.

How many people have you heard this week get behind the microphones and say maybe we should actually start to adopt technology, modernization, deal with the reality of our fiscal cliff that is coming? Instead, I watch a parade of my brothers and sisters here say: I have an idea. It costs more money, but it is a really good idea. Let's just put it on the credit card.

It is out of order, but I will get to it. I am going to say it a couple of times because I did a presentation of a report from I think it is the Massachusetts or Boston economic council, freaky smart professors. If you use a 6 percent discount rate, which you can argue something lower, but sometimes you have to talk about math. A child born today, you need 104 percent of that child's lifetime income, so more money than they make in their entire lifetime, just to cover Federal pension benefits, Social Security, Medicare, military, Federal employees, and railroad retirement.

Does anyone care? Does anyone care? What is wrong with this place? The immorality that the next generation will be poorer than us--but we are not allowed to say that because, let's be honest, people want more stuff. If we keep giving them more stuff, they vote for us. They might even contribute.

Look, let's just continue to do some of the basic demographics. From 2004 to 2024, you see this one line here, those are 18-year-olds. Somewhat similar, but now you start to get to 2035 and start to understand, without immigration, you have a world where you functionally have more 65-year-olds than you have 18-year-olds.

We are having debates right now. There is a report out that--now, it is not adjusted for self-deports--saying that the United States had about 400,000 as a first snapshot growth in 2025. We have another report that says the United States had zero population growth last year. We have another report that says the United States will have zero population growth this year.

Mr. Speaker, are we going to tell the truth about math? You want our Social Security. You earned it. You deserve it. You want our Medicare. You earned it. You deserve it. In 7 years, both of those trust funds are empty.

What are we going to do? The argument is we will just borrow more money because, God forbid, we have any conversation about the cost of delivering healthcare. That will upset someone's business model or bureaucracy's model. It is hard to read.

The basic point was trying to show we are having terrific economic growth. I will show some slides here. With our GDP growth, some of the tax policies and some of the regulatory policies adopted in the last year are working.

Our problems are spending. Almost all the spending growth is interest because we are refinancing. We have $30 trillion out there we have to bring to market over the next few years. I think this year refinance was going to be about $11 trillion. That is bonds, notes, and paper that come due, plus another $2 trillion probably in virgin. That is new issuances. They are subject to the higher interest rates today than we had 5 years ago.

That is why our interest coverage costs have gotten so much more expensive. That is why if we do total interest from last year--the interest we also pay back to the trust funds from the money we borrowed from the trust funds--we spent $1.2 trillion on interest last year. Interest was the second biggest expense in this government last year, and it is getting worse.

What happens when we produce economic growth? We see this in red here. Our debt projections are actually every bit as bad as last year. That means for every dollar we take in, in tax receipts--remember that our tax as a percentage of GDP is basically back to the mean that it has been for decades. For every dollar we take in, we will spend $1.43. That is $1 in and $1.43 out. How long can we carry that on, Mr. Speaker? Yet, you start looking at where we are demographically.

What frustrates me is this is just what we are. There is not a magic: Well, we will suddenly have more children. Really?

This is happening all over the industrialized world. We have countries that buy you a house on your third or fourth child, and it didn't increase fertility rates. Yet our pension systems were designed on four or five workers.

Remember that Social Security and Medicare are pay as you go. We had a benefit of building reserves when the baby boomers were in the labor force. They ultimately were designed as pay as you go.

I have been in a 50-50 district for years. The political consultants lose their minds. They tell me I am not allowed to talk about the truth in math, but no one here wants to go near it, not even the people in 20-point or 30-point partisan districts. Will anyone here help us plan for the future?

This future is coming fast. We have economists now say we have functionally 3 years before we get in the interest cycle back and forth. I will try to explain that one of these days.

You have to understand when we hit in--what was that? In 2020, we had 2.7 workers per Social Security retiree. We are actually getting to the point over here where we think we are down to 2.3. In the coming decades, it is even less. So you and your spouse, you and your partner, functionally have your own retired person. It is just to understand the basic economics of the math.

Then we have the brain trusts who say we will just borrow the money each year. Did they hear the math? In 2033, the year the trust funds are empty, it is well over $600 billion. You are going to borrow basically half. That is 40 percent equal to what is the--well, actually almost 60 percent equal to today's defense budget. We will just throw that on the credit card. The next year it is bigger, and the next year it is bigger.

There are good things happening. The GDP numbers, which means the baseline economic growth numbers, are remarkably healthy. There is huge investment going on right now in technology that could actually boost productivity. Therefore, it will boost wages.

Where is the unified theory here? We are going to do another reconciliation where we are going to tell the markets that we will start limiting the spending so we get lower interest rates and so we can have more market growth. People can afford houses, all the input. Instead, you have a government that for every dollar we spend, we have to borrow another 43 cents. This is insane.

I was going to try to walk through some things I consider really hopeful. These are the contributions to GDP growth. Many of these contributions in the GDP growth, if we can get our policies and our regulatory designed properly, we can get some pops and productivity. Pops and productivity means pops in people's wages and pops in tax collections.

We have to get all the stars aligned at the right time. I just don't see us doing that because somehow it is not part of our lexicon. I will do presentations. We have too many people, particularly even on my side, who say things that aren't mathematically true. We hear something, and we repeat it. The customs duties, tariffs, are helpful. It is not as much money as so many people think.

Mr. Speaker, I am blessed to chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am number four on Ways and Means. I chair the Oversight Committee. I am the guy running a bunch of committees and am responsible for a number of these really uncomfortable investigations. I am blessed to have a staff that is a hell of a lot smarter than I would ever have hoped to have been at their age.

We start to work out charts like this. I am going to make some people mad. As a matter of fact, I am not even going to bother with that one. I will walk us through the straight number.

We are still vetting the number because we are doing predictions. All of this could mean nothing if the Supreme Court tomorrow changes its rules on the President's authority to

do the enhanced tariffs--let's just call them that--and whatever authorities the President may have to supplement those tariffs.

We have to understand our latest articles that we are looking at saying, for 2026, $215 billion of what we call customs receipts-- tariffs--the baseline, if there had been no changes, it would have been $84 billion. Mr. Speaker, is everyone working with me on this? That means there was $131 billion of new tariff money coming into the budget this fiscal year.

If we pull out our calculator, so far in the first quarter of this fiscal year, we have been borrowing $8 billion a day. We are hoping it actually comes back to the mean of being about $6 billion. Let's do $131 billion divided by 8. We functionally are covering 2 weeks of borrowing. It is helpful. It is not a solution.

Yet I will do the speech. I ask anyone who is watching if they have some suggestions of how I can actually start to break through because I am exhausted. Then I will watch someone come up. I am sitting in my office, and I am watching the floor. On occasion, I will pull out my calculator. I am just enraged because of the mathematical lying that goes on behind these microphones over and over. This is the survival of our Republic.

Let's actually do something that is semi-optimistic here. Let's look at waste and fraud. I had a meeting with a wonderful woman the other day. She actually is involved in our county party. She is really smart and absolutely lovely. I hope I misheard her. She seemed to believe that if we just didn't have that fraud in Minnesota, we could have covered a whole bunch of our national debt. She was genuinely concerned. It sounds like she was trying to quote what she actually thought she heard on cable news.

Mr. Speaker, I had to walk her through saying, okay, here is the best projection. Remember, some of this fraud may have happened over a decade. We are still getting all the numbers. There have already been a number of prosecutions, ``Minneapolis woman pleads guilty in $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme.'' She stole $250 million. There are a number of these articles that I have here, but you still have to do the math.

The fraud, just to give you an idea of the scale of our Nation's borrowing, is only a couple of days of borrowing. How do I help people understand the perspective of the scale and the fact that everything that we as Members of Congress vote on is borrowed?

If you told me today that I have to balance the budget, I can do it. Every part of government has to be shut down--no Park Service, no Congress, no EPA, no FDA. Everything that is discretionary is gone. Today, my math is that several hundred billion dollars of mandatory spending have to be gone. We are borrowing so damned much money now that we have to borrow money just to cover our Medicare obligations.

Do we understand? What if I came to you tomorrow and said that I can end most of the fraud in the IRS and the government and the SNAPs and all of these subsidies, like welfare and nutrition support programs?

We have actually had a bill for 6 or 7 years to use AI to audit the Pentagon. The Pentagon, I think, last year was its ninth audit. It failed. It could not pass an audit.

The same technology that we wanted to use to audit the Pentagon, it turns out that all of these programs, you just put that in the back end. Instead of doing the pay-and-chase model that, for some reason, the left seems to embrace, why let the fraud money ever go out the door?

I want to give you a simple example. How many of you have a credit card? How many of you have ever gone to a place where you have never purchased from before, and you stick your credit card in because I am going to buy some fishing tackle or whatever the hell you are buying, and suddenly, you get this text message saying: Is this you? Can you put in your PIN? Can you put in your code?

That technology has been around for a decade. If the credit card companies now have even more advanced AI to know that someone isn't you, that it is fraud, and that the data on your application and other things are fraud, you are telling me that we put billions and billions at risk trying to help our brothers and sisters, only to later find out that we have been financing scammers.

I have a passion for dealing with the long-run debt of this country. How do I convince the American people that we are going to have to do hard things when they are able to point and say that you haven't taken care of the filth and the stealing from our society, from our taxpayers? How do I get them to trust me when I still have scam artists robbing them?

Mr. Speaker, we have proposal after proposal to use technology to stop the scamming. Will it ever get a hearing here?

There almost seems to be a war to stop us from using technology because--I actually can't give you an honest answer. We know that, for years, I have been trying to fix technology at the IRS, and the IRS union loses its mind thinking: You are trying to get rid of us.

When we have been doing the audit at the Pentagon, the unionized auditors come and want to have meetings with me. They are concerned that we are trying to get rid of their jobs. I am just trying to protect the American taxpayers, but the technology already exists in the private sector. It is time we adopt it.

On healthcare, I just want to give this as an example. Utah, a couple of days ago, announced that they are going to allow AI as a pilot program in Utah to prescribe. It is for the renewal of your prescriptions. As I was talking about before, my calcium inhibitor, my hypertension medicine, the same one I have had for decades, I could plug in my data to the AI, and it would order my prescription, and it would be sent to me. It functionally has almost no cost.

We have dozens of examples that I have brought to the floor here over the last--actually, dozens and dozens of examples that I have brought to the floor here over the years, showing how we could crash the price of healthcare instead of doing the scam of let's just keep subsidizing the subsidy and the insurance companies. How about we change the accessibility and use technology to make it less expensive?

We are actually working on a thought experiment--and this will be the end--a crazy thought experiment. President Trump and the White House actually get a lot of credit, though we worked on this for years. Glutides, GLP-1s, I believe by the end of this month, one of the tablet versions will be available for $149 a month.

If obesity is responsible for 47 percent of U.S. healthcare spending, according to the Milken study, what would happen in our society, particularly where we have States where technically over half of their populations are considered obese? What would happen if access to the drug and, hopefully, nutrition and all the other things that need to go with it--but just do this thought experiment with me. The lobbyists weren't able to stop access to the glutides.

You might be on the cusp of a revolution of people who are morbidly obese, who have multiple chronic conditions, and who are losing their feet are about to get healthier.

Let's actually start accepting the technology, thinking creatively. With that, Mr. Speaker, we might be able to do some amazing things out there.

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

Madam Speaker, I promise you at least this one. I think I have the half an hour. I am going to try not to use all of it, and I will try to slow down some of the speaking.

Madam Speaker, I had a couple of odds and ends and then some basic optimism on one or two things. First off, let's do some cleanup.

Last week, I actually walked through a little bit of an economic report. We got a preview of it. I think it will be published fairly soon. It is ``Measuring What Matters,'' and the title is: ``Why Italy May Be in Better Fiscal Shape than the U.S.''

This is done by some of the super economic geeks out of Boston and Cambridge, but what terrified me because I am actually doing my best to read these sorts of documents is the little sentence I have highlighted here. I tried to point this out last week. This is for supergeeks. If you use a 6 percent discount rate, you need 104 percent of a child's lifetime income who is born next year and this year just to cover the pension and healthcare benefits in our country. You need more than they are ever going to earn in their entire life just to cover those promises.

Now, if you take it down to a 2 percent discount rate, which is a way you sort of say that here is where inflation and these things are going to be, you still need a 22 percent increase on their lifetime taxes just to cover pension benefits. This is actually based on some numbers where I think they may have too high a fertility rate.

The reason I point that out is we are not having the really difficult conversation here. What happens in a country this year when my economists on the Joint Economic Committee are saying that we may have zero population growth in the United States this year and the fact that we have fewer 18-year-olds today than we had 20 years ago but almost double those who are 65 and older?

Madam Speaker, I keep coming here week after week after week and showing charts about the debt and the unfunded liabilities. Now I am seeing some stories today saying that net interest will be over $1 trillion this year if you add in the paying back because we have to pay interest back to the Social Security trust fund and all of those when we borrow the money. It could be $1.25 trillion of interest.

What you should understand there is--let's walk through some of the hierarchy. Social Security is number one. We are going to spend $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion this year on Social Security. Guess what the number two expense in our country is now? It is interest. If you do the total interest load, interest.

The next is Medicare.

Number four turns out to be the ObamaCare, or the ACA subsidies and Medicaid. That is number four.

Guess what is number five now in our spending? It is defense.

So often, I will talk to my liberal brothers and sisters, and they will turn to you and say that we should cut defense. That way, we can give out more money. It is now number five.

Look, it breaks my heart because we keep having these discussions, and I have come behind this microphone for over a decade now and feel like sometimes I am doing a junior economics lecture.

The point is trying to say: Here is the scale of the problem, but there are actually solutions if we can be bold, if we can be creative, and if we can take on the entrenched incumbency of the bureaucracy and business models.

Let's actually do a couple of things here and see if I can make this make sense. Let's march along--this is sort of important--and see if I can make this make sense.

This is last year. The red is spending. The blue is tax receipts. That gap is debt. You will notice, actually, that our projection for the fiscal year 2026 is our tax receipts--so tax collections are actually up. They are actually up almost 17.8 percent, which is wonderful. Most of it is capital gains. You know, the stock market is doing well.

Oddly enough, our spending is actually slightly down, but we still have this massive gap. Our best guess is that we are still running a $2 trillion deficit this year. Depending on what the Supreme Court does in regard to the enhanced tariffs, we may pick up some other liability that we are going to have to find out a way to work out with the White House.

Madam Speaker, this is an improvement, but the scale is still terrifying. It is still a couple trillion dollars. I know there are some products that have come out of the White House, CBO, and others saying that debt may only be $1.6 trillion or $1.8 trillion. It is not what we are tracking because so

far, the first quarter of this year--we still have a couple more weeks on it--for every dollar in tax receipts, we are spending about $1.62. We think this will even out to being about $1 of taxes in, and we are going to spend about $1.43.

Guess what? Most of that debt--that growth and that debt is interest because we have been refinancing a lot of our debt that was sold a few years ago when interest rates were very, very low, and healthcare costs.

A point I want to make--and I am going to come back to this a couple of times here--a couple hours ago, we had the Joint Economic Committee over in the Senate. It is one of my blessings. I get to chair it. We did something, and both sides were pretty good. Some Democrats took some pokes at us, but the theme of this Joint Economic Committee hearing was healthcare.

