Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend from California (Mr. Kiley).

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from California for his remarks, and as I always say to Californians, don't take Arizona's water.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to do a run-through of a couple things here. I am going to try to walk through some economics. Then I am going to actually try to walk through some warnings that are in the documents that are around us that very few people seem to bother to read. Then I am going to actually do some things that are hopeful because I think sometimes I am a bit dour, and I don't do enough of this.

First off, in August, Republicans are going to go out and tell the morality of people's taxes not going up next year. What we did in the reconciliation budget: incentives to invest in America, to build new plants of equipment, for working people to have some things to actually draw them back into the labor force, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, some of these things.

If you actually look at one of the reasons those things are in there, and we are actually starting to see some of the models of the economic side, seeing some very optimistic things that we think are going to change labor force participation, small changes.

The left will actually sort of do a bit of schizophrenia such as you cut spending over here, but too much of this money is borrowed. I agree too much is borrowed. I want to cut more spending, but then you attack us when we try to actually point out misalignment, bad acts.

What was the report that just came out a couple days ago, where we found 2.8 million of our brothers and sisters enrolled in subsidized ACA plans as well as Medicaid plans.

They don't want to talk about that because it screws up their pitch when you actually walk through what we see in the math. We know the American people believe and understand the morality and the great economics of encouraging those that are able-bodied, able to work to participate in society.

If anyone is a geek out there--it is probably 4 or 5 years old--the University of Chicago, four of their Ph.D. economists wrote a brilliant paper talking about: If you actually ask people to participate in society, in the economy, to take a job, even if you give them welfare or government subsidies, because they have an attachment to the economy, to work, at the

end of 10 years, those who had the work requirements actually end up much wealthier and off of government support. It is the morality of learning to get up, building an attachment, learning skills, and moving up in an organization.

There was a time when it was actually the left's ethos, that the argument of work is moral. Somehow that left the Democratic Party.

Let's walk through a couple things. I have used this board for months now. It will probably be the last time I use it. Understand baseline over the next 10 years, according to Congressional Budget Office, we are going to spend $86 trillion. Think of the screaming and gnashing of teeth and protests that are all ginned up, you cut $800 billion from this, and a little bit from a couple other things, it was less than 2 percent of that spending.

Are you telling me that the left doesn't believe that if you are spending $86 trillion as your baseline spending, and understand--I am going to show you some of the charts and how much of this is basically demographics. We got old. Our healthcare costs money.

I am going to show you a couple charts that I really want folks to understand. But for the American people, when you see someone from the Democratic Party behind a microphone saying, they cut spending. It is this off of the base of this. It is the lack of understanding.

One of the points that you keep trying to make over and over again is, was it the Democrats' plan that they wanted to raise taxes on everyone? Because that was automatic; that was coming at the end of this year.

Your taxes were going up back to the pre-2017 tax reform. Every once in a while, you will get someone who says, well, you shouldn't have extended the tax policy for the highest income. Okay. That is a tiny, tiny portion of the total dollar amount. When they had control of everything, they didn't do it.

But just from a point--and this is more for everyone to understand, particularly even staff. You see the blue here, nondefense/defense, every dime of that is borrowed. I think this year we will probably borrow, let's call it, $400 billion for Medicare. We are going to actually hold a contest shortly to see who can guess the final borrowing for this year.

The economy has actually been pretty good. We are tracking customs receipts. Many of you think of it as tariffs. We may have another $70 billion on top of baseline. It is probably going to come at $2.2 trillion of borrowing this year.

This doesn't have the tax reform, many of those things built into that base. How do I help folks understand? Here is where we are already at, and this will make sense in a little while.

For every dollar we take in in tax receipts, we spend $1.39. We spend $1.39 for every dollar we take in tax receipts. If you saw that previous chart, you would have noticed that only about 24 to 26 percent is in discretionary, what we really get to vote on. That is why we end up having to use what we call these reconciliation budgets.

The 1974 Budget Control Act allows us to move a bill, if it has certain fiscal properties to it, through the Senate without having to get 60 votes. It is all a dance to deal with the 60 votes. If we were actually a little more honest about math, maybe we wouldn't have to do this dance.

Why this is important is--I am a little freaked out because this is the MedPAC report. I know every Member of Congress has read every word of it because it is really important. There is a chart in here that if you actually read the footnotes--now, look, for anyone that is paying attention, I am trying to bring Medicare Advantage back where the incentives actually are about helping populations be healthier and not about risk scoring them that--it is a concentration of illness, but the incentives are that if populations are healthier, the plans can make more money.

But inside here is also a great data point, Mr. Speaker. This year, we are going to spend, let's call it, a trillion dollars on Medicare.

How many of you would guess what we are going to spend in 7 years? The model in here says in 7 years, we go from $1 trillion a year on Medicare to $2 trillion. We double Medicare spending in 7 years.

Now, part of that is demographics. Starting, functionally, 30 years ago, we started having a lot fewer children. So if we took today and stepped back 20 years ago, we had about 35 million of our brothers and sisters who were 65 years old, 30 years ago. Today, we are approaching about 70 million of our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up, so more than double.

Go back 20 years ago, the number of 18 years olds we had is pretty much the same as the number of 18 year olds we have today. Next year, the number of 18 year olds goes down, the year after that it goes down, and the year after that it goes down.

Is that Republican or Democrat or is it just demographics? It is a little hard to campaign on that. It is a little hard to attack the other side, but the fact of the matter is, if we all read our data, we don't have a choice.

This is the Social Security Medicare actuary report, another thing I know every Member here has actually read. Seven years from now, the Medicare part A trust fund, which is about 38 percent of Medicare spending--the rest comes out of the general fund and members' participation, I think is about 15 percent, the fees they pay--but that 38 percent, that trust fund is gone in 7 years, meaning hospitals, surgery centers will have an 11 percent cut, but I know we are all going to talk and work on how we are going to revolutionize the cost of healthcare.

One of the classic problems around here, Mr. Speaker, is for some reason the left--and many of us on the right--we talk about healthcare as a finance problem. The ACA was a finance bill. It was who had to pay, who got subsidized. Medicare for All is a finance bill. I would argue the Republican alternative from a few years ago was a finance bill. It had a little better actuarial curve, but it was a finance bill: who got subsidized, who has to pay.

I beg of our brothers and sisters around here, open up your brain. We live in a time of miracles. We are going to have some conversations about how you change the view of healthcare. It is all about what we pay. Can we change the cost by doing it better, faster, cheaper with technology and our brothers and sisters being healthier?

If we don't, we will have problems like what is shown on this chart. Today, 16 percent of all tax receipts go just to interest. In 9 budget years, actually 9 years straight up, in 9 years, 30 percent of all U.S. tax receipts go just to interest. Heaven forbid, if we had a 1 point movement in interest rates, my math is 45 percent of all tax receipts would go to interest.

When you see people come behind these microphones, how many people are saying: Hey, how do we convince the bond markets? The bond markets are basically on the edge of running this country now because when you borrow $6 billion a day--next year, I think we borrow $6.5, maybe $7 billion a day. In 9 years, we are over $10 billion a day. Let's see. That is, what, $70,000 to $72,000 a second.

I have this aggregator on my news, and there are some crazy articles. A couple leftwing economists are saying: Borrowing doesn't matter, people are always willing to buy U.S. debt.

Okay. Let's pretend these leftwing economists are right. We can continue to borrow and borrow and borrow. They purposely sort of forget the punch line. Let's say we could borrow forever. At what point are there no more services, purchases, government helping our brothers and sisters because it is all covering the interest costs on the bonds?

So let's say--I think you are a little insane--you believe we can just borrow forever, you are a monetarist, but even the fragility in the monetarists, you saw in the previous few years of inflation that their model didn't work. Also, in addition to that, we are going to pay the interest. In 9 years, baseline under a favorable interest rate model, 30 percent of all U.S. tax receipts go to interest and, Heaven forbid, if interest rates were to come up 1 percent because we have to--this coming year, I think we are going to refinance $11 trillion, the year after that I think it is $13 trillion because we stay so short on the financing term, we sell short-term debt instead of longer-term debt because it turns out there is not as big an appetite. We are in this world where in 9

budget years, it will be $10 billion a day.

I am just going to run through a number of these things fairly quickly just to sort of get to the point. National health expenditures as a percentage of GDP, this will make sense in a moment. In 2033--so functionally, what, 8 years from now--over 20 percent of the economy will just be healthcare. Why?

The Joint Economic Committee 2 years ago wrote a report--and I thought I was going to get the crap kicked out of me, but we spent months and months and months grabbing every bit of literature and saying: Can someone tell me what obesity costs America? What it costs society? What it costs family formation? What does it cost? We came up with a number 2 years ago of $9.1 trillion in additional healthcare costs. We had some mortality statistics, the number of multiple chronic conditions, the misery out there.

What is fascinating is we have some articles right now talking about that we may have actually hit something crazy, and it is an odd way to phrase it, but it is what the researchers think, we may have already hit what we call peak obesity.

When we published the report 2 years ago, we still had about 4 or 5 more years of growth of obesity. In some States, actually approaching 50 percent of their population are technically obese under the BMI calculations.

It looks like in the last 12 months we may have started to bend the curve. We are trying to recalculate. Is this a sign of incredible hope that we know so much misery in our society--because there is a brilliant paper from about 7 years ago saying the leading contributor to income inequality in America, it turns out, isn't education. It turns out it is health.

When you think about it, the cascade of costs of someone with severe diabetes, when we already know diabetes is 33 percent of U.S. healthcare. What if things like this actually could help our brothers and sisters? Is this Republican or Democrat? It is just good policy. It has just always been uncomfortable to talk about.

Maybe society is starting to open up, saying, hey, maybe a healthier society actually is a really good, really moral thing.

Look, as we walk through these, I want to come back and sort of hit a punch line here. These charts have been available to us for years. The curve keeps getting steeper. When you have someone say they are a protector of Medicare, that is great. I am with you. It is an earned benefit. We made a societal promise, are they telling the truth about its financing? Oh, David, we can't do that, someone will say something mean about us.

In 7 years, what else will also be empty? The Social Security trust fund.

I am sure you all dove into the Social Security Medicare actuary report and saw the point in there where it says in 2032, 2033--actually we think it is 2032--our brothers and sisters on Social Security will take a 24 percent cut. Our model says we double senior poverty in America. That is absolutely immoral.

Have you also read the papers, the scale of tax hikes, of policy? Now, is the left offering to work with those of us on the right who are willing to step on the third rail and do the moral thing to actually take these on? Hell, no.

Mr. Speaker, I have talked to so many people on the Committee on Ways and Means and other committees who basically look at me in terror and run out of the room.

The political consultants care more about the power of the politics than the fact that in 7 years, Medicare is $2 trillion a year. In 7 years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. In 7 years, the Social Security trust fund is empty.

In the first full year, if we want to backfill that shortfall on Social Security, one of the rough numbers we have is $618 billion. Basically, what is that? It is two-thirds of what the entire defense budget is.

There is a lack of understanding of the scale of almost the dystopianism that comes from what happens when these trust funds are empty.

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

Mr. Speaker, I will learn to talk faster.

To the poor person trying to take my words down, I apologize.

I am going to skip over some of the other charts.

Mr. Speaker, you get the punch line. In the next decade, the vast majority of debt is driven by interest and healthcare costs. We are often very uncomfortable talking about it.

Let's actually talk about things that are great and that if we would get the policy right, we could lower that healthcare cost. It is not just an argument about who gets subsidized and who gets financed. It is what would be really good for society and really good for the budget.

We all saw The Economist article the last couple of days that talked about the miracle of how much the statistical benefits were having on the number of cures for cancer, particularly lung cancer and blood cancers, and their model that we are on the cusp of having major breakthroughs.

We saw this article a couple of days ago about a Microsoft platform. I didn't even know they were specializing in this. What was stunning about the datasets they had in here was that AI systems diagnosed patients four times more accurately than a human doctor.

I just upset some of my brothers and sisters in the doc caucus, but the data is the data. Mr. Speaker, should we legalize technology? If I have something I can blow into called a Breath Biopsy and if it is statistically as accurate or more accurate than a human and knows what I have, should it be allowed to prescribe?

It is uncomfortable, but it would help crash the cost of healthcare. It would actually help us with the fact that we have a shortage of medical professionals.

We are on the cusp of these things. As a matter of fact, that technology has been around for 5 years except it is functionally illegal. We don't reimburse it, and we don't allow it to prescribe. We are on the cusp.

An hour ago, Sam Altman with OpenAI was down the hallway. He and I had a few minutes of conversation about a new healthcare stat that is going to go public in about a month. He seemed incredibly optimistic that its accuracy will be off the charts.

Should we legalize the use of technology to help our society be healthier? Should we allow it to prescribe? It is uncomfortable because this place is a protection racket. We have to understand. Congress is mostly about one thing. It is about money. The left pretends it isn't. The right pretends it isn't. It is about money.

When we start to say maybe we can use technology as a competition to help our brothers and sisters be healthier and, therefore, change the cost of healthcare, somebody is going to say: I make money on that. You are now going to have me compete against a data system that is more accurate than I am?

We see it over and over. A new Apple Watch AI model can reveal hidden health conversations. Here are a couple things I have been most interested in the last couple of years. There is a great article. I did a whole speech on it a couple of years ago.

AI discovered a whole new categories of antibiotics. Remember we were all panic-stricken that we had diseases and bacterial infections that we didn't have antibiotics for. The antibiotics weren't working. AI discovered a whole new category of antibiotics that the literature said it would take humans 20 years to develop.

Instead of being afraid of the technology, maybe we should get our heads straightened up. In our society we have a shortage of young people. Baby boomers like me with gray hair are getting older, and we are going to consume a lot more healthcare. Can we embrace the technology? That technology sets us free when we start to realize the things that are going on.

We just had a doctor of radiology in our office. He walked us through the statistical abstract of breast cancer and the scans and showed that his AI platform was remarkably more accurate. It is cheaper, faster, and more accurate. Why wouldn't we embrace it? We don't reimburse it.

The barriers to entry here are protection rackets saying we are not fighting

for what is fastest, best, and cheapest. We are often here because we know our incumbency.

We really are on the edge of miracles. How do I get the left and the right to understand the math is the math? Demographics are the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. It is hard to campaign against the other side. Maybe we can take a couple of months off and actually do good, quality policy and legalize properly vetted and properly certified AI to prescribe.

This August, with the wearables, I am going to do an experiment with this Oura Ring. I am buying some Dexcoms to manage my glucose. Have we all seen the app where we can take a picture of food and it calculates glucose and calories?

How can we create the incentives? Maybe we should look at the ACA. Instead of just smoking in three age categories, we can add a fifth category that is an incentive for our brothers and sisters to manage their health.

Mr. Speaker, 16 percent of U.S. healthcare spending is people who are not taking their drugs for hypertension and are not taking their statin. Mr. Speaker, 16 percent of U.S. healthcare spending is over $600 billion a year.

There are solutions. We can make a difference. Embrace the technology. Change the cost. Have a healthier society. It is the most powerful thing we can do for U.S. sovereign debt.

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

Mr. Speaker, we are having a really exciting discussion with my buddy of how CBO actually does scoring on things. I was trying to explain that some of the things we consider absurd are actually our fault because it is the law that we have passed to tell CBO how to do the scoring.

Mr. Speaker, I want to make an apology to everyone because this one will

go a little longer than normal. Yes, I know. Everyone can grab a cup of coffee or something. Hopefully, the Sergeant at Arms--we are apparently not allowed to drink coffee on the floor. Whatever happens, don't get caught, right?

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try three things tonight. I will upset a number of folks. I am sorry. My math will be accurate because we have spent the last couple of days double-checking it.

I am going to try to do something a little insane. I am going to walk folks through the Social Security actuary report. We are just going to do some of the most basic parts of it so folks understand what the reality is.

Number two, I am going to walk through actually something that really bothers me because I have a number of politicians on the left and the right who spend day and night making up math. Mr. Speaker, can you believe that?

They attack the CBO. They attack the Joint Committee on Taxation, this and that. I am going to walk us through parts of the accuracy and what we call the variance report done by the Congressional Budget Office and try to demonstrate--yes, there are mistakes. They are actually more accurate than most of the outside groups.

That is uncomfortable because one of the other things I am going to touch on--and this is tough--is we have aspirational documents coming from the White House and from our own folks here on what growth can be. We can actually do remarkable growth, but we have to do very difficult policies to make it work.

Are we going to do talent-based immigration? Are we going to do incentives to automate, to modernize, to use technology, or to even use AI? My fear is we want to take credit for very high growth numbers, as in GDP grows this, but we are not willing to do the hard lift with the policy.

With that, I will explain why that is so important. The growth of debt, the drivers of debt, is the thing it is hard to tell the truth about.

I am going to show some charts in a little bit, Mr. Speaker, that show over the next 10 years interest is the number one driver of debt and then healthcare, Medicare, almost exclusively.

It is hard to explain that it is actually like 65-35 now. The some $22 trillion dollars that are baseline and then stack everything else on it that is going to be borrowed over the next 10 years, about 60 or 65 of that is just interest.

Whether we like it or not, the reality of it is this country, our Federal Government, is an insurance company with an Army. We don't have enough cash in the bank to pay for all the promises we made as part of that insurance coverage.

Let's have at it, Mr. Speaker. I keep bringing this chart because it is a really simple visual. Think of the people who almost attack us in our hallways and say: How can you want to cut spending?

We show them this chart that says baseline spending. It is $86 trillion over the next 10 years. All we are talking about on the House reconciliation budget--and my understanding is the Senate, our good friends down the hallway, their cuts and spending are even more anemic.

It is 2.3 percent. $86 trillion is the baseline spending for the next 10 years. We are trying in the House reconciliation budget to cut $2 trillion. That caused absolute panic because Washington, D.C., is about one thing. It is about money. When so much of America makes its money off D.C. policy, this has caused absolute panic, but it is a fraction. Mr. Speaker, when you see the new data on what is happening in healthcare costs--we have got some new data today that the numbers are even worse. Almost no one has actually started to do the math--the fact that the Social Security Medicare actuary report from 4 days ago actually has an 11 percent cut coming in the Medicare trust fund in 2033. That is not actually in the baseline debt numbers.

Mr. Speaker, are we just going to pretend that we didn't get older as a society?

Let's actually walk through.

Mr. Speaker, I have done this chart for a decade. About 74 percent of all spending is on autopilot. It is what we call mandatory. It is interest, it is Social Security, it is Medicaid, it is Medicare, and it is other promises that are built into the formula. Members of Congress almost never ever get the chance to vote on any of this red. The only time it will ever really come up is if we have a reconciliation budget.

All the blue, defense and nondefense, is 25, 26 percent of our spending. Every dime of it is borrowed. Please, anyone who cares, get this in your head: Every dime--other than some of the things in the reconciliation budget, every dime a Member of Congress will vote on, many for their entire careers, is borrowed money.

Mr. Speaker, you see this 26 percent that is in blue, that is defense and nondefense discretionary.

This year we are on track for every dollar we bring in in tax receipts--that is corporate taxes, that is individual taxes, that is everything--we are going to spend $1 in, $1.39 out the door.

Does anyone see a math problem?

Mr. Speaker, 1 month ago, Moody's actually downgraded U.S. debt, so now the three big rating agencies have lowered our credit. We actually have 18 States in America that have a higher credit rating than the Federal Government.

If anyone bothered to actually read it, it was actually really well done. There were a lot of details. Mr. Speaker, you would have had to have gotten it through a Bloomberg Terminal or pay a subscription. We are blessed to have a Bloomberg Terminal.

Yes, they got attacked by people who want to keep spending money who said: Stop. You can't downgrade U.S. sovereign debt.

The other two rating agencies had done it years earlier. The punch line in there is that in less than 9 years--and this was assuming interest rates stayed stable--in 2034, 30 percent of all tax receipts just covered interest. If interest rates went up 1 percent, Mr. Speaker, 1 percent, in 2034, then 45 percent of all U.S. tax receipts pay interest.

Are we paying attention?

Yet, the first words I will get from my brothers and sisters on the left are: Well, just raise taxes.

I will show over and over here, Mr. Speaker, that if you look at times when we had high marginal tax rates, low marginal tax rates, we basically always get about 17 to 18, sometimes 18\1/2\, percent of the economy in tax receipts.

There is our problem, it is that split. Right now if we are sitting in the almost 18 percent of the economy we are taking in in taxes, but we are spending 24--and understand, over the next few years it goes from 24, to 25, to 26--that gap is the annual deficit that gets piled on to the debt.

I have lots of charts here that actually start to show--let me see if I can find my favorite one here--that when we actually raise--well, actually, I hid it in the back so we will do that as a whole section.

How many understand we borrow $6 billion a day?

How many understand in 9 years we are borrowing over $10 billion a day?

Right now that means we borrow $72,000 a second. In 9 years we are functionally borrowing over $100,000 a second. The reason I try to break it down like that, is I am trying to find a way to make numbers like this, absolutely crazy numbers, work.

Mr. Speaker, so you have that.

My Democrat brothers and sisters have legislation they have introduced over the years. They have never actually brought it to the floor even when they controlled this body and controlled the White House. It gives you a sense, Mr. Speaker.

Economic study, go on Manhattan Institute, Riedl, it is about 1 year, 1.5 years old, they did the scoring on all the Democrats' tax proposals.

Here is the problem: Increasing taxes, Mr. Speaker, when you did actually all of them--and I am going to do this in a couple of fashions--you basically got to the point that when you did all the corporate, the estate, the individual, and then you did the economic effects, you got about 1.5 percent of the economy.

All the taxes hikes--every time we have someone over on that side saying: Just raise taxes--if we do every one of their tax proposals, then we get 01.5 percent.

Hopefully, everyone knows what the joke is.

We are going to borrow 7.3 percent of the economy this year, and in 9 years we are borrowing 9 percent of the economy.

How do we tell the truth to the American people that we are going to have to embrace things that are actually hopeful?

The cost of healthcare--it is always fascinating, I always thought I would get beaten up for saying this behind the microphone, and, shockingly, we have had people being remarkably kind to us.

The economist in my Joint Economic Committee--and it was a hard report to write--a couple years ago wrote a major study saying: What does obesity cost America?

That is not Republican or Democrat. It is just what we are. It means, every time you say that, Mr. Speaker, did you make all the people who make money off certain foods, off of certain healthcare, and other things, nervous?

We came up with a number 2 years ago. It was $9.1 trillion of additional healthcare spending over 10 years.

Now this one is a few years old. Milken did a study, he said that 47 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending was associated with obesity.

Is that Republican or Democrat?

It is just the math. It is something we could do together around here.

How do we help our brothers and sisters be healthier so they live longer? How do we help them so they could maybe have more family formation, live a life, participate in the economy, and use a hell of a lot less healthcare?

Mr. Speaker, you know the perversity around here. When we start talking about maybe we need to modernize how we do agriculture in America, what we grow, because we concentrate functionally on like five crops.

What should we do? This is a question--and I have been attacked by Democrats on this--is it moral to give an EBT card, modern food stamps, to someone to go buy onion rings?

I love onion rings. It is one of my addictions. I am working on getting off of it.

Is it moral with taking hard-earned money, rare resources--remember, it is borrowed money now--and say: Go eat crap.

Now the people who sell onion rings come lobby us and come attack us and say: People should have the choice. They should with their own money.

The fact of the matter is, when we looked at some of the data of the 7 million prime-age males who are missing in America, we have a data set that says about one-half of that population may be missing from the labor force. They are missing from the American labor force not because of drugs and not because of video games but because of health, because of obesity.

Are we allowed to talk about it?

Mr. Speaker, a bit of trivia. Let's do something I consider wonderfully funny and amusing.

In the last 20 years, what is the only success that has happened in the United States of helping young people get healthier?

Remember, under Michelle Obama's initiatives with President Obama, I think we spent, it was $16 billion or $36 billion, but some number like that, and it had absolutely no success. This was the dietary issues and the food issues, trying to get young people to go exercise. Can anyone guess?

Come on, this is a play-at-home game. It was Pokemon GO. I know it sounds crazy, but the gamification actually was the one great example of success for the last couple decades of helping young people get healthier.

What if we took that knowledge of, hey, these incentives do work, and actually legalese that and made that part of how we deliver healthcare services or how we allow insurers to provide incentives because the ACA ObamaCare is a finance bill.

It is who gets subsidized and who has to pay. You have three age groups and smoking. You could be creative enough to add a fifth category that says you can provide a series of these sorts of incentives, so when you wear the digital ring, wear the smartwatch on your wrist, or walk 5,000 steps, at the end of the month, we are going to give you something. Is that Republican or Democratic? Or is it just using data to try to keep our brothers and sisters healthier?