We, as a body--we, as Congress--we, as a society, have turned into financial engineering. The ACA, ObamaCare, is a financing bill. It is who pays and who gets subsidized? The Republican alternative had much better--well, somewhat better actuarial distribution, but it was still a financing bill. It is who got to pay, and who got subsidized? Medicare for all is almost completely a financing bill.

How about if we held a hearing where we talked about not the financing of healthcare but things that could disrupt the cost of healthcare? We had one gentleman from one of the biggest life insurance companies in America come in and talk about it saying that here are the things we do to keep our insured population alive and healthier.

We do things. We reward them for doing these data rings, or putting things on their wrists, or how they eat, or we gamify some exercise, and talk about how much healthier the population is. For them, it is a profit model. Turns out, if you sell life insurance, the longer someone keeps making their premium payments, the more money you make. They were incentivized.

We had one of the lead medical officers from a healthcare system in Arizona called Banner talking about how they are trying to align a system that actually they get rewarded for helping populations be healthier and the technology they are using to do it.

The fact of the matter is that we are finally trying to drag the conversation around this place from being financial engineering is the future of healthcare, ``Let's subsidize more populations,'' even though I am going to show you a couple of boards here of how much of that subsidy, your tax money, is just disappearing.

Maybe the crazy conversation here is what happens with the combination of the use of technology, of cures, of availability.

If it is true that semaglutides, you think of the GLP-1s, one of the deals the President made is the tablet version is going to go to $149 sometime next year. We know from the Milken study a few years ago that obesity is 47 percent of U.S. healthcare spending. Wouldn't it help if we could help our brothers and sisters get healthier? Yes, obesity is complex. Diabetes is complex, autoimmune. There are all sorts of things that go on. I accept the complexity.

The morality of what happens in a society if you could, over a couple of years, help your brothers and sisters get healthier, it turns out you could have these remarkable changes in costs. How many times have you heard the saying in healthcare that 5 percent of the population is over 50 percent of the spend? It turns out that much of that 50 percent of spending is on people who have multichronic conditions. A substantial portion of that is because of obesity.

Let's not be afraid to talk about it. Let's do the moral thing of helping ourselves, helping our brothers and sisters. It actually helps the debt and deficit.

We published a major report 2 years ago now, showing that obesity will be responsible for $9.1 trillion of additional healthcare spending over 10 years, making it the single most expensive thing in our country. Yet, how much work have you seen behind these microphones, saying maybe we shouldn't always talk about the subsidization of healthcare and start talking about what we all pay.

For a decade, I have come behind these microphones with technology and ideas. We are going to walk through just a little bit on the ACA because I can't stop myself after what I heard a couple of our Democrat colleagues say.

This is from the audits and the Joint Economic research, and it is a very simple thing. This is on the ACA, the ObamaCare subsidies, and then the enhanced subsidies, so it is the subsidies on top of the subsidies.

We actually get to the point where it appears only 33 percent of the money actually goes to you as a consumer for your healthcare, for your getting well.

We have 27 percent of what I call deadweight. It just disappears. It is someone who is insured who has never made a claim, even though they may have been 100 percent subsidized. Now, we are finding out huge portions of that appear to be fraud. Last year, over 41 percent of the ACA population, which is 7 percent of healthcare, so ACA, the ObamaCare population, 41 percent paid no premiums. If you are not paying premiums, you see how easy it would be to sign someone up, take the commissions, and no one ever has to know because you are not getting a bill. We are discovering stunning amounts of fraud.

The other thing, which was just fascinating, is that in the study, we have almost 38 percent of these dollars disappearing, functioning insurance. You go, but they can only hold 6, 7 percent of it. That is not actually what happens.

We published an entire paper on this 2 weeks ago in the Joint Economic Committee. Go to the website, Joint Economic Committee Republicans, and you will see our methodology and where the math is.

We are back to, once again, arguing: Is this how you want your taxpayer dollars to disappear? We want our brothers and sisters to have the most affordable healthcare possible in America, but to do it, do you want us to funnel your cash, your tax dollars, into this level of fraud? We have to walk through this.

Why the fixation, particularly for my Joint Economic Committee and myself, on changing the actual costs of healthcare is you look at the long-run charts, the national healthcare expenditures, we have the substantial gap--and I know these types of charts are almost impossible to read, but what I am trying to help you understand here is here is the gross domestic product. We are growing as a country, but the cost of healthcare is growing substantially faster.

A factoid, I beg of you, whether you be on the left side, or the right side, or confused somewhere in between, in 7 years, the $1 trillion we spend this year on Medicare becomes $2 trillion. We double the spend on Medicare in the next 7 years, and in 7 years, the trust fund is gone, meaning if you are a hospital or a doctor and part of your revenues that you receive on Medicare patients is from the Medicare Part A trust fund, it is gone. It is gone in 7 years. Let alone, the Social Security trust fund is also gone in 7 years, and we will double senior poverty.

We are not allowed to talk about that. I will get an angry text message this evening saying: David, you can't talk about that, as the Democrat political consultants are saying, oh, good, more attacks.

The immorality of this place to not want to tell the truth about our demographics and the complete barrier we have built legally on innovation--I have a couple of really geeky things here, but I am going to skip them and go to something that is a little crazy.

Every week when I do these, I try to come here with something that is optimistic. A few years ago, I got behind this microphone and talked about a University of Houston drug that basically takes fentanyl in your system--and I am sure I am describing it partially wrong, but I am doing my best--and attaches a protein to it, and, therefore, the drug can't pass the blood-brain barrier. It lasts for 6 months to a year.

What would happen if I came to you and showed you some of the economic studies we have done in the Joint Economic Committee by reading the literature? Some of our data, we are a few years out of date, but in 2020, we were approaching $1.5 trillion for the cost of fentanyl in America in 2020. Do you realize that is more than the defense budget? That is almost what we are

going to spend this year in Social Security, the cost to society from fentanyl.

What happens if someone like me comes to you and says, hey, and anyone that is interested, look it up because WIRED Magazine last week actually did an amazingly detailed article--it is a long article; it is a long read--on the labs around the country. They featured the University of Houston and a couple of the private companies that are trying to bring these things to market. They call it a fentanyl vaccine. It is technically not a vaccine. What would happen in our society if someone who has used a synthetic opioid, it has rewired their brain, and it is one of the ways we help them get through rehab? How about if you are the police officer who doesn't have to worry about having Narcan close by?

The other challenge I will give you is to go look up a couple of the articles that are about Philadelphia and some of the animal tranquilizers, and this is beyond the xylazine and--I think that is spelled with an x. It is a whole other category that makes it almost impossible to detox because the cravings are so violent.

Once it starts on the East Coast, it is coming across the country. I beg of everyone here to start to think about what happens if our ability to help bring a solution, a drug solution to help our brothers and sisters and protect our first responders--because so far, the data on--let's call it a fentanyl vaccine--is that it is 92 to 98 percent effective. What if this were worth a few hundred billion dollars in economic savings to our society in a single year?

Repeatedly, I come here and I talk about helping our brothers and sisters with obesity, the technology, that you can walk around and have a medical lab attached to your body. Here are some of the others that I talk about, with biology and synthetic biology and other solutions. They are out there. But how do I get the brain trust around here to come together and say: We are going to take all of these ideas and build a unified theory, and this unified theory is how we crash the price of healthcare, instead of spending a couple more years arguing back and forth on how much more money we should borrow to hand out as subsidies, particularly to insurance companies.

That is my simple theory I am trying to sell. There are solutions. They are complex. You have actually got to read a lot of long articles to try and understand what is going on. You have got to stop being afraid, and you have got to stop protecting incumbent business models that are terrified of having cures, solutions, better and faster ways to do it, and the use of technology. If we get rid of that fear and start doing what is moral and economically rational around here, we are in the time of miracles.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to let you go back to your lives. I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 12 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, December 18, 2025, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, the good news is we have only until 10:00. The bad news is I am going to use every second of it. Let's race through this because originally, I think I was going to go almost an hour. Maybe this is mercy.

I want to walk through just a couple of concepts here. One, we are going to talk about one of my intense frustrations. I have talked about this for a decade or more. Please, how do I get my brothers and sisters on the left and those on the right to understand we have turned the whole discussion of healthcare into financial engineering? Work with me on this.

Many of us know ACA as ObamaCare. It is a financing bill. It has community rating in it, so the guaranteed access, but it is a financing bill. It is who gets subsidized and who has to pay. Our Republican alternative was a financing bill. It just had a little better actuarial modeling in it. Medicare for all is a financing bill.

We don't have the discussion about what we pay, the waste, the fraud, the adoption of technology, the adoption of cures, the adoption of how we deliver, the adoption of making us autonomous because we can wear our medical lab on our body now. I wear one of the data rings, and I experimented with a Dexcom in the last couple of weeks.

Instead, we are going to beat each other up around here. The Democrats are going to try to make a political issue out of it. We are going to basically fumble because we had trouble explaining that we have turned healthcare into financing. They want to hand out billions and billions of dollars more to insurance companies to buy down rates.

Let's actually walk through some points I want to make. This is the first one. I desperately hope this number evens out as we go through the rest of the year.

Our model right now says in the first quarter of this fiscal year-- remember, October 1, we began the 2026 fiscal

year. For every dollar we are taking in tax collections, Mr. Speaker, we are spending $1.62. The original model was, every $1 in, we would spend $1.42 or $1.43. Our spending is up.

What is driving that spending up? It is the refinancing of our debt at higher interest rates, because we had all that debt we sold a few years ago at very low interest rates. The fact of the matter is healthcare costs keep going up. The stupid discussion we are going to have here is a financing debate--how much more subsidies should we hand out--and not a discussion of what we are going to do to change the price of healthcare.

Let's actually take a quick run through this. I am going to try to explain a couple of basic things about the ACA. Most of us know it as ObamaCare.

This chart is hard to read from a distance. ACA goes into effect. I want us to step all the way back out to where we are here when the enhanced subsidies--these are subsidies on top of subsidies--is $40 billion. Over here, the basic subsidies, the growth of the subsidies since the pandemic, is another $75 billion. On top of the base subsidies, they are $80 billion. This is only 7 percent of the healthcare market.

Let's take a look at that. This is so hard for people to understand. I was listening to one of my Democrat colleagues speak the other day. It was a complete distortion field of the truth and what was going on out there. They say all the healthcare is going to go up this much.

Are they willing to admit they screwed up? They created an absolutely distorted model. By screwing up all the incentives, everyone's healthcare costs went up, even though the ACA, ObamaCare, is only this little wedge here. It is 7 percent of the healthcare population.

The vast majority of the other population gets it through their employer, veterans, Medicare, and Medicaid. Then I need my colleagues to see this other wedge there. That is the portion that is not getting subsidies from taxpayers. The rest of this right here is getting subsidized.

I will show a chart in a moment where 41 percent of this population that is being subsidized in the ACA had no premium at all. You as a taxpayers bought their healthcare. Is that really what the Democrats promised us? Does anyone remember President Obama saying that healthcare premiums will be lowered by $2,500? Folks will get to keep their doctors. Should we hold the left to their own standards?

As conservatives, we need to get off our heinies and start explaining that if we continue this model, we are all screwed. We need to step up and say we can do this better. We have technology where we can lower premiums rather dramatically. I have been coming behind this microphone for a decade. I will try to go fast enough to touch on it.

I did this board the other day. I just need to show you this is what they call an economic scoring of the enhanced premium tax credits, which is basically the subsidies on top of the subsidies.

Functionally, only 38 percent of that $40 billion is actually going to cover actual insurance where people are going to use it. The vast majority of it just disappears. It either doesn't get used, or it may have disappeared with the brokers or the insurance companies. Something is horribly wrong in this money.

Yet, when we actually start to look at the studies and articles, here is the GAO report about the ACA. It has a simple line here.

``Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: Preliminary Results from Ongoing Review Suggest Fraud Risks in the Advance Premium Tax Credit Persist.''

Then you read it, Mr. Speaker, and it is page after page after page of different types of fraud. People have been signed up and had no idea. Brokers are going to prison right now because they have been signing up folks in the system.

``ObamaCare Is a Mecca for Fraud,'' The Wall Street Journal from just a couple days ago. ``Open Enrollment is Healthcare's Most Expensive Lie.''

How many more studies do we need to explain that you are being defrauded, Mr. Speaker?

If this were helping people be healthier, then bless it, but, instead, the Democrats are terrified to tell the truth because the model they built is only 7 percent of the population. Almost one-half of that population is getting the healthcare for free, and it has created a distortion field of costs.

I will give you a simple test, Mr. Speaker. Ask yourself, go back 10, 15 years ago. Let's go do 10 years ago when the ACA goes into effect.

Mr. Speaker, how much have your healthcare costs, your insurance costs, changed?

Remember, Mr. Speaker, insurance is different from healthcare. How much have your costs changed?

Did they meet the promise that was given to you: We are going to make things more affordable.

It is not the Affordable Care Act, and that is the reality of the math.

So let's continue to walk through parts of this.

The number of subsidized zero claims is fascinating. The enhanced subsidies that came out after COVID were only supposed to be 5 years. The Democrats voted for this. I don't think a single Republican did. It was their plan. This was Democrat policy, and now they are acting all uppity saying: Well, you Republicans need to fix our mistake.

Almost 11 million who were part of that enhanced population never made a claim. We are now seeing studies, data mining, looking at a huge portion of these people had no idea they had been signed up. It is rampant fraud.

Let's have a little more fun here.

How many who were enrolled with these enhanced subsidies ended up having no skin in the game at all and who had no cost?

Last year, 41 percent had no cost. You, as a taxpayer, Mr. Speaker, paid for their healthcare. This year we modeled it. It is going to be around 39 percent. Think about that, Mr. Speaker.

Is that what you were promised? Is that what you were told?

As we start to walk through this, 6.4 million people this year were improperly enrolled in subsidized ObamaCare plans costing taxpayers $27 billion a year.

Understand, Mr. Speaker, what this means. It is rampant fraud.

Mr. Speaker, how many members of the Democratic Party, the left, have you seen come behind the microphone saying: Hey, we really like subsidized healthcare, and we really like the level of fraud, so we don't want to change anything?

Mr. Speaker, 96 percent of all applications representing fake enrollees were approved on the ObamaCare marketplace and received subsidies. Understand, Mr. Speaker, do you remember, we were promised: Well, the website is going to find fraud.

It turns out that 96 percent of the fraudulent applications going in where someone is just bleeding the system got approved. The system doesn't stop the fraud.

This is your money, Mr. Speaker. You are paying for fraudsters, and you are paying for brokers who are going to jail.

Our debate here is: Well, we want to give another $40 billion to the fraudsters, but there will be a portion of that that will get some buydown on their healthcare costs.

In 2023, one Social Security number--and I used this one just because it is so easy to understand. Remember, there is a system that is supposed to be mining this for fraud--one Social Security number was used and got 125 policies.

How do we not catch that?

We are really that bad at this.

I am not going to make you go through that.

Mr. Speaker, this chart is almost impossible to read. I am going to put it up on my website. What you need to understand is that these are the different ways people ended up in healthcare.gov or healthcare.care. The broker community goes and walks you through, but what we are discovering is that it has no actual checks for fraud.

Have the Democrats stepped up and said: Okay, we know a huge portion of this cash we were handing out after COVID has been disappearing. It is not going to make our brothers and sisters healthier and provide them access to care. Are they willing--no, they are not--to actually fix this system so we are not bleeding American taxpayers?