The stock answer is to just raise taxes on rich people. The math doesn't get you anywhere close. It may make you feel better. It may make you feel better, but I am going to show you numbers that should scare you half to death.

Let's continue to try to run through healthcare expenses. We are going to have to update our charts because we got one just a couple of hours ago and didn't have a chance. It actually had the spending growth on healthcare over the next decade actually accelerating again.

Here is part of my problem. Nominal, which means before inflation, we actually have domestic productivity growing at 4.3 percent over the next decade. We have healthcare growing at 5.8 percent. It is geeky, but that margin keeps separating and separating. Unless we are willing to do policy, whether it be technology or incentives to stay healthy, these sorts of things, if that separation continues, the debt picture is actually worse.

Mr. Speaker, at some point, I am going to show a slide here that if you actually take some of the policy we are working on, the baseline between now and 2035 of the $22 trillion we are supposed to borrow, some of the potential financing costs of what the Senate is doing right now, the higher interest rates, we are not exactly there, but we come close to doubling U.S. sovereign debt over the next decade. That took us 240 years, and we functionally double it in the next decade.

Let's get to the really uncomfortable stuff. I have to admit that I am only two-thirds through the Social Security actuary report. I have one on my desk that has highlights and little questions and things that I have to get my economists to go back to help me understand. For some, I actually don't like some of the math I see.

I am going to try something, and we are going to try to build a chart on this. This is crazy math, but we see it in the report.

You will have lots of activists say to just open up immigration. That will take care of the Social Security shortfall. Remember, the report says, in 2033--so, what is that? Seven or 8 years from now, there is a 23 percent cut coming in Social Security checks. That means we will double--we have had witnesses that explained this to us. We will double senior poverty after 2033.

Are we ready to do that? Is that moral?

Yet, I will get folks who will say that if we just open up immigration--it turns out that is actually not the math because one of the real reasons they moved up the date of the exhaustion of the Social Security trust fund was actually flattening of wage growth. It turns out there is no free option here.

We have some charts that show some things. Here are people who are undocumented in America. They are working under stolen Social Security numbers. They are giving into the system, but they are never going to get anything out. Then, you look at the suppression of wage growth. I know this is geeky, but I sort of need to lay a marker on the suppression of wage growth. When you bring in millions of people across the border who have similar skill sets, and they are often willing to sell their skill sets for even less money, Social Security actuary reports are now modeling a flattening of wage growth. That is one of the things that has actually shortened the life of the Social Security trust fund by a year.

The next time someone says that we just need to open up the borders, that that will take care of the Social Security trust fund, it turns out that it doesn't work that way. You actually didn't get anything from it. You did a suppression of working people's wages, and this one takes us out about a decade.

I don't know why people don't think, don't understand, these almost basic economic--we all went to our high school economics class, right? Here is what is coming. You have the 23 percent cut coming in 2033. If you are watching this and don't plan to be around in 2033, you don't have to care. The one that we have had almost no discussion about is that the Medicare trust fund is gone in 2033. That means if it lives off its income, its tax receipts from the FICA taxes, it is still an 11 percent cut.

The next time we get someone here saying that we need more money for

our hospitals, outpatient surgeries, and hospice care, point out to them that, in 7 years, there is an ugly cut coming. This 11 percent shortfall isn't even in our long-run CBO projections yet because a year ago, to give you an idea of how these numbers eroded in 1 year--I think 2054 was in last year's actuary report for when the trust fund was gone.

How many people over the last week, because this has been out for almost a week now, have you seen come behind these microphones and say maybe we should all work together, do something that is mathematically honest, or just even tell our voters the truth that, in 7 years, you are getting a 23 percent cut in your Social Security check and, by the way, another 11 percent cut in your hospital coverage and other things because the Medicare part A trust fund is gone.

For those who don't understand, and that is most of us, of the portion of your payroll tax that goes to Medicare, about 38, 40 percent of it is covered by the trust fund. That is the hospital portion, as we typically refer to it. The rest of it actually comes out of the general fund.

One of the most difficult numbers I have in my dataset here--because this is the one that I see people get upset about--is the primary driver of U.S. debt. Interest? It is healthcare. For every dollar you put into Medicare, you are getting $6 to $7 back. That delta is uncomfortable to talk about, but it turns out to be that and interest are the primary drivers.

All right, you start to actually look at some more--and I put this chart together just because I thought it was really interesting. We finally actually have really good data that has been designed on what happened during the Biden administration having the border open. We got some direct effects of, hey, we got a little bit more tax receipts and potential effects over time, but it turns out its deficit effects are more than two times because of the consumption of services.

It turns out that when someone tells you this is going to grow the economy, it is not in the economic literature. It may be in your aspirations, in your heart, or how you feel, but it is not in the economic literature. Tell the truth about the math.

National health expenditures as a percentage of GDP--remember, a couple of moments ago, I told you we are trying to figure it out. We just got another report that we expect the growth of healthcare spending to pop almost 3 percent more than modeled. That is a lot of money. Here is the punch line: We estimate that this year, right now, we are right here. We are spending about 18 percent of the entire economy on healthcare.

In 9 years, it is over 20 percent. Those differences are monstrous. That is functionally a 12.8 percent growth in the cost of delivering healthcare in that 9-year span. This is going to tie into why I am talking about some of our growth rate projections.

How do you hit these folks who are running around saying: ``David, we are going to grow at 3, 4, 5 percent GDP growth.'' At the same time, interest and expenditures are chewing up everything around us. How does that math work?

Then, I am going to show you some of the demographics. I am going to probably say this twice just so it starts to bleed in.

Today, we have the same number of 18-year-olds as we had 20 years ago. We have doubled the number of people 65 and up. So, functionally, we have the same number of 18-year-olds--it is no one's fault. It is not Republican and Democratic. Starting in 1990, U.S. fertility rates rolled over. We have a shortage of young people in America.

Tell me how I grow the economy if you are not going to let me do things like automation of ports, automated rail, AI, technology, allowing AI when it has the right data to be able to prescribe, and people go: ``Oh, I don't like that.'' Fine. Tell me how much poorer you are willing to live.

It is economics. If I can't grow the economy, yet I am being buried in debt service and increased costs for providing the services, tell me how I am to pay for it.

There is a path where I can make this math--I can't pay it off. I can stabilize it and make this another American century, but, damn it, how do I do it in a body that is just terrified of telling the truth about math or just basic economics?

This is the reality. This is our latest report. In 2033, 20.3 percent of the economy will just be healthcare. Considering government is functionally the primary payer, I think we are well over half of all healthcare spending coming out of the trust fund and the general fund.

Does anyone see a problem? Do you remember, a moment ago, I showed you that the Social Security and Medicare actuary report said that there is an 11 percent cut coming in 2033? Are we going to let that happen? Probably not. Are we going to reach into the general fund to pay for it? Probably. It is not in the debt projections yet. The scale of this is off the charts.

Back to the math problem. If I am making someone unhappy, be mad at the math, not me. Be mad at all the people who have never told you the truth with a calculator.

How do I save my future? Remember, my little boy turned 3 years old yesterday. I have a 9-year-old. Yes, they are adopted. It is a miracle. My wife is my age. Yes, we have screwed up my retirement. It is the most fun I have ever had in my life.

My child will be the first generation to live poorer than his mommy and daddy. Great job, America. This is our morality.

People will say: ``No, it is going to be great.'' Great. Okay. I hope it is great. Tell me how I do it in the math. Walk me through the economics. Walk me through what we are going to do to maximize GDP growth or what we are going to do to change productivity.

People will say that we are going to just grow. Okay, tell me how. That is our problem right now. We are using these wonderful, aspirational words, and we are not doing any of the policy.

The reality of it is that Social Security, Medicare, and net interest account for 80 percent of the spending growth.

If you are a Member of Congress, how many protesters did you have in your office this last couple of days? ``You can't review. You can't go after waste and fraud and Medicaid.'' Medicare Advantage, The Wall Street Journal has done a five-part series that, if you add it all up, is $1 trillion to $2 trillion of waste and fraud over 10 years. ``That is hard. You can't actually talk about that.''

If we can't do the work, how do you save the country? How do you save my kids' future? How do you save your own retirement? Maybe we can just keep lying to each other and the public because the public really doesn't want to hear these things.

There is a path to make this math work, but you keep telling me that we are going to take off on productivity, but then you see the charts of available young people to participate in the labor force. The number keeps falling and falling.

Remember, we have the smallest group of 18-year-olds as a percentage of population in U.S. history, and next year is even smaller, and the year after that is even smaller, and the year after that is even smaller. ``David, we are going to grow like crazy.'' We can, but you have to do policies that maximize productivity. ``Productivity might cause creative destruction.'' We are not allowed to do free-market economics anymore. Remember, we are populists now.

If you embrace that you are going to drive this country--we will still be greater than any country on Earth, but we are going to give up so much.

Prosperity is moral. The growth is moral. We are killing ourselves, but we are making promises that aren't in the data. They are not on the charts.

You have an idiot like me who gets behind the microphone week after week--I am not smart, but I am good at math--and tries to explain by saying that there are ways to make it work.

Mr. Speaker, 1 month ago, after almost a year's worth of work--I chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am number four in the Committee on Ways and Means. I chair the Subcommittee on Oversight. It is public now. The press broke the story. We have been doing investigations after The Wall Street Journal did that major series on Medicare Advantage-- the amount of fraud, the people being diagnosed with

diseases they don't have, people being dumped on VA even though they had the Medicare Advantage insurance, and people being dumped in hospice care. If you don't know about it, grab your computer and google: The Wall Street Journal MA.

The MedPAC report--I have come to this floor year after year. I am sometimes thinking, Mr. Speaker, that I am the only idiot here who reads the MedPAC report. It is like this, but it is not a hard read.

In there, it will say that when we started Medicare Advantage in 2005, it was designed to come in at 95 percent of the cost of fee for service, but its model was that we were going to incentivize the folks who manage the care to make money by helping you be healthier. The incentive was that we were going to help populations be healthier.

The MedPAC report for the beginning of this year, today, comes at 120 percent of fee for service. Just that delta from the 95 to 120 percent over 10 years is like $2 trillion.

Think about it. We are knifing each other right now, trying to figure out how to finance as much of this reconciliation budget as we can. I am an idiot, as I have been told by my wife over and over, because I thought we cared. We spent 6 months writing the modernization to Medicare Advantage to make it so it incentivizes to help our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up who choose Medicare Advantage, which is 55 percent of the population, to get services so that they are healthier.

The Joint Economic Committee economists say that, over 10 years, it is $1.76 trillion of savings over 10 years. The preliminary score from our conversations with CBO--it is not in writing, but preliminary--is $1.84 trillion, making it the largest savings bill in U.S. history. It doesn't take away a single service. It fixes the misalignment in the system.

Mr. Speaker, how many cosponsors do I have? The bill has been introduced for 1 month. Remember, we are tough. We are going to help stop this borrowing. We are going to take on the debt. I have zero cosponsors. We have visited almost 100 Members of Congress in their offices. ``David, this is uncomfortable. It has big words. David, it has the word `Medicare.' ''

I beg of you, understand the scale of this debt. I have people now who won't even look me in the eye as they walk down the hallway because they are fearful that I might ask them again and again: ``Will you sponsor this? You tell me you care. Help us. Help us do the right thing.''

Yet, if I try to show what is going on--remember our baseline. Over the next 10 years, we expect to spend $14.67 trillion on Medicare Advantage. It is not Medicare but just the Medicare Advantage portion. All we are trying to do is save about 10 percent of that. That is the alignment of incentives.

Stop telling me how much you care. Stop telling me you are a budget hawk. I am a budget hawk. I care about the budget. But God forbid, I am not putting my name on something that actually does something because that is hard.

I am the guy in the 50/50 district. I am in one of the most competitive districts in America, and yet I am willing to stand up behind this microphone and tell the truth and actually put it on paper.

My economists did a model over the next 10 years with what is happening demographically in America. We have a shortage of young people. President Trump said something that was brilliant on the campaign trail. He said: It is insane we educate people, then we send them home with their degrees from the American universities to compete with us. That sparked an idea, and then we got our economists to do the modeling.

It creates about $150, $160 billion of additional tax receipts in the 10-year window, but in the second 10-year window, it explodes. We wrote an immigration reform bill, moving the American immigration system to a talent-based system, but it has the word ``immigration'' in it so that scares the hell out of the political class because reporters will lie about it. The activists on Twitter or X, whatever it is, will lie about it, but the economics are incredibly important.

If you are going to move this country to raise its productivity so we can raise wages so we actually can survive what is happening in the actuary reports of Medicare and Social Security, guess what? You almost can't close the numbers unless you do something like this.

The reason I am doing this is, we added the President's Gold Card, but it is skills based. I get people saying: I don't know how I feel about that. How many of you have a Dr. Patel? It was meant to be funny. I am from Scottsdale. It is one of the greatest medical communities in America, and a bunch of our great, amazing talent has come in from all over the world.

Stop bathing in folklore and start bathing in math.

Our third bill to pay for the reconciliation budget is less of a cut. This is using data to find where the hell is all the cash. It turns out if you add it all up, there is $1.5 trillion sitting in accounts up and down government. It was appropriated 3 years ago, but they never built it.

There is a great example of hundreds of millions of dollars that were set aside for one State. It is in the account to build a bridge. They chose not to build that bridge. Cash is still sitting there. We call it Total Discretionary Balances Subject to Rescission. We call it forgotten funds. We are paying interest on that money. Almost every dime of this was borrowed money, and some of it has been sitting in accounts for years.

Why is it so hard? We have the legislation. I have introduced the legislation line item by line item by line item saying let's just grab that cash, even if you just went back to know your money, or maybe the ones that are just a couple years out, it is a half a trillion dollars. Grab that cash and bring it back and put it under Treasury.

If we as Members of Congress want to appropriate it again, appropriate it again. I just gave you three pieces of legislation: I gave you fixing Medicare Advantage, alignment of the incentives. Moving to a talent-based immigration system, which, in the long run, is one of the most powerful things we can do for GDP growth for productivity. And capturing the forgotten funds. I just paid for most of the reconciliation bill.

Wouldn't that solve a bunch of our problems around here? Wouldn't that solve a bunch of the fighting? Wouldn't that solve a bunch of the stress when we are saying: We are going to borrow how much?

This year, we are going to borrow $2.2 trillion. At the end of 2026, if we do what I think and the Senate is going to try to jam us, that is $2.5, $2.6 trillion of borrowing that year. But David, we are going to have all this magical growth.

Look, I accept I am a senior Member. I have staff. I have really smart economists. I just brought you three bills without cutting a service to anyone. I found $3.3 trillion of savings and not a single cosponsor in Congress.

I am going to try to do this next little section here. I don't want to be a jerk. I am going to hurt some people's feelings. The math is important. Why the math is important is because there are solutions. The reason I am doing this is, I think it was Monday or Tuesday, I had a Member I was talking to, great Member, brilliant in their area of specialty, really smart. I have spent my whole life doing budgets and healthcare finance and a few other weird things.

They said: David, CBO is always wrong, the Congressional Budget Office. They make up things. It is way off.

Okay. For anyone that keeps telling you that, this is what you call a variance report. CBO puts it out every year. I know every staffer and every Member of Congress grabbed it in January and actually read the data.

If you look at the calculations--and I didn't actually bring one of the boards, which probably is good because it was really obnoxious. What did happen to that board?

CBO projected when we did the 2017 tax reform, 2018, 2019, just before the pandemic, they were like 99.5, 99 percent accurate. Don't tell anyone because it will make it harder for us to lie around here. Then you get Members saying: But over the next 5 years, they weren't accurate at all.

Does anyone remember there was this little thing called COVID? Does

anyone remember what Congress and the world actually did? We dumped how much cash into the world market. You are accurate to here, and then all of a sudden, we dumped how much cash? Do you think there is a chance when you borrow trillions and trillions of dollars, pump it out into the economy, you don't have your tax collections go up? Oh, but David, they didn't project that. They didn't predict that. Come on, people. Stop it.

Because even now, when we get back to baseline after we got beyond COVID, they were still remarkably accurate. I found the chart. It was hidden back there. It is on the smaller board.

The fact of the matter is, what they projected and what actually happened--and this is actually 2018, not 2016, so I found a printing error--99.5 percent accuracy.

Mr. Speaker, they are not always accurate. Of what they projected for the clean energy tax credits and inflation reduction, they missed by miles because they didn't actually pay enough attention to the fact that they were uncapped. There are a number of things where they absolutely screwed up, but the fact of the matter is on tax collections, the numbers have been good, and we need a scorekeeper.

My grandfather used to have this saying: It doesn't matter how you play the game. It is who keeps score. He thought that was hysterical.

How do we convince the American people we are serious about economic growth, productivity, taking on the debt and deficits, and not bankrupting their future when we spend almost every day saying: Well, we don't like the scorekeeping.

Then you look at every outside group, the Tax Foundation, Yale Model Foundation, all these others, and it turns out CBO was more accurate than they were.

I am not standing here to be a defender of them. I am actually being a defender of my brothers and sisters here. Please, I know it makes our lives easier when we can attack the scorekeeper. We can say the scorekeeper didn't get it right, therefore, pay no attention when they say we are trying to add $3, $4 trillion of debt.

We are better than that. There is a reason so much of the economic press is just mocking us and making fun of us. I understand it is good politics. You get to go home, get in front of the audience that is not reading the Economic Press and say, they didn't get the it right. Let's treat our voters like they are adults. They understand what is going on.

These are the scores from Yale Budget Lab, from Penn Wharton, from Congressional Budget Office, from Joint Tax, Tax Policy Center, American Enterprise Institution, Tax Foundation, and then here is what we are telling people.

Is every other Ph.D. economist wrong?

It becomes an excuse not to do the things I was just complaining about when an idiot like me comes and says: I found you $3.3 trillion in savings.

David, we don't have to do those hard pieces of legislation. We don't have to explain those bills to our constituents. We don't have to take on the lobbyists who are going to be all upset with us. We will just tell people that it pays for itself.

So everyone else is wrong because it makes our life as policymakers easier. Somehow, we are going to have magic growth, magical thinking when just today parts of the latest census data came out. The population 65 and older rose by 3.1 percent in the last year, while the population 18 years old--under 18 decreased by 0.2 percent.

I am trying to make an argument that--I love the partisanship. I love a good fight with my Democratic brothers and sisters, but what happens when the debt and deficits are demographics? If we can blame the other side, we will just do this ping-pong back and forth--they are in charge, we are in charge, we are in charge, they are in charge--and we will blame each other. Then we are going to have a failed bond auction, and interest rates are going to explode.

Remember, there are datasets--I presented them here on the floor-- that just a single point of interest going up over the next decade wipes out almost all the good we are trying to do extending the tax reform of 2017.

Mr. Speaker, there is a way to make this work, and I am mentally just exhausted. Maybe I need to consume more coffee or maybe I need to stop caring so much because I am really worried. There is a way to make this work. There is hope, but what happens when no one will hear a word you are saying because it requires doing hard stuff and pisses off some lobbyists or some group or some group that is in our office that wants us to regulate their competition's business or give them something?

We used to be the party of fiscal sanity. I still think we are. We can get there. We can do it. Maybe we just need to understand the math.

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

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Green caught us a little bit off guard. He suddenly stopped, and I am not used to him doing that.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to try a couple of things tonight, and I am going to try to do this as efficiently as possible. I hate doing it this way, but part of what I am going to do tonight is respond to basically a little bit--actually, a whole bunch of just a little bit of misrepresentation that keeps coming into our office.

Every week for years, I come by here, and I sound like an idiot economics professor when I walk through the math, trying to help our brothers and sisters here in this body who might be crazy enough or might not have enough of a life to watch a presentation like this. It is a simple philosophy. At the end of the day, the math will always win.

I am going to try to do three things here. I am going to try to actually get the reality of what happens and how the tax system works. When our brothers and sisters on the other side say to just raise taxes, that that will cover everything, I am going to show, with our history, that it doesn't work that way.

The second thing is that I am going to show a series of proposals that we have made--and these are only my responsibility, so don't blame another Member of Congress. We have this current reconciliation budget and another one that sort of starts again this summer because, remember, functionally, depending on timing, we could have three bites at the apple on reconciliation.

Why do we do reconciliation? It is a way to get through the filibuster in the Senate under the 1974 Budget Control Act.

I have brought pieces of legislation to reform Medicare Advantage because you have seen The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica stories of, functionally, the criminality that is going on. The MedPAC report basically shows hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud because of what some of the insurers are doing.

I am a big fan of a capitated healthcare delivery model because your incentive is to help people be healthier, but if you have a system where you can make stunning profits by scoring people as sicker, we have a misalignment. That is not what Medicare Advantage was designed to do. It was designed to actually provide a package of delivery to make you healthier.

I am going to show a little bit of data on a talent-based immigration system. Over the previous weeks, I have come here before and shown that we have a demographic crisis. We have a shortage of young people.

Think about this bit of math. Twenty years ago and today, we functionally have the same number of 18-year-olds, but the number of people who are 65 and up has doubled.

Over here, I have my 18-year-olds. Over here, I have gone from 35 million to now almost 70 million of our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up.

You have a shortage of young people in this country. Unless you deal with that reality--but you don't want to open up the borders. That is the disaster. You make people poorer by bringing in people to compete with your working poor. That is the cruelty of what the last administration did. They crushed working people's wages.

I want to grow the economy, grow productivity, and make this society wealthier. We are the only country in the entire industrialized world that hasn't moved to a talented-based immigration system so that we can grow and compete.

I am slightly off the rhythm I wanted to use.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the world competed for hydrocarbons. In the last decade, we competed for rare earths. This decade, and the economists say maybe over the next two decades, the world is going to knife each other for smart people. In a world that basically is heading toward flat population growth, maybe we should show up to that battle because we educate people here. We educate them with our system, and then we send them home to compete with us.

Have we lost our minds? To President Trump's credit, he has talked about this repeatedly.

Forgive me, but I am going to have to reach over here to do a little sorting of these charts because they are out of order.

First, I need to work out some principles. If you actually look at our history--I am going to show a couple of charts of this--times when we have had fairly high marginal tax rates--actually, let me do it on this board. This one is actually a little easier to understand.

Actually, let me just use this one. It is not the board I wanted to start with, but let's work through it.

If you take a look at what we spend and take in, in tax collections, here is your structural problem. We have had times with very high marginal tax rates and very low marginal tax rates.

Go back and, since the 1970s, we always seem to end up somewhere between about 17\1/2\ to mid- to high-18s high marginal tax rates. We are still getting 18 percent of GDP in tax receipts.

When we talk about these things, you will often hear us talk about a percentage of the size of the economy. It is too confusing doing dollar amounts because of inflation and those things, and the dollar amounts change. When you hear someone pretending to be an economist, we are going to talk in percentage terms.

We have had times where we have had very low marginal tax rates, such as after the Reagan revolution. Yet, we still have the same percentage of the economy in total tax receipts because the economy grew bigger. Our crisis, particularly in the last decade or two decades, is this gap here. We are heading toward now spending 25 percent of the entire economy.

Think about this. This year, where the economy has actually been fairly decent, we are doing okay in our tax receipts. We are right on target, but with our spending, we are going to borrow about 7.2 percent or 7.3 percent of the entire economy this year. That gap is the debt and deficit.

When our brothers and sisters on the left keep saying things like raise taxes, we have done that. Remember, we have been experimenting with this since--what is it?--the 16th Amendment. We have had times of raising the high marginal tax rates and low marginal tax rates. Somehow, the size, the growth, of the economy is what fluxes.

Therefore, the receipts we get--we call them tax receipts; we don't call them revenue--the receipts always sort of stay right there in that mean.

If I can get my boards in some sort of order so they will make sense to us--forgive me, as I get myself organized here. I put them in out of order.

What should scare us to death is, right now, basically the percentage of all tax receipts required to cover interest. This year, for every dollar we take in, 16 pennies of it cover interest, just interest. In 9 budget years, 30 percent--actually, in 8 budget years, 30 percent of every dollar we take in, in tax receipts will just cover interest.

I didn't bring the chart. Maybe I should have because they have been mixed up. If we had a 1 percent increase from what we expect baseline interest rates to be, Mr. Speaker, would you dare in your head guess that, in 2034-2035, 30 percent of all of our tax receipts is just covering interest?

Mr. Speaker, 1 percent interest increase, we get up to 45 percent of all tax receipts is just covering the interest. That should scare the crap out of people.

Are we allowed to explain that almost every dime--well, the vast majority of the debt increase over the next decade is interest. God forbid, we tell the truth. It is Medicare. We got older. We have a shortage of young people.