Now let's actually talk about some solutions.

First, I need everyone to understand how perverse the system is. I have

come behind the mike over and over and over and over and said: You have this technology that you can wear, this thing you can blow into, this thing here that can diagnose. This wearable here is actually more accurate than a human doctor. The Apple watch now is an FDA approved medical device for the heart, it should be allowed to prescribe. I need you to understand, Mr. Speaker, how perverse healthcare has become moneywise.

This one is absurd but it is easy to understand. Here are a couple of articles: Paper industry, drugmakers spar over requirement to print prescription forms.

Mr. Speaker, to show you how absurd the world has become, there was a simple attempt to say: We are just going to put your prescriptions on your phone so when you get them you can see all the side effects.

Mr. Speaker, do you know that all that paper that is printed? We had lobbyists here and a U.S. Senator who blocked it saying: No, my paper industry.

When the paper industry was able to stop a simple money-saving reform because apparently cutting down trees and turning it into paper pulp and printing it is more important than something that would have been dramatically more efficient. It has gotten that absurd.

We attempted to basically run a piece of legislation because we did a study on how they duplicate MRIs, X-rays, ultrasounds, and CTs there are. We have some numbers that look like it could be as much as $25 to $35 billion a year.

Do something crazy. When you get your knee MRI, Mr. Speaker, put the data, the images on this so when you go to the next doctor a week later, it is right there: Doctor, let me hand it to you. Not get another scan.

We already have lobbyists running around the building saying: No, the duplicate scans are part of our profit model.

Where are my own brothers and sisters, particularly on the conservative side, saying: We want to unleash technology. We want to unleash doing this a better, faster, and cheaper way?

For those Members who run around saying: PBM reform. Fine, but understand that every study we have right now is that PBM reform saves a fraction of a fraction of money, and it is already happening.

Mr. Speaker, you will start to see companies now ditching the middleman and starting to sell directly. Go look up Civica RX for anyone who is in front of a computer. It is a co-op making drugs, selling insulin cheaper than our Federal Government-subsidized price.

The fact of the matter is legalizing, encouraging, and incentivizing disruption in the market is where you get all sorts of different channels. If PBM is the best price, God bless them. If the drug company wants to sell directly to consumers, bless them. If a co-op wants to get together with your Medicaid system, the hospital system, or insurance company and they decide that we are going to manufacture our own and we are going to do it cheaper than the government-subsidized price, then bless them.

There are ways to crash the price of healthcare. We have one right here. It is a discussion of AI. AI went through someone's medical bills and started realizing how much mis-billing there was in there.

What if we did something very, very simple: Legalize one of my AI billing--we call it clean claims. Where here is the doctor's note, here is the insurance contract, they meet, and it gets paid.

How much staffing and other things would you save but also how much more money?

We have the technology. I just can't seem to get our brothers and sisters here willing to accept the bills.

Here is another one that is incredibly optimistic. If you have a subscription to Wired magazine this week--Mr. Speaker, and it is something we in our office have been working on for years now--they call it a fentanyl vaccine. It is not technically a vaccine. It is a protein binder that attaches to the drug making it so it can't pass the brain-blood barrier. There is an entire article in Wired magazine.

We did some research. I had trouble believing this number. I had one of my economists actually go back and double check it: $1.5 trillion in 2020 is the cost from fentanyl.

There are solutions, Mr. Speaker. We need to step up and start understanding there is a moral way to approach the cost of healthcare, and it is not a bunch more taxpayer subsidies. It is actually lowering the price.

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

Mr. Speaker, to begin, I am going to yield to Chairwoman Foxx, and then we will have some fun with math.

Mr. Speaker, the good news for the team here, I am not going to use the rest of the hour. I

promise you I am not going to go that long. That is the only happy part of this I have for you because I thought I would actually use this week, I would come and show you all the creative ideas we have to take on debt and deficit and get wages growing.

Mr. Speaker, we had an incident today where the Budget Committee was inviting Members to come in and sort of give our priorities.

My comments to the Budget Committee--I brought them some work that has been done by the Joint Economic Committee economists. One of my only joys I have here anymore is I am blessed to chair the Joint Economic Committee. I have a handful of Ph.D. economists. It turns out they are really good at math. I handed it over. I said that we need to tell the truth about math. I say this almost every week, and I beg for someone out there to hear it.

Regarding debt and deficit, we are buried in debt, but it is primarily interest and demographics. I would love to blame the Democrats. They want to blame us. I have shown over and over that, as a country, 40 years ago, our fertility rates started to fall. I am going to show it on the board.

This year, we functionally have double the number of 65-year-olds as we had 20 years ago, but we have the same number of 18-year-olds. It gets worse next year. The year after that, it gets worse. The year after, it gets worse. Yet, we built Social Security, Medicare, and these things on a model that had population growth.

Mr. Speaker, I am only one-third through the paper. It is always dangerous to come behind the microphone and act like I know what the hell I am talking about. Let's actually walk through it.

This was brought to me by some of my economists. The National Bureau of Economic Research has a number of folks from Cambridge. It is not Cambridge, England. It is Cambridge, Massachusetts. There are little institutions hanging around there such as Boston University, MIT, Harvard. Apparently, they are freaking good at math.

The headline here should actually make us pucker up, ``Measuring What Matters: Why Italy May Be in Better Fiscal Shape than the U.S.'' Then, we go in here and start to understand the punch line of this paper. I will do my best to describe this.

Please, someone out there, if there is anyone listening, it basically says that if we keep things the way they are--the current tax policy, spending policies, and pension policies--to cover Social Security, Medicare, military retirement, and Federal employee retirement, it will require 104 percent of the income of the next generation.

This isn't building bridges. This isn't modernizing the military. This is just the retirement system of the United States. Doing so requires levying lifetime net tax rates exceeding 104 percent.

We need 104 percent of the next generation's income. It is not 100 percent of their income but 104 percent of their income to meet our pension healthcare obligations. Is that going to work? We have the research.

How many people are going to come behind this microphone the rest of this year and the next year and actually say: Hey, we have a demographic problem. We have a spending problem.

Let's actually walk through some of the things we do know. Every day, I send out something called the ``Daily Debt Monitor.'' It is a text message. We have a few thousand people who subscribe to it. We have probably a lot more people who don't want to get it. It tells us how much we have actually borrowed.

Mr. Speaker, this always goes on. This is the conflict between the White House, Congress, and those of us who actually have some responsibility on spending, budget, economics. They say: David, you are scaring people by telling people how much we are borrowing so far this fiscal year.

Think of this. We are what? I should have calculated this in my head before I got behind this microphone. What are we, 73 or 74 days into this fiscal year, Mr. Speaker? In that 70-some days, we have already borrowed $788 billion as of yesterday. If we stay at this rate, we will click off another $1 trillion of borrowing. From October 1, the beginning of this new fiscal year, to before Christmas, it is another $1 trillion of borrowing.

Once again, the left will blame us. We will blame them. No one wants to have a conversation of how healthcare costs are exploding on us, and we refuse to do the things to lower healthcare costs. Instead, we will spend months around here debating subsidies because we have turned healthcare into financing and not the actual price of services and healthcare.

Mr. Speaker, I need my colleagues to think about this. That $788 billion in that 73 days or so is like $148,000 a second in borrowing so far this fiscal year. If we average it out over 12 months--I did see the number. It is like $73,000 a second if we take the last 12 months. That is what we are borrowing.

Don't worry. Be happy. Don't tell the truth. Yet, I have done presentation after presentation over these years, saying that in 8 years, 8 budget years, 30 percent of all of our tax receipts in this country go just to pay interest. If interest rates go up 1 percent, 45 percent of all tax receipts in 2034 or so go just to pay interest.

Yet, the clown show--excuse me--the Congress will find shiny objects and will find things that will enrage them. They will go really hard on getting on cable television tomorrow night and say something inflammatory so the dopamine hits.

Mr. Speaker, how often do we go home and have meetings with our constituents? There will be this one person who found something on the Internet, and it sounds like a conspiracy theory. I would argue the greatest conspiracy in our society is the unwillingness to tell the truth about basic math.

Once again, let's go back. Let's go double down. I was told ``double down'' is actually saying when I have a good hand. Maybe it is not appropriate for this. Let's see what the report says. Assuming the current generation makes no contributions to reduce the U.S. fiscal gap--that basically means taxes, contributions, and incomes stay on the track they are on, and there is not suddenly much higher taxes or much further paydown--a newborn today, a new generation today, would pay a 104 percent net tax rate.

Mr. Speaker, 104 percent of their income would be required just to cover Social Security, Medicare, military retirement, Federal pensions, and railroad retirement pensions. It will not cover the rest of government. It will not cover a new building, a new bridge, the State Department, the FBI, or the military. It is just to cover our unfunded liabilities, Mr. Speaker.

Where is the fiscal commission? Where is telling the truth?

What will happen if we don't get our act together and adopt the technology, adopt the revolutions in healthcare, adopt the things that make our brothers and sisters healthier, adopt the things that actually raise wages, or adopt the policies on immigration that maximize growth instead of the importation of poverty?

We are being handed reports that say, if you actually look at the underlying math: You are worse than Italy.

When Greece has a better credit rating--Greece, right now, can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States--I struggle. Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. I keep trying to find out ways to describe this. Yet, in this place we call Capitol Hill, I will walk into a room with some of the budget documents and say: Hey, I am here not only as a Ways and Means member, I am number four on Ways and Means; I am the Oversight chairman, so I chair the Joint Economic Committee, our economists have come up with some numbers we really should talk about. I look around and everyone is getting up and leaving because we don't want to know.

So let's actually deal with a couple of other facts.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, last summer, I think it was July 4 this last summer, we raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. We have already burnt $2 trillion. So we borrowed $2 trillion of that $5 trillion of authorization.

We are doing a calculation by April 27, so in 1 year and a few months, we will hit the debt ceiling again.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, the debt ceiling is just the authorization to borrow what you have already obligated.

When you get the clown show that says: You can't raise the debt ceiling. Then I say, okay, I can do that. Tell me the portion of government you want me to cut, Mr. Speaker? Because this fiscal year, for every dollar of taxes we take in, we are going to spend $1.43. I am happy to work with you. Let's not raise the debt ceiling.

Tell me the functioning half of government--because, Mr. Speaker, you have to understand the economic effects if you stop the spending. So, Mr. Speaker, what is the 50 percent of government you want me to cut tomorrow?

Consider that only about one-quarter of U.S. spending is actually voted on by Congress. We vote on defense and what they call nondefense discretionary. The rest of the spending, the rest of the 75 percent of the spending is Social Security and it is Medicare. They are the things that we call entitlements. They are earned benefits that are on autopilot.

Well, David, they stole my money.

No, they didn't. We just stopped having children.

The number is a couple of years out-of-date, but the average couple in America gets about $73,000 more from Social Security than they put in. It is a crap rate of return, but Congress, the AARP, and the union groups back in the Bush administration--this was W--when there was discussion of: Hey, can we take maybe a small sliver and put that into markets? If we had done that 25 years ago, then today's retirees and those moving into retirement would be dramatically better off.

It is too late. Remember, in only a couple of more years all the baby boomers are 65 and up. So the demographic curve is here. It is just math. It is just math. These numbers get worse. So that is the debt ceiling.

Let's actually have a little bit more fun.

Medicare. There is a trust fund with Medicare. You pay it on your FICA tax, Mr. Speaker, your payroll tax. Except we have a little problem. We calculate in early August 2032, so 7 some years from now, the Medicare part A trust fund is gone.

Hospitals are probably the largest lobbyists here in Washington, D.C. They are all up and down the hallways.

Are they ready for the 11 percent cut in spending?

Because in less than 7 years this is coming.

So let's add something else on top of that. This is the one--and I am told I need to stop cussing behind this microphone. It shocks me because I will get some very important people around Washington, D.C., who get upset with me for this portion because apparently--particularly as a guy who is in the 50/50 district--we are never, ever, ever, ever supposed to use the word Medicare or Social Security.

So let's actually have some fun here.

The Social Security trust fund is projected to be depleted in late 2032, so 7 some years from now. When this happens, then we double the poverty of seniors in America.

Mr. Speaker, if you are on Social Security, then you will get a 24 percent cut in your check. There is math and there are models out there, and you will double the poverty of seniors, and we will double the number of baby boomers on the street.

Do these two things together, the trust fund for Medicare and the trust fund for Social Security, being gone in 7 years, to capitalize it--so that is happening in 2032. If you took 2033--and I am sorry but the dates are important--and said for that full year, we are going to just reach into the general fund. We are just going to use the general fund. It is over $600 billion, and then the next year it is bigger and the next year it is bigger. So it is functionally about 60 percent of the entire defense budget, just to make up that shortfall for that first year.

Mr. Speaker, you would think something this--to use my little girl's term--ginormous would be a big deal around here. Yet, what happened in this place, because it is so perverse, is that right now there is some leftist political consultant saying: Hey, Schweikert used the words Social Security and Medicare, let's design our attack ads for the next campaign.

They spent millions of dollars in the last campaign beating the ever- living crap out of me because I cared enough to want to fix this.

When this place cares more about what the political consultants can design as an attack ad, then where is our fiscal commission?

Where is the fact that we are putting people who can do math into a small room, turning off the air-conditioning, and saying: Come up with a plan to save the future? Or is just doubling poverty of seniors functionally our political plan?

The left says that we are just going to raise taxes. I have done presentation after presentation on the floor here. I have shown the math. Every tax hike of the Democrats--so a tax on capital gains, a tax on income, a tax on corporate taxes, you can go grab the entire Bernie Sanders playbook, and we have had it scored, and you do its economic effects, and we do the maximum tax rate before the tax receipts roll over--produces about 1.5 percent of GDP of the economy.

I am so sorry for the staff because they have all heard me say this a dozen times: When we do the cuts, the actual spending cuts and their economic effects, it produces about 1 percent of GDP.

So what is that, Mr. Speaker?

It is 2\1/2\ percent.

If we do the borrowing we did from the trust funds last fiscal year, we borrowed almost 7.2, 7.3 percent of the entire economy, then does anyone see the problem?

We borrowed over 7 percent, but all the solutions of raising taxes and cutting spending over here come in at 2\1/2\ percent. It is called a fiscal gap.

But, David, you are not allowed to talk about these things. We need to just pretend.

What sort of pretending is it going to be in 7 years when grandma gets a 24 percent cut in her check and when the hospital won't see her because they had an 11 percent cut in their Medicare compensation and they no longer can afford to see seniors?

This is coming. This is real. This isn't pretend. This isn't feelings. It is called math.

Please understand. I am giving up. I have spent one-and-a-half decades of my life behind these microphones running around here and actually producing actual legislation to fix it. I can't even get my fellow Members of Congress to cosponsor the legislation just to take on fraud in Medicare part C, let alone fix things. You know, David, it has the word Medicare, and we are not allowed to say that.

I need to do a correction from last week because I was going so fast at one point, I didn't describe this chart well enough.

I was actually trying to just say that tax collections are up, but capital gains are up 64 percent. Remember, Mr. Speaker, capital gains are only about 7 percent, where income taxes and taxes on wages are up 5\1/2\ percent. That is amazing. However, remember, Mr. Speaker, income taxes are over one-half of all income into the Federal Treasury. I didn't want to say: Hey, 64 percent of all tax collections are up because of capital gains. That is only the little sliver that is capital gains.