Let's actually sort of walk through some of the reality of what our brothers and sisters say on the other side.

I have used this article before. It is one of the best in explaining the reality of the math and also the reality of the lies. They are just outright lies. We have to tell the truth.

This is written by Jessica Riedl in 2023. What was done is, they took all these tax proposals that the Democrats have proposed, the ones we have scored, and then did the economic modeling.

Let's raise the capital gains tax on rich people. We will take wealthy people and we will raise their marginal income tax. We will raise their estate taxes. All the things that we get in our townhalls and discussion groups, everyone says just tax rich people. That takes care of the problem.

Here is the math. The beautiful thing about what Riedl did here is she actually took economic data from all sorts of studies from leftwing groups and from just statistical modelers. When you read it all, almost every proposal the left has given us, if you add it up--so raise the estate tax, raise investment taxes, raise corporate taxes, raise individual income taxes, by the time you are done, you might pick up another 0.5 of GDP in taxes for the U.S. Treasury.

Did you hear my voice a couple moments ago? This year we are borrowing 17.3 percent of the entire economy. Next time you have someone on the left say just raise taxes on rich people, go online to the Manhattan Institute, pull up the study, and walk them through the actual math.

I have a chart for those on the Republican side when we walk through some of the things we want to cut. We can have a revolution in the cost of government if we are willing to redesign.

There is a difference between redesigning programs and cuts, but many of the things we talk about cutting, we get only 1 percent. Once again, why this is so important here, when the left says, well, you don't have to cut anything. Just raise taxes on rich people. That is not what even their own economic literature says. Of course, that would require literacy, wouldn't it? Someone would actually have to sit down and read the stuff with a calculator.

We have a crisis. Having a society that is getting older is not Republican or Democrat; it is just what we are. It is math.

Look, if we are not willing to tell the truth, we can continue to use our campaigns--all right. I will take a slight non sequitur.

We are going to get a new Social Security-Medicare actuary report in the next couple weeks. I know we will all be just giddy to actually read it and see what it says. If we look at last year's, it basically said: In 2033, so 7 years, 8 years from now, the trust fund is gone. It is empty. That is because every month Social Security gathers payroll taxes and there is a shortage, so they take their special T-bills, because they have loaned money to the general fund, and they cash those in. They get that money back from Treasury. Treasury goes out and borrows the money, but they get that plus interest. In 7 years, they have no more special T-bills to cash in with the general fund at Treasury.

In 7 years, if you get a Social Security check, you are taking a 21 percent cut. We will double senior poverty in America in 7 years. It will double senior poverty.

This is a really moral place. How many idiots--excuse me--electeds do you see come behind these microphones and say: It is a Democrat problem. It is a Republican problem. It is a human problem. We are going to fix this. And then the lying that goes on here.

Last year, I did an entire series of charts, which the Democrats turned into attack ads, that showed raising the cap. If every dime someone earns is subject to the full Social Security tax, it only covered 38 percent of the shortfall. We didn't even do the economic effects as to how much the economy slows down when you do that.

The solutions you hear repeatedly from our brothers and sisters on the left just mathematically aren't true. They will say just raise taxes. You get 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. In 9 years, we are borrowing 9 percent of the entire economy.

Well, for Social Security they will say just raise the cap. Okay, but don't give any benefits. That is the other part. Keep the benefit formula where it is today. Tax people on every dime above that formula. What is that today? It is about $170,000 today. Take every dime above that, put the full 12.4 percent Social Security tax on it, but don't give any benefits for that. It will only cover 38 percent of the shortfall.

I think we were modeling it for 2034, the first full year, the shortage--they even said we will just pay for it out of the general fund. I think it was $608 billion, so almost two-thirds of our entire military budget.

If you are someone that comes to me and says: David, I want to protect the country. I want to protect the military. I want to do this. I want to do that. Well, tell the truth about our demographics and the earned benefits that actuarially are collapsing around us. We are terrified to step up and do the math and then tell you the truth.

We can start to actually walk through actual solutions. If I came to you right now and said--let's see if I can find the right charts here.

I did a whole presentation over and over the last 3 weeks on Medicare Advantage. In 2005, the Republican idea was to buy capitated managed care policies for seniors. The idea was that there would be a benefits package and the insurer would actually make money by helping people be healthier.

Over the years, some of it was in ObamaCare and other things. It got screwed up when the insurers were making money by scoring people as sicker.

In 2005, the model for Medicare Advantage said it is going to come in at 95 percent of the fee-for-service cost. Look, I am sorry to geek out on this, but this is important.

Remember, 55 percent of Americans are on Medicare Advantage. I represent an area with terrific penetration because we have very robust networks and those things in the Phoenix area, but it was supposed to come in at 95 percent of the cost of fee-for-service.

Today, according to MedPAC, because I know we all read the MedPAC report, it comes in at 120 percent. Just that difference last year is $100 billion.

When The Wall Street Journal does five major series on the fraud, misrepresentation--let's call it misalignment. When the Justice Department has leaked out, making announcements of not only civil suits but criminal suits, criminal investigations that are going on, maybe this place should pay attention.

The beauty of it is, this type of scale for waste and fraud being the largest in the entire country--remember, our preliminary score from CBO of Medicare Advantage is $1.840 trillion, making that bill the single biggest savings bill for a single bill in U.S. history, and I have already introduced it.

You see the discussion, the debates going on in the Senate right now, but it is scary because you have got to get up in front of the American people and explain, okay, this is Medicare, this is Medicare Advantage. What we are concerned about is not the healthcare you receive, your earned benefits, it is what the insurance company over here is doing. That is why they are under criminal investigation. I am sorry, it is uncomfortable, but our job here is to tell the truth and make the math work.

The second thing--the reason I am walking through these is we have introduced three bills that cover every dime, every dime of the reconciliation budget, and add, I think, maybe even an extra trillion of savings.

Remember how I mentioned before one of the crises we have in the United States is we don't have enough young people? We have introduced a talent-based immigration bill. Now, I am actually surprised I haven't taken more beatings, but I am sure they are coming.

We are functionally the only country left in the industrialized world that uses a familial-based immigration system. It is, your family sponsors the next person, the family sponsors the next person, and so on. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, everyone else has gone to a talent-based system to maximize economic growth in their countries. We haven't shown up to that.

However, if you listen to what President Trump has talked about of the insanity of educating people and sending them home to compete with us, maybe if we move to a talent-based immigration system, we stop educating them here and then sending them home to compete with our economy, it turns out that actually comes in at producing $152 billion of savings.

The amazing thing is, in the second decade, that with some of the expensing of research and development, those things, you get a substantial economic growth. You get productivity. This is how you actually grow the economy so you have the resources to cover our promises.

The other bill we are doing that is actually going to be sort of fascinating--let's see if I can try to explain this. This one is less about cutting spending. It is about finding cash that is sitting up and down the government in accounts. Some of these things have hundreds of millions of dollars that have sat there for years and years. We call it unobligated funds.

I did this chart just to try to explain. There is no year. It is sort of cash that was assigned there, but the way it was authorized, there isn't a particular year it has to be spent. There are those that it was actually a 2-, 3-year commitment where you borrowed the money, we stuck it in this agency's accounts, and it sits there, but it hasn't been spent. Then there is those where it is actually money that they never used all of it.

The crazy, crazy thing, if I came to you and said what would you guess--now, as a policymaker, I deal with the reality, I am never going to get all of it, but if you add up all that what we call the forgotten funds money, it is $1.524 trillion.

If anyone else is playing along, I have Medicare reform, $1.8 trillion, and talent-based immigration, $150 billion. Let's say we were able to get just part of the expiring provisions, that is $540 billion. I just covered every dime of the reconciliation budget.

There is no borrowing, and you maximize economic growth because you are not engaging in the crowd-out effect of having to go to markets. Remember, we borrow $6 billion every day. In 9 years, we borrow $10 billion every day. We have got to do things like this so we are not competing with you or your family trying to get a mortgage, trying to get a car loan, trying to see what your credit card interest rates are going to be.

Think of this, in the last 12 months, half of all the debt in the U.S. bond markets, half of it has just been the United States Federal Government. Your school district, the company that wants to expand, all the bond market that is supposed to be helping finance the growth of this society, this country, half of it now is just the Federal Government, and it is going to get worse.

I am giving you three bills that cover every dime of the borrowing. None of them cause burning and slashing and gnashing of teeth and the whining that happens around here. It turns out they are all really good policy. This is the constant argument I keep trying to make to our brothers and sisters here, we are going to have to do policy, and policy is hard. It is complex. There are armies of lobbyists walking around this campus here, and the inefficiency of the Federal Government is their profit model. There are bureaucracies who despise the concept of saying maybe you should use technology.

I have a report on my desk from the IRS. I have only read the first three or four pages. It is an analysis of their data. It turns out the crazy thing, the chat, the computer answering the phone at the IRS, has a higher favorability rate than when a human answered the phone.

Maybe we should stop being scared of adopting the technology because, remember, last year's taxpayer audit said only 31 percent of the phone calls to the IRS were getting answered, yet the IRS union attacks you for saying maybe we could use technology.

Oh, we can't do that.

Well, now we have the survey data that shows the chat that answers the phone, that answers your questions, that walks you through your tax form also has a higher favorability than the human. It is uncomfortable, but it is math and the facts.

I will try to walk through a couple of these things. I am just going to show this board, even though I am going backwards. I mentioned my boards are out of order. See that red area? That would be the savings on the Medicare Advantage. There is still $14-plus trillion--trillion-- being spent on this program over the next 10 years. The crazy thing-- this idea of fixing the waste-fraud misalignment--this reform bill could be Republican and Democrat because anyone who has bothered to actually read the MedPAC reports for the last half a decade knows we have a problem.

How do I get the talent around here to not be terrified of the army of lobbyists and actually step up and do what is hard, but do what is right?

Mr. Speaker, I apologize, I am going to try to go a little bit faster here and see if I can get to some of the points that would help make sense.

I was just saying this a moment ago, but maybe it is easier with the visual. This is baseline. This is our baseline. Almost every dime of this growth from the baseline spending is the growth of interest and Medicare.

Today, we borrow $6 billion a day. In 2035, functionally for us it is nine budget years, we borrow $10 billion every day. Okay, let's do that simple math in our heads, 10 times 365, and it is actually not 10. It actually comes in, I think, at $10.4 billion, so it comes in like $3.8 trillion is Moody's who did the analysis on this, Moody's Analytics, that in 2035 we are going to borrow $3.8 trillion that year. We are going to borrow 2.2, 2.3 this year, and that is just sort of built off of what our baselines look like.

Why this should terrify us, CBO has us over the next 10 years adding another $22 trillion of debt. If interest rates move--because now you need to calculate the higher interest rates. If you start to put those dollars in--we are not completely there, but we are getting close to the next 10 years, we borrow as much as we did the previous 240 years.

Okay, this has got to be the dozenth time I have said this on the floor, and I can't seem to get it to sink in, but that is the underlying math.

What should also be scaring people to death, yet the hallways are full of people coming into our offices demanding more money, the United States now is like number 12 or 13 on the credit stack, meaning take a look, Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. We have 18 States that can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the Federal Government, but yet we borrow money to send to our States.

Take a look at this. Does this not just curl anyone's toes? Yet, somehow, magically, we think the money tree is going to continue.

Look, let's see if this visual helps. Think of the protests, the whining. I won't use the word ``bedwetting'' because I think that is just inappropriate for Members of Congress to say.

The baseline is that the Federal Government intends to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years. $86 trillion is the CBO baseline. All we are talking about in the budget reconciliation was a $2 trillion savings.

To give you an idea of just how absurd this debate is, tomorrow, we are going to do, I think, a rescission vote. I think it is tomorrow. Maybe it will be Thursday. Think of the angst, the protests. ``We are upset. David, you can't lower spending.''

Let's see if we can do this. How many hours are there in a year? There are 8,700 hours in a year. Work with me on this, Mr. Speaker. The rescission package takes care of 28 hours of that 8,700 hours of borrowing. Yet, listen to people come behind these microphones. It is like the world is coming to an end.

Please understand that this is just the beginning. We want this Federal Government to be able to stabilize and survive. We have economists on the left and the right saying that if we can get to about 3 percent of borrowing of GDP, we can stabilize. We are borrowing 7.3 percent this year. In 9 years, we are borrowing 9 percent of the entire economy.

Understand what this means. That would be reduced spending this year. We are going to spend--what?--$7.3 trillion this year. You would have to reduce Federal spending by $1.4 trillion to get down to 3 percent borrowing.

The vote we are going to have in the next day or so on the first part of the rescission package covers 28 hours of borrowing for the whole year, yet I know I even have Members on my side who are all puckered up, running around saying: ``How do I explain that?''

Do you understand how much trouble we are in if we are borrowing about $72,000 every second of every day? In 9 years, we are borrowing over $100,000 every second of every day.

I have shown before in the charts and the reports that the Democrats' plan to just raise taxes on everyone doesn't get you anywhere close to what is required. Remember, every tax hike they have, 1.5 percent of GDP, and we are borrowing over 7 this year.

We need a revolution in how we deliver services. Yet, Mr. Speaker, I will tell you right now, look at the lobbyists walking up and down our hallways. They despise--the bureaucracies despise--anything that changes their business model.

I want to extend the policy, Mr. Speaker. I know my boards were a little disjointed because they came in out of order, but the concept was very simple for this presentation. It is three things. The scale of the borrowing--there are actual policy solutions that you can pay for everything we are doing right now. It will actually open up our brains, open up our minds, and open up our calculators.

Actually, look at it. A number of the solutions actually don't need to be partisan warfare. We will turn them into partisan warfare because we care much more about winning the next election than we do saving the Republic.

Mr. Speaker, I am in a 50/50 district. I am blessed. I represent a really well-educated population. They are fairly prosperous. They are smart people, and they have tolerated--not because they are thrilled about what I say, but I think they believe what I say. I go to great lengths to get the math right. There is hope. There is a path. There is a solution.

I also have one of my economists who makes it very clear. We may have only about 36 more months, and then we start to hit what is referred to as sort of the interest rate feedback loop. Remember, a year ago, I think we had 3 or 4 months where this government had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing. If today the 10-year bond is at 4\1/2\, realize that if it goes to 5\1/2\, in 9 years, 45 percent of all of our tax collections are just interest.

Let's not let that happen. Let's get our act together. Let's communicate to those people we borrow money from that we are serious about some fiscal sanity. That is how you maximize the efficiency. That is how you lower the interest rates for every American. That is how you give our kids and your retirement a future.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to just do a couple of very simple things here. I will walk through that. I believe there are actual solutions. The problem is they are hard, and it is one of those occasions where I think we play this game. We talk around each other because we talk

our book. We talk what gets us elected. We talk what raises us money. We talk what enrages our base so that they are more politically involved. The fact of the matter is a substantial amount of that is just a boldface lie.

For anyone who is really interested just in sort of the academics of what goes on here, I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. If you have your search engine, look up ``AI Review of Congressional Speeches.'' There is an academic group.

This is in like Nature, so it is a peer-reviewed article going back over 140 years of congressional speeches. It basically says that the use of facts has absolutely crashed. If you actually read it, it has crashed. We now talk about our feelings and intuition because that is how we manipulate people.

Mr. Speaker, it is in Nature publication right now. Go pull up the academic article. That is what goes on behind these microphones day after day after day, is we have people who tell stories. We tell about our feelings, but we don't seem to actually bother doing something called math. The family slogan is: The math will always eventually win.

I am going to do this a couple of times here.

We are in the middle of the reconciliation budget battles, the propaganda, the things that get said that are true or not true. My argument for everyone here is that there is a way to pay for lots of this. It still doesn't save us.

As a country, we borrow about $6 billion a day right now. Next year, we are going to borrow about $7 billion. I am going to show you some charts. In 9 budget years, we are borrowing about $10 billion a day. The vast majority of that is demographics. Turns out it is not Republican, not Democratic.

One of the great lies here--and I have done entire presentations here where I took a whole hour a while back where I did every tax hike that the left has proposed and the scores and its economic factors. Actually, we did a bunch of the cuts in spending and those things, Republicans.

These tax hikes came out to 1.5 percent of GDP. Our cuts came out to about 1 percent of GDP, a big 2.5 percent. Looks like we are going to borrow 7.3 percent of the economy this year. And in 9 budget years, Moody's says--I am going to show this board a couple of times--we will be borrowing 9 percent of GDP.

Now, I am sorry. Most people--David, we don't know GDP. What do you mean by that? Just understand the scale is--so often, the solutions are never meant to hit you with a dopamine hit. They are meant to manipulate you. When I say ``you,'' I mean the voting public, often our staff, trying to even manipulate each other. We have spreadsheet after spreadsheet around us talking about what is going on.

My point I am going to come back to, Mr. Speaker, I have introduced legislation to fix what MedPAC has talked about now for years, back when the Democrats controlled all this place, now that the Republicans control this, but we are all too scared to actually read something that is in a big binder that actually has math in it that would be hard and difficult because, let's be honest, it is really hard putting a couple of hundred pages of facts and details in a tweet.

The fact of the matter is that MedPAC, The Wall Street Journal series, and the ProPublica series have gone over Medicare Advantage. If any of you have your phone and like tracking stories, put in ``Medicare Advantage fraud'' right now. You will see at least five major articles from The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, and some of the others. In some of those articles, if you actually add it up, it is $100-plus billion a year in fraud.

We have introduced a piece of legislation. The preliminary number is around $1.7 trillion to $1.84 trillion, making it the single-biggest reduction bill, I believe, in modern history--actually, in history at all.

So, I just got you $1.8 trillion. We have also introduced a talent- based immigration bill. If you want to hit the GDP growth numbers that we keep talking about, that the left has even talked about, and that the President has talked about, you can't do it without a talent-based immigration system. Read the literature.

As even the President has said, it is insane. We educate people, and then we send them home to compete with us. Are we out of our minds? Do a talent-based immigration. Keep people.

I am going to show you another chart in a moment that is saying that we have to deal with the reality. If the primary driver of debt in America is demographics, it is functionally Medicare; in a few years, Social Security, when the trust fund is gone; and interest.

If you go back 20 years ago, the number of 18-year-olds we had then compared to the number of 18-year-olds today is almost identical. The number of our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up has almost doubled in that 20 years.

Are we allowed to tell the truth about our brothers and sisters? Those of us who are baby boomers with gray hair have changed the math in our country. When I was a kid in the 1970s, for every dollar that was spent on people 65 and up, there was $7 spent on young people. Today, that is reversed. Today, we spend $1 on young people and $7 on those over 65. It is the deal. It is part of our societal commitment.

Fine. Keep our promises. The way you keep your promises is to know your math because, at some point, you have to finance it.

So, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Part C, deal with the waste and fraud issue from the insurance companies managing it. Make it so the incentive is to help our brothers and sisters be healthier instead of making billions and billions of dollars scoring people as sicker. Read the articles.

Turns out, I think this bill the Democrats would like, the Republicans would like, and people who do math will really like. Talent-based immigration is great for long-run economic growth. It actually fulfills even things the President talked about on the campaign trail.

The third one is functionally our bill that I have done for years and years around here. It is called the forgotten funds bill. Now, in some ways--got to be honest--this isn't new money. It is cash we have borrowed and have given to agencies, but they haven't been authorized or haven't spent it.

Mr. Speaker, off the top of your head, will you raise your eyebrows a little bit if we call this SF 133, so it is money that has been appropriated, sitting in their accounts, so it is cash. We are paying interest on it because that money was borrowed. We estimate that it is over $1.5 trillion.

If you grab that cash and realize you don't have to pay interest on it anymore, talent-based, MA reform, you just paid for our reconciliation bill and put some more money in the bank.

My point is that if we would actually think about policy, the modernization, doing things better, faster, cheaper--next week we are going to do a--I think one of our Democratic colleagues a couple of moments ago was attacking some of the--we will call it the DOGE cuts. Last year, for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.39.

When I go home, people say, David, I need you to balance the budget. Great. Tell me what 40-plus percent--because you have to deal with the economic effects--of government you want us to cut.

The fact is, with just the movements in interest rates this year, it is approaching a couple of trillion dollars in additional interest over the next 10 years.

Look, no one needs another speech from me doing interest rate fragility, but the fact of the matter is the bond market is on the cusp of running this country, except that is really hard to explain to our voters. If you are a Democrat, you don't want to explain that because you want to keep handing things out and doing the lie that we are going to tax rich people. Then, you show the charts saying, okay, it just takes care of weeks of borrowing, and that is it for an entire year.

Those of us who run around saying we are going to just cut waste and fraud, got to cut waste and fraud--I am going to show you some charts. We need to redefine, redesign, modernize, and use technology on how we deliver services.

Let's walk through a couple of things. What is the real reason we are doing the reconciliation budget? It comes down to one thing, at least for

me. Our taxes are all going up next year.

In my district, it is over a couple of thousand dollars for an average family. In some of my ZIP Codes--look, I represent a fairly prosperous district; I represent Scottsdale and Phoenix--it is over $3,000. For my average, it is a $2,062 tax increase next year.

I have been really happy to hear how many of my brothers and sisters on the other side have gotten behind the microphone and talked about how they don't want--small businesses in my district will be hit with a 43 percent tax hike, and that is the law. That is already coming. They are going to give us ideas on how we keep this from happening?

If you think like an economist, this is sort of maintaining today's policy instead of what is in the law, where everyone's taxes go up. It maintains consumption, but you don't get the same type of economic pop of doing things that create investments in productivity and those things.

This is your reason that we have to battle through this, and the absolute absurdity I get from some of our brothers and sisters out there, you can't cut--this is just heresy. It is brutal.

We are baseline going to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years, or we are talking about reducing. It looks like we are not going to hit the number which will enrage me. It is $2 trillion. You see the stack of coins there. That is $86 trillion over the next 10 years. That was baseline spending. All we are talking about cutting is functionally 2.2, 2.3 percent of it.

Then I think of the rage, of the theater, of the protests, and of the nasty text messages. You don't realize that just a couple ticks in interest--I think I can almost do the speed math in my head. If I had 70, 75 basis points, it is more than all those cuts.

If we went back to the interest rates we had in the early 2000s, I think that would add another $3 trillion, $4 trillion over 10 years of just interest. The theater around here is about telling stories. It is emoting the emotion, but damn it, does anyone own a calculator?

Mr. Speaker, what was it, 10 days ago, 2 weeks ago, Moody's downgraded the United States and part of the point--because I know we all read it because it was such a big deal. You subscribe to Moody's, you downloaded the report. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for letting me have a Bloomberg Terminal. I chair the Joint Economic Committee so we bathe in the math.

In 9 budget years, we are spending--9 percent of the entire economy is borrowed, and that is based on our baseline. I said that twice. In 9 years, the borrow will be $3.8 trillion.

Mr. Speaker, most of that growth is interest and healthcare. I am sure we are all around here trying to revolutionize the cost of healthcare by curing people, by using technology, doing it better, faster, cheaper, helping our brothers and sisters live healthier, instead of in misery with their chronic conditions. So often the debates behind these microphones are about needing to spend more money to help you maintain your misery instead of curing it.

The complete lack of vision around here of the morality--when you realize couple of the great studies from a few years ago is the number one contributor to income inequality in America wasn't education; it was healthcare. It was the health of the population.

What happens when your brothers and sisters have diabetes, when they are crashing repeatedly? It turns out if 33 percent of all American healthcare is just diabetes, if 47 percent of all American healthcare is obesity, why wouldn't we take those on?

Yeah, it means doing some very difficult things. It means having a brutal discussion about agriculture policy, nutrition support, and how we are going to deliver healthcare through our clinics and other things. It is really great economics, and the morality of having people live longer, be healthier, be able to have families, family formation.

We are going to show a couple numbers here. If you have 7 million prime-age males missing from the economy, and one of the datasets says it is not drugs; it is actually obesity and other things, what do we do incentive-wise to help our brothers and sisters, particularly those prime-age males, get back into the economy and participate in the society?

In 9 budget years, we will go from borrowing $6 billion a day to borrowing $10 billion a day. Why doesn't this just set people up saying, okay. I don't want to raise my brothers' and sisters' taxes. We need to do some things to get the economy to continue growing and get investment back in productivity.

That is why you do expensing, research and development expensing, and other things of that nature because you need the investments and productivity because we have got to raise wages.

Now, we are going to do a little economic geekdom. Remember the previous few years where we had high inflation? Most of America is poorer today than they were 4 years ago, and that is basically inflation. Your dollars, your salary became worth less.

In my district today, if you don't make about 27-plus percent more than you did 4, 5 years ago, you are poorer today. You are not magically going to make the cost of everything in your life go down, particularly in an environment where interest rates are going to be higher because we are borrowing so damn much money. It is not just us. Germany is backing the debt markets. The world is bingeing on debts. If you think interest rates are going to come crashing back down you are delusional. The world has only so much savings.

What do we do, Mr. Speaker? Well, you do things so you invest to create productivity. The incentives within the tax code, regulatory code to invest in things so you can raise wages.

Remember after 2017, one of the datasets we had, I think it was 68 percent of all the corporate tax cuts that enraged the left went to workers' wages.

It turns out that the way you make our brothers and sisters whole from the years of inflation is you have got to get the growth. You have got to get productivity stepped up.

In this chart--and please understand, this one upsets both Republicans and Democrats. I have even had people in my own party saying, David, you have got to stop telling people the truth.

Even just a little beyond baseline, that is if we had no legislation at all, what took us 240 years, we are almost going to double in the next 10.

Let's think of that. The day we were all re-elected or elected last November, public sold debt, so this is debt that is auctioned off--the Japanese own some, the Chinese own some, but we own most of it--was around $28 trillion. We will almost double that in the next 10 years.

We have to deal with reality. If you are going to rage at me because I said the bond market is going to be running our country soon, don't rage at me. Crack open an article about bonds and the stress and bond vigilantes and term premiums and what all these things mean and what happens when just clicks of interest rate consume every available dollar that you and I might want to invest in medical research or the left wants to do whatever the hell they want to do and it is going to be consumed by paying interest.

Demographics, which is the primary driver of our debt, is not Democrat or Republican; it is just who we are. We have a shortage of young people. There are lots of us who are baby boomers and we are going to continue to lie our backsides off. If you keep looking at the charts and just understand, the 65 population has nearly doubled in 20 years, while the number of 18 year olds is basically the same.

You would think these would be the types of data that we could all get together and say, all right. That is math. It is what we are. It is indisputable. It is math. It is Census Bureau. It is from census data from the Biden administration, so as a Republican using it, it isn't partisan, it is just math.

How do we keep our promises as a society, as a country, as a population that used to, at least, make an attempt to be moral? How do we keep our promises in--what is it--7 years now, the Social Security trust fund is empty.

Basically, meaning, if Social Security follows the law, my math a couple weeks ago was a 21 percent cut in Social Security checks across America. So 2033, it is gone. Mr. Speaker, 2034 is the first year with the 21 percent cut meaning we double senior poverty in America.

We are going to double senior poverty in America. How many Members have you seen come behind these microphones and talk about the morality of, guys, 7 years from now, let's double senior poverty, and then, let's do everything we can to talk about it. By the way, the solution you get is to just raise the cap. Okay, raise the cap. Do you realize just eliminating the cap on Social Security at that time covers only 38 percent of the shortfall?

The first full year, our math last year we did was $609 billion or $608 billion. It is almost two-thirds of what the entire defense budget is. That is 7 years.

We should have been working on this 15, 20 years ago, but the fact that an idiot like me gets behind the microphone and even uses the word, it will be an attack ad next week because, God forbid--this place cares more about winning the next election than doing what is right, doing what is moral, owning a calculator. This place is absolutely perverse.

Here is another thing. Let me enrage my brothers and sisters because so much of what we are having to deal with in this reconciliation budget--look, I hope the scorekeepers are wrong. I hope the Joint Committee on Taxation economists are wrong. I hope the Ph.D.s over at CBO are wrong. Because much of it is extending current tax policy--what we get today--instead of what is in the law, where just individual taxes go up--what?--$3.1 trillion over the next 10 years, and add in the passthroughs to small businesses and those things, add in another several hundred billion dollars.

That is the law. It is coming. Just extending that, you don't get a huge pop in growth, but you do maintain consumption. Where you get the growth is some of the other things--the expensing, the research and development, those types of things, a couple of the tweaks we are trying to do, and also the incentives to invest.

If our brothers and sisters are going to say we are magically going to grow at these sorts of rates, I wish they would actually give me a reference, give me a credible economist, maybe a guy, a gal, someone with a Ph.D. in actual economics.

I chair the Joint Economic Committee. I have a handful of Ph.D.s. These are the numbers they come up with.

Back to solutions, we have introduced a bill. Our first number was $1.76 trillion in savings just reorganizing and redesigning the incentives within Medicare Part C, Medicare Advantage, as everyone knows it, where you are incentivized to keep your brothers and sisters who are on the program, you make money by helping them be healthier instead of scoring them as sicker.

Our preliminary number from CBO wasn't $1.706 trillion over 10 years. It turns out they gave us $1.84 trillion as a preliminary guess. Hopefully, in the next couple of weeks, we will get an official score.

Is this Republican or Democrat? It is just fixing the waste, fraud, and misalignment in the program.

Look, I fully expect within minutes I will have attack ads in my home district beating the crap out of me, and I am in a 50/50 district. Maybe it is an occasion where a few more of our brothers and sisters here take a risk, particularly those in overwhelmingly partisan districts. They can afford to tell the truth. Try it. If an idiot like me in a 50/50 district will get up and tell the truth about the math, why will no one else here?

Do the charts. These charts aren't magic and secret. They have been in the MedPAC report for most of the last decade if someone would just bother to open it up, crack the binder, and read it. You can see the savings and alignment. The model that comes back is that seniors on Medicare Advantage will be healthier because the incentive is to keep them healthier.

We have to do some designs. We have to say that you should be within one plan for maybe 3 years, so there is an investment in helping you be healthier. There are things we did in there to make it work. The bill has been introduced. Yet, if you look at the total spend over the next 10 years, it is still $14.67 trillion as the baseline spending over the next 10 years.

We are just trying to deal with what article after article has basically said, that this is fraud. If anyone else has their phone in their hand and wants to look up something, look up the number of criminal cases that are open right now. The Wall Street Journal--the Justice Department, I guess, has been leaking. It is no longer civil suits. It is criminal suits, saying people are going to go to jail.

Has there ever been a moment where particularly the left and the right can get together and say that we need to fix the incentives in this program? Also, it is great economics, good healthcare, and great vision for the future. No, David. You see, we care too much about winning the next election and beating the crap out of the other side.

Then, you hear some of the brilliant things that are said about Medicaid. Now, I need to disclose that it has been many, many years. As a child, I spent two terms in the State legislature. I was never going to run for office again. Because I was so tall, smart, and good- looking, I got to--well, it had nothing to do with the fact that I was the vice chair and my chairwoman actually had a brain aneurysm. Also, they had just indicted 10 percent of my State legislature.

Remember, the fastest way, Mr. Speaker, to move up in an organization is to have 10 percent of the people go to jail.

I was a 28-year-old kid in my State legislature, and I was chairing the health committee. Arizona does something very unique in our Medicaid system. We were the last State to enter Medicaid. We didn't enter it until the mid-1980s. I was actually a part-time page during the negotiations.

In Arizona, we do something odd. We buy managed care policies, so we functionally buy HMO policies for--the technical term is our indigent population. We actually do it really well. We were the first ones to do pharmaceutical benefit management and those sorts of things.

It is an interesting intellectual argument, and I wish we could actually have a little more highbrow discussion here. Should a State like Arizona be rewarded for how efficiently we deliver and the quality of our services compared to so many other States that are just ripped with fraud?

You start to see cumulative improper Medicaid. This is not Medicare. This is Medicaid. It is supposed to be healthcare for indigents. That is the law. Payments since 2019 are over $400 billion. If you actually look at the literature, people who have analyzed it--here is a Paragon study, written by a Ph.D. It basically says that Medicaid reported functionally half a trillion dollars over 10 years, but their analysis when you do all of it is $1.1 trillion of improper payments.

Think about that. If you just fix this, if you just fix this one issue, that covers everything that is being discussed right now in trying to reform Medicaid. This would require work and also reading a hell of a lot of accounting documents.

Look, I am going to run through these boards really quickly because I have already gone, Mr. Speaker, longer than I want. People forget that we actually had a time slot here where, functionally, we sort of stopped some of the measurements and some of the enrollment criteria. If you look at the overall rate of improper Medicaid payments, if you have a multitrillion-dollar system and it is 5 percent, it turns out that pretty much pays for what E&C did a couple of weeks ago. Are we willing to invest in the technology to go fix it?

Look, remember how I was just telling you in a previous life I actually helped--I was not there during expansion, but I was county treasurer years later where I managed some of the dispro share moneys. That is sort of the geeky talk.

This is a chart from The Wall Street Journal, and they just happened to pick out my State. I love Arizona. Look, if you get to represent Phoenix and Scottsdale, you are one of the most blessed human beings in life, but the point that The Wall Street Journal was trying to make in putting up this chart is that, in Arizona, we put money--$363 million-- back in the general fund because of the way they do their provider tax. They are actually making money from the Federal Government.

We idiots--excuse me, this fine august body, we borrow the money. We

are borrowing money. A State is doing a provider tax. It covers their match, and then, they are sticking money in their general fund from our borrowed money. Why is this good?

Mr. Speaker, I am just going to skip to the last one because we need to tell the truth. With our great financial burden, we are elected. We are functionally the board of directors of the biggest enterprise in the world. We represent a quarter of the world's economy.

Does this body act like a board of directors? Do we pay attention to the math? Do we pay attention to how we take care of our customers, the American citizens? Do we pay attention to the reality?

Social Security, Medicare, and net interest account for 80 percent of the spending growth over the next nine budget years. If we do the 30 years, it is everything. If we do the 30 years, military and nondefense discretionary are scheduled to grow slower than tax receipts.

Are we even allowed to talk about these? Are we even allowed to tell the truth about the math?

Mr. Speaker, we have been collecting every article we can that talks about--and some of these are Republicans. Some of these are Democrats. Some of these are Conservatives. Some of these are just academic economists.

Here is one that talks about the growth of males of prime age in Medicaid. What is fascinating about this particular study is they spent an average of 6.1 hours per day, or 184 hours a month, on all socializing, relaxing, and leisure activities.

We get attacked for saying we are asking for work requirements. Understand how many States--my State already has an application in for work requirements. I think we already have work requirements--forgive me if I get this wrong--in ten others.

If we take a look at the chart, a number of the States had applications in. The applications were approved. Then the Biden administration took over, and something happened either through court or action here. They started rolling them back.

If I say right now there are 7 million males of prime age missing from the labor force, Mr. Speaker, if I come to you and say we want tax receipts to grow, that means we need participation in the economy.

If anyone wants to geek out, probably about 5 years ago the University of Chicago did an amazing study on what work requirements do in benefit programs. At the end of the decade, the participants are wealthier because they may get the benefit, but the work requirements changed their participation in the economy. It raised their skill set. They moved up in the economy.

In many ways, if we read the academic literature, those who oppose things like work requirements have to read the literature. They are crushing people. They are destroying their economic futures, their ability to learn skill sets, and how to participate in the economy.

Maybe we have people around here that permanent poverty--that level of cruelty--is what is built into their political manifesto. I refuse to believe that. I believe we all want the right things.

Page after page of this data is here. We will have these trite debates and arguments based on feelings. Then we will wonder why tomorrow is no better than it was today and the day after that will be no better than the next day.

There is hope. There are ways to make this work. There are ways to stabilize the debt. There are ways to make this society much more prosperous. Prosperity is moral. I am wondering if we are intellectually capable of actually doing the work.

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

Mr. Speaker, had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 145.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Ellzey). Then, we are going to actually do some actual math and facts.

Honoring Commander Bruce ``Puppy'' Fecht

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas. He always has some amazing stories.

Mr. Speaker, tonight is going to be a little tricky because I am going to try and weave three major subjects together. Some of it is going to be really technical. Some of it will be slightly sarcastic, but the math here is really important.

I am going to do it backwards from how I originally thought because I want to hit a couple of things that are remarkably important.

I have come behind this microphone, heaven knows how many times and shown the charts. We are borrowing $72,000 a second. We could borrow as much as $2.3 trillion this year. I am going to show some other things in here such as Moody's, and why they downgraded us, and show some of the things that are going on.

On occasion I get this: What are your solutions? Then we always try to come in and say: Here is the technology chute where you can disrupt the cost of healthcare. Here is the technology where you could change the price of delivering government services.

We started almost a year ago in my capacity on the Ways and Means Committee, chairing the Oversight Subcommittee.

I now chair the Joint Economic Committee, and I thank Mr. Speaker because he helped me actually have the capacity of hiring a Ph.D. in healthcare economics.

We have dropped last week--that is a term where we put in something called a ``hopper.'' That is actually where you file your piece of legislation--two pieces of legislation where the preliminary scores are almost $2 trillion in savings over 10 years.

As we are having this discussion of debt and deficits, can you extend the tax policy? Can you do other things? It is not going to come from traditional austerity. The fact of the matter is that math doesn't work. You are going to do it through policy. You are going to fix policy, and people just stare at you like you are an idiot when you try to explain these things.

Let's walk through our big one. This is an occasion where I promise you that there is so much money involved. There is a reason other Members of Congress have been unwilling to do what we knew was a problem.

A few weeks ago, I came here with the MedPAC reports. I don't know if anyone ever bothers to read them, but you go through there, and it should light your hair on fire. For the last year, The Wall Street Journal has done a series of articles basically showing hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, misallocation, just misalignment incentives in something we call Medicare Advantage.

Walk with me through. In the early 2000s, there was this concept of managed care that if we could help our brothers and sisters with their earned benefit in Medicare, saying that we have fee-for-service, but you have to pay all of these copays. What would happen if you could align the incentives saying that we want insurers to manage a portfolio of access to healthcare, but within that, those insurers will actually make their money by helping you be healthier?

The model, which started in 2005--many of you know it as Medicare Advantage. You see the ads, and that is actually part of the problem-- was supposed to come in at 95 percent of fee-for-service because this was a system where you were going to get better quality care, get taken care of, and the insurers would make their profit by helping their population become healthier.

Mr. Speaker, it turns out that if you actually read those MedPAC reports--these are the auditors who do the modeling, and we are talking something that is almost a trillion dollars in spending last year, so we are talking about something that is stunning amounts of money--last year, Medicare Advantage came in at 120 percent of fee-for-service.

Mr. Speaker, just that delta, 120 percent to the 95 percent that it was envisioned to be, that right there is $100 billion a year. The fact of the matter is if you have been following the series of articles--I think ProPublica--The Wall Street Journal has spent tremendous resources doing it--it will curl your hair.

Then you have been seeing the most recent stories about the potential criminal acts. I think last Thursday, a story broke of actual criminal--not civil; criminal--coming.

Is it time for us as Members of Congress to talk about something which is often dangerous because when you are taking on a system that has trillions of dollars flowing through it, you have to understand that there will be ads in my district that are going to beat the ever- living crap out of me. It is the job. You have to tell the truth, know the math, and come with actual solutions.

Mr. Speaker, we went back and said: How do you design a system where you make sure the benefits, the promises, are there for seniors because it is an earned benefit? How do you make sure that you are doing nothing--nothing--to cut that access to healthcare, to cut that access to quality healthcare, but you align the incentives to go back to the original vision where it is about helping those seniors who are on Medicare Advantage become healthier, and the morality of that.

We had to do a number of things in design, so we introduced legislation. This was the preliminary score from the Joint Economic Committee economists: $1.76 trillion of savings over the 10 years.

Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is it is only about 10 percent of the cost of the program over those 10 years, so you start to understand the scale of the cost of this. We believe--understand, this is only conversation between economists, and I was not on the call--that the preliminary score right now is $1.84 trillion coming from the people that will score the legislation.

That would make it probably, from everything we can guess, the single biggest reduction in spending in a single bill in probably U.S. history. Does that give you a sense? When you have people talking about waste and fraud and misalignment and bad acts, this is the ginormous granddaddy of it all.

It is not that big of a bill. It is a little complex. It is really scary because, as you know around here, we are not ever supposed to talk about these things, particularly Medicare, but this is not Medicare as you think about it. This is the insurers who are paid to actually manage your care and help you be healthier. Yet, you have this series of stories saying how they have been taking advantage of the system.

There is a way to make this work. Even the MedPAC report says that we support Medicare Advantage and want it to stay, but we are going to have to fix these misalignments. The economists have been modeling the savings.

Mr. Speaker, what happens if you have a moment here where these sorts of dollars in savings--and this is going

to tie in, Mr. Speaker, to talking about what Moody's did last week, talking about how this and our talent-based immigration bill, those two bills together, probably score at $2 trillion of savings, and they would be good for the economy. They would be good for healthcare. They would be good for people to be healthier. They would help grow the economy.

This is an example of getting policy right to actually take on a small sliver of the debt because, remember, our baseline debt for the next 10 years, we are going to borrow another $22 trillion. Even though this number is massive, it is still just a fraction of what is coming at us.

Mr. Speaker, I am trying to make the point again. Our legislation, which we call Better Medicare, has been introduced. It is in the process of being scored. Yet, when you start to see these sorts of dollars--and, yes, it would change the current spending projection by about 10 percent to 10.7 percent according to the Joint Economic Committee economists. Yet, you already had the MedPAC saying it is already 25 percent more expensive than was the original model.

It gives you a sense of we are making reforms, but we are just trying to align the incentives. We have done some things to actually help the insurers be able to have sort of automatic enrollment, but you can choose to opt out for a longer period of time so that the investment for that senior who chooses that Medicare Advantage plan to be given the services to be healthier. Yet, also with that healthier, the provider benefits by having a healthier population.

We have been trying to just think like economists instead of so often what you hear behind these microphones because something I have teased about--I actually talked about this a couple of weeks ago--in Nature Human Behaviour, there was an academic article. This is one of those geeky ones that is peer reviewed, all of those things: ``Computational analysis of U.S. congressional speeches reveals a shift from evidence to intuition.''

They basically took 240 years of House floor speeches, ran AI across them, and said: Guess what has happened? These speeches around here no longer talk about facts, about data, or about math. We now tell our feelings.

The problem is, if you have complex problems, your feelings aren't going to help us fix complex problems. It turns out that math does.

This is what we have been trying to do on this reform of Medicare Advantage. We want the system to work, but we can't allow $1.76 trillion over 10 years of fraud and bad acts.

If you don't believe me, get in front of your computer right now and look up some of the articles of the potential indictments, the criminal activities that are coming. Also, look up The Wall Street Journal series that actually talks about people being scored as sicker, and they don't have the diseases. They don't receive services. They are not on those medications. Yet, you and I as taxpayers are paying for it, and we are borrowing the money to do it.

Please, if you are a staffer watching this, if you are an American that actually cares about us getting our act together and doing things better, if you are a Member of Congress, I know doing big things around here is terrifying. We don't have a choice anymore.

If anyone actually read the Moody's report that was put out last Thursday, they make a couple points that should scare the crap out of us.

In 9 budget years, they believe about 9 percent of the entire economy in that year will be borrowed by the Federal Government. That $3.8 trillion will be the borrowing amount in 2035, and that is just a baseline.

The reason we often don't tell the truth, the reason we avoid it is because almost all this growth of this borrowing is interest and Medicare. It turns out it is really not Republican or Democrat; it is demographics. We are so busy trying to get elected next time, we need something to blame them, and they want to blame us.

If you stand up here and try to actually fix problems, you will get the crap kicked out of you, but at least you are trying to do the right thing. This is what you are hired to do on this job. It is not pander to your voters, but tell them the truth and try to fix things.

I can't tell you how many speeches I hear behind these microphones where people will tell you the problem over and over. They will never spend a year writing a bill, putting about 100 hours in to it with academics, with Ph.D.'s, and healthcare. Experts from the industry put together a bill that says: This will work. This will make things better.

Mr. Speaker, here is a philosophical thought I want everyone to think about. The United States just got downgraded by the third major credit rating agency. Did you know there are 18 States that have a higher credit rating than the United States Government right now? Eighteen States have a higher credit rating, yet every dime a Member of Congress will vote on, every dime of discretionary, nondefense discretionary, as we call it, is borrowed money. Every dime of defense is borrowed money.

About $400 billion, I believe, last year of what we call mandatory spending, the formulaic earned benefits, things of that nature, is borrowed money. Last year, for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.39, and much of that money we are sending to States.

My State of Arizona, we do some things actually really well. Our Medicaid system called AHCCCS is actually remarkably well run, except for some of the fraud. I am going to touch on that. We haven't built the models to catch it faster because we are not actually incentivized.

Now, we also play incredible games where we use a provider tax. We actually make money for the general fund more than is actually spent on healthcare. One of the great scams we are trying to fix right now is what happens when the washing machine is actually where you are padding State budgets instead of taking care of healthcare, but that will get protests.

Eighteen States have higher credit ratings than we do. It is just an interesting thought experiment. How about if I told you that, I think it is as of yesterday, either 12 or 13 countries can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States.

If any of you are paying attention, remember there is this concept of interest fragility. One of our greatest threats to this country is our ability to finance this debt. Today, both the 20-year and 30-year bond went over a touch 5 percent. We showed actually a couple months ago that a single point of interest on U.S. debt over 10 years came in at like $3.3 trillion of additional interest.

Just a small movement of interest rate is bigger than everything we are debating here, but we are not going to tell you that. A, because it would require math; B, it would require facts; and C, it might actually mean someone has to do something.

There is an economist at Bloomberg, Anna Wong, who is truly freaky smart. I have had the opportunity and the honor. She came and spent part of a day with my Joint Economic Committee economists. She has been at the Federal Reserve. She has been at the White House. She is one of those people that is just intimidating on how she is able to calculate the world. She actually was looking at our reconciliation budget. She says that if we will do just a couple policy things, it is neutral in cost. It balances out. That is the point I am standing here for.

We cannot allow the taxes to go up on working people in this country. Well, right there that is $3.1 trillion. How are we going to offset it?

It turns out if you take a look at--and this is just from Anna Wong's analysis. If you are a really geeky, you can get this on your Bloomberg terminal, all six people in Washington that have a Bloomberg terminal. They are really expensive, but I actually need it for what we do.

If the tariffs what they are producing, some of the DOGE offsets, it turns out if we will incorporate some of this policy, we can make this budget neutral. That is actually often part of my request for the leadership, for the committee chairs, for those of us in Ways and Means, we need to start actually pulling out our calculators and thinking this through. How do we do these things so we can stabilize the economy, maximize economic growth,

but not be adding to the debt? There is math that does it. Will anyone actually read the documents?

We actually start to walk through this. We are actually trying to build models right now on trying to see what is coming in in custom duties. That is the tariffs. What is that offsetting? You will see me over the coming weeks with a couple of charts and start saying: Okay, here is what we have to plug into our models. For everyone who has been whining around here, here is your math problem. I wish they would start the whining with telling the truth on math and facts before telling anecdotes and stories. Remember, I just pointed out to you the 140 years analysts of the speeches here in Congress, how they have become now about feelings instead of facts because we can manipulate you with telling anecdotal stories.

This simple chart here--see the nice coins? We stole this from someone else. Baseline is we are going to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years. All we are talking about trying to save is $2 trillion out of that $86 trillion. Are you telling me we can't get $2 trillion out of $86 trillion over 10 years?

This is what is causing the emotional meltdown here because this place only cares about one thing, and that is the money. Spend it, spend it, spend it, and basically screw over people's retirement and my kids. I have a 2\1/2\-year-old and 9-year-old. When my 2\1/2\-year- old--yes, I know. My wife and I adopted some kids. It is the greatest thing we ever did. When my 2\1/2\-year-old is basically 23, 24, every single tax in America has to be doubled to maintain baseline spending.

I have done presentation after presentation where I have come here with the actual charts using Democrat economists showing that every tax hike the Democrats have proposed on the wealthy--capital gains, income--the entire plethora produces about 1.5 percent of GDP. All the austerity, the cuts on our side, accounts for 1 percent of GDP. That is a big 2.5 percent.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to borrow about 7.3 percent of the economy this year. I showed you a chart a little while ago that Moody's has us in 9 budget years borrowing 9 percent of the economy.

Does anyone see a math problem? The rhetoric here, the moving of the mouth, doesn't match what is on the calculator. We make crap up. This is the baseline fact. Baseline, we are set to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years, and all we are trying to do is reduce $2 trillion.

I think we should reduce dramatically more, but I think you can do it through policy, the adoption of technology, and the alignment of incentives, and we can make the delivery of government services work.

When only 31 percent of the phone calls at the IRS get answered, are we doing our job? You do realize there is technology that would fix that, but that would anger the union of the government employees there. There are these barriers where you have armies of lobbyists walking up and down these hallways, and the inefficiency, that waste and fraud, is their profit model.

Mr. Speaker, 80 percent of the spending growth--we are not supposed to tell people this, but it is the math. You can't do policy unless you are willing to tell the truth about the math. Eighty percent of the spending growth over the next decade is Social Security, Medicare, and interest. The interest is now scaring the crap out of us because there is this concept called term premium.