A 5.5 percent increase in wages is amazing. The problem is that spending is up about 9 percent. If we could just hold our spending flat--except our problem is our demographics. This year, every day we have 13,000 of our brothers and sisters turn 65, they move into their earned benefits. We made a social contract.

In 1990 or 1991, when the fertility rates in the United States started to roll over pretty hard, we never built a model saying, oh, heavens what happens when you don't have enough young people.

Let's make some more people mad with the truth. The customs duties, the tariffs, have actually been very helpful. They are important. I actually think we need to come up with a much broader scheme on international tax collections, particularly imports and dealing with other countries and their value-added tax, what we call a VAT tax, and how they arbitrage or they refund it when you export to the United States. However, if we send them something, they attach their VAT back on. It gets a little confusing.

We actually held a hearing today in Ways and Means on the international tax system because if the Supreme Court, whether it be this month or in

the coming months, changes the President's authorities on tariffs, maybe those of us on the tax writing committee should step up and do our job.

I need to tell you the truth about the math. Let's have a moment here. Let's do 2025. That is the chart here. The $77 billion you see right there on the chart, that was already the law. That was before the Trump Presidency. That was tariffs. Customs duties is the proper term.

The President added other rules, mechanics, tariffs, customs duties. They gave us another--a total of $155 billion. That means we collected, in the 2025 fiscal year, an extra $118 billion. That is a lot of money.

Remember, in 2025, we were borrowing $6 billion a day. You can do the basic math. That is like 18 days of borrowing, was the increase we took in 2025.

It is helpful. It is helpful. Do not walk away from it, but also don't make up numbers that it is going to pay off the debt.

In 2026, we modeled that the base tariffs, base customs duties, would produce about $84 billion. Wonderful. The total we model is $324 billion, meaning we are going to get an extra $240 billion this year, if President Trump's tariffs are allowed to stay in. It is really helpful, but it is basically 1 month of borrowing. It is 1 month of borrowing.

If you go on cable news tonight or cable talk and you say: We are going to get a refund--math is math, and I really wish this body would get better at telling the truth about it.

Just a couple more boards, then I am going to give everyone back their life. Then I will go home and deal with the angry text messages I am going to get from people who don't like it when I tell the truth.

You don't want that one, but it basically says CBO actually did some remodeling, and we calculate that total customs duties over the next 11 years will bring in about $3 trillion. That is a lot of money, very helpful.

But you have got to understand, over the next 10 years, what took us 240 years to build up in debt, we almost double in the next 10. It is estimated by 2035, we are somewhere around $63 trillion to $65 trillion in debt. You actually start to see the squeeze where publicly sold debt, compared to borrowing from the trust funds, goes because we are depleting the trust funds so there is less money so borrow out of them. In the next 10, 11 years, we almost double what took us 240 years as a country to build up in debt.

Here is the thing that is really hard to talk about. I actually saw Elon Musk this last week saying: We have got to have the productivity. We have got to not be afraid of AI.

I wish he would also talk about synthetic biology and all the cures and the fact that we are curing diseases. The President did an amazing thing of getting the prices down on glutides. We know obesity is almost 47 percent of U.S. healthcare spending. If we could cut that in half, could you imagine the growth of the economy, the family formation, the savings to the debt and deficits, if we helped our brothers and sisters get healthier.

There are policies that will work, but you never hear them evangelized behind these microphones because either they are complex or they don't set off a dopamine fit of anger.

We have got to deal with this reality, and this basically says demographics. We have fewer 18-year-olds than we did 20 years ago and almost double of number of 65-year-olds. That is going to continue. It is happening all over the industrialized world. We are actually in much better shape than so many other places in the world.

But we don't tell the truth, saying, hey, it is math. We are going to have to find a way, because we are magically not going to have millions and millions and millions of people in diapers, little people.

I am 63 and my wife is 63, and we have a 3-year-old and a 10-year- old. I am optimistic about the future. I had better be. Either that or my kids are coming to my nursing home. Sorry. I didn't mean to say that. This is the reality we are up against.

Just one more board. This is hard to see. It is important for anyone who is actually listening, who actually has a fondness for basic math. This isn't that complicated.

We now model, in the Joint Economic Committee Republicans, that there is over a 50/50 chance that the United States, this calendar year--so 2025, the calendar year we are in--will be close to zero population growth.

Why is that a big deal? We built our Social Security system, we built our Medicare system, and we built much of our entitlement, our earned benefit system, on a concept that we grew population-wise and therefore grew economically, therefore we grew in GDP, therefore we grew in productivity, and therefore wealth grew in the country for everyone.

What we are trying to show in these charts is, you can see from 2004 to 2024, the difference--this was under 18. We functionally have the same, but the number of those 65 and up going from 36 million to 61 million. Yet what is fascinating is if you go with no immigration, or even with immigration, we still end up upside down. It is just demographics.

Yet when the President tries to talk about this, he gets attacked. When people like me try to say there is a way to set off productivity so we don't live poor, that the future is prosperous, that this is another American century, instead we engage in sort of clown-show type politics because we want to satiate the theater instead of the economics.

There is a path to do amazingly good things for your retirement and for my kids, but the fact of the matter is that, Matthew, my 3-year- old, when he hits 23 or 24 years old, every tax in the United States has to be doubled just to maintain baseline services.

Have we really made the moral decision that the next generation lives poorer or will be poorer than we are? Is that what America has become about? It doesn't have to be that way.

Are we on the cusp of an amazing productivity curve with artificial intelligence, with synthetic biology curing diseases, and with robotics being able to produce products cheaper and faster? Possibly, but you have to understand that we have lots of laws that this place has made that it is illegal to modernize a port. It is illegal to modernize a rail system. It is illegal to actually adopt technology that can read your body at home and prescribe to you.

We have barrier after barrier so that when we talk about deregulation to make the economy grow, we also have to talk about the deregulation that the armies of lobbyists in our hallways are here to stop us from doing because it will force a change in their business models.

Once again, it can be another American century. The future can be absolutely amazing, but we need to get our act together and stop lying about the numbers, tell the truth about the demographics, and then actually think boldly. We can do amazing things. I just haven't had an amazing conversation around here in years.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to go and apologize to all of the people I have just made mad.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 52 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, December 4, 2025, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I have missed all of you. I don't know if you missed me.

We are going to actually try something tonight, and some of what we are going to do this evening is a little bit complex. It is going to be a little bit thick, but we have double-checked and triple-checked the math, which means that a number of our brothers and sisters will turn their ears off almost immediately because, remember, Mr. Speaker, we all work in a math-free zone.

A couple of items of order first. I thank--though I don't know if they were screwing with me or having some fun. I think it is ``Forbes Breaking News'' that took about 12 or 13 hours of these floor speeches and put them up on YouTube. I have actually had a couple of people who obviously don't have lives who have been watching them, and we have been playing this game of: Here is the prediction, Schweikert, you made over the last year. Here is what you have right, and here is what you have wrong.

First, I got wrong my prediction on interest rates. I really thought the 10-year bond would be closer to 5. It is at 4.1. However, things like the U.S. getting downgraded, things like the semaglutides crashing in price by the end of the year, we have actually gotten right.

The one thing I wish I had gotten wrong was the debt and deficit projections. For the trolls out there who immediately say, ``Well, there is all this spending in the tax bill,'' most of that hasn't started yet. If you actually look at the breakdown of what is going on, what the two drivers of U.S. sovereign debt are, they are the very things that we are not allowed to talk about. It is interest and demographics.

We are going to walk through some of the reality of the math because this is how perverse this place has become. The Democrats will blame, and Republicans will blame, and we are going to blame shiny objects, things that actually have almost no actual value to our future, to this Republic, and where we are going.

As we start this, I need everyone to embrace a couple factoids. We have 7 years until the Social Security trust fund is empty. No one stole the money. We just didn't have enough young people to keep the ratios. So, in 7 years, the math right now says a 24 percent cut.

In 7 years, we double senior poverty in America. In 7 years, the math says: You are going to start to see baby boomers doubling homelessness. In 7 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. Hospitals right now and others who are part of the Medicare part A cash flow take about 11 percent cuts. In 7 years, we double the spending on Medicare. We go from $1 trillion right now to $2 trillion.

It is demographics. Mr. Speaker, I am going to show you some of those charts, but let's first walk through the craziness. I have had some administration folks and other folks talk to me about tax receipts being up, and they are. There is a whole series of things we have done to reduce spending, but none of it appears to be big enough to deal with the cost of the refinancing of debt that is coming off the very low interest rates from a few years ago to the much higher interest rates today, to the medical inflation, to the healthcare utilization, and to just the things that are basic driven by our demographics.

Let's deal with some reality. If anyone has a question about my math, you can look it up online, Mr. Speaker. Go to the Treasury's website. This is important. We are now 51 days, I believe, into the new fiscal year. We are 51 days.

Mr. Speaker, do you realize we have now borrowed $628 billion in the first 51 days of this new fiscal year? Treasury has put more--is holding almost $900 billion in cash, which they typically operate with about $800 billion because of the in and out, but you start to realize, at the current borrowing rate, we crossed $1 trillion this fiscal year before Christmas.

It is not Republican or Democratic. It is demographics and interest, but that isn't a lot of fun because our political consultants need something where we can attack each other. By doing

that, we are incapable of an honest conversation of the bleed.

Understand a basic principle, Mr. Speaker: At this rate of borrowing, when you are clicking off $1 trillion in just 4 months, 5 months, then you have decided the bond market, basically, is the most powerful organization in ruling your country. It is not us as policymakers. It is not the White House. It is the bond market because if you do the last 12 months, we have been borrowing about $6.3 billion a day. So far this last 51 days, we are borrowing closer to $12 billion a day.

It is just math, except we are incapable of actually talking about it.

Think about these microphones here, Mr. Speaker. How many people since we got back from the shutdown have you heard, on the left and the right, get behind these things and say, ``Hey, guys, the greatest threat to your Republic is actually the math''?

This group hates something Donald Trump does. Our side doesn't like some of the things they do. Okay, great. The lack of civility is crushing. However, one of my personal theories is the reason you just had a 40-something-day shutdown, Mr. Speaker, is that it is not like the old days, where you could have bought the Senators' votes. Hey, if you vote for us, you get a bridge. We now have to deal with the fact that we don't have cash lying around.

We are going to borrow. You will start to see this. We went from $37 trillion to $38 trillion in 71 days. There were lots of excuses for this. There was, hey, we had the debt ceiling, had to repopulate, pay back the internal borrowing we did, those things. Except the difference is here we are into the new fiscal year after the debt ceiling has been raised, and the burn rate still looks really similar.

I am sure all the committees, all the leadership, all the folks who are helping us watch the bond market and the liquidity and our ability to borrow are all paying attention to the bleed rate, but it is math. It is real.

Mr. Speaker, our debt to GDP when we closed the '25 fiscal year actually got slightly better, but we also rolled some of the borrowing into the next day, which hit a new fiscal year. It happens all the time. You have strike dates of when you can actually pay certain bills, Mr. Speaker, but this one isn't in question. Last year, for every dollar of tax receipts we took in--this is customs duties. This is excise tax, income tax, corporate tax. Everything we took in, we spent $1.43.

This year, for every dollar we take in, our budget says that we are going to also spend $1.43. How long can we do this? How long can we do this?

Mr. Speaker, my 3-year-old--and, yes, I am this age. My wife is my age. We have a 10-year-old and a 3-year-old. There is a dataset out there that basically says that when my 3-year-old is about 22, 23 years old, so 20-some years from now, every tax in America, every tax, needs to be doubled just to maintain baseline spending.

Mr. Speaker, how many people have you had come behind this mike and who have just said: Look, is this moral? Is this really what America is all about? Yes.

I am going to show the slides that show what the Democrats say: We will just tax billionaires and rich people. It doesn't get you anything close. It doesn't close the gap, and you know it.

For our side, we are going to cut spending. Really? It doesn't get you close because we are not ready to have the revolution of how we spend money. That is because adopting the very technologies, the cures, the things we can do, this army of lobbyists outside this door loses their blanking minds because we are requiring them to either change their business models or make the bureaucracy do it differently or maybe come up with the conclusion we shouldn't do it at all.

Once again, for every dollar we take in of tax receipts, we are going to spend $1.43. Why doesn't that almost create a sense of panic, of agita, for the left or the right?

Is it just that we run into the problem of telling the truth to our voters after maybe we have lied to them? It is rich people that we don't tax enough. It is waste and fraud. It is illegals. All of those are real, except, in the scale of the spending, they are just not that much. It is just the insanity of what is going on.

Look, I am trying to help you understand wages.

Let's back up.

Tax receipts are up. Spending is up dramatically more, but most of the tax receipts that we are gaining are almost all capital gains. So, of the increased tax receipts, only about 5.5 percent of it is actually the growth in wages. Almost 65 percent is capital gains because the stock market has been doing well. So, once again, we are back to the world of financial engineering.

Those of us with assets, we are doing great. You keep hearing people talk about the K-shaped economy. What they mean by that is if you are on the lower tier, you don't hold assets, particularly after the years of inflation. Those with assets, the asset is inflated, and they are just fine. If you didn't hold assets, you are poorer today.

For my district in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, I think our calculation is, after sort of the first year of the Biden administration, if you don't make today at least 28 percent more than you did then, you are poorer today.

Now, there is almost no cycle where magically prices start to come down. The way you deal with this is economic growth, wage growth.

Is prosperity moral? Is it Republican or Democrat? It is just the right thing to have a society where people's lives get better every day.

This is just a board I have used before, but it is just to make a point for anyone that is paying attention. This is the 10-year bond. Right now, the United States isn't at 4 percent. We are about 4.1. Okay. We can sell a 10-year bond today for about 4.1 percent. I need you to look here. Greece can sell a 10-year bond today for about 3.3 percent. When Greece has a better strike, a better--let's call it a credit rating. It is technically not a credit rating, but when Greece can sell a bond cheaper than the United States, should that actually raise the hair on the back of your neck?

Are you thinking about the fact that the United States, for the industrialized countries, is like number 12?

Let's call it the credit stack, the ability to sell a 10-year bond. Why are other countries able to sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the biggest economy in the world, the country with the reserve currency? Does anyone pay attention to this? People say, ``Oh, David, that is not fair. Greece engaged in fiscal consolidation.'' They are actually lowering their debts, where we are now over 100 percent of debt-to-GDP. There are no plans to tell the truth about it. If you tell the truth, you might get unelected. You have a dozen countries that can sell a 10- year bond cheaper than the United States today, Greece being one of them.

Let's get into some of the complications. When I say one of the primary drivers is interest and demographics, remember, if you have $38 trillion--and remember, we play this game. The United States does this. Other countries don't do this.

Here is $30 trillion that we have to go to public markets. People from all over the world, primarily from the United States, buy our bonds. It is in your pension. It is in the bank note you buy. There are another several trillion that are actually borrowed internally. It is not magic money. We still owe the Social Security trust fund money, the Medicare trust fund money. When we borrow the cash out of those trust funds, they are paid interest, so it is still an obligation.

It is one of my great frustrations when you hear some of the government economists say, Well, publicly borrowed money is this. Yes, but the internally borrowed money we still owe interest on, are we not going to pay it back? It is borrowing.

When I come back and say demographics, understand age groups as a share of the population, from 2004 to 2024, so a year-plus ago, we had 1.4 percent of the population was 18 years old. In 2024, 1.3 percent of the population was 18 years old. It is just demographics. The United States, in around 1990 to 1991, started to roll over in the number of children we have.