As the Ray Dalios and these people who are the billionaire experts are saying: China is in the market. Germany is in the market. The United States is bingeing on debt. There is almost not enough savings in the world to finance the scale of borrowing, and much of that borrowing is driven because of demographics. The entire industrialized world got old. We have a shortage of young people. I think the math is, in 9 budget years, 23 percent of America is 65 and up.

Are we doing the things to maximize automation and growth so we can have productivity and continue to afford and provide the very services we promised? No, that would require math, thinking, and policy. It is not good storytelling, is it, Mr. Speaker?

Look, it is also one of the reasons I was so enraged about the intellectual laziness, I thought, of the Senate. Look, this is where I am being a bit sarcastic, if not mean. The House is not perfect. There are a number of things I am unhappy with. Leadership still doesn't have my vote on it until I get some agreements that we are able to move policy to start changing some of these numbers, but I have shown up with the policy. I am not just moving my mouth. We put it on paper, and we introduced them as bills. Now, look at the charts of the Senate's unwillingness to actually put policy into their budget reconciliation.

The reason we have to demonstrate a level of fiscal discipline--if you care about poor people, if you care about economic growth, if you care about my kids, if you care about your retirement, and if you care about what this government provides to society--we have to figure out how to pay for it.

CBO says that when we finish this fiscal year, U.S. debt will be at $37.2 trillion. We have to take to market this year in just refinancing--and I am not counting the short roll on the short end of the curve if you want to geek out. I think we are going to bring $9 trillion to market. We are probably going to bring another $2 trillion, $2.3 trillion of new issuances, and will start to see where the United States is interest rate-wise.

We start seeing Greece and other countries having substantially lower interest rates than us. That should set off an alarm. Do you want the money to go to the world's bond markets? You do realize that convincing the world debt markets that we are creditworthy, that we are being disciplined, that we are doing things--just that differential is more money than everything that is being debated here.

When just 1 point of interest, 1 point differential here, is over $3 trillion, that would solve a lot of this debate, wouldn't it? We can actually get those types of bond rates if we demonstrate to the world that we are creditworthy, disciplined, sensible, seeing long term, and actually understanding the honesty of our demographics.

Instead, a bunch of the brain trusts here in Washington spend their time attacking Moody's for downgrading us and telling the truth. The problem is, if you actually read their document, it is the truth.

For everyone out there who thinks balancing the budget and doing those things is simple, if you actually listen to folks from the last administration, this administration, the fantasy goal is to get to 3 percent of debt to GDP, not 7, not, heaven forbid, in 9 budget years being at 9 percent. If you have 3 percent, you are more sustainable.

You have to stop the fantasy of saying that we are going to cut it all with nondefense discretionary. Nondefense discretionary is 12 percent of our spending. Almost everything you think of as government-- the Park Service, the FBI, the White House, our salaries here--that is in this 12 percent.

Interest on the debt is every bit as big as all the nondefense discretionary. Actually, real interest on the debt, if you add up everything, is about $1.2 trillion this year. Remember, when we borrow money from the trust funds, we have to pay interest and pay it back.

For those who are willing to run around here and are interested in having discussions on Medicaid--remember, Medicaid is the program that was designed for indigent populations, for women, children, infants. Yet, you hear almost protests from the left. Here is a $2.5 billion fraud in Medicaid in Arizona, where they exploited Tribal members, abused them, recruited them from our Tribal communities, put them in sober living homes, and bled the system for money. It took years because in a system that has the incentive where you are doing provider taxes and more of that money, raising the cost, it ends up in the general fund of your State. We should be ashamed that these types of scams were allowed to bleed money that should have been going to people who needed the help.

Look, if we don't get an alignment of policy, the cost, and how these things can actually work, Mr. Speaker, I think we are going to continue to live in this world where our debates mean nothing here. They are just based on feelings, exploitation of our voters, telling them things that are actually mathematically not true. It is great politics, and right now, this place

seems to care so much more about winning the next election than the survival of this Republic and its economy, people, and prosperity.

Is prosperity moral? There is a path where we can meet our obligations, help our brothers and sisters who need the help, and not scare the hell out of the very people who we turn to every single day because this government borrows $9 billion a day, $72,000 a second. Next year, it is going to be close to $82,000 a second. In 9 years, it is approaching $100,000 a second.

Often, the discussion behind these microphones are things that set off your anger and the mathematical fantasies. If I get one more person who says: I saw on cable news this, so why don't you fix it? I say that I would be happy to fix it, but realize that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting--I think that calculated to paying for 2 hours, 15 minutes of borrowing in an entire year.

Mr. Speaker, it is the lack of understanding of the scale of this math. There is hope. There is a way you can make this work but not until the calculators are pulled out. The morality and the prosperity are the goals, and it is the moral thing to do.

Mr. Speaker, I apologize to anyone if I hurt their feelings. Send me a note. I will write you an apology note. I seem to write a lot of apology notes. I continue to be mad at both parties and almost everyone around here because we are not willing to do the math. There is a way we can make this work.

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

Mr. Speaker, I could almost hear the joy from my staff saying: Hey, it is only 30 minutes this time, not an hour.

Mr. Speaker, I want to do just a handful of things. One of these days we are going to have not enough noise about the facts, the numbers, the data, the debt, those things that we can come in and sort of do our boards, our charts, on things that actually reduce spending and modernize.

I do want to sort of start with this. We have spent time since last summer working on pieces of legislation. The Wall Street Journal series and the ProPublica series came out about the scale of bad acts that were happening in what we call Medicare part C, which is Medicare Advantage for most of us, which is now I think about 55 percent of the Medicare population. We have been working on that to sort of modernize it, and so for all the lobbyists who are making money trying to beat us up for trying to actually fix it, I will warn you that the legislation is almost done. We now have to work with the economists and others to score it. We have been stunned though that it continues. Even last Thursday, I think, there was another whole set of investigations or indictments announced.

Let's get on to some of the math here. Mr. Speaker, I have come behind the microphone many times and talked about the scale of debt. We borrow about $72,000 per second. Our math next year, that goes up to about $82,000 borrowing per second. If you are a country that needs to borrow about $6 billion a day, we borrow about $6 billion a day, what happens in a world where you actually--the liquidity of the debt markets.

I grabbed an article that was in one of my--I think it was in one of my bond publications because I have some weird reading habits. ``Japan prepared to use its role as America's largest creditor as leverage in Trump's trade talks.'' The point I want to make by reading that headline to everyone is: Japan now is our largest individual creditor country. When you have a country that has $900 billion, maybe a trillion dollars of U.S. sovereign debt, and you walk in the door and say: We want to renegotiate some of our trade pact with you or we want to build an actual trade pact with you, they look

at you and say: But we right now take those dollars that you send us because you have been buying our stuff, and we are buying your debt.

The fact of the matter is if you are a country that is borrowing $6 billion a day, does anyone understand the fragility, and I am going use that fancy word a couple of times, because also interest--we are actually seeing some indications that when we get out of extraordinary measures--for everyone who doesn't understand, we hit the debt ceiling a couple months ago. Right now, the Treasury every day for that $6 billion shortfall is juggling money internally and borrowing it out of the military retirement accounts or our thrift savings accounts, the cash accounts, and those things. We are doing internal borrowing. All that has to be paid back, and it all has to be paid back with interest.

We are still working on the rough calculation. Treasury put out a number, but I don't like their number because I don't think it was real, and we had all the visibility. We worked on the dataset saying: When we finally raise the debt ceiling, let's say a month or two from now, Treasury is going to need to pay back those dollars plus the interest. They are going to come to market with $400 billion, $500 billion, $600 billion of borrowing. Just be prepared for what is really going on in the interest rate markets, the debt markets, and will we be beyond some of the discussions of trade where countries like Japan aren't leaking stories that they are going to use our debt as leverage against us.

I used this board a couple of times now, but I want it to make sense. This is the estimate for net interest as a share of revenues in 2035, so that is 9 budget years from now. The chart here and the bar here I want people to pay attention to is Moody's, who has this whole thing where they do analytics on debt and spending. Mr. Speaker, their estimate is in 9 years, 30 percent of U.S. tax collections, that is everything, corporate, individual, estate, the tariffs, everything, they estimate in 9 years, 30 percent of all those tax receipts that come into the Federal Government will just pay interest. This is based on sort of today's interest rate projections.

I showed some charts a couple weeks ago that showed an estimate that if U.S. debt went up 1 percent in interest--selling our bonds, if interest rates went up 1 percent on us, in that 9 budget years, it is not 30 percent of tax receipts that go to just interest, it is 45 percent.

Are you prepared to have a world where here is $1 of taxes I am paying, and 30 cents of that just pays interest; or God forbid, interest rates go up, and 45 cents of that dollar just pays interest on the bonds?

There is also a chart where we actually went back to the early 2000s when we were kissing up against 6 percent, and it was just like devastating, the amount of tax collections that get consumed by interest.

Remember, when we finish this fiscal year, the CBO estimate is U.S. sovereign debt, all of it, the gross debt, will be at $37.2 trillion. The thing we are not supposed to tell people because it hurts their feelings, gets them upset, but it is called math, is over the next 10 years, the vast majority of debt is interest and healthcare costs, mostly Medicare.

Unless you are willing to have honest conversations about debt deficits and demographics, the demographics is the driver of U.S. sovereign debt. We have a shortage of young people in America. We have foreigners come and get educated here, and we send them home because we are so brilliant.

Healthcare costs: We do all this game playing around here where our healthcare discussions are about healthcare finance, not about changing the cost of healthcare.

The thing about this, the ACA, many of you know it as ObamaCare, it is a financing bill. It is a financing bill. It is who gets subsidized and who has to pay. The Republican alternative was a financing bill. Medicare for All is a financing bill.

We don't have the discussion of how to revolutionize this either through technology, a healthier society, taking on obesity, the things that drive the cost of healthcare--how about this concept of we build a healthier society, and we use technology.

I am wearing one of these Oura rings. We are doing experiments in our office with other wearables trying to build data. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just data. I don't know why we haven't been able to build a love connection here or a policy connection or whatever the hell we are supposed to call it between the left and right saying: What would happen if we engage in policies that change the price of healthcare? Instead, we do these debates because everything in Washington is about the money.

The people marching up and down our hallways here are not coming to our office to say: David, adopt technology. Lower the price of living. Lower the price of healthcare.

It is: We want more money, or we want you to build a barrier to entry to our competition.

We call it rent-seeking, if you remember your high school economics class.

Let's take a look here. I need you to understand how rough our position is in the world right now. Global 10-year borrowing rates. I brought the charts before. We have been bouncing between the 13th position--I think we fell to the 12th position, then the 14th position--where other countries are able to sell their bonds cheaper. Yet, the one that just enrages me, here is Greece. Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States today.

When you run around thinking that the United States is the gold standard, we are also screwing up our extraordinary privilege of having the world reserve currency, and the dollar is coming back to us because you start to see some slowdown in buying U.S. sovereign debt.

Mr. Speaker, we don't know the real numbers because we are in extraordinary measures. We are not coming to market with new debt. Yet, think about this. Here are the countries that can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States: Italy, Greece, France, Canada, Germany, China, and Japan all can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States with lower interest rates. Does that make anyone concerned?

I think I have a chart that shows that the United States will consume 30 to 40 percent of all of the world capital that is going to sovereign debt in the next decade. Yet, we are not supposed to talk about that. Then, the absurdity from the left: Well, we tax rich people more.

Okay, at best, you might get 1 percent, 1.5 percent of GDP. For all of the things we talk about cutting, we get about 1 percent. So the 2.5 percent--Mr. Speaker, this year, we are on pace to borrow 7.3 percent of the entire economy. That is just this year.

One of our charts--and I think this one comes straight from CBO--says that with that little change in interest rates, in 2035, we may be well over 9 percent of the entire economy that year in borrowed money. It doesn't have to be this way.

We are doing these reconciliation negotiations, all of those things, and the inability of groups that come into the office and demand more money to come in with an idea, saying: Maybe we shouldn't be spending billions and billions of dollars on duplicative MRI scans or the things we just waste money on because it turns out that that waste--some people who come behind these microphones call it fraud--turns out to be the profit model of many of the bureaucracies and many of the business models. It doesn't have to be this way.

Start to take a look at the actual data. Last year, the gross interest--that is what we sold publicly and had to pay interest out internally. When we borrow money from the Social Security trust fund or these other things, which all that money has already been borrowed, we have to pay interest back. When Social Security redeems its bonds, we pay them back the money they need for that next month's checks to come out because, remember, Social Security is running about a little less than a structural 25 percent shortfall from tax collections to checks out the door. We also pay them interest.

Last year, we spent $1.133 trillion in interest. Our best estimate right now is your government will spend just a little shy probably of about $1.3 trillion

in interest this year. Why that is important: Realize that is more than defense. Let's take a look at this. Think about that.

Starting at about 2022, our interest became more than the Department of Defense budget. How many of the public understand that interest, if you actually calculate the gross interest, is now the second biggest spend in the United States? Social Security comes in at about $1.480 trillion. Interest this year will probably come in at, what, $1.2 trillion, $1.3 trillion?

Interest now is No. 2. Defense right now is actually coming in around No. 4--Social Security, interest, Medicare, defense.

How many times do you hear people come behind these microphones who actually at least know their basic math or want to tell the truth to the voters? Once again, is this Republican or Democrat? It is just math. It is an obligation that we have to pay.

We are going to do what about it? We are going to squeeze out our ability to do the things that we believe are important for protecting the Constitution and the society because, God forbid--the bond markets forbid--that we all of a sudden start to have a spike in interest rates.

You start to understand that many of our brothers and sisters who come behind these microphones--I show the chart all the time saying: Here is the pie chart of all of our spending. Today, about 75 percent is on autopilot. Mr. Speaker, you and I get to vote on 25 percent of the spending. About half of that is defense; about half of that is nondiscretionary. Every dime that a Member of Congress votes on today is borrowed.

Think about that. Other than when you are in reconciliation where Members actually get to have a vote or try to work on mandatory spending, which is formulaic, all defense and all nondefense discretionary is borrowed.

My colleagues have heard a number of Members come behind the microphone and talk about how much nondefense discretionary has gone up, and it has. We have lied repeatedly when we did sequestration.

Paygo, how many times--paygo, I actually think was a Democratic proposal from years ago that, if we are going to add new spending beyond the 5-year window, there needs to be an offset. Members saw a number of bills that expired just before the fifth year so that they don't set off the paygo, or like we did back in January when we owed approximately $1.2 trillion in cuts to meet the paygo--pay as you go-- rules.

Now we just waive it, just like we have done with sequestration and all these other things. We tell people that we are going to be fiscally disciplined. As soon as it is uncomfortable, then we will just waive it.

Why this is important is we will say that there is a 45 percent increase in discretionary spending since 2019, and it is. Yet, when my colleagues actually look at it, it is a lot of money.

Did I mention that we are borrowing $6 billion a day? We went from $662 billion--this is nondefense discretionary, this is the Park Service, this is the IRS, this is the State Department, all of the things we think of as the government--it went up to $960 billion.

Yet, why this is important to understand--I would vote to roll that back to the 2019 budget. Yet, if you see it as a percentage of GDP, the size of the economy, we are spending, which is the proper way to do big-boy math on budgets.

In 2019, nondefense discretionary was 3.1 percent of the economy. Last year, it was 3.3 percent of the economy. It went up, but the economy got bigger. It turns out that, if you are borrowing 7.3 percent of the economy this year, you could get rid of all of what you think of as government, nondefense discretionary, and you could get rid of all of defense, and my math on the top of my head--I probably should have calculated this before coming behind the microphone--you would still need about another $400 billion to cover borrowing that covers Medicare. Think about that.

There are those who say: David, balance the budget today.

I can do it. Of course, you are not going to have a military, you are not going to have what you think of as government, and I need to find $400 billion in the mandatory space.

There is this lack of understanding of the scale. Getting old, when it is healthcare and interest, that is the primary driver. No one wants to hear that. That doesn't set off the dopamine receptors. It doesn't make people mad. It doesn't get you on television.

If you tell the truth about the drivers of U.S. sovereign debt, you will never end up on MSNBC or FOX News or any of those because no one wants to hear the actual math. We want things that anger people. It turns out that good accounting isn't really that exciting, but it is math.

Mr. Speaker, here is the punch line which worries me and why I beg my brothers and sisters: For those of us in the House, we have a reconciliation budget. We are trying not to let the expiring provisions raise people's taxes. We have a reconciliation budget in the House that, if we do everything right, we get a couple trillion dollars of savings over 10 years. We are going to spend over $68 trillion in the next 10 years.

How many Members of Congress have had protesters outside of their offices saying that they can't cut things. We are talking about a total of $2 billion or $2 trillion in savings over 10 years when we are spending $68 billion. Have we lost our minds?

Yet, if we were to do the Senate's reconciliation budget, which has almost no cuts in spending in it, we will borrow approximately--I am conflating publicly sold debt with the debt we would create in the next 10 years. What took us 240 years to build, we will double in 10 years, or come close to doubling in 10 years.

Does this body, the lobbyists in the hallways, the groups in the hallways demanding more spending, or any of the staffers who might not have a life so they are watching this really think that the bond markets aren't going to go: They are doubling U.S. debt, maybe we should ask for a little premium, which is called term premium, on U.S. sovereign debt, but I just showed you and told you what happens if we go up 1 percent.

Just that 1 percentage point is $3 trillion of additional interest. It is more than everything we are talking about trying to cut.

Here is your balance: How do you communicate to the people we borrow money from that we are a good credit risk? We are going to pay you back. We are going to pay you back appropriately. We are not going to say crazy things: Maybe we should force you to go longer on the bonds, or maybe we should ask you to do this or that. You can't do that. You don't screw with your bankers.

Just as in the article, we are already up against the leverage of Japan in this one, but I don't know why it is not about other countries using the fact that we have used them and we have needed them to finance our debt. Then we intend to leverage them?

Okay. They need trade with us. Let's use that leverage, but let's also be respectful of the fact that they are one of our bankers.

Understand the fact, Mr. Speaker, that if we don't get our act together, the United States is on track to double its borrowing over the next 10 years. If that becomes the perception in the world debt markets, we are going to pay a penalty for it, and that penalty is really expensive.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to go back to the office and have more coffee. I appreciate the Speaker's tolerance, and 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 3 o'clock and 28 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, May 7, 2025, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, as always, I apologize to the bored staff, and I will try not to speak like a machine gun.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to do basically three things. I am going to make fun of us. I am going to actually walk through some debt and deficit numbers, interest, those things that are scaring my economists, myself half to death; and then I am going to touch on some of the--and it is a technical economics term--bedwetting in regard to the reconciliation budget and how people are making things up. Let's have at it.

Due to the fact that I sit in an airplane 10 hours a week, and I have some weird reading habits, I actually came across a paper written last year, published just recently. It is in Nature Human Behaviour. It is one of those quirky--excuse me, those academic, but actually what they did is they went back to the late 1800s, and they took all of our congressional speeches up until 2022, and they ran a data set on them.

They ran AI, and can you believe it, Mr. Speaker, they figured out that our congressional speeches have become less and less and less based in facts. I know this is hard for us to believe, but apparently the quality of idiots--I mean, people like me--getting up in front of these mikes and doing presentations and walking through our job has crashed in quality, in facts.

As a matter of fact, they used the word intuition. I basically say we make public policy now by our feelings because, God forbid, we go to our voters and tell them the truth about the math.

It made me feel better because I have mocked us for years on how much of public policy we now make on feelings. It is great television. It gets you followers on social media. You get a hit on cable television tonight if you are willing to make crap up, but do it with passion and feelings, but if you actually want to talk about the math of what is going on in this country, it turns out it is how we are rewarded now as elected officials.

Now, what was interesting is they had the curve actually starting to fall in 1970, and it has just gotten steeper. Part of it and part of my conclusion is television, then moving to cable news, and then moving to social media, we have crashed the diet of robust facts in our speeches.

Now that we are going to make fun of ourselves, let's go on to the next thing. Mr. Speaker, for anyone who asks, we have been running the current data on how much we are borrowing. What would you guess we borrow per second right now? Right now, it looks like we are burning $72,000 every second. We are borrowing $72,000 every second. My best guess right now is we will borrow 7.37 percent of the entire economy this year. Try to keep that number in your head because we are going to come back to that in some charts and explain why that is so devastating.

Mr. Speaker, it is like we don't care about people's retirement, our kids, the next generation, and how the hell they will actually cover any of the scale of debt. Then we lie about what drives the debt.

Mr. Speaker, our best guess is we go from that $72,000 a second this year to maybe about $82,000 a second next year. This is hard for people to accept, but it is the math. Over the next 10 years, the baseline borrowing was about $22 trillion. We are trying to figure out how to extend the expiring tax provisions. We have the requests from the White House. We have other disasters and things we are trying to cover.

We are basically looking at--and I am going to show this multiple times--the United States, the day we were elected, Mr. Speaker, how much debt. We will double it. We will double 240 years of borrowing in this 10-year period.

The majority of that borrowing over the next 10 years is interest and Medicare. God forbid we are not allowed to tell people the truth. Most of the debts, deficits, and demographics is the fact we got old. We stopped having children. We have a shortage of young people in this country. We are terrified to tell our brothers and sisters the truth about the math.

Let's have at it. For anyone out there paying any attention--and this number, actually probably right now is a little bit worse. We now think about 75 percent of Federal spending is on autopilot.

Mr. Speaker, when you become a Member of Congress, everything you get to vote on is borrowed. When you vote on nondiscretionary, when you vote on defense, every dime of that is borrowed and about $400 billion of what is mandatory spending, which means formulaic. When we work so many quarters, we get our benefits. When we serve in the military, we get our benefits. For those who are part of a Tribal group or part of our treaty obligations, certain things are coming to them.

Then there are the things we vote on and the things we try to balance the budget over. We need more money for defense, and we have threats in the world. We get down to where we are trying to balance the budget on about 13 percent of our spending because we are terrified to talk about everything else. We can't touch interest.

I am going to show a slide here in a moment. This one should scare the crap out of people. I know my language is becoming more and more inflammatory, but I can't seem to break through.

This is from something called Moody's Analytics. It is one of those fancy subscription services. They have a bunch of economists and they collect data. They have us in nine budget years, 30 percent of U.S. tax collections will go just to interest.

Mr. Speaker, you pay your dollar in taxes, and 30 cents of that in 2035 goes just to interest. Does it not scare anyone? When the interest growth is bigger than everything we are talking about in trying to say--by multiples, by multiples--we calculate this fiscal year, the one we are living in right this second, we could spend $1.1 trillion to $1.2 trillion in just interest.

There is a dataset that if we do some of the things that we were going to do, the Senate's reconciliation budget, with almost no money to pay for it, in 10 years, interest could be a couple of trillion dollars a year. The annual deficit will be three-plus trillion a year. It will probably be $2.3 trillion this year.

Last year, for every dollar we took in in tax collections, take a guess. What did we actually spend? We took a dollar in tax collections last year. What did we spend? We spent $1.39. We take in $1. We spend $1.39. This year was supposed to be better. We were only supposed to spend $1.36.

We have a small problem. With some of the GDP growth numbers, just that adjustment, we may have lost $200 billion in tax receipts in this fiscal year, the end of September, between now and then. It just shows how fragile we are with small movements of interest when we have to refinance $9 trillion.

Think about this. A single point of interest on U.S. debt--and it takes years for it to roll in because of how much we have to refinance. So we will take about $9 trillion to market this year and refinance, we will issue a couple of trillion new this year. A single point of interest over 10 years costs $3 trillion.

Why does this not scare the crap out of people? Why do we not have people coming behind these microphones? But we are better off getting behind these microphones and telling passionate stories, anecdotes, and those things, because that is what gets us on social media. That is what gets people's dopamine hitting. But at some point the math is going to win.

We have the really smart analytic firms saying they are scared about U.S. sovereign debt. We see things happening around the world that makes me very nervous. There is an appetite for going on the long end of the curve.

The United States sells very short-term debt. Then we have 2 years, 5 years, 20 years, and 30 years. We are having real trouble selling the debt on the long end of the curve. Do not pay attention to some of the debt markets over the last month or two. Mr. Speaker, do you want to know why? We are in extraordinary measures. We are up against the debt ceiling. We are not issuing new debt. We are only issuing refinance and what comes due within the cap.

What happens a couple of months from now when we all raise the debt ceiling? I love the brain trust that says don't raise the debt ceiling.

Did I mention last year for every dollar we took in, we spent $1.39? Tell me what 39 percent of the Federal spending we should stop doing. When we don't raise the debt ceiling, we have to end all of that. More than a third of all our spending is functionally borrowed. I am happy to do it. Tell me which third we should stop financing. Those are the very people filling up these hallways, demanding we give them more money.

What happens when we raise that debt ceiling, Mr. Speaker, and we have to come to market--Treasury has to come to market--with $500 billion to $600 billion functionally to catch up and refund all the accounts we have been borrowing from? That is what is done in extraordinary measures. We grab every account and use that cash, now we have to refund it, and you take that much to market.

We have one analyst who is saying we will see a pop in U.S. interest rates, maybe on the 10 year, hitting five, just, boom. Because suddenly we are grabbing so much of the world's capital to finance what we have been borrowing internally and now we have to pay it back.

Be prepared. These aren't surprises. We all know it, but no one reads the damn documents. It is math, and it turns out telling the truth-- remember our story here that fact-based discussions on the floor no longer get us elected. No one listens to them. No one cares about them. We make things up because feelings is now how we make legislation.

This board is almost a year old, but it is to try to make a point to our brothers and sisters, particularly on the left, that keep coming to us and saying: Let's just tax rich people more. We show them--we are going to show the slide here. I am probably going to have to say it two or three times so it sinks in.

We have a detailed report that sort of walks through every tax hike the left has proposed. We are guilty on our side of every cut we have actually proposed. We take every tax hike and then do the economic data on it and get about 1.5 percent of GDP. Our cuts come out to about 1 percent of GDP. If I can do that math, that is 2\1/2\ percent.

Mr. Speaker, do you remember at the beginning of this? We are borrowing 7.3. The next time a politician says raise taxes on rich people. And then they are shown that it is a fraction of a fraction of what we even borrow every single day, that is a great rhetorical use of language. It is horrible math; completely fraudulent math. Remember demographics but we are not allowed to tell people that because it means we as a society have to do hard things.

I have this chart here. I was just trying to make a point how Washington finances 366 days of spending in 2024. The top 20 percent of earners covered 201 days. For the next core tile down, the next 20 percent covered 41 days. The middle earners, the middle 20 percent, paid for 17 days of government spending. The bottom 40 percent pay for 4 days of government spending. Then 103 days we finance by just borrowing it.

I think we are tied for the most progressive income tax system in the industrialized world. When we modernized the tax code in 2017, the United States income tax system actually became more progressive. Yet how many times have we heard Members say: Well, they gave money to the rich? The rich, after 2017, were paying more of the Federal income taxes.

At some point we are going to have to have this really uncomfortable discussion. Is it on the tax side or the spending side? I have done entire presentations here on the floor where I have shown my colleagues--go back to the last 65 to 75 years. Here is a time of very high marginal tax rates. We take in about mid-17 percent of the economy in tax collection. Very low marginal tax rates, we take in about mid-17 percent of Federal taxes. When we go up, the actual economy slows down. This is what is taken in.

The secret is: How do we adopt regulations and modernize it? How do we adopt tax policy that incentivizes productivity? How do we do the whole thing and get them to interact?

We maximize economic growth, and that growth becomes tax collection stability and gets us to the top of the total dollar amount, but we will probably still constantly fall back into that mean of the percentage of the economy. So have a bigger economy. It is not that complicated.

Upper-income taxpayers overwhelmingly finance the Federal Government. I know this isn't good politics. People like me are supposed to say: Yeah, the rich need to pay their fair share. The top 20 percent of earners pay 25.2 percent. The next core tile pays 15.8 percent. The middle covers 11 percent. The fourth core tile down, the next one down, covers 5.5. We send the bottom 20 percent of income earners money.

Remember that we have sort of this negative tax income system, earned income tax credits, and those things. If someone is in the 20 percent of the bottom core tile, we send them money.

Mr. Speaker, as a matter of fact, we have data--I didn't bring the chart--that shows functionally in America, if you are in the bottom half of the income earners, post-inflation, your life is miserable because wages haven't gone up as fast as inflation did.

That inflation was substantially created by stupid policies from the previous White House and the Democrats

who spent like crazy. When we finance and dump that much cash into the society, you set off inflation.

Mr. Speaker, it is your high school economics class, and here we are a couple of years later. The poor are still poor because we still haven't gotten wages growing faster yet.

What scares the crap out of me is I am now seeing some data saying that we may have a year where inflation could be hovering around 4 percent by the end of the year. We have to do policies to get those wages growing.

I have a chart that will show you, Mr. Speaker, that the bottom 50 percent pay about 4 percent of the income tax, but the bottom one-third actually get money.

In some ways, that is just being compassionate, but we have the data from post-2017, when we did tax reform, when we had the miracle of income inequality starting to really shrink. We had 3 years there where the poor were getting dramatically less poor. Why isn't that moral?

Good regulatory policy and tax policy maximizes that velocity.

Let's really annoy some of our leftist brothers and sisters. This is an article in the Manhattan Institute written by, I believe, Jessica Riedl. It is now about 1 or 1\1/2\ years old. What they did is they went through basically all the proposals the left has on raising taxes and, step by step, here is the tax raise, the economic effects, and what we actually take in.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, our rules about the size of the economy, 17.1 or mid-17 percent of the GDP.

Individual income tax, investment tax, raising the corporate taxes, and raising the State taxes, when you got to the end, Mr. Speaker, you functionally were getting about 1.5 percent of new tax receipts for the economy.

I look forward to the Democrats actually proposing this and being willing to vote on it. That is because they throw these things out and get them scored. They controlled everything here 1 year ago, a couple of years ago. You notice they never did them, Mr. Speaker. They pretend this solves the problem.

You get 1.5 percent, Mr. Speaker, and you will have stagnated the economy.

Mr. Speaker, you have already heard the discussions of how close you are to stagflation, which is partially driven because of the economics.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, at the end of the decade or within 9 years or so, 22 or 23 percent of the population is 65 and up. We have a demographic issue for productivity.

The point of showing this chart is the solutions you will hear, Mr. Speaker, if, God forbid, you go on leftwing cable television, sometimes even rightwing. They are mathematical lies.

We are borrowing 7.3 percent of the economy this year. Are we willing to engage in a revolution of using technology and modernization? How many businesses still run themselves as if it is still the 1990s? Government does.

I had someone bring me, just the other day, a piece of healthcare paperwork. I think it might have been from the Indian Health Service. It was a three-part NCR paper for a purchase order for a healthcare procedure that you fill out and, I think, faxed it in. Have we lost our minds?

Yet, we get protesters from the left saying: Don't use technology.

You have seen article after article of the five major databases the United States has, Mr. Speaker. None of them talk to each other. If you are willing to actually read, then you saw the stories of the Small Business Administration having--what was it?--3,300 people who had taken out loans. Except the small problem was that all of them were 114 years old and up, meaning they were on to their rewards. They weren't with us anymore. It turns out $300 million in loans, no one had paid a dime back, but the Small Business Administration didn't have the ability to bounce off the Social Security mortality or death file.

We have designed these walls to functionally--it is as if the fraudsters designed our data systems here in the Federal Government. Let's go fill out things, go get money, and steal the taxpayers' money, but we are going to make sure that there is no way to check the data that is being filled out because we want to protect their privacy.

Some of that is not privacy. They are asking for a government-insured loan over here, and we can't check the death file? What idiots allowed this to happen? Yet, we get protesters in front of our congressional offices saying: Don't let DOGE and those actually make the system work. I am sorry they are scared of change.

Did I mention that we borrow $72,000 a second?

How do we convince our brothers and sisters across the country that we, as Members of Congress, the administration, and the bureaucracy, are taking it seriously if we are not even willing to make the data talk to each other?

Back to one of the things that has just annoyed the crap out of me--I used this board a handful of times for some of my leftwing protesters the last couple of weeks, and to their credit, some of them were actually shockingly intellectually honest saying: Oh, that is not part of our talking notes. No one told them the truth.

Mr. Speaker, it is on the internet. Trust me, I am not that bright. I just looked it up. It is there. You can find it.

The next 10 years, the Federal Government baseline was spending $86 trillion over the next 10 years--$86 trillion. All we are talking about in trying to modernize and change spending in this reconciliation budget, if we did the high end, so the House, full, all in, high end-- which, please God, let us get there. The high end is $2 trillion. $86 trillion, we are trying to get 2, that is 2.3 percent, and that is creating the bedwetting. Do they really love their money, this spending?

Remember, Mr. Speaker, if you don't want tax hikes--I don't want tax hikes. Borrowing is a tax hike. It is just paid for in the future with interest. Stop thinking borrowing is free.

My wife and I have adopted a couple of kids. I have a 2\1/2\-year- old. We are incredibly blessed. It looks like he is going to be fine. He is going to be normal. He is absolutely a joy.

When he is 22 or so, just to maintain baseline spending in the United States, we have to double every single tax. That is the morality of this place.

For the lobbyists and the groups that are walking our Halls saying, ``We want more spending. Don't do this horrible, devastating 2 percent cut in spending over the next 10 years,'' I say: Thank you for screwing over my 2-year-old. You are absent in morality. If you are going to walk into our office and demand more spending, then tell us where you think we can modernize and change the cost of government.

We have come here and done presentations that the single biggest expense we have in government, it turns out, is obesity. We did a whole model for the last couple of years, huge amounts. Remember, Mr. Speaker, I chaired the Joint Economic Committee, so I have five Ph.D. economists. We did the data: $9.1 trillion in additional healthcare costs.

It turns out the morality if we would help our brothers be healthier--but we have to do it through the farm bill. We have to do it through nutrition support. We have to decide we are going to have access to glutides and other things. Are we going to use technology, the wearables and the other things? I have one of those data rings on.

What would happen if one of the most powerful things we can do for U.S. sovereign debt stabilization is a healthier society? Somehow, that becomes a fringe conversation around here because people make money off of our brothers and sisters being sick. It is absolutely perverse.

Mr. Speaker, if you actually go--I think it was 1 year or so ago. I think Goldman Sachs did this huge report on GLP-1 glutides, and somewhere in one of the footnotes that was sent to me, it had this line, a couple of lines, saying that if there was wide adoption and the United States actually became much healthier with much less morbid obesity, there would be healthcare systems that would go bankrupt because they wouldn't have enough multi-chronic sick people to pay their bonds. Think about that.

Everything is about the money here, not about the morality of having a society that is growing and prospering. Prosperity, I would argue, Mr. Speaker, is moral.

How much of the crap we do here is not just satiating today's Twittersphere screaming at us or something that is completely made up but actually building a plan saying:

Here is the prosperity we are going to build for the future.

I probably have already had too much coffee today.

This is just to make a point, and this is more to mock the Senate. I was talking to one of the Senators last night, who is also concerned, as I am. Maybe they hear our voices.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, these are just the base numbers when they are first scored. This number actually came in one-half of that. No interest is attached to it. We stole this from someone else, but it was to make a point.

Democrats complained about that. In the CARES Act, we complained about the excess of spending. In the American Rescue Plan, we complained about that. Then you add in the bipartisan infrastructure act--it wasn't bipartisan. I think they had a handful of Republicans who wanted projects in their district. If you add it all up, Mr. Speaker, all the things we have fretted over over the last decade don't even add up to the amount of borrowing that is in the Senate reconciliation budget because it is so much easier here just to spend and borrow it. There is this attitude here of: Give it to me now. You guys will figure out something in the future.

We have worked with some of the DOGE folks because I have the economists, but go on their official website right now. They think, next year, 2026 fiscal year, we can save $160 billion. That is real money. If we borrow $6 billion a day, that is 24, 23 days of borrowing. That is everything we have gotten.

There is this inability for Members of Congress, our staff, and the public to understand the scale of what we are up against.

This basically just reiterates what I am going to show a couple of times here because I need it to sink in. If we do the Senate reconciliation budget with our baseline, we double U.S. debt in 10 years. I am going to say it a couple of times so it sinks in. Debt held by the public--and they are using 2034. We prefer to use 2035 because that is more of an honest budget window. We start to look at what the Senate resolution--this was baseline debt. They add another 32.7 percent to the debt. If we do what the Senate put out in their budget reconciliation, we functionally double publicly held debt in the United States.

What took us 240 years to do, bless us, we can do in 10 because we are good at borrowing money, handing things out, telling people there are no consequences, and making crap up, saying it is healthcare for illegals. Okay, we shouldn't do that, but it is only a couple of days of borrowing over 1 year.

We have to do lots and lots of difficult things. We have done entire presentations where we have shown we could revolutionize the cost of healthcare. We have actually looked at one dataset. We have been studying this now for months. If I came to you, Mr. Speaker, and said, just in Medicare, duplicative MRI scans, PET scans, X-rays, and ultrasounds could be as much as $25 billion a year, duplicative scans. Mr. Speaker, what if you have your knee scanned and attached it to this thing so it is portable with you? That is one-quarter trillion dollars over 10 years. Is that a cut? No. It is just a simple use of almost a free technology that is out there where you can load them on this and it is portable with you, Mr. Speaker.

We get lobbyists who don't like that idea because, apparently, they make money on the duplications. The inefficiencies and the frauds, those things are a business model now. Government controls functionally one-quarter of all the spending in the United States, of all the GDP. A big chunk of that is functionally waste, fraud, misallocation, or bad design. Give it whatever title you want, Mr. Speaker.

Many of the lobbyists who are walking these Hallways are here to stop us from modernizing the system and bringing us into this century. Just use the technology. We walk around with a supercomputer in our pocket.

This could crash the price of healthcare, make you healthier, give you access, all these things, and there is an army of people trying to stop us.

Remember, telehealth here was an absolute war. There were millions being spent to stop it because it screwed up people's business models.

I am going to do this a couple more times, and then we are going to do one more example.

If we do what is being planned right now, we finish the next decade, 10 years from now, with either $73.7 trillion of debt--our other chart actually gets it up to $74 trillion of debt.

You will hear a Member on the Democrat side or Republican side running for office: I care about the debt, but I am more afraid of telling you the truth of what drives the debt. The fact of the matter is, the people walking the hallways here, often our own constituents, are screaming at us for more spending. Don't they have kids? Don't they even care about their own retirements? It is the absolute vacuousness of immortality.

I grabbed this from The Wall Street Journal. I can't imagine anyone here has had protesters and people showing up in their office about Medicaid, which is supposed to be our safety net for indigents and the poor. I have some old experience with that. For a short time, I actually chaired the Healthcare Committee in the Arizona State Legislature when I was a child. For a while I actually worked on the AHCCCS budget, which is the Arizona Medicaid system. We do something unique. We actually buy managed care HMO policies for our poor people. It is actually shockingly efficient. As a matter of fact, if you took the rest of the country and adopted the Arizona model, you could save hundreds of billions of dollars over those 10 years.

The Wall Street Journal did us a favor. They actually took the Arizona system, which actually has a shockingly high satisfaction rate and good outcomes. We can make it much better. The punch line here is they are showing something called a provider tax. This was a scam--a scheme. I have to openly admit, on part of it, which was the disproportionate share--this is geeky stuff--I was actually part of managing that many years ago. I was county treasurer, I managed money, and we were part of the swath.

Part of the scam out there is to raise the cost of healthcare, create a tax, capture that tax, and because you raise the price, you also capture more money from the Federal Government in their percentage match.

What The Wall Street Journal did was brilliant. They just produced this chart that says: Do you know the Arizona government--and this is most State governments--actually use this provider tax washing machine and they make money. They actually take in more money. They are not meeting their obligation of--it was supposed to be a partnership. It was supposed to be a match.

Is this a cut? It is just saying there was a deal made in the late sixties that we were going to share some of the risks and some of the costs with our poor by providing healthcare. Then when Obama came in, they did this expansion and 90/10 percent, even though it was going to people who were still work eligible and those things.

Then States--we all knew this was going on, but it was supposed to be temporary. It was supposed to be when coming out of a major recession. We were going to go back to normality. Instead, it is padding for State budgets. That cash isn't going into healthcare; it is financing other things and raising the U.S. debt. This is borrowed money.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) for the purposes of a colloquy.

Mr. Speaker, most of this was designed in the late sixties.

I have this weird history. I was a child--in my early twenties. I was a temporary page at the State legislature. Arizona was the last State to enter Medicaid. It was bankrupting our counties because up to that point in the early eighties, the counties were actually the provider of healthcare. We entered this, but we created a really crazy system saying we are going to do managed care to drive the price down.

The actual language was for indigents. It was mostly for women and children.

In the early days, it was like a 50/50, not 100 percent coming from the Federal Government.

Yeah. It blends out closer to the 70.

Now, talking about the expansion population. That is where--

Mr. Speaker, it goes further.

Have you had the occasion yet, Mr. Speaker, where a group comes into your office--somehow, they were put on a plane, put in a hotel, those things here, they have no understanding of the math, the mechanics, but somehow there were Medicaid providers in your State that had plenty of cash lying around to fly people out to come lobby. So we did this, we pulled open another Wall Street Journal article from a week or two ago talking about how many people in the Medicaid systems in the United States are enrolled in multiple States.

You actually have billions and billions and billions of dollars here that are enrolled in multiple States. Even for the discussion of could we just match data, you actually get objections to this because the fraud is part of the profit model.

I am on Ways and Means. This is something Energy and Commerce has in their primary jurisdiction. They are working through it.

If you just stack up the cheating, the misuse--the vacuousness, the absence of data to try to deal with the multiple enrollment population, if you actually start to stack these things up, how dare you call those cuts. How dare you. Why don't you care about the future of this government and the future of this society? We cannot handle the stacking of debt.

Did I mention the $72,000 we borrow every second? It only goes up. We have a model that says in the 10-year window, we are up somewhere in the mid-nineties per second in borrowing. We are terrified to tell the truth.

Mr. Roy may not want to be in the room for this one, because this is the stuff that gets you attacked at home. But it is the math, it is the truth, and they are the CBO numbers.

Rising Social Security and Medicare shortfalls nearly drive the entire 2019 to 2033 deficit. This board is a couple of years old, but the facts are the facts.

We are terrified to tell the public the truth. The primary driver of debt is demographics.

This board is actually today. We are waiting for the update, but we have done some back-of-the-board math. The math is much uglier because interest rates are up substantially from when we calculated this 2 years ago.

You functionally have a country that--this one is from 2 years ago-- the 30-year debt, we were going to borrow $124 trillion. If you remove Social Security and its finance costs, Medicare and its finance costs, the rest of the Federal Government actually grew slower than tax receipts. We will probably have the update on this from CBO in the next couple months with the higher interest rates and the higher running debt.

We have models now that say over the 30 years, we are going to be at 200 percent of debt-to-GDP, that that number is no longer $124 trillion; it may be $170 trillion of borrowing.

I don't know how many of you plan to still be alive over the next 30 years. Do you really think the world's financial markets are going to finance our debt? We have Ray Dalio, the multibillionaire hedge fund manager, who is now retired, has actually been coming here to Congress saying: Warning, warning. The entire world's capital markets--because China is borrowing, Japan is borrowing, and now Germany is going back into the debt markets--there is not enough capital in the world.

When the United States is consuming 30 to 40 percent of all the money that goes to sovereigns, to governments--what happens when there is a shortage of savings in the world to finance? We can print money. Of course, that will set off inflation, so your life just becomes more miserable. Since so many of our benefits are inflation-indexed, you can't inflate yourself away from them because they go up. Or we can just pay the higher interest rates.

Now, you already saw the beginning chart, that Moody says in 9 budget years, 30 percent of our tax collections is interest. We have a model that shows a 1 percent increase rolled into our refinancing. In 10 years, 45 percent of all U.S. tax collections, all of it, is interest.

Yet, Mr. Speaker, you have Members here running around here saying: I need more money for SALT. I want actually more money for this program. I want more money for this.

Okay. Bring us ideas on how we modernize spending, how we can reduce costs by technology, by better systems, by a healthier society. Stop showing up at my door demanding more spending. There is no more money.

Mr. Speaker, he actually just stopped me from cursing, so he did good.

Yes, if you add in internally financed.

The CBO says we will end this year at about 37.2. My number is 37.3, so yes.

Yes, 12 zeroes.

We distort.

Mr. Roy, we use the term ``socialize.'' How do I get it to part of our folklore, our use of language? Borrowing money is a tax hike.

You have to understand. Okay. You are not going to raise taxes. I despise raising taxes.

I want as much velocity in the economy. I am a classic free-market economist.

But borrowing money is a tax hike, and it is a tax hike with interest on it.

It is just to be paid at a future date. Yet, because the curve is now steepening--remember that I just showed you some charts that says we may double U.S. debt this decade. The curve is like this.

You don't think we are not going to reach in and take some of your retirement? This is no longer about your grandkids. It is no longer about your kids. It is you, Mr. Speaker.

Yet, I believe the political classes lied their backsides off for so long, or we play this game. You will see some people on social media: You could save a million dollars doing this.

Okay. You borrow $250 million an hour.

The borrow is $250 million every hour. Watch out for the scam artists who play the game. They give you something that is outrageous. Okay. Get rid of it. Yet, sometimes the things that we will debate for hours here are minutes or sometimes seconds of borrowing.

Yet, the big stuff, since there are so many lobbyists and constituencies who live off of that money, you are not allowed to talk about that.

Mr. Roy, I am blessed. I have Phoenix and Scottsdale. I have one of the best educated districts in America. I have been fairly prosperous. They tolerate me. They sometimes are not happy with what I say.

Yet, at least they know that my math is good.

That is a better name.

We can't do it.

Yes. Just understand, in reconciliation, which is the one time where we are allowed to talk about mandatory spending, the majority of mandatory spending, we are not allowed to touch--

--because, between Social Security and interest, that is probably 54 or 55 percent of all mandatory. Sorry. It is a weird way I remember numbers. Well, let's risk our political careers. How many of you have read--

--The Wall Street Journal articles from the last year? I think they have done five or six major, major exposes on something we called Medicare part C. It is the Medicare Advantage. It was the sort of managed care version within Medicare option that was developed by Republicans in 2005.

One of their articles basically says that they identified about $63 billion of waste, fraud, and misalignment a year.

A year.

A year.

The MedPAC report, since I am the only idiot who came here to the floor with the MedPAC, but that is partially my responsibility being on the Committee on Ways and Means. The MedPAC report was all highlighted, and we showed the MedPAC report says: Medicare Advantage, part C, is coming in at 120 percent of fee for service.

Just that delta from where it was supposed to be at 95 percent--I know that is a lot of numbers--when we designed Medicare Advantage, long before you and I got here, it was supposed to come at 95 percent of fee for service.

That 25 percent delta is $100 billion a year. If you do the curve because of the growth of the program that is expected, that is $1.5 trillion over 10 years just putting it back to what it was supposed to be. It is equal to everything we are talking about trying to reform in our reconciliation packages.

How many conversations have we been willing to have saying: You do realize we could modernize Medicare Advantage so that the incentive for the providers is to have populations be healthier than running around and scoring them as sicker? Just align the incentives. I just found you $1 trillion.

Why can't we have conversations like this where we are trying to preserve the programs and the future at the same time?

Yes. You don't have to answer that because, the moment you answer, there will be an army of paid lobbyists, people running ads in your district, probably now beating the crap out of me on social media--

--because, when it is that sort of money, you know they are going to--

You also saw the articles 3 weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal. There is criminal investigations now going on. Justice Department now is diving into these folks, so there is more going on here.

I will argue, Mr. Roy--and some of our friends who are fiscal conservatives but also want to modernize the delivery of services, help me. We have spent almost a year diving into the data. What would happen if fixing these misalignments, the waste and fraud--actually, it doesn't get us where we need to be, but it starts moving us in the right direction.

Mr. Roy, I think I am actually against my time, so I am going to do that moment.

I am going to first apologize to the folks who had to try to take our words down for talking too fast, for the poor Speaker who had to sit here and listen to this, and to my staff who is now going to have to write lots of apology letters for all the people who I have just hurt their feelings.

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

Mr. Speaker, let's have some fun with math and the reality of what is going on in the world.

First, let me get something off my chest. I hate it when I make a mistake. Mr. Speaker, have you ever had that moment when you say something as you are walking down to your next meeting and you go: oh, damn it?

Last week, I was walking through a series of different numbers, and one of them was a proposal, or a discussion coming out of the White House. It was about taking the top tax rate and just letting it expire.

I think I said it was $32.7 billion. That is for a single year. Just multiply it by 10. That is what the actual math would be.

Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons I am sort of stressed out of my mind right now is more than the chaos we see in some of the financial markets and trying to understand the tariff issues and our leverage on other countries and their leverage and what is going on there.

I don't think we are spending enough time talking about our own work. Last Friday--actually, it may have been Saturday morning--the Senate passed their version of a reconciliation budget. It was a completely unserious document.