For the people who are into the natalist policies, we spent lots of time researching this. There is no magic solution. You have a country out there that, when you have your third or fourth child, they buy you a house. It still hasn't increased fertility rates.

There is a crazy math set, and I have never vetted it, saying, like, South Korea in 150-something years, there are almost no South Koreans left. It is happening all over the industrialized world.

This is why getting tax policy, regulatory policy things, so correct--because we are going to have to be able to find a way to have productivity grow and grow so we can raise people's wages because so many of our brothers and sisters are poorer today. The way you raise wages is two things: inflation--well, that doesn't get you anywhere--or productivity.

You can't be afraid of AI, synthetic biology, robots. People go, ``Oh, David, you are not supposed to say that,'' but it is true. Next year, the number of 18-year-olds is lower, smaller, than this. The year after that, it is smaller than that. Then, it is smaller than that. America is now running into a situation where we have too many classrooms and too many schoolbuses and not enough senior centers.

This place is doing an amazing job at having an honest conversation about the United States' demographics and where we are going. ``Oh, David, we are not supposed to talk about that.'' How do you make public policy if you can't even be honest about the most basic parts of the math?

The other part of the punch line here is, 20 years ago, 12.3 percent of the population was 65 and up. Mr. Speaker, 20 years later, it is, functionally, 18 percent. It is not double, but it is pretty darn close to double those who are 65 and up.

Look, a weird little factoid: When I was a teenager in the 1970s--and I remember this number. There was, functionally, $7 spent for every young person and $1 spent on seniors. Today, that is flipped. It is just demographics. The baby boomers have moved into their retirement years. We have a societal promise we have to keep. We made a promise, but once again, in 7 years, the Medicare trust fund is gone. In 7 years, the Social Security trust fund is gone. We are going to lie our heinies off around here. If we just tax rich people more--and I will show you the slides. The math doesn't work. Once again, we work in a math-free zone.

Let's have a little more fun with reality, change in population by age. Now, this board is controversial, but the math is accurate. I will see if I can try to describe this in a way where we can all absorb it. In 2004, we had, functionally, 77 million that were 18 or younger. We estimate, in 2035, if we do not have immigration--remember, this year, we expect almost zero population growth, so let's first do those who want no immigration. In 2035, we have only 64 million that are under 18. With immigration, you still have fewer people. That is over 20 years.

Okay, fine. Maybe that is the policy decision of our society. In that case, don't stand in our way when people like me are trying to find ways to actually have productivity, wages grow.

This is something very unique that the United States is up against: massive amounts of debt. Massive amounts of debt. Remember, so far this fiscal year--God, I have to do this math really quick.

I think we are borrowing like $130,000, maybe $131,000 every second. If I take it over the last 12 months, it is like $71,000 a second.

So you have this massive debt, and then a population that is flat, and where we are going right now, it actually could be declining over the next decade. Not by a lot.

Tell me how I make the economy grow. How do I make sure your pension is there? How do I make sure your access to healthcare is there? How do I make sure your wages go up? There are ways we can do it, and I have come up behind these mikes over and over and over and talked about the adoption of technology, about redesigning government.

We have bills that actually would save $3 trillion, and I can't get a single other Member of Congress to sponsor them because they are hard.

I will get lobbyists who will say mean things about me.

So let's keep just doing the shiny objects. Let's just keep doing the petty around here. I think yesterday was the 14th time we have tried to reprimand or censure a fellow Member. Let's just do more of that because it gets great Twitter traffic, and we don't have to talk about the fact that that day we borrowed over another $6 billion. Actually, if it is just this fiscal year, it is closer to $12 billion that day.

So let's take another look.

Change in employment status of native born and foreign born. This is something that is really, really interesting. We are actually taking a look right now for what we believe is sort of this fiscal year's snapshot. We actually have foreign born actually going down. Now, some of this is self-deportation. There are things going on, we don't have enough data to completely understand it, but my problem is: I don't actually have enough folks for the civilian labor force.

Look, something funky happened in this morning's unemployment numbers where there was a good pop in jobs, maybe almost 2, 2\1/2\ times what many of the economists expected, but did you notice unemployment popped up? Now, that is typically saying: Oh, we don't like that.

I need you to think about this. We have been desperate for more of our brothers and sisters to come back into the labor force, but here is my problem: How many of those folks are coming back to the labor force because they can't pay their bills because wages still haven't gone up enough to make up for the years of inflation?

We actually don't know completely yet, but we do know that our brothers and sisters out there are stressed out of their mind when you start to look at credit card delinquencies, car delinquencies. ``Our impairments'' is the better way to phrase it.

We need to get our heads out and start thinking about those policies that get the economy working, a tax code that actually gets investment in the next generation. But are we going to adopt policies?

All right. Let me go jump on a landmine.

Does it make sense to have a government that goes out and owns 10 percent of Intel? So your government is the largest shareholder of Intel.

Okay. I love Intel. But I can actually show you some brilliant economic papers that say that it should be four different or three different companies; here is the fab; here is the engineering; here is this and that.

The concept of creative destruction. Here is how the thought experiment works: If you are old enough to remember Blockbuster Video, should we have slowed down the internet so that Netflix could not have put Blockbuster Video out of business? That is sort of what we are doing today, we are choosing the winners and losers instead of the creative destruction that starts the next cycle of productivity.

We need the creative destruction in our economy to have the rebirths of the newer, better, and faster. Yes, it is always uncomfortable. It is also really great free market economics. And it is as if we have repealed the rules of a free market economy in this country right now.

So let's actually take another look. Now we are going to step onto the next, much bigger landmine. Let's talk about Social Security.

Social Security finances and worker-to-beneficiary ratio. This is how many workers there are compared to our brothers and sisters receiving.

Do you see the red lines here? This is actually the trust fund. You will notice, actually, around 2020, the trust fund had $5 trillion in it.

In 7 years, it is all gone, and no one stole your money. The average couple, it is a crap rate of return. You have to understand. If 20, 25 years ago, you had been allowed to take a little sliver and put it in the markets, you would be dramatically better off moving into retirement, but the left lost its mind on the discussion. The unions lost their minds. AARP lost its mind. But now we can look back. We have 25 years. We can actually do the calculation and tell the truth.

They were wrong. But it is too late to do anything like that today because the population bubble has already moved into their retirement years. So here we are. At 7 years, that trust fund is gone.

What is also interesting--it is a little hard to see in this chart-- as we get into the outer years, you are getting to the point where you have 2.2, 2.3. So you and your spouse or you and your partner functionally will have one retiree, and that is the way the system

was designed. They didn't think about, when they designed things like the Social Security trust fund, that we would have a day when the population of young people in the United States actually was declining.

It is demographics. We know the math. We have known for how many years that we had baby boomers and 67 million of them. Yet, this place because it is crap politics to tell the truth about math, we lie. We make up things. Well, we tax billionaires.

I am going to show you boards that every dime of every billionaire in America would only run the government 9 months, and, also, you would put the world into a depression because most of that value is actually in stock. So if you happen to have some stocks in your retirement fund, it is all gone. We are going to crash everything, but it is a thought experiment.

There was someone who had an article out this last week that talked about saying: Well, when the Social Security trust fund is gone, we will just borrow it from the general fund, and the general fund will borrow it from the debt market.

Okay. Let's see. When you start to look at the scale of debt, do you see the red here? That is already where we are going. That is already in the baseline. This line here exploding up, that is as if we took the Social Security trust fund--and I don't believe this even has the Medicare trust fund, which is also empty in 7 years.

If anyone really wants to understand how difficult the policy choices are and, also, how--let's have a brutal moment--the Members here don't tell the truth, particularly my brothers and sisters on the left. We will just tax rich people.

Please go look up Jessica Riedl's calculations from the Manhattan Institute. There are a couple of great articles. They walk you through the math.

Every tax--so do the Bernie Sanders math. We are going to take people over $400,000, $500,000, and we are going to maximize tax. You maximize everything. It is almost a Laffer curve. We are going to tax you to the point that it rolls over. On every tax, you get 1\1/2\ percent of GDP in new taxes.

Okay. It would probably be really helpful.

On the Republican side, the things we talk about cutting, we only get about 1 percent of GDP.

Last year, if you do the internal borrowing, we borrowed about 7.6, 7.4 percent of the entire economy.

We are actually looking that in 2035 we are going to borrow 8.4 percent of the entire economy, and the solution I get from the left covers 1\1/2\ percent. Often, the solution I get on my side is 1 percent.

Does anyone see the math problem? We are all going to go home and talk to our partners and audience and say: If I just cut taxes, or if I just cut things. Maybe we have to do that, but it doesn't get you close.

Once again, 1\1/2\ percent from taxing all the rich people, and 1 percent of GDP in the cuts we have actually articulated. I have 2\1/2\ percent. In 9 budget years, we are borrowing 8.4 percent of the entire economy, and that is assuming interest rates don't go up.

Remember, in 9 years under today's interest rate scheme, 30 percent of tax receipts go to just the interest. If interest rates go up 1 percent, it is 45 percent of all tax receipts of the United States in 9 years would go to just interest.

I will say this, and I have said it how many times behind these microphones and people go, David, that is interesting. Please never say that again because I don't want to actually have to explain this.

If we do the math, take every billionaire in America, get full face value of everything they have. Sell every stock, every yacht, every this, every that, you covered government for 9 months. That is assuming you don't put the world into a depression. You don't crash all the stock markets. You don't crash all the asset markets. It covers 9 months.

Why do we live in this fantasy world where people throw out solutions like this that they know are absolute frauds? Because it is great politics. It is crap math.

Let's actually go on to one of our current debates.

I watched someone come to the floor yesterday on the subsidies on top of the subsidies in the ACA. Let's call it ObamaCare because that is the common vernacular, but it is the ACA. We are having the debate because the Democrats actually did these enhanced subsidies on top of the subsidies and those subsidies expire.

Let me do this one backward, so there is a little more understanding of the line.

How much of the healthcare population in America is actually in the ACA? It is really important. Forty-eight percent is employer sponsored, 7 percent we believe is uninsured, veterans are about 3 percent, Medicare is 18 percent, and Medicaid is 22 percent. Now over the next couple years that flips. Only 7 percent of the healthcare population is actually in the ACA.

That is the entire population that is receiving the enhanced subsidies, so the subsidies on top of the subsidies, is a fraction of that.

Now you have to also take a look at what is wrong in that math. We actually keep looking at these numbers over and over. We have been analyzing them with our joint economic economists, and I have a couple Ph.D.s in healthcare economics. We are trying to understand what the hell is going on with these numbers, but you start looking at it after the COVID subsidies.

Do you know you got 41 percent of the population that is actually supposed to be just receiving government subsidies to make it more affordable and they are paying zero?

Do you understand what they did with the subsidies on top of the subsidies? They took populations 400 percent of poverty and up, and in some areas, you have four or five kids, you have people making $400,000, $500,000 qualifying, except that is a small population of them but they still would qualify.

Why is this important?

Mr. Speaker, if I could have some way to burn this on to people's psyche. What the ACA, Medicare for All--the Republican alternative had better actuarial distribution, but they have tried to turn healthcare into financial engineering.

What you have done is, is financing, is subsidies healthcare. Well, we will tax these people and we will subsidize this population. Listen to the debates here. It is about subsidies on top of subsidies. It is financial engineering. Now, it is healthcare. Why it is healthcare is because it is easy. It makes the lobbyists happy. It makes the people receiving the money happy because no one gets cut. No one has to do a new design. No one has to actually stop new technology. No one has to fixate on our brothers and sisters.

If obesity is 47 percent of U.S. healthcare, none of the money goes to making our brothers and sisters healthier so they live longer and they don't have multichronic conditions because we are just going to subsidize them.

It is perverse.

Could you imagine the $35 or $40 billion that the Democrats are demanding for the subsidy on top of the subsidy for populations that are upper income? If some of that money actually went to lowering the actual cost of healthcare instead of the financial engineering of subsidizing insurance companies because that is what they are talking about.

Let's just go to this one and see if I can make this make sense. This is a bit complicated, but we have been trying to do the analytics of how much the subsidies have screwed up the price of healthcare.

If you walk through it, we can actually chart where the subsidies come in and it actually raises the price of healthcare. The way the insurance companies retain their profits--we have actually built a model that shows, of the stunning amounts of money we are spending, only 34 percent actually goes to the insured and their healthcare. Another 28 percent is disappearing into people that didn't even know they had insurance.

I am sure we all have been reading the articles that a third, 30 percent of those in the enhanced ACA subsidies--so the subsidies on top of the subsidies--didn't even know they had health insurance.

A couple days ago, you saw someone got convicted of or pled guilty to a couple hundred million-dollar fraud

scheme where they were signing people up, getting the money, getting the government subsidies, those things, and the people had no idea they had insurance because they really didn't. They were just taking the money.

The system is absolutely screwed up and we have 38 percent disappearing in the insurance malaise.

This is what we have turned healthcare into. It is a financing. I beg of my brothers and sisters here, we have pieces of legislation, dozens of them, that would change the cost of healthcare.

When we think we may have spent $25 to $35 billion last year in duplicative MRIs, X-rays, CTs, ultrasounds, why not a simple piece of legislation that when you get your MRI, it is attached to this thing so it is portable to your next doctor.

Is that that scary? Except the lobbyists show up and say, David, you don't understand. The duplicative scans are part of our profit model. Oh, I am not supposed to say that out loud. We have dozens of things like this.

We have turned healthcare into being about the money instead of our brothers and sisters living better, living healthier. Mr. Speaker, what if some of the money goes to the cures so we don't finance your misery, we finance your freedom from that misery?

I say these things and tomorrow morning there will be an army of lobbyists or an army of groups from my district saying, David, you don't understand. We need the cash. Don't make us do it in a modern fashion.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to make the argument prosperity is moral. Curing people's misery is moral. Using the technology that makes you sovereign, that makes you free so you can help take care of your own health, is moral, and what we do here is absolutely immoral.

We don't tell the truth about the debt. We don't tell the truth about the demographics. We don't tell the truth about the damage we are doing to your retirement, my little kids' future. We don't tell the truth that if we would actually legalize technology--and I am serious about this--legalize it, how much healthier every American could be and we could crash the price of healthcare.

Will this go on deaf ears?

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

Mr. Speaker, for everyone's sanity, I hope not to go 60 minutes. I might go 40.

Mr. Speaker, first, the good news. If anyone else is a geek out there, there is this app put out by the Atlanta Fed, Atlanta Federal Reserve, and what they do is they do certain samples in trying to constantly estimate what the gross national product, GDP, will actually be.

A little while ago, they actually updated it saying the U.S. economy looks like it is running at 3.4 percent.

That is remarkable. If you stop and think about it, this is absolutely--think about all the headwinds and all the things over tariffs and all these

other, the economy actually is surprisingly healthy.

Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons I am up here today and every other week is, our fiscal year ends in a couple weeks and our best estimate is this fiscal year we will have borrowed $2.4 trillion, maybe $2.5 trillion. We have one model in our office that says more than $2.5 trillion. That is like $70,000, $72,000 every second of every day we are borrowing.

Let's think of a world where you are borrowing $70,000 a second, yet the economy is actually fairly decent. What is going on? Is it Republican? Is it Democrat?