I am going to show over and over here how they took a pass on doing what was difficult. If this is a negotiation between the House and the Senate, for example, Mr. Speaker, if you have ever bought a car or been in a negotiation, when one side gives a completely unserious offer, the other side often has to walk away until they get serious.

There are real things going on in the world. Here is an article from the other day. I have a small stack of these. It is talking about bond markets and debt markets and others starting to unload U.S. debt.

Mr. Speaker, today, if you are a geek and are watching the 10-year bond--I was watching it over a period of an hour or so. I saw the 10- year bond move by about 20 basis points. Now, in geek speak, that is a big deal. Apparently, it has been 5 years. Think about some of the crazy things that were going on 5 years ago to see that sort of movement. We are stressing the crap out of the markets.

Why that is important is this country borrows about $60,000 to $70,000 every second. That becomes $250 million every hour. Last year, for every dollar we took in, in tax receipts, we spent $1.39.

The reality of it is you borrow 39 cents out of every dollar. For the $5 trillion we are going to take in, in tax receipts and we are going to spend $7.1 trillion or $7.2 trillion. Maybe we don't screw with the bankers.

Mr. Speaker, the reality of it is your savings, this government's bond fund, the family on the other side of the world that has savings, that is the money that buys our debt.

Ray Dalio, the Bridgewater founder, has written these articles that say we have a problem. The basis of the problem is there is not enough capital in the world to deal with the bingeing of debt coming from the United States and coming from China. Now it is starting to come from Europe. In Germany, it looks like they are going to be lifting their debt cap.

When we borrow, we are also competing with other countries in the world. The United States, I think, is now maybe 13, maybe number 12 on the credit stack. Think of this. I believe Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. That is worth thinking about.

Let's actually walk through what is going on right now with the reconciliation budget. Let's sort of explain. Why do we do the reconciliation budget? The Budget Control Act of 1974 created this mechanism that if we are going to cut spending--and it gives us one of the few times in life where we can actually work on mandatory spending, the things that are on autopilot.

For most Members of Congress in their entire career, everything they vote on is borrowed money. When we vote on defense, when we vote on nondefense discretionary, the things we do get to vote on, every dime of it is all borrowed. Last year, about $300 billion or $400 billion of mandatory, earned benefits, those things were on borrowed money.

Mr. Speaker, start to understand. Here is what is going on. You have heard we are doing these reconciliation budgets, because that is a whole mechanism to be able to move something through the Senate, where only 51 votes are needed so it doesn't hit that 60-vote filibuster. That is the real reason we do this whole dance.

Remember how many people are so upset. David, you are going to cut spending over the next 10 years. This is the baseline money. We are scheduled to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years. At best, the House resolution adds $2 trillion of spending reductions and modernization over 10 years. $86 trillion is the baseline spending. We are talking about trying to trim $2 trillion out of the $86 trillion. This causes people to lose their minds.

Have we lost our sanity in this country? We can't find--that is what--2.3 percent? Forgive my math. I am trying to do it quickly. That is Armageddon? Does that give us a sense of just how addicted the bureaucracies, the society, and the business models out there are to U.S. borrowing?

There was another thing that happened last week that really should have taken people's breath away. This is sort of behind the paywall. We have found other articles that write about it. Moody's Analytics, the people who study what is going on in economics and businesses, put out a paper that in 9 budget years, 30 percent of U.S. tax collections are going to go to just pay interest.

So, Mr. Speaker, you pay your $100 in income taxes, 30 percent of it just went to interest, and this is before the Senate or what we are trying to do in the budget reconciliation.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, I am going to show you the Senate document is completely unserious. It piles on stunning amounts of debt.

Mr. Speaker, does this scare anyone that in 9 budget years, 30 percent of your taxes you pay go to just cover interest?

Am I just an idiot for coming behind this mike every week and trying to show the math?

I get my brothers and sisters around here:

That was interesting, David. I am still going to vote for piling on more debt because, well, let's be honest, my voters want stuff, and I will be out of here by the time this blows up.

It probably doesn't blow up. What happens is you hit a moment where the money required to finance the debt like this consumes everything. You hit a moment.

I showed a chart a couple of months ago, 1 month ago, that showed if we went back to a six handle, so it is 6 percent interest rate on U.S. sovereign debt, which we were right up against in, what, the mid-, early 2000s, 2005 and 2006. We went to a 6 percent interest rate. About 45-plus percent of all U.S. taxes went just to cover interest. If we go to 9 percent, it is the majority of U.S. taxes go to cover just interest.

Part of that is because right now we are sitting what, $29, $30 trillion of publicly sold debt, so the actual debt is about 36.6 or something like that. We are in extraordinary measures so the actual debt number is a little distorted right now because we are borrowing internally and we have got to pay that all back. So watch interest rates pop when we finally raise the debt ceiling, and now we have to refund all that money back to the accounts plus the interest that they missed.

Mr. Speaker, you start to think about we have to refinance--and some of this gets refinanced two, three, four, or five times in a year because you are borrowing 30 days, 6 months, so we will refinance about $9 trillion, and we are going to issue about two, $2.2 trillion new debt.

Tiny movements of interest rates are really stressful. The Federal Reserve, what was it, 1 week or so ago, lowered their economic growth projections for the United States for the next 3 years. Just that lowering, I think they lowered us from like 2.1 to 1.7 percent this year, that is almost $200 billion of tax receipts in a single year.

Just that movement of lowering down economic growth projections is more than we are talking about trying to reduce spending if you take it over 10 years. It is like this place is incapable of understanding the scale of the trouble we are in.

I have tried to show this a couple of times. I am not beating up anyone. I am just asking people. I desperately want to extend the 2017 tax reform. I was on the committee. I am one of only four or five people still on Ways and Means who actually helped to write the 2017 tax reform, and those portions expire at the end of this year. I believe it is the absolute right thing to extend them. We should just pay for it, because when we don't pay for it--our base number, now you are going to see two differences here. We are using the next 10 years, so that takes us to 2035.

The Senate budget, they did a gimmick. They used 2034. We couldn't figure out why we couldn't get the numbers to match up. They played a game. They only used 9 budget years.

We are scheduled to borrow over $22 trillion over the next 10 years. If we do all the tax reform but don't do pay-fors, but add interest on it, that is another 6.8. If you basically add then a number of the President's additional priorities but don't pay for them, don't try to find a way, then you end up at $74 trillion of borrowing in functionally 9 budget years, 10 years.

I am going to show you a couple of boards here, Mr. Speaker. If you actually add it up, we are functionally talking about almost doubling what took us 240 years in debt to build up, we are talking about doubling it, well, close to doubling it, in the next 9 years. Have we lost our minds?

This is what you heard a number of us fussing about, Mr. Speaker. We can't figure out what the Senate was thinking.

Were they just in avoidance of we don't want to tell anyone, we are going to try to do something that should not even be that hard.

Remember $86 trillion in spending, the House was just trying to do 2, and I thought 2 was absolutely anemic. We should have covered all 4, $4.5 trillion.

One of the hardest votes I made in my decade-plus here was standing right there and swallowing saying: I am going to vote for this, but I am really unhappy because we are capable of doing more. And if we don't start to telegraph to the bond markets we are going to do something serious, at what moment does the bond market say: Screw these people. They are just not serious. They are consuming the world's capital. Let's charge them more.

Mr. Speaker, do you really think the United States with our exorbitant privilege of having the world's reserve currency and being the country that people want to come and do their business in, move to put their capital in, do you think that is our birthright?

Remember, Mr. Speaker, up until World War II it was Great Britain that had the world's reserve currency.

We are squandering our place in the world. People run around saying: Well, we need to push down the value of the dollar.

You have trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars around the world that are held by people, and you are going to push down the value of their holdings. Just understand every time someone says something like that, Mr. Speaker, you can actually start to see the full faith in the United States start to taper away.

We are about to squander this extraordinary privilege we have because the world trades in our currency. They need to buy our debt because they need to hold our currency because that is what they dot nominate in, that is what they trade in, and that is their peg.

If you look at this chart, Mr. Speaker, new Senate budget resolution, that is functionally another $8.5 trillion in deficits.

Here is extending the tax cuts in 2017, and then they made a margin there for additional spending, either it be some of the other priorities, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, those things, and then we have another $520 billion in additional spending.

Can you see this line here, Mr. Speaker?

You can't really see it. It is $3 billion of cuts. That is what they put on to their budget resolution. If we borrow $6 billion a day and their budget resolution is 3, actually our borrowing is actually a little more than $6 billion, it is 10, 12 hours of borrowing for an entire year, and this is for a 10-year budget. That is what they gave us.

Oh, but, David, when negotiations start, it will actually get filled in. Except we are negotiating--we put $1.5 trillion of savings with the hope of getting to 2, and they give us $3 billion. Remember, 1 trillion is 1,000 billion.

Mr. Speaker, you wonder why some of us are cranky when our colleagues down the Hall give us basically crap to work with.

Let's actually start to walk through what this actually means to us as a body. When we finished the last budget year, we were $28 trillion of publicly held debt. That is the debt we have to sell. When you hear someone say $37 trillion in debt, remember, Mr. Speaker, there is a portion of that we borrow internally. We reach in debt trust funds and other things. We borrow the money there. We pay interest on it.

People say: Oh, you borrowed my Social Security money. Yes, and they got actually a pretty good interest rate back.

Here is the baseline. Remember, Mr. Speaker, why is this not $22 trillion? It is because they were using a 2034 number. We caught them playing a game there. Then they added another $6.9 trillion on top of that, and what do you get, Mr. Speaker?

Here is what you get: Functionally when we all got elected this last November, the United States sovereign debt was around $28 trillion. When we finish this 10-year cycle, we are going to add another $28 trillion if we do what the Senate sent us. What took us 240 years to build up, we are going to double in the next 9 budget years, next 10 calendar years. Go team. That is the morality of this place.

People say: It is hard, David, to explain to people that we need to modernize, we need to change the way we deliver services, we need to use technology, and some programs we should just stop because they have been outdated for decades.

This is important here. This is without any of the disaster aid, this is without the economic potential slowdown, so tax receipts are coming down, and this is without a war. I mean just using actually what were optimistic numbers of the next 10 years' tax receipts, and what we are talking about doing right now is over the next 10 years doubling what took us 240 years to build up in debt.

Does anyone care about your retirement? Does anyone have kids? Think of this: It may be insane--my wife is my age--but I have a 9-year-old daughter and a 2\1/2\-year-old little boy we have adopted. Yes, they are brother and sister, so that explains it.

When my little boy is 24, 25 years old, every tax in the United States, every tax, has to double just to maintain baseline services. We are raising kids that would be part of the first generation to be structurally poorer than their parents because when you borrow money, it is a tax. It just means you are going to let someone else pay it with interest. It is not free money. It is a tax.

Sometimes taking on a certain amount of debt is what you have to do because the thing that Republicans and Democrats are terrified to tell our voters is, in the next 10 years, almost 100 percent of U.S. sovereign debt is interest and Medicare. It is demographics. We got old.

Mr. Speaker, one of the things going on in the entire Western world and also here in the United States, we don't have enough young people. If you look at our demographics--when you hear people talk about that, as soon as I say ``demographics,'' I know people turn the channel. There is a very good chance that, in the last 12 months, we had more deaths than births. It wasn't supposed to happen for 7.5 years, according to the Census Bureau, but there are a couple of datasets out there saying we may be up against already having more deaths than births.

Understand the way we deliver and finance the earned entitlements, the earned benefits. Today's worker pays for today's retirees. Last week, I showed a number of charts that, those numbers in 10, 20 years, it is you and your partner, you and your spouse and a little bit more, you have your own retired person you are paying for. That is not Republican or Democrat. It is demographics.

In 2033, so 7.5 years from now, the Social Security trust fund is empty. The law says you cut benefits. That would be a 21 percent cut, meaning in 8 years, we double senior poverty in America. Yet, if you talk about how you want to try to save Social Security and all the steps you have to do, all the inputs, because it turns out it is complicated, that side over there is going to run attack ads beating the crap out of you because you mentioned the words ``Social Security'' even though you are trying not to double senior poverty. That is how immoral this place is.

Remember, our math from last year is the first full year with the Social Security trust fund gone. Just the shortfall is over $600 billion. The scale of what we are talking about is brutal.

Mr. Speaker, you intend to be here for another decade, so you are going to get to deal with it. Every day we wait, that math gets more and more difficult.

Let's go back to the Senate's reconciliation budget. Here is what they gave us. They are using a 2024 gross debt number of $21 trillion. It is really $22 trillion, but we will let them because they made up some numbers in their budget.

Remember, they played some games on growth projections. Functionally, 32.7 percent of the next decade they gave us is additional borrowing. They basically decided that, over the next decade, let's add another third of debt.

What are we going to do? For those of us in the House who give these beautiful speeches that it is immoral to do this to our kids and crush people's future retirements, what are we going to do? Are we going to step up and say: Look, Republicans, we have priorities. The White House has priorities. We just have to find ways to finance them.

Are we that terrified to tell the truth?

A couple more of these, and hopefully, I won't have bored everyone to death. The Senate budget provides for $5-plus trillion in new deficits over the next 10 years. Then, you add in the additional spending. You start to go over. Even our budget reconciliation, I thought, was unacceptable.

It was one of the hardest votes I made, and I can't make up my mind how much I regret it. Sometimes, I really regret it. Some moments, I am hoping that the leadership team that said they would work with me-- because I believe we can find a trillion dollars in savings in just modernization. Remember, those inefficiencies are the people's business models, so you already see the hallways full of lobbyists trying to stop them.

Take a look here. Here is the debt we were going to add. Here is the additional debt the Senate adds. They made it functionally even double what we were talking about. Increasing the deficit results in higher interest costs. This is one of the things. We forget to tell people the truth.

There is a model out there--CBO actually ran it for me--saying if interest rates went up 1 percent on this policy baseline, and I am tired of talking about it, in the 30-year window, you broke the Congressional Budget Office's model. Let me say that again. We broke the CBO's model. It went over 250 percent. The problem is their computer only goes to 250 percent. It just hit it.

We are now pushing levels of debt so high we are breaking our budget models. Go team. Even with what the Senate just gave us over that 10- year period of time, stack on another $1.1 trillion of interest. We didn't buy anything. It is just interest.

The House proposed trying to get to $2 trillion in spending reductions. Dear heaven, I hope we can be tough enough and disciplined enough to get there. I have produced all sorts of documents. I am not one of those people giving speeches. I am showing up with binders of ways you can get there. Much of it isn't cuts. It is just using technology to change the way we deliver services.

The Senate, remember, a billion dollars and a trillion dollars are very, very different things. They functionally gave us $4 billion in spending reductions. That is what they thought we were worth.

Mr. Speaker, I know I am being a bit redundant on these boards, but I am trying to make a point. We sure give a lot of great speeches around here of the greatest threat to our Republic. It turns out to be the scale and the speed we are burying this society in debt.

Then, we hit moments like this, and we are going to happy talk our way through it. We are going to lie about things. Oh, we are going to make up a pretend growth rate, and that is going to produce $2.6 trillion. Our own reconciliation budget, there is going to be $1.7 trillion of additional cuts in discretionary, but you can't really do that in a reconciliation budget. It is completely unenforceable.

We should be ashamed of ourselves. Look at something like this. Understand the scale of what the Senate--you know, the 2017 tax reform, in its full score of debt, it turns out to have come in at less than half that. Take a look at the CARES Act, the American Rescue Plan, and all these things that we as Republicans railed against because of the data produced. This is the Senate reconciliation budget.

Do you see why I am angry or disappointed or just bewildered? These are tax cut extensions without trying to make any attempt to pay for it.

Remember how a moment ago I was telling you we start to break the budget models?

The driver of our debt ultimately is our demographics. The left will say: No, Republicans need to tax people more. Okay. Yet, we have shown the studies over and over that every Democratic tax that has actually been proposed and scored produces about 1.5 percent of GDP. The cuts we have talked about are about 1 percent of GDP. You have a big 2.5 percent there if we both did everything.

Mr. Speaker, we are scheduled to borrow about 7.3 percent of the economy this year. Does anyone see a math problem?

Why is it so hard around here to tell the truth? We say things that are just not mathematically true. My family used to have a saying: At some point, the math is going to win, and it always does.

Mr. Speaker, thank you for tolerating a bit of my rant, but it is my way of just saying how disappointed I am with even my friends. I have a couple of really good friends who are over in the Senate, and they were just desperate to avoid doing what was difficult, so they threw it in our lap.

Mr. Speaker, we as House Members get to make a decision: Are we going to do what is right and moral and what actually sets up the future for economic growth?

Very last point. Almost 2 months ago, the Congressional Budget Office did a model that says, if you want to maximize growth over the next decade, pay for as much of the tax extensions as you can. Do them because that will maintain consumption. You don't get a lot of growth from it. Where you really get the growth is the expensing side and continuing some of the business tax, the passthrough tax portions. Yet, if you pay for it, you don't screw up the capital stack, the money that you borrow for your small business, for your home, or for your car.

It looks like we are going to screw it all up. Let's not let that happen, Mr. Speaker.

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 9 o'clock and 21 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, April 8, 2025, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, forgive me as we get ourselves organized here. Our friends on the other side ended a little faster than we expected.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to do something a little dangerous. Have you heard the saying you should never go to bed mad? I think there should be another rule. You probably shouldn't come behind these microphones cranky, but let's have at it.

Mr. Speaker, I have been walking through numbers after numbers. For a decade now, I have come behind this microphone trying to walk through the scale of our borrowing, the scale of what is going on. The fact that most of it is driven by our demographics is giving a little bit of an excuse. Saying that makes it so it is not Democratic or Republican; it is just math. At Home, I represent the Scottsdale-Phoenix area. I am trying to figure out what is going on in our brothers and sisters on the left's heads.

I get it. They are cranky. As a former Senator that I sat next to from my State was sharing with me, one of the great frustrations of Democrats in my area is, for 15 years, they raised money and ran on marriage equality. Well, that is pretty much settled. They ran on the right to terminate pregnancies. Well, now that is in my State constitution.

What do they run on now? They run on rage, apparently.

I want to get this out of my head before I start to walk through some of the math. You have a country that is borrowing about $6 billion a day, about $70,000 a second. In a decade, there is data saying 30 percent of our tax receipts will go just to pay interest.

The wheels are coming off, and, instead, the brain trust of some of these folks--okay, I accept the tonal quality of some of the folks out of the White House isn't warm and cuddly, but do you go around neighborhoods, offices, and stick Nazi signs on their cars?

My wife drives a Tesla. We bought it a couple years ago. It is funny, at that time she got teased a bit: Oh, now you are driving an electric car. I thought you guys were really conservative.

Is this where your heads are at? Sticking Nazi things on people's windshields? There is no way they knew it

was my wife's car. She just has a little BASIS sticker, which is a charter school my kids go to.

This is really the quality of conversation discourse of communication that is going on with the leftwing activists in my community. It is not: Hey, David, we are concerned about Medicaid. Here are ideas how you can deal with the debt and deficit so we have the resources. No, because it is this really highbrow, intellectual discussion with our brothers and sisters on the other side, stick Nazi things on people's cars. This is what you have come down to? This is what is going on? Come on, people.

Look, I almost always start with this chart. You see what is in blue? It is defense and nondefense discretionary. It is--we expect it to be 26, 25 percent of spending. Last year, for every dollar this country took in in tax collections, we spent $1.39, but everything we vote on is 26 percent of the budget. Does anyone see a math problem?

We are going to get behind the microphones and have honest discussions of how we are going to save the country. If it is about programs the left cares about, help us figure out how to pay for it. Yet, when you actually look at some of the spending and debt--I think I have the chart. We actually did some of the math.

The crazy thing, one of my Democratic neighbors who makes a lot of money, he has a beautiful home: David, is it true that the President is even talking about going back to the 2017 tax rate for high-income earners?

Well, apparently the President said something like that on Friday.

Well, David, do you think that is fair?

This is a guy I know is a Democrat because he has Democratic signs even of my opponents in his front yard.

We did the basic math. If you actually were saying, let's just go back to the tax rate for the top earners back to 2017, it is $32.7 billion over 10 years. Okay, we can all divide that by 10, so let's call it $3.2 billion a year.

We borrow $6 billion a day. If that is $3.2 billion, you functionally bought yourself 12\1/2\, 13 hours' worth of borrowing for the entire year, and there is the mental breakdown. The left runs around and says: Raise taxes. Okay. We are going to borrow 7.3 percent of GDP, which is my latest number. Some of the other economists are around 7.2 percent of GDP. Either way, you can go to the Manhattan Institute and read the articles. It is from Democratic literature that if you take every tax they have that they have scored: Raise tax on capital gains, raise tax on income, raise tax on businesses, raise tax here.

I am sorry for talking so fast. Believe it or not, I live on coffee, and I need to apparently deal with my issue with a 12-step group for coffee.

However, the point I am going to, read the article. All those taxes when you do the economic adjustment is about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. This place lies. Excuse me, we make up math because it is really hard to tell people the truth. Almost every cut we talk about as Republicans is about 1 percent or so of GDP.

I am enraged right now because I am hearing down the hallway the Senate, they are talking about doing their reconciliation budget and setting a floor, saying: We are not going to allow the Senate to pass budget cuts of less than $3 billion. Huh?

I am upset that ours is so anemic at like $1\1/2\ trillion, but if they do $3 billion, it is functionally a half a day of borrowing. This is, yea, go team.

Look, at some point, the math is the reality. Why is it so hard to tell the truth? One of the other points I sort of want to make--and I stole this graphic from another group, thank you. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline law, not baseline policy. The law. I will explain that later.

Over the next 10 years, we are going to spend $86 trillion. We are talking about, at best, on the House budget resolution cutting $2 trillion over those 10 years. That is 2.3 percent. Oh, God, dear Heaven, you are butchering government. It is 2.3 percent. You are telling me that if we didn't grind through government, look at our programs, look at all the reports the GAO and others have given of the waste and fraud and just programs that haven't been authorized in decades, you couldn't find 2.3 percent, but it is easier to go stick this sort of crap on my wife's windshield than it is to do the intellectual work of saying, hey, we think we have more elegant ideas on how to reform spending in government, modernize it, make it better, faster, cheaper for the American people. No, we would rather burn things down.

Are we all proud of ourselves? The fact of the matter is $86 trillion in spending over the next 10 years, and at best our budget reconciliation is 2.3 percent of that spending.

This is the one I get complaints from everyone, so please understand, I am trying to offend everyone with facts and math. If you do all this--because we have a number of Senators over there saying: Don't cut any spending. They are Republicans.

When you hear someone say: We should do baseline policy, not the law. What they are basically saying is they don't want to have to deal with telling the truth of the math.

Let's take a look here. We finished this fiscal year $37.2 trillion in debt as a country. Baseline, we add $22 trillion of additional borrowing over the next 10 years. If we were to do the tax extensions, which we really need to protect the middle class and others by not raising their taxes, but if we were to do it without any offsets and then you add in the interest, that is about another $6.8 trillion of borrowing. Then if we were to take care of the President's requests, that is another $8 trillion, functionally saying we will borrow more in this 10-year period than we did in the previous 240 years. On the day we are elected we are going to double 240 years of borrowing.

Are we proud of ourselves? This is how we are going to save the Republic? We are going to continue to just bury it in debt because it is hard to tell people the truth about the math?

I have a caveat on this board. We don't have a subscription to Moody's Analytics. It is expensive. Congressional Research Service doesn't have one, but we found four or five articles talking about Moody's saying their model says in 2035, nine budget years from now, 10 years from now, 30 percent of all U.S. tax receipts--so you pay a dollar in taxes, 30 cents of it just paid interest.

Think about that. In 10 years, 30 percent. This year, it is 18 percent. Dear Heaven, there is a model out there that actually shows that if interest rates were to go up 1 percent in that nine budget years, it is like 45 percent of all U.S. tax receipts go just to interest.

We are playing a very dangerous game here, but at least we can stick things on Teslas and protest and be angry because God forbid we talk about actual math.

In 7\1/2\, 8 years from now, the Social Security trust fund is empty. The law says you cut benefits. That is a 21 percent cut. We double senior poverty in America. How many people do you think come behind these microphones are willing to have a conversation of how we are going to save it?

The first year, my math, actually the Joint Economic economists' math, the first year--so if the trust fund is gone in 2033, in 2034 it is over $600 billion just to make up that shortfall. That makes what we are talking about here in the budget resolution tiny. Those are only like $200 billion a year. We are talking $600 billion a year, and it grows just to cover the Social Security trust fund being gone.