It turns out it is the very thing we hate to talk about. It is the cost of interest and the cost of healthcare, and that healthcare is primarily driven because we are unwilling--Mr. Speaker, you are a doctor, if I remember. We are unwilling to have the honest conversation of how we deliver, where we can revolutionize the cost, where we can adopt technology because we are in the incumbent protection business. We protect incumbent bureaucracies and incumbent business models.

If we don't take this seriously, do you think you can have a country that is borrowing $70,000, $72,000 every second? Do you think you can keep that going?

Remember, once again, I am going to try to show versions of this. In 7 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. In 2032, 7 years, halfway through that year, the Medicare trust fund is empty. In 2033, the first full year, our best estimate is that there is about $140 billion shortfall.

Mr. Speaker, in 7 years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. Meaning, in 2033, if you are going to cover Medicare and Social Security, you are approaching almost $600 billion. How many of us get behind these microphones and actually talk about things that are truly terrifying?

Are we really going to avoid dealing with our actual jobs? Are we going to allow the doubling of senior poverty in America in 7 years at the same time we are bankrupting much of the medical system?

In 7 years, grandma gets a 24 percent cut in her check and our model says that it will double the poverty of seniors. Yet, often the solution we get is, well, we will just raise taxes.

Okay. The first year of the shortfall--I am rounding up a bit--it is $600 billion. You really think you are going to do a $600 billion tax hike.

Here is my battle. I have tried for years and years and said, we need to do a fiscal commission. The fact of the matter is, we have the same number of 18 year olds as we had 20 years ago, but we have double the number of Americans, our brothers and sisters, who are now 65 and up.

Twenty years ago, we had 35 million Americans 65 and up. Now we are at 70 million Americans that are 65 and up, and I think we have another 10, 15 million that will be 65 and up in the next few years.

We are incapable of telling the truth. How many of us want to get up in front of our voters back home or put into our newsletter saying, we have a demographic financing crisis? Are we going to do all the things necessary to skyrocket productivity because wages--sorry.

Do you remember your high school economics class? Wages go up by inflation, but that doesn't mean you get anything. You are just treading water. Our wages go up by productivity. Are we going to do the things that are necessary for productivity?

It means Democrats and Republicans need to stop saying things like you can't automate ports. You can't automate this. We don't want to allow that technology. There is a way to make this not be dystopian.

Mr. Speaker, I am so tired of coming behind this microphone. The poor staff here has to be just exhausted, but I am trying not to speak like a machine gun anymore. I am trying to slow down.

Every time I come up here, the numbers are a little bit worse and what is frustrating is, the economy is actually doing fairly well, but it is the scale of the debt because we keep spending and spending and spending.

Let's actually do some of the charts to try to see if I can get this to sink in.

Next year, for every dollar of tax collection, we are going to spend $1.43.

Let's do that again. For every dollar in tax collection next year, starting in a couple weeks, October 1, we start the new fiscal year. This is for the 2026 fiscal year; we are going to spend $1.43.

How long is that sustainable? For everyone going in your head, oh, we will just raise taxes. Let's do this again. In the way back machine, like in the beginning of the year, I think I did entire presentations on Democrat tax proposals and what we have talked about in just cuts on the Republican side.

Our best estimate is this fiscal year, which we are finishing in the next couple of weeks, we are going to borrow 7.3 percent of the entire economy. Our borrowing would equal 7.3 percent of the economy.

Every tax hike that we have scored that the Democrats have proposed, capital gains, income tax, corporate taxes, the whole litany, when you do the economic adjustment, it comes in at 1.5 percent, maybe 1.6, but the math is easier, 1.5 percent of the economy. That is what we get for all the tax hikes.

For those of us on the Republican side when we walk through, we can cut this, we can cut this, we can cut this, it is coming in at about 1 percent of the economy.

Anyone see the math problem? I got 2\1/2\ percent and that is all you have ever heard behind these microphones, but we are borrowing 7.3 percent of the economy this year.

How many idiots like me will get up behind these microphones and tell you the truth?

Next year, for every dollar of tax collections, we are going to spend $1.43. Let's say you are the most liberal Member here. Do you have any understanding when this hits the wall, the devastation, the crushing of poor people? How about if you are the most libertarian or free market? Do you understand the crushing of the economic system, which has produced so much prosperity, that will happen when we are in crisis mode? Let's not let it happen.

Let's actually walk through this because this is actually one of my things. We are actually borrowing a little over this. We borrow about $6.5 billion a day. I always love the debates here: We are going to save $100 million. Great. Great. We borrow about $260, $270 million an hour, so a quarter trillion dollars an hour. We will have debates here that go on for sometimes an hour to save functionally a minute, half a minute. We have had one where it was like 15 seconds of borrowing.

In 9 years, we are over $10 billion, my math is closer to $10.5 billion a day. That is just the structural borrowing.

One of the deceiving things is, over the next 10 years, we functionally spend $70 trillion, and you will get someone who says: Well, you guys voted for this. Well, you guys wanted to tax this. You actually start to help them understand, saying, we are talking fractions of our exposure.

I accept, you don't need to be an accounting major or math major to be a Member of Congress. We make some very pretty charts, though. For anyone who actually gives a darn about what is going on, every single month, the Joint Economic Committee Republicans publish a monthly fiscal update. We have tried to make it as simple as possible to understand, page after page, to show you what the hell is really going on.

One of the things that is incredibly frustrating is we live in a world where so much of what you are going to find on the internet right now isn't true. Let me prove it.

Here is an article I was very disturbed to find out: Complex infection keeps the Pope in hospital. This is Newsweek from a couple days ago. Apparently, the Pope is in the hospital. This is actually a story that was posted September 8, except the small problem is, this Pope has been dead for months.

Welcome to the quality of what we call news anymore. This is Newsweek. They just let their AI generate a story, fill it up. There is no human that bothered to look at it. Yet, you and I have to help our voters. Our constituents call us and say: Is this true? You can't find the story. You ask them if they can send it to you. You think, well, that doesn't make any sense. It is someone who hit a computer button.

What also happens when we actually see stories like: OMB says Trump's economic agenda will cut the deficit in half. I am trying to find the policies.

You start to go over it, and many of these stories are actually someone was giving a speech, and so the AI wrote a story. It is not actually what was said.

My frustration with this is, I have Members here right now who say: David, we are going to take in $300 billion in tariff receipts--customs duties if you want to be accurate--next year. We are fine.

Okay. Next year, we are borrowing about $270, $280--sorry, we will borrow about $2.5 trillion in the 2026 year. So $300 billion is very, very helpful, but you are still borrowing $2.2 trillion. We haven't actually done all the economic effects of does that actually change purchasing behavior.

Actually, we have some great stories today on the Bloomberg terminal of companies that look like they have been actually undervaluing their customs duties, meaning they are lying to the Customs Service, and we are taking in less receipts than we should.

The scale of what is going on is just intensely frustrating. Let's actually start to also knock down one of the urban folk legends: It is defense spending. How often do we go home and I will have a liberal person saying: If you would just cut defense, we would be fine.

Okay, here is your problem: Healthcare is about 28 percent of our spending, Social Security is 22 percent of our spending. This is 2025 to fiscal date. Net interest is 14 percent of our spending. If you do all the other outlays, it is 14 percent. Income security, that is actually--well, it is what it is--10 percent. National defense is 12 percent. It turns out national defense is now number 5. The thing that is actually in the Constitution is actually number 5 in the spending stack.

Your government is functionally an insurance company with an Army. You laugh, but you know you are going to quote that later.

Let's actually sort of take a look. This is net receipts by category, 2024 compared to 2025. Hopefully, this will make sense. I am going to put this chart up on our website later because I know it is really hard to see. If you actually take a look at what is happening, how do we finance this government? It is mostly individual income taxes.

Now, for someone who says: Well, it should be corporate. Remember, in the late 1980s, early 1990s, all across the country we were moving to LLCs, professional partnerships, pass-through entities, so much of what you would have seen back in the early 1980s, 1970s, 1960s as corporate now passes through, so some of it was a corporate structure. You always have to be careful when you say: Why are corporate taxes down so much? It is now because it flows through on the individual line. I am just trying to make that point.

Take a look at this. Here is Social Security and retirement taxes. Well, that is FICA. Actually, you were getting $1.7 trillion last year. This year it is up 3 percent. This year it is $1.761 trillion. Corporate income tax, last year we took in $529 billion. Then you start to look at customs duties.

Now, this is interesting. I am going to say this two or three times to try to make a point. In the 2024 fiscal year, we took in $77 billion in customs duties. That is tariffs. All right. We estimate this year it is going to be up 146 percent, but that is $190 billion. That is a lot of money, Mr. Speaker, but 177 minus the 190 . . .

Did I mention, next year we are set to borrow about $2.5 trillion is our estimate? CBO, I know, has a number that is lower, but I will tell you in this fiscal year, my Joint Economic Committee was more correct than CBO.

If we are borrowing $6.5, $6.7 billion a day, you can do the math. The step-up in customs duties, we might be picking up 3 weeks of borrowing. This is my frustration.

What happens when our brothers and sisters get in front of televisions or put out things and say stories like: Well, DOGE is going to pay for everything. Well, the customs duties, the tariffs are going to pay for everything. Then some of us have to actually try to make the math work.

The voters are much smarter than we ever give them credit for. Hell, I think they are much smarter than we are. Maybe we can tell them the truth. We have got a problem. Interest and healthcare costs are consuming this society, consuming this government. You start to take a look at the debt outlays, and you start to see, well, Social Security taxes, oh, they are up 8.3 percent over last year. Excuse me, sorry, this is outlays, so spending on Social Security went up 8.3 percent over last year. It is the baby boomers.

We actually have an unusual thing happening. If you take a look at the Social Security actuary report, a lot of our brothers and sisters are choosing to retire at 62, which actually is hurting productivity because many of these folks are very productive workers, but they are fearful, saying: Well, in 2032, I get a 24 percent cut, so I am going to take my money now. That is another reason why we should fix that cliff, but you are not allowed to actually talk about it because the other side will run attack ads beating the crap out of you in the next election because you dared talk about the morality of actually fixing these things.

Look, right now, I am in a 50/50 district. There is someone over at the DCCC taking clips saying: He said the words ``Social Security.'' We have our attack ad.

Then, we wonder why no one here will work on it.

The point on the net outlays is, last year, we spent $7.746 trillion. This year we are going to spend $7.148 trillion. Remember that 2025 is an estimate because I still have a couple of weeks, and there are always weird timing effects at the end of the year where we roll a bill over into the next fiscal year.

What happens with our total receipts? We are going to take in $5.254 trillion and spend $7.148 trillion. The point there is that we are spending a hell of a lot more money than we are taking in.

A bunch of the money is not stuff you can touch. It is Social Security and what goes into the Medicare part A trust fund.

Let's go down to geekdom. On your FICA tax, your payroll tax, a portion of that is Medicare, Social Security, unemployment, and other things. That tax only covers about 38 percent of Medicare. The other portion of Medicare, it can be 10 to 15 percent, is you paying copays if you are in traditional Medicare. The rest comes right out of the general fund.

That is why the fact is that, in the next 7 years, Medicare goes from $1 trillion of spend this year to $2 trillion, in 7 years. It is demographics and healthcare inflation.

This gap, from here to here, is the annual deficit, 7.3 percent of the entire economy. For those who want to say that it is the legislation from--no. This was structural. This is what we were built on.

The increase in spending, once again--discretionary, what we talk about, what we work on, keeps getting smaller. Defense as a percentage, as we are going down from years--years ago, defense was number one. Now, the way you actually stack it, it is either number four or number five in our spending.

Yet, if you go home and tell people that, what continues to shock me is how many people say, ``If we just did this.'' Show them the math that you just covered about 30 minutes of borrowing, and they look at you angrily because, my belief is, the political class for so long hasn't told the truth.

Let's go on our truth binge. Anyone I am making unhappy, grab your phone, grab your computer, and go hit DOGE.gov. It is right there. It is live right now. You can go look it up. I actually really support using technology to crawl through every ounce of this government.

In the NDAA, year after year--and I got it attached this year, the ability to use AI to audit the Pentagon. Remember, the Pentagon has now gone 8 or 9 years. It is unauditable. That is the term. It has not been audited. We don't even know the stuff we own.

On DOGE's own website, at this moment, they say they have found $206 billion. Now, the reality is that only a fraction of that has actually been executed by us in Congress or the White House.

If we are going to borrow $2.3, $2.4, $2.5 trillion next year, 8 percent, and that is if you have the face on it. We have all seen the articles. They have only been able to actually execute on a fraction of this.

Yet, I can show you some of our colleagues who run around and say: Well, with DOGE and the customs duties, we are going to be fine, so, Schweikert, shut up. We don't have to tell people how much trouble we are in. Don't go and mention that the Social Security trust fund is gone in 7 years and that they are taking a 24 percent cut. Don't tell anyone that the Medicare trust fund is gone in 7 years and that their hospital is probably going bankrupt. Yay, this is what we got elected to do.

Yet, 2025 total receipts--receipts are tax collections. It is just Ways and Means speak. We don't call them taxes. We call them receipts. For this year, we gained 3.7 percent of our total receipts from customs duties. Wonderful.

We can have a whole other presentation, debate, on its effect on the economy, who actually pays it, whether is it paid by the consumer or shipper. Fine, we will have the intellectual debate later, but it is more revenue receipts coming in.

Our best guess, if we give the full faith of what we believe, $300 billion next year, 5, 5.6 percent on top of all the additional tax collections. It is helpful.

Borrowing, in many ways, is a tax. It is a tax paid for in the future, probably by our kids. It is a tax paid for with interest.

Stop pretending we have solved the problem.

Here is where it gets really uncomfortable once again. This is sort of the Social Security chart, and the point was the trust fund balance. We peaked about 2001, 2002. Baby boomers were in the peak of their earning years, but here, it is gone. We need to step on this.

If you are someone out there and you say they stole the Social Security money, no, they didn't. It was loaned to the Treasury.

There are some great articles. If you go back to the original design of Social Security, they thought they would have a certain amount of money. They would loan it for building bridges, dams, and all sorts of things and get yield, but they loaned it to the Treasury.

The Treasury pays a fairly decent interest rate back. Our Treasury pays the interest back to the Social Security trust fund twice a year. That is why there are certain months where there is this sudden, big spike of interest payments that are credited to the Social Security account.

The chart is the chart. About halfway through 2032, so 7 years from now, the trust fund is gone.

Here is the irony of our budgeting. When we talk about future debts and deficits, CBO is instructed to act like we just keep spending the money. The actual Social Security law says you have to cut benefits. If you follow the Social Security law, that is a 24 percent cut.

In reality, about halfway through 2032, be prepared to have your check cut by 24 percent. Our calculation is a few months later. We double the poverty of seniors in America.

The fastest-growing homeless population is baby boomers right now.

Look at this chart. Look, I just threw this one on. It is a little more complicated than I wanted to do tonight, but this is actually showing the increases in spending.

One of the reasons I brought this chart is trying to help folks understand. We are all so acculturated around here to Social Security is always going to be the biggest spend. Except, when you get in the out-years--I accept some of this is 20-some years from now, 25 years from now.

Actually, healthcare costs, this is something we could actually have a miracle in changing. I have come behind this mic over and over and said we are on the cusp of miracles. A couple of weeks ago, I went to New Hampshire to a lab where they were growing undifferentiated islet cells. Apparently, islet cells don't need antirejection drugs to get bodies to be able to start making their own insulin again. There are crazy ideas.

Mr. Speaker, can we do a thought experiment? I am probably going to get beat up for this. This is a thought experiment. Give me some leeway on it. I am trying to help our brothers and sisters, and anyone crazy enough to watch this, to think.

We have turned healthcare into a financing debate. The ACA, ObamaCare, was a financing bill. It is who gets subsidized and who has to pay. It was mostly borrowed money. The Republican alternative was a financing bill. It was a little bit of an actuarial curve, but it was a financing bill. The Medicare For All Act is a financing bill.

I am begging us: Could we have a revolutionary thought between Democrats and Republicans, maybe if we actually talk about what we pay and what we get for what we pay?

The debate right now is about a number of the expanded subsidies on the ACA expire. There are parts of the country where there are high medical costs and high income, where a person can make up to $600,000 a year and get $4,000-plus in subsidies paid to the insurance company.

Here is the perversity. These subsidies, the $33 billion it would take for one year--$40 billion if it is made permanent--are paid to insurance companies.

Mr. Speaker, here is just a crazy thought experiment. Ozempic goes off patent in Canada in January. States like Florida and Colorado have already gotten the FDA to approve reimportation. We actually have a chart that is looking at the potential of generic manufacturers producing it from $60 to $120 a month.

This is a crazy thought. We know Milken researchers a couple of years ago said obesity is 40 percent of U.S. healthcare. Diabetes is 33 percent of U.S. healthcare. It is 31 percent of Medicare. How many lives are lost right now because of multiple chronic conditions?

What would happen if we took a portion of that money for our brothers and sisters who are on Medicaid, Indian Health Service, VA, or other subsidized government programs and we actually said: Screw it. We are going to allow the reimportation. We are going to buy it. It is off the patent. We can actually get an incredible deal. Yay.

What would be the actual cost of healthcare? What would be the health statistics of our brothers and sisters? What would the effect be on labor force participation, family formation, and all the other crazy things we have seen in this data? What would it look like 1 year from now, 2 years from now, or 3 years from now?

That is actually the thought experiment. Do we want to hand $33 billion of subsidies to insurance companies, or do we want to affect the actual cost of delivering services and maybe have our brothers and sisters live healthier and longer?

Why can't we think this way? Is that Republican or Democrat? I would argue it is just moral. It is trying to be creative with the limited resources we have. Every dollar of that is borrowed. Why wouldn't we want a society that is actually getting healthier? I am just trying to come up with solutions.

There will be an army of lobbyists outside my office tomorrow, beating the crap out of me, because it turns out sick people are business models. It is cruel to say that. It is just really cruel to say that. We have to change it. The morality of cures, the morality of--and it is also really good economics.

Mr. Speaker, I have two last boards. I want to make a point. We updated this as of a couple of hours ago. We are actually remarkably lucky. In other industrialized countries, the debt is starting to scare the hell out of bond markets. A bunch of our longer term--10 years and out--have actually been operating very efficiently.

Does it bother anyone that France just took down their government because they were trying to do some fiscal consolidation? They won't let them deal with their debt, but they can sell a bond for about 50 basis points cheaper than we can.

Greece is actually about 70 basis points cheaper. When Greece takes a 10-year bond to market, it is a substantially lower interest rate than the United States. If we look at the credit rating of what people are willing to buy the debt for, all of these countries have a better credit rating than the United States.

Mr. Speaker, there are 18 States that actually have a better credit rating than the Federal Government. I don't know other ways and I keep struggling to find ways to get folks to take this seriously.

Once again, Mr. Speaker, the hallways will be full of people knocking on

our doors, saying: We want more money.

They don't show up to say: Hey, we have an idea to do something better, faster, and cheaper. We want a free market. We believe in creative destruction.

Mr. Speaker, I never liked the CHIPS Act because it directs cash subsidies. Often, subsidizing last-generation technology leads to what is going on right now. Should Intel give up 10 percent of its ownership? What would happen if Intel were forced to break up? We might end up with four or five creative, efficient, and cutting-edge companies. As an example, one company is doing design.

Do we remember our high school economics class? Creative destruction is what brings us to that next level of productivity, which raises wages.

For working people in my district, who are not making about 27 or 28 percent more than the first year of the Biden administration, they are poor today. I think at the end we came in number two. Yet, I have seen some numbers in Arizona that are making me very nervous on the growth of unemployment and the stagnation of wages.

There are ways to make this another American century. The first thing we have to do is tell the truth. We have a country that is borrowing $70,000 to $72,000 a second. How long do we think we can keep that up?

Yet, if we get our taxes from a regulatory system and legalize, once again, creativity, legalize productivity, instead of barrier after barrier--those barriers may be great politics. They show up in our fundraisers and help us. Maybe we can get a union to vote for us, but it is crap economics.

Mr. Speaker, I am incredibly optimistic for the future. I am 63. My wife is 63. I have said this a few times, and people think I am insane. We have adopted a 3-year-old and a 9-year-old. We are the luckiest family on Earth.

When my little boy is about 21 or 22 years old, every tax in America needs to be doubled just to maintain baseline services. My kids will be part of the first generation to be poor because of our unwillingness to tell the truth. Is that the America we aspire to? We are better than this.

I am sick and tired of having the leadership and others say: David, we will do it after the next election.

Mr. Speaker, guess what? There is always another election.

I believe the American people would reward us if we demonstrated to them that we told them the truth. We tried to do hard things and we saved the future, because that future is coming very fast.

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

Mr. Speaker, instead of an hour of another economics presentation, we need to have a conversation.

Is the evil winning? A couple of hours ago, one of my constituents lost his life. There is a 16-month-old whose daddy is not coming home. There is a 3-year-old little girl whose daddy is not coming home. Erika, the wife, can you just imagine what is going on right now? Do we really now live in a country where words take your life?

Last weekend, it was either Monday or the weekend--and Andy will know the proper name. There is a newspaper called the Beehive or something like that--forgive me for not knowing the name--and it actually did a whole expose on Charlie Kirk coming to universities in Utah to actually spread his message.

If you actually read it, it was a classic conservative message of hope, of loving people, of believing marriage and prosperity were really good for Americans, and a message for young people.

The other half of the article was about how many people in Utah hated this message and what they would do to stop him because, as you know, having a conversation now is--particularly, if it is conversation that doesn't support collectivism, the left, and some weird dystopian view of what America is--your kids don't have a dad that comes home.

Look, I am not here to try to make this a drama. Maybe we hyperpersonalized it a little bit. I have a 3-year-old little boy at home, and I have a 9-year-old girl. My little girl is scared to death. When she is home with mom, she has to walk through the house every evening and make sure every window and door is locked because we had someone attack us a couple of weeks ago in a Costco parking lot.

This is America. Great job.

I have asked a couple of my friends who knew Charlie Kirk better than I do--actually, my brother knows him better than I do. The morality of a life that is taken at age 31 that was actually just trying to make us better--and that cost you your life? What is wrong?

Every Member of this body, particularly on our side, I beg of us, understand and embrace this message of love, conservatism, prosperity, hope, and the morality of family. We have to make sure this legacy of a young man who was actually having a remarkable impact on a society that is lost--let's keep that message alive because it is worth fighting for.

The idea of someone losing their life for words--I am going to sit down. Andy, bail me out here.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs), my neighbor.

Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from Colorado (Ms. Boebert) and I were talking in the back. I yield to her to please share her thoughts.

Mr. Speaker, I have a challenge for everyone out there who thinks you know things. A little while ago, I was sent--and I hope this is either a bot or just someone who is having a mental health issue, who was putting out horrible, evil comments. You could tell this is a person who has never actually listened, never actually gave a moment.

Here is my challenge to particularly my brothers and sisters on the left, a lot of us on the right, and those who consider themselves populists everywhere else in between. I need to apologize. My world, I see the world through math. It is sometimes a little cold. Maybe I should learn to spend more time like Mr. Kirk, with just the morality of family, of prosperity.

My challenge to you is to go online, go actually watch some of the actual videos, not the interpretation of them, not someone who is offended because it is a violation of their collective dystopian view of the world, but the actual videos. Go find something where Mr. Kirk is basically saying here is the philosophy.

Here is my hope. Here is where I actually think that if we embrace this, all of us, our society would be better, more prosperous, more loving. I challenge you, before you start to actually think you understand--why is it some of us who sometimes are best of friends, sometimes we beat the crap out of each other, and we are all here saying the same thing to you?

Do words that I actually believe are based on what we are as Americans, based in our founding documents, should those words take your life? Should they leave a 16-month-old, a 3-year-old, and a wife without a father and husband?

Mr. Speaker, if the movement is going to work, if the movement is going to save our future, if the movement is going to give hope to a generation that in many ways has been crushed by so many things we have allowed to happen, it needs someone like Charles Kirk going out and saying: Look, there is hope. Here is a path.

Go watch the video. Go watch and read what is written. If we are going to have an opinion, make it based on actual information and not on some propaganda on social media.

This can't be what we have become, but it is. There is a pit in my stomach when I think about how Steve Scalise almost lost his life and when the President was shot at. I have heard stories from Members, which we try often not publicize, who have been assaulted and had a bullet through their office windows. I think about my own experiences with my children in my arms.

We are politicians. There is a certain risk and a certain insanity that goes with doing this. How many of us are out there who have built a very powerful and very successful organization but are also telling a story that is America? It is actually what made us.

Go read the actual documents. Go watch the actual videos. After that, if folks have an opinion, it is their opinion. They are Americans. We get to have a belief, but don't make it a belief based on ignorance.

For everyone in my community, in the Phoenix and Scottsdale area, Charlie's home, I ask them to please pray and extend kindness. I say to his family--Erika and his two children--he is not coming home.

Please, God, let's not make this what our future looks like. We have got to be better than this, even when the messenger that is ultimately a message of optimism and prosperity and morality and love takes a life.

Mr. Speaker, I come up here every week and talk about the economics and how terrified I am about the debt, deficits, and demographics. Maybe I should just be terrified of what our future looks like when we have someone at 31 years old, who has built a following just telling the truth--Mr. Speaker, I have to stop myself from rambling because I have a thousand thoughts going through my head. Many of them are quite angry. I promised myself I wouldn't come up here and do a tirade.

Let this be a moment of reflection and particularly for those who fill my text message, fill my emails, and fill my mailbox at home with hate. If there are people on the left who are full of burning hate, maybe now is a good moment of reflection for what those folks have brought to our society. Is this really what we are?

Actually take my challenge. Go actually watch and go read what Charles Kirk was actually trying to communicate. People might actually find out it is not that foreign to where their hearts are at.

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 7 o'clock and 23 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, September 11, 2025, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chair, ranking member, and my good friend, in some ways, this is a budgetary discipline amendment.

The fact of the matter is, we have been doing a project with the Joint Economic Committee for a couple of years now, where we have been going up and down budgets and finding resources, money that has been appropriated that has sat in accounts, sometimes for years and years. My argument is that many of these things I actually don't oppose. You belong appropriating it again. You belong engaging in the budgetary discipline.

If we are truly doing regular order, we should say that this was originally appropriated in 2015. It is clean coal, which is an actual one. The money is still sitting there, since 2015. Maybe we should reexamine it, reappropriate it, or pull it back.

Instead, Mr. Chair, we actually estimate there is over a trillion dollars sitting in accounts.

Mr. Chairman, much of it are things that I like. It is not about liking the appropriation. It is about budgetary discipline of going up and down and reviewing everything because maybe there is a newer, better, and faster way of doing these things. Yet, the fact of the matter is that we play this game where we leave this cash sitting in these accounts and then stack on it and stack on it.

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

Mr. Chair, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

Mr. Chairman, to my appropriator friend, this is the game that we play, and this is where we talk past each other. Can I give an actual example?

Clean coal technology, appropriated August 18, 2015; unobligated balance, $2 million.

In the scale we deal with, when we borrow approximately $6.5 billion every day, we are, right now, burning through about $71,000 to $72,000 a second. That is our borrow.

I actually think I voted for this in 2015, but it is still sitting in the account, unspent. Maybe, if we are doing our jobs, we should go back through and say: Do we still want this? Do we still want to do this?

This is our job. Instead, we are stacking.

Mr. Chairman, I will say it again: We are borrowing close to $72,000 every second. The Joint Economic Committee and our math is that we are going to borrow 7.3 percent of the entire economy this fiscal year, the fiscal year that we are in right now.

When you hear the economists both on the Democratic side and the Republican side running around saying: We should only be borrowing 3 percent, that would mean almost $1.8 trillion of cuts this fiscal year to get to a 3 percent borrow. Most of the borrow, or the vast majority, is interest and healthcare, but we are not allowed to tell the truth about those mechanics.

Is it appropriate to be engaged in stacking? This is something that was appropriated in 2015. It has sat in the account, static, but we are just going to stack on top of it. It is not about the belief that it is good for the country, good for the economy, and good for this. It is the budgetary discipline of: Are we going to tell the truth that we have something that we call ``forgotten funds,'' and it equals billions and billions of dollars sitting in accounts?

If we are going to be adults, be professionals, and do our jobs--I am sorry--every single one of these line items belongs in this budget, being modernized, reviewed, and determined whether it is still needed.

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

Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I missed all of you now that we are back. I get teased back home of doing these things that seem more like an economics lecture. That is actually not the goal here. It is actually just to sort of walk through the reality of the math because so much of this body is about theater and not about facts.

As my wife a decade ago said: David, you get to go and hang out in a math-free zone.

Let's have some fun with facts and math.

Mr. Speaker, next year, the 2026 fiscal year, 3 weeks away, take a guess: For every dollar of tax collections--for every dollar of tax collections we get next year, what are we going to spend?

For every dollar of tax collections we take in next year, we are going to spend $1.43. This one number right here should scare the hell out of people. Instead, the hallways around here are full of people demanding more spending. Just a little while ago in my office there were more people saying: Can you get us a grant? Can you get us more money? Can you regulate our competition?

For every dollar of tax collections this year--we still have 3 more weeks before the fiscal year is over--my estimate is that we are going to spend $1.39. Next year, it is $1.43.

How long do you intend for this to go on?

Here is your problem: Most of that increase in spending is not some sort of crazy this or crazy that. It is interest. Remember, interest rates are up. We still have to finance about $10 trillion of refinance this year, and we are going to bring about $2.4 trillion or $2.3 trillion in total new debt this year.

Next year, the baseline was we are going to borrow $2.5 trillion. It is probably going to be less $300 billion because of customs duties, tariffs. Yet, here is something I beg of everyone. Whether you are on the left or the right, burn this into your psyche: We borrow about $70,000 to $72,000 every second, and almost all of the growth in that borrowing is interest and healthcare costs.

Mr. Speaker, I am sorry. Forgive me. I enjoy tormenting you. I don't mean to.

Think of this: In 7 years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. Under the law--under the law, grandma takes a 24 percent cut in her check. In 7 years, we double senior poverty in America.

Yet, if you are an idiot like I am, and you get up and say: We really should work on this. The Democrat consultants are going to beat the crap out of a Republican and vice versa for even mentioning the fact about the math. It is not Republican math. It is not Democrat math. It is in the Social Security actuary report.

In 7 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. If you are running a hospital or one of these where the part A trust fund is your revenue source, you get an 11 percent cut. In 7 years.

This year, we are going to spend $1 trillion on Medicare. In 7 years, we spend $2 trillion. It doubles in 7 years. It is demographics. It is not personal. It is not Republican-Democrat. It is what we are as a society.

We have the same number of 18-year-olds today as we had 20 years ago, but we have double the number of our brothers and sisters who are 65. It is math.

Behind these microphones this week, how many people have come up and actually talked about math, about the demographics, about the economic future? I would argue that understanding the math is moral. Is it moral to look the other way and in 7 years double senior poverty?

Yet, you will get the living crap kicked out of you around here if you actually tell the truth about the math because we have spent so many decades lying to the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I have this board I have used for a while. It was saying that right now we are borrowing $6 billion a day. I apologize. This number is wrong. We are borrowing $6.5 billion dollars a day, and there is the theatric problem.

You get people saying: I am going to save a couple hundred million dollars. That is wonderful. Let's see. If I am doing $6.5 billion a day, that is almost $270 million an hour. There is the fraud around here. It is the inability to understand the scale of what is going on.

Let's understand that borrowing is a tax. It is a tax paid for in the future with your retirement, my kids, but it is a tax paid with interest.

We have a society who so desperately wants free stuff. They want money. The 100 times I have come behind this microphone and show the charts saying, I want every dime of my Social Security. Of course. Of course. Most people don't realize the Social Security formula actually is progressive. If you are a high-income earner, you get less

of your money. If you are lower income earner, your FICA tax, you actually get more, but in the mean, you get about a $72,000 spiff for that couple. It is a crap rate of return.

However society, the Democrats, back 20, 25 years ago decided that the idea of putting a little money into the market was a horrible idea except for the fact that now we look back 25 years later, it was a wonderful idea.

Poverty rates of return and those things would have been dramatically different, but it is too late now. We are well into the population bubble of baby boomers. The driver that we don't like to tell the truth about is that same couple for every dollar they put into Medicare, you are going to get about $6, $7 back. Most people don't realize that about 38 percent of Medicare comes from the trust fund, about 15 percent comes from your copay, the rest comes right out of the general fund.

Are we allowed to tell each other, the lobbyists, the activists, the people on social media making absolute crap up? How about our voters? Are we allowed to get in front of them and say: This is serious. This isn't a game. We right now are borrowing about $6.5 billion every single day for this fiscal year. We are down to the last 3 weeks, so you have a really good sense of what we borrowed.

In 9 budget years, it is well over $10 billion a day. Yet, a couple hours ago, I offered an amendment that basically said there is all these dollars--and I am going to talk about this probably two, three times--that were appropriated. I showed one example of money appropriated in 2015. It wasn't a huge amount of money, few million bucks, and it has never been touched. We just leave it sitting in the account. We borrowed it, we are paying interest on it, but it just sits there. That is insane. You hear budget geeks go: We should do zero- based budgeting. Absolutely, because you can say, oh, we did that. We were going to do this.

In that case, it was actually a clean coal program, but no one actually ever qualified for the grant so the cash sat there. There was like $36 billion of stuff that has been sitting in the accounts for more than a year and some for half a decade.

Yet, we are so dysfunctional, we can't actually start from the beginning and go line by line by line. It doesn't solve the problem, but it helps.

Let's actually walk through math reality. I am a Ways and Means guy. I chair Oversight Subcommittee on Ways and Means, but I also chair the Joint Economic Committee. I have a handful of Ph.D. economists that work for the committee, and we try so hard to do intellectually honest math.

Mr. Speaker, please don't tell anyone, but I am a dinosaur. I actually believe in free markets. I actually believe in the elegance of competition. We are actually going to touch a little bit on the economics of creative destruction. If you want productivity--because I am going to show in these charts where we are demographically, if we don't have an explosion of productivity, we can't make wages go up.

If you are a working person in this country today--particularly like in my Phoenix-Scottsdale area, if you are a working person today and you haven't had about a 28 percent pay hike in the last 4 years, you are poorer today.

It is called inflation. The biggest tax in modern history was those 3, 4 years of inflation because we now get to pay back our debt with inflated dollars. We are crushing people. The way you make wages go up is two things: You raise people's wages because of inflation. That just means you are treading water, or productivity.

Now some of the things we did in the reconciliation budget that we passed before break is expensing, research and development expensing, things to try to get investments to do things better, faster, cheaper, but we are going to have to have the brutal discussion of--you functionally have the same number of 18-year-olds coming in and next year it is going be lower and the next year it is going to be smaller and the year after is smaller. People like me, baby boomers, with gray hair, there is a whole bunch of us. We have got to legalize technology. Is it rational? I will say this a couple times. Is it rational to make it illegal to automate a port?

I would love to have the dockworkers and the unions love me. Maybe they would even send financial help and say nice things about me, but it is not about that. It is about the entire continuity of society, when we create these barriers for automation, for doing things better, faster, healthier, and cheaper.

If you are going to have a command and control economy, let's just admit we are populous. We want to run the economy. We want to own businesses. We don't believe in the economic theories of creative destruction, creating new, better, faster, but give up on the productivity cycle and then you tell me how people's wages go up. You have a middle class that is getting absolutely crushed and squeezed.

Their purchasing power is stagnant, if not reduced. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is going to happen through policy here. It is like no one here went to their basic elementary school economics class.

The chart here--I am going to try to make a point--is customs duties. We all talk about tariffs. I heard a Member a couple days ago say: Customs duties. Tariffs are going to pay for everything. No, they are not.

Now, they do pay for most of the big, beautiful bill. The fact of the matter is, last year we took in about $77 billion in customs duties. This year, we are going to take in, our best guess, is $190 billion.

Except the problem is, did I mention to you a little bit ago that we borrow about $6.5 billion a day? The increase in tariffs, customs duties, is going to pay for like 11 days of borrowing. Out of 365 days, we just covered 11 days of borrowing.

For anyone who is watching, much of what DOGE was doing was fascinating. Go look at DOGE.gov right now, and you will see a couple of hundred billion dollars of potential savings, though only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction has actually been executed because we in Congress can't even do basic rescissions.

We did a rescission before August. It was a total of like $9 billion, so if you are borrowing $6 billion, we covered a day and a half of borrowing. It was war here for 6 weeks to save that much money.

We are living in a mathematical delusion where people don't understand that is 12 zeros. They don't see the difference between a trillion and a billion, but the fact of the matter is, we need to start telling the truth about the math.

Let's walk through. Let's get a little more geeky. This morning, there was something called the JOLTS data. It is basically ADP's attempt to sort of take an estimate of what is happening in jobs data. There has been a lot of slop in the numbers. Look, we were beating up BLS before, but remember, we also have a response rate to the surveys that is down dramatically. Sometimes you get big revisions, and then the next month you get a little more data, and the next month you get more returns, and you can finally calculate.

In the JOLTS data, there is a fascinating number to look at. The number of jobs was fairly flat, but unemployment looks like, our best model, it is going to stay steady because we are finding we don't have as many workers looking for jobs. It is really worth taking a look at that, as we are starting to see the demographic implications of how many of our brothers and sisters are choosing to take retirement at age 62, when for years we have been looking at there are, like, 7 million prime-age males missing from the labor force.

That was actually one of the controversies when we were trying to do some of the reforms in Medicaid, saying that should we ask folks to at least look at participating in the economy and the society because, Heaven knows, we need them.

Look, this may be a little bit geeky, this chart, but the basic premise is, when you are taking a look at labor force participation, back here is the recession. We had, like, 70 percent of the population participating in the economy. Today, we are down here below 62 percent, or 62.5 was our 2025 estimate, and we believe it is going to continue to fall.

Is this people just sitting on the sidelines? No. It is more complicated. As a society, we got older. We have done entire presentations--and I know this is controversial and uncomfortable--of our brothers and sisters when you have

entire States where more than half of the population qualifies as being obese. We are not being mean, but the Joint Economic Committee a few years ago did a major study saying, hey, it turns out obesity costs about $9.1 trillion of additional healthcare spending over 10 years, and there is the Milken study from a few years ago saying 47 percent of all U.S. healthcare. Maybe the morality is getting our head straight and saying we help our brothers and sisters get healthier so they can participate in the economy, so we have more labor force participation, so the economy grows, so productivity goes up, and so wages go up. However, we are incapable of a unified theory around here because it would require thinking in math.

To get a little more sarcastic, we actually are fixated on just some of the budgetary problems. We actually believe there are hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars that are subject to rescission. They have been sitting in accounts for years. Instead, we just did an appropriations bill a little while ago, where we stacked on top of stacks.

Why is it so terrifying to the army of lobbyists, the people back home who want more money to say, hey, we are just going to look at everything because we found occasions where we are doing an appropriations that there was an appropriation done 3 or 4 years ago, and the money is still sitting in the account.

I can understand the scale, if you are borrowing $270 billion a month, maybe fixing this, but we don't have a choice. Is anyone else at least at all freaked out a little bit looking at what is happening around the world right now, what is happening to French bonds, British bonds, Japanese yields on the long end of the curve? When you see the long end of the curve going up and up, that lets you know the entire world is getting really nervous about long-term debt.

Ray Dalio, the billionaire, has been giving speeches around the country. He even wrote a book saying you have a math problem. The entire industrialized world basically is at zero to negative population growth. Our brothers and sisters who have gotten older, who are moving into their pension years, their healthcare years, where are the savings to keep financing all these governments that are borrowing? His argument is there is not enough savings for all the borrowing.

Then, you get the idiot who says: Well, we will just print the money. Of course you will. What is that thing called again? Yeah, inflation. You debase the currency. Yes, you pay for it with inflated dollars, but everything you have, your savings, become worth less. You make real estate and things more expensive, so the next generation can't buy a house. We are basically--it is an economic term--oh, yeah, we are screwing over the next generation and maybe our own retirements by not telling the truth about the math.

It doesn't have to be dystopian. There are ways to deal with this stuff. We just don't have a lot more time.

Look, we have something called the Sunset Act. We have been looking at regulations, command and control, that are woven through the economy, particularly post-Biden administration, where they regulated at breakneck speed. They are up for review. They need to be modernized.

Part of the question is, if you are going to regulate air quality, do you do it the same way you did 30 years ago, when you actually have remote sensors that can be in your pocket, or do you need the million- dollar-a-year tower to do it where you look at the entire marketplace?

The fact of the matter is, there are better, faster, cheaper ways, and much more elegant, and you get the bad actors. We have actually done some economic modeling, and it turns out we can actually add a real pop to GDP growth, the size of the economy. GDP growth is important because that is actually your living standard. When we grow, you live better.

It turns out, it is not deregulation. It is smart regulation. Find this bureaucratic control of economic growth and let's just review them. Should we still do it the same way we did 20 years ago?

Let me give you a conceptual. A year and a half ago, I met with a Phoenix-based company that is actually building a ginormous drone. They intend to do ground-penetrating lidar, radar underneath this drone.

Let's say you want to build a pipeline or a road. They are going to fly it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and penetrate the ground to see if there are archaeological, geological issues, these things.

At the end of the week, they claimed the AI, the artificial intelligence, can write the entire environmental and engineering report. What would it have taken for people to go out and walk the site? A couple of years.

We have already been being lobbied by, ``We are the archaeological guild. We are the geological guild,'' we are this and that because we don't want to be replaced by the technology, so it should take 2 years. We are going to do permitting reform, saying we want to do it in half the time, so we are going to have these people walk twice as fast?

That is the way this brain around here works. We are going to make it so that they walk twice as fast. Are we out of our minds?

That technology is not in the code yet. We have not legalized saying, I can let AI, even though they claim the statistics of it would be more accurate than humans out walking the site. We can do things dramatically faster.

There was a great article. I think it may have been in The Economist or the Financial Times a couple of days ago that was making the point that China has become a country of engineers. We have become a country of lawyers.

Why does it take us so long to build something? Why does it take us so long to do the things that would make us more prosperous? It sort of becomes obvious in that one line: We are a country of lawyers. Our competitors are countries of engineers.

Look, when we start looking at actual GDP growth--maybe this is a better way than using the chart. The long-run economic growth, almost all the credible economists in America say that we are going to get a nice pop in the next year or two from what we did in the reconciliation budget. Great. Then, because of our demographics, we start to hit going back to the mean. It is only like 1.8 percent GDP growth.

We cannot make it if we grow at anemic rates, but you can't do it through a bunch of handouts and subsidies. It has to be from unleashing markets. It is why I am concerned, seeing things going on where we are taking ownership interests in companies.

Look, this one is going to be uncomfortable. Let's go back 15 years ago, the Great Recession, when we bailed out a car company. Yes, we were saving jobs, except for long-run economic growth. There are some brilliant papers that have been written, saying, after a couple of years, you would have had the same number of jobs and three or four creative, smaller, innovative car companies, one doing electric, one doing sports cars, one doing--that is actually how creative destruction works in the economy. It is like a phoenix. It is the rebirth.

When you stop that rebirth from happening, you don't get to clean out the legacy headwinds, the things that are slowing down the innovation. You basically perpetuate the inefficiencies. It doesn't make you popular telling the truth, but we all knew this.

Should we have bailed out Blockbuster Video 15 years ago because there were tens of thousands of people who worked for Blockbuster? Should we have put Netflix out of business? Should we have slowed down the internet? Should we have stopped the revolution of technology where you go home now and hit a button?

You say that is absurd, David. No. It is the same sort of concept. Should government have stepped in and stopped innovation?

We have done entire presentations here where you talk about the morality of cures. If diabetes is 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare, should we spend more money on helping people maintain their misery? Probably. Should we spend what is necessary to cure the disease? What would be the economic impact?

There is a brilliant study from a couple of years ago talking about maybe one of the leading, if not the leading, contributor to income inequality in America. It is actually health, except we will get lobbied by groups that are upset saying: If you kill the disease, what happens to my business model?

This is how perverse this place has become. Where is the passion? Where is the vision? Where is the innovation? Where is the optimism?

Look, I am 63. My wife is 63. I have a 3-year-old and a 9-year-old. The 9-year-old is remarkably loud.

We are blessed. We were able to adopt. It is the most greatest joy in life.

Mathematically, my children will be part of the first generation that is going to be poorer than their parents. That is the American ethos now? The Americans' ethic is that we are going to make our kids and grandkids poorer because we want stuff? This is what we have become because we are so damn afraid to do things that are hard around here?

Look, I am going to do this slightly out of order. Ten weeks ago, when we were doing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, part of my deal was, Mr. Speaker, that I don't like some of the things that are in here, but I really want to offer legislation to pay for it because I think there are some eloquent things we could do to offset. The deal was, okay, go ahead. See if you can get anyone to sponsor it and vote for it.

We have been chasing for over a year. Go read The Wall Street Journal articles, the MedPAC report--the amount of fraud, waste, misalignment. Some of it is perfectly legal misalignment. We are the idiots that screwed up the law in Medicare part C, or what I was talking about a little while ago, cash that has been sitting in accounts for years that could be swept that we are paying interest on.

This number is getting bigger, a talent-based immigration system. We educate people and send them home to compete with us--and the President's golden visas. It came in over $3 trillion of savings. We wrote the bills.

We had Ph.D. economists help us model them and get our numbers right. We got a preliminary number from CBO that the Medicare Advantage modernization saves $1.8 trillion, making it the biggest savings bill in U.S. history.

Mr. Speaker, guess how many cosponsors we have? Zero. Zero because it is hard, complicated, difficult to explain, but it is really good policy. There are solutions. Toughen up.

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 1 o'clock and 46 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, September 8, 2025, at noon for morning-hour debate.