That is 7\1/2\, 8 years from now. Are we going to talk about that, though? No, because they are going to run television ads beating the crap out of us because we tried to figure out a way to save it. The perversity of this place. They don't give a damn about someone's future, their poverty. It is about winning the next election and raising money on it.

We have got to tell the truth also what is going on in our country. You all saw the updates from the Census Bureau basically saying after next year if you zero out immigration, our number of prime-age workers starts to fall. As a matter of fact, there is a dataset. Now, we have been using 8 years from now because that was the official Census Bureau number.

There are a couple demographers out there who wrote articles a week ago saying, we may have already hit more deaths than births in America. I need you to process what that means. You have a system where Social Security, the financing of Medicare, financing of so many of our pensions relies on a

growth of the working population, particularly those prime-age workers.

If we are now entering a time of a shortage of young people--in 2027, not that long from now, we actually go negative of prime-age workers.

Maybe our committees should maybe invite in a demographer and talk about saying, is this Republican or Democrat? Starting in 1990, we started to roll over the number of children we had. Now we are paying the price for it. Now make these long-run programs, which are pay-as- you-go math, make them work.

This should be scaring the hell out of this place. Oh, no, David, we can't tell our voters that. It is harder to raise money when you tell them the truth of how hard the future is.

It is fixable. I have done presentation after presentation of adoption of technology, redesigning some of the programs where you don't cut anything, but you do really hard stuff. The problem is our hallways are crowded with people. Here it is all about the money. Understand, Congress is really about one thing: Money. The inefficiencies, the design failures for these bureaucracies, for the business models that make their living off government, that is their profit. They actually like the inefficiencies.

We came and showed some charts I think a week or two ago just our calculations that there could be $25 billion a year in duplicative MRIs, X-rays, ultrasound scans in Medicare. Does a duplicative scan when it is not necessary make someone healthier?

On the other hand, you could actually do something crazy, take the scan, attach it to one of these things, the little supercomputer in your pocket, and carry it around with you. There it is. Did that cut anyone's service? Mr. Speaker, $25 billion this year times 10? It is a quarter trillion dollars with one little reform.

The perversity of this place when I do that piece of legislation is that I will get attacks saying I am trying to cut benefits. No, I am trying to save the programs.

I guess it would cause the difficulty of math, having to design and put something on paper, and getting some of the economists to work through it, but that is our job. We are the board of directors of the biggest economy in the world, the biggest entity in the world. We are going to spend over $7 trillion this year. Of course, we are only going to take in $2 trillion in taxes, meaning we may borrow about $2.1 trillion, $2.3 trillion this year to keep the wheels on.

The scale of this should be scaring the hell out of people. Look, the demographic curve, when we start to think right now, in 2024, we have 2.9 people working for every person receiving their benefits. A decade from now, that is going to fall to 2.7, 2.6. Then, it really starts to crash. When we start to look at the 30-year window, we are down to about 2.4. That may not mean much to you, but trying to make these numbers work, it can be done. It is just hard.

You are going to hear people come behind these microphones, give these beautiful speeches of how they want to save the Republic, how we care about the future, how we care about our kids, how we care about your retirement, and then we will do nothing that is actually hard. It is just immoral. It is just absolutely immoral.

I try over and over. When I am doing these, I am trying to do a better job of bringing examples of where we can save.

I am going to admit DOGE and those, I am fascinated with the data mining and those things. I know the quality of the gentleness or gentility of the communications. They have a hard, rough edge. The fact of the matter is a lot of the craziness actually wasn't coming from them. It was coming from people in the bureaucracy trying to throw out stuff to make it more difficult and just really anger people. Then, the government unions have to try to light things on fire, so disharmony.

We have five major databases in the Federal Government. Is it Republican or Democrat to just build a world where those databases would talk to each other? If there is potential of $100 billion a year in misallocations and fraud and these things, and you could fix it by just having the databases talk to each other and know this is a fraudster, this person isn't with us anymore, they have gone on to their reward, but somehow they are out here asking for an SBA loan, is that Republican or Democrat? It is just technology. Yet you have protesters out there saying we can't allow the databases to talk to each other. Have we lost our minds?

I want to do this just as an example because this one just burns me. Between Christmas and New Year's, I went up and spent 3 or 4 days up in the Navajo Nation. I took my little 9-year-old daughter. Yes, I have a 9-year-old and a 2\1/2\-year-old. That is the definition of pathologically optimistic when you are 63 and have a 2\1/2\-year-old. It is both funny and true.

Guess what? We have spent $42.5 billion for broadband equity. Remember, we always like to add that word ``equity,'' except no one has gotten broadband.

The Tribal president of the Navajo Nation and a number of the communities called chapter houses basically said screw this. I am not willing to wait another 20 years. You know what they did, something just crazy? Instead of being patient and waiting for us to spend billions of more dollars and run a piece of wire, they went out and stuck up a satellite dish. Forty-eight hours later, for several hundred dollars, they had broadband for the whole neighborhood, for the whole what we call chapter house.

Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just the adoption of technology, except the lobbyists who run around here wanting billions of subsidies for something they are never going to connect get really upset every time I do this board.

Do we care? Does this place care enough to do the hard things, to actually do the math, the creativity.

Last week, I came here with the MedPAC report. It is like this. I have no idea how many Members have actually bothered to read it. Yes, I understand there are some anomalies, but they are rounding errors compared to this. I think it had that $84 billion was spent last year in the differential between Medicare part D and Medicare part A. That is Medicare Fee-for-Service and Medicare Advantage. It was supposed to be at 95 percent. If anyone wants to go back and do their history, in 2005, when they started Medicare Advantage, if you do that basic math, that is $104 billion a year.

How about if Republicans and Democrats got together and said we are going to fix this, that we are going to get the capitation program to actually work the way it is supposed to, that we are going to have the providers of services actually make money because they help our brothers and sisters who are in their retirement years earning their healthcare benefits, helping them be healthier? They get rewarded by having their population be healthier, not by running around scoring with sicker. Yay, everyone wins.

What would happen with that several hundred billion dollars over a decade? That is not a cut. It is actually lining up incentives. Instead, it is just easier to run around and scream stories that they are going to cut things.

Let's pay people, so I have hospitals and other groups paying people to fly out here, tell stories, and they have no idea what they are talking about because we make crap up, once again, because everything is about the money.

The last board and the one that always seems to upset people because they don't want to know the truth, the Congressional Budget Office-- this one is a year out of date. The numbers are actually apparently worse, but we haven't had the update yet. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next 30 years our country borrows $124 trillion. Now, I have to tell you, this number when we get our updates could be much worse. If you look at their data, they actually have discretionary, the part we vote on, growing slower than tax receipts. That has a $9 trillion positive over the 30 years, but Medicare is $87.2 trillion in the hole. Social Security is $36.8 trillion in the hole over those 30 years.

It turns out, even the next decade, almost 100 percent of the U.S. sovereign debt growth is interest and Medicare. There is nothing we can do about interest. We can do some things to incentivize going out on the curve so we are not as fragile to communicate

to the bond markets because the bond markets are basically about to run this country. If you have to sell $6 billion a day, $60,000, $70,000 every second, maybe you need to pay attention to your bankers who you are having to sell your debt to, to communicate to those debt markets we are serious and looking at ways to use technology, better models when obesity is the single biggest expense in our society. Yes, we are not supposed to say that. Mr. Speaker, please don't tell anyone.

Last year, the Joint Economic economists calculated $9.1 trillion additional of healthcare spending. Is it moral with what we do in food policy, nutritional support, how we deliver healthcare? Maybe the concept of helping our brothers and sisters live healthier when 31 percent of Medicare spending is diabetes--33 percent of all healthcare overall is just diabetes.

Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just trying to get your policy alignment to the fact we are buried in debt and getting older as a society. I think in a decade, 23 percent of our population is 65 and up. We now know that we are having this remarkable shortage of young people. We are already potentially on the cusp of having more deaths than births in our country.

In a couple of weeks, we are trying to roll out a STEM-based, talent- based immigration bill because for the economy to grow and stabilize, we don't have a choice. People say, David, you are not allowed to talk about immigration. People won't understand it. Well, they understand the economic survival of you still getting your benefits when you are a senior. We can make this work.

Mr. Speaker, we are now starting to run into articles saying that we are putting the extraordinary privilege. What are the two extraordinary privileges America has? Our currency--the world borrows in our currency, meaning the fact of the matter is when we sell debt, there is a demand to hold U.S. dollars denominated. Then, the second thing is people want to live here. They want to invest here. They want to be educated here. They want to be entrepreneurs here.

Mr. Speaker, we are now running into multiple articles saying some of the things we are doing, particularly our debt stack which is putting our extraordinary privilege of the country at risk. It doesn't have to be this way.

A couple of smart economists say we have 3 or 4 more years. At that point the debt gets so hard to manage. The Federal Reserve last week took us from a 2.1 GDP down to 1.7. Just that movement is almost $200 billion a year in tax collection. Just that GDP reduction the Federal Reserve calculated for the next 3 years, taking that out to 10, that is more money than everything in our budget reconciliation.

The lack of understanding of the inner dynamics of our debt, the interest, and these dollars terrifies me because there is a path. There is a path for this to work, Mr. Speaker, but we are living on a razor's edge because we are not doing the hard work.

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

Mr. Speaker, this one is going to be a little thick, so put on your economics hat, and let's have a ride here.

On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office responded to a request I made in my capacity as chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. I was trying to get an answer to whether the economists' projections from the Joint Economic Committee are correct. You have to understand that there is actually a weird little battle going on here between the Senate and those of us in the House and those of us on Ways and Means.

A number of our brothers and sisters over in the house of lords have decided that we have current tax policy from the 2017 TCJA, the tax reform, which I was on the committee and was one of the people who helped author that, but they expire at the end of this year. They want to play this game and say that we are just going to pretend that there is no cost, that the law is not the law, that the policy is the law. This is when you hear people say, current policy baseline, just do it.

We have been trying to do the math. The Congressional Budget Office, a couple of months ago, actually did a projection saying that if we want to maximize economic growth over the next 10 years, what you do is extend those tax cuts but pay for them. The basic idea is that by paying for them, you don't have government gobbling up the capital stack that is used to finance growth, to finance business, to finance when you want to buy a truck or a new home or your business wants to expand.

We got an updated letter from the Congressional Budget Office. Apparently, it didn't make me particularly popular with a few people, which actually provides me a perverse joy. If you read it, in the 30- year window, it looks like if we do all this without an attempt to pay for, if we drive up interest rates by 1 percent, in the 30-year window, it looks like you break CBO's budgetary model because you hit 250 percent of debt to GDP.

If I am reading one of the paragraphs here correctly, they are basically saying our computer model doesn't go beyond 250 percent. The point is, you have a government that--here is our baseline. Let's see if I can make this make sense. At the end of this fiscal year, $37.2 trillion is going to be the country's debt. Over the next 10 years, we are expected to borrow an additional $22 trillion.

On top of that, if you play with these folks that say we don't really need to pay for things, just keep it going, that is about another $5 trillion, $5.5 trillion, another $1.3 trillion in interest. Then, if we were to be able to make the President's wish list without finding offsets or modernizations--and I am going to walk through a whole series of things where it is not cuts. It is modernization, legalizing the technology that disrupts the costs that makes our society better, happier, more efficient. If you were to do all those things without an attempt to pay for them, without an attempt to adopt policy to modernize the way we deliver services, in the previous 240 years, we borrowed about $28 trillion from the public. That is from investors around the world, from your pension system, from everything. It would mean, over the next 10 years, it pretty much would double. We are going to double it or come close to doubling it in the next 10 years.

That is the perversity of what you have going on around here, yet the people coming behind these microphones keep having a wish list and want more stuff and more stuff. The people walking through our hallways here are in our offices demanding more stuff. They want more carve-outs in the tax code, barriers to entry to their competition, or just another check.

I am going to walk through just how dangerous the game we are playing right now is because when you look at these charts--this is online. Just go on CBO from last Friday and read it for yourself. It is not a hard read. Why are my brothers and sisters so terrified to tell the truth to the public?

You have a country--I am going to show the charts--that in about 7.5 years, we have more deaths than births. You have a country that when we get out of the extraordinary measures--remember, right now, we are borrowing from our different funds because we are up against the debt ceiling. We may be borrowing almost $70,000 every second of every day.

For those of you who turn to me and say, ``David, I demand you balance the budget,'' I can do it tomorrow. Let's see, if I use the 2024 numbers, for every dollar we took in tax collections, we spent $1.39. Tell me the 39 cents of the government you want me to cut.

The problem with that math is, when you look at the charts, do you see what is in blue? That is everything a Member of Congress gets to vote on, defense and nondefense. Your only problem is that it is 26 percent of the spending.

If you ask a Member of Congress right now to balance the budget, we can do it. We can do it. You have to get rid of all defense, all nondefense discretionary. That is basically the Park Service, the EPA, all the agencies, and then tell me what portion--because you have to pay your interest or you blow up the world economy--tell me what portion of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other things you want to hack away at.

The reality of it is, in this fiscal year, our projection is up till the recent--now, we are starting to downgrade our growth. For every dollar we take in tax collections, we are going to spend, functionally, $1.36.

Do you understand how screwed--actually, that is a technical, economic term--we are when we don't tell the truth about the math? It is not fixable, but it is possible to stabilize. We can stabilize this. We just have to think and do things that are hard.

So often around here, the thinking part is complex, and it is hard when we have to go home and tell our constituents the truth about math.

Remember, the math will win. How many of you have heard about people out protesting? They are terrified there are going to be cuts. Okay, let's actually have a moment of truth about math.

This was baseline. Over the next 10 years, we were going to spend $86 trillion. Next 10 years, CBO baseline, we are going to spend $86 trillion. The reconciliation budget had--what?--$1.3 trillion in cuts, and if we got lucky and did everything, you might get to $2 trillion. So, we are talking about $2 trillion in cuts over 10 years on $86 trillion of spending.

That is what the left over here is losing their minds over because they need something. They have lost the working middle class. They have lost so many American voters because they no longer trust them because they have spent decades not telling them the truth about the math.

It is not hard, except the problem is 30 percent of that is borrowed. People are losing their minds that we are trying to cut $2 trillion on $86 trillion of spending. That is what this place has become. This place has become a clown show of math.

Once again, I need to disclose I have had a stunning amount of coffee today, so forgive me if I am a bit cranky.

We were trying to do projections of what our interest coverage would be this year. Let's see if I can make this make sense.

How many of you saw on Thursday or Friday that the Federal Reserve actually lowered economic growth for this year and, functionally, for the next 3 years? They lowered us down to 1.7, I think. Just that lowering, if you do the math on the back of an envelope, it is not that hard. It is just a little less than $200 billion of loss of tax receipts. If you plug that into our committed spending, it basically means what we are going to have to borrow--you may have interest this year of $1.1 trillion and a borrow this year when the economy is fairly good of $2.2 trillion. One of my folks has a number that it is up to 2.3, but let's stick with the $2.2 trillion of borrowing in a year when the economy is good.

Think about this. We are functionally going to spend about $7 trillion this fiscal year. We are going to take in about $5 trillion, and this is in a time when the economy is good. We are not in a pandemic. We are not in a war. We are not in a recession.

Understand that when you take some of these charts of interest exposure into the future--there is one of my charts that shows, in 9 budget years, interest, just interest, is over $2 trillion a year.

Why aren't we running around terrified here? I mean, if you care about your retirement--or someone that is crazy, like my wife and me, we are older parents. I have a 2\1/2\ year old and a 9-year-old. You do realize for my 2\1/2\ year old, when he turns 23, 24, or 25, every tax in the United States has to have been doubled just to maintain baseline services. This is the morality of this place.

Look, the last slide I am going to pound on, it is called interest fragility. We had Ray Dalio in one of our offices. Those of you who don't know him, please look him up. He is the Bridgewater CEO, founder. I think he has now stepped down from that. It is the biggest hedge fund in America. He happens to have 50 years of being one of the hyper- experts on interest rate markets and debt markets. He was saying: You guys are screwed. You guys have a really interesting problem.

The United States and other countries are borrowing, bingeing on debt. The United States borrows about 40 percent of all the world capital that goes into sovereign loans. His argument is: Our problem is, there are not enough savings in the world. We are consuming more money; it is us, China, Europe. Now Germany is going into the debt markets as they are raising their spending caps.

What happens in the world when there is a shortage of borrowable money? Remember, every day when we borrow at $6 billion a day that debt has to be sold. Most of it is actually financed domestically, it is in this pension, it is in this bank. And then there are the foreigners, except the foreigners have been lowering their U.S. debt because they are having to finance their own governments.

You start to look at our interest payments, and there is this concept called a term premium. When we make the bond markets nervous, we pay higher interest rates. So the clown show will go around and say: Well, let's just not pay our debts. Hey, we are up against the debt ceiling. Let's just not raise it.

Okay. Fine. I mean, enjoy your decade of world depression because when you collapse the U.S. currency, you also collapse the world. Stability is our goal. Stability is how you minimize interest rates. If you are financing $37 trillion and another $22 trillion, plus whatever else we are going to stack on top of that over the next decade, you really want the debt markets to think we are acting like adults.

In many ways, when you look at these charts and you see our interest coverage and how fragile we are, the bond market basically may be the greatest influence on this government.

However, how many people have you seen come behind these microphones and talk about debt?

Yet, the one thing we are not allowed to tell our voters, our public, our staff, each other, is the truth about what drives debt. Over the next 10 years, almost 100 percent of U.S. sovereign debt issued will be to cover interest and Medicare.

In 7\1/2\, let's call it 8 years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. That first year we have to make a decision, are we going to let the poverty of seniors double when they get a 21 percent cut in their checks? Or how much are we going to raise taxes?

Are we actually going to do something complex to fix the system and make all the adjustments and those things?

Except the moment you actually talk about saving Social Security, they have a consultant on the Democratic side writing an attack ad because they care so much more about winning the next election than the morality of not doubling senior poverty.

The brain trust runs around and says: Oh, just raise the cap. Okay. Except you just covered 38 percent of the shortfall. What do you want to do with the rest?

Mr. Speaker, 38 percent of the shortfall is our math, meaning that first year--so if the trust fund of Social Security is empty in 2033, 2034 the full year, I think $608 billion was our estimate on that first year.

Think about that. Think about that scale. Then you hold up a chart like this. This is CBO's number for the next 30 years. Nondefense and defense discretionary actually have a positive balance, meaning they grow slower than tax receipts. Medicare and Social Security create $124 trillion of debt during those 30 years.

It is not Democrat. It is not Republican. It is just demographics. We have

a saying in our office: debt, deficits, and demographics. Deal with the facts. Deal with the math. Tell the truth.

This place has been so busy spinning stories, though. We were listening to the Democrats a few minutes ago tell stories: There is an enemy out there. No, these things, we can fix them. We can stabilize it. However, so many care so much more about winning the next election.

The point I am trying to make is: You look at the next 10 years, okay, there is growth. Mr. Speaker, 24 percent of the growth in spending over the next 10 years is interest, 31 percent of the growth in spending over the next 10 years is Social Security and disability, 28 percent of the growth in spending over the next 10 years is Medicare, other mandatory and discretionary grows about 13 percent, but a portion of that is actually, I think, defense and other things in that. The fact of the matter is your government is an insurance company with an army.

Now, here is the other part that makes doing the math so incredibly difficult. Every year there are fewer workers, fewer working-aged people to support our older population. This really seems to upset people, but understand, look at our fertility, look at our demographic charts.

Go back to 1990, the year we started to roll over. There is a dataset out there--I don't believe it yet; I haven't had the chance to try to prove it--saying even last year we may have had more deaths than births. Okay. You want us to finance pay-as-you-go systems, which is Social Security and Medicare, at a time when we have a shortage of young people. There is a way to make it work.

Are you going to allow people like me, people who are here willing to think to be able to refine the process, to modernize?

Look, we will try to touch on this if I have time. Here is the MedPAC report from last week. A whole bunch of apparently really smart people examined Medicare and walked up and down through the growth in spending and what we could do to modernize it and use technology to stabilize the prices. On some things, particularly on Medicare Advantage, they have hundreds of billions of dollars in here that wouldn't require cutting any service, any access to healthcare. It is just using technology and modernizing.

You have got to understand, when we start to look at a chart like this, we are functionally here. Let's call it 2024. We have 2.9 in the population--there is another chart that is going to scare you even more--for every one person receiving benefits. Then you see, it gets down to 2 people in society.

I am going to bounce around just a little bit on some of these.

When you actually look at the Social Security trustees' data, something is happening out there where some of these numbers may be much worse than we expected because it turns out people actually are taking retirement earlier than we expected, meaning the participation in the labor force is actually starting to get soft on the high-skill populations, higher income population.

Actually we had a debate on this one about how upset this would make people. Here we are, we are going to start the 2026 budget year. We are actually supposed to be working on that budget. Without immigration, working-aged people will start to disappear from the labor force. You go: Huh? Huh?

Basically, 2026 is the last year where the age population is functionally stable. Then the next year you start to actually fall in your numbers of working-aged people in the population. It is demographics. It is not Republican or Democrat, it is just math.

One more chart of this, and then I am going to give you the one that scares me the most. This is Social Security and disability benefits. Here we functionally are, and let's get about to where we are. Right now if you add both those programs together, you have 2.67 workers for every beneficiary. At one point, it gets all the way down to just a little over two people working for every beneficiary.

If you actually do the big chart, which is how many people are actually in the labor force compared to how many people are receiving benefits. Remember, I am not talking about changing people's benefits. I am talking about dealing with the reality of our demographics and ways we can deal with it, particularly when we start talking about healthcare.

Let's take a look at 2023. Functionally, for every 100 people we had working in America, we probably had 36, 37 people receiving benefits. Remember, the whole concept of labor force participation. I have done presentations here about, functionally, the 7 million--that was my old number--of prime-age males that are missing from the labor force.

What do we do as a society to make it possible to encourage our brothers and sisters who are not working to actually get into the labor force? Yet, my colleagues on the left say: Oh, you are going to have work requirements. You can't do that.

If you don't do it, tell me how I make these numbers actually work.

That is some of the miserable stuff. Let's actually sort of walk through how I make it work. Okay?

I have come here and done a presentation showing that if this is our demographics, we are going to have to be willing to have a brutally honest conversation.

Let me walk through a concept. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, what was the world conflict? It was for hydrocarbons, oil. The previous decade, much of the world conflicts were for rare earth materials. I will argue, we are in a decade right now where the conflict is for smart people, people with skill sets. Yet the United States has barely shown up for the battle.

When you hear President Trump talk about the insanity that we educate people and then send them home to compete with us, the President is absolutely right.

We have a whole presentation we have done here showing a talent- based, a STEM-based immigration system that turns out to be remarkably beneficial for tax receipts, for economic growth, and for prosperity. It turns out you need that as one of an entire unified theory of things to do.

I want to walk through just a handful of quirky things. When you hear people talk about DOGE and how upset they are, one of the primary things that is being discussed is that the United States has a handful of huge databases. The problem is, they don't talk to each other.

You saw the story last week of, hey, we just looked at some of the Social Security death files. The oldest person in America is, what, 114 years old? We took people over 114 years old and then wondered how they were getting loans at the Small Business Administration.

Forgive my math. I am doing this from memory from last week. There were like 3,300 people who were over 114 years old who got SBA loans. Mr. Speaker, $300 million in loans. Can you believe not a dollar has been paid back?

What would happen if there was a way to eliminate waste and fraud without an army of auditors, without an army of bureaucrats? It turns out it is technology. You actually have to start having your data talk to each other. Is it really that scary? The government already has the data. Why can't they bounce against each other saying, hey, this person is on the death file. Maybe they are not actually applying for a Small Business Administration loan.

Mr. Speaker, some of our Democrat colleagues remark that, oh, waste and fraud doesn't really exist except for the billions of dollars we are identifying.

Let's walk through a couple of other frustrating things. We provided $42.5 billion for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. Stick with me on this one. We have spent over $42.5 billion to get broadband to communities. Not a single community, not a single house has been connected to that broadband; but we spent $42 billion doing it.

Between Christmas and the new year, I took my little girl out on the Navajo Reservation. For those of my colleagues who are not from the Southwest, the Navajo Reservation is immense. It is bigger than many States.

We chased around, and we met with a number of people who said they were tired of waiting. They weren't going to wait another decade to get that wire or that fiber, whatever it was, to their chapter or to their community so they could get broadband. They were doing something crazy. They ordered a satellite dish, and 48 hours later they had broadband. They were sharing it with

WiFi repeaters. For a few hundred dollars, they were fixing something that was going to take another decade and how many hundreds of millions of dollars.

Think about adopting technology. Is the morality that we want to spend lots of money to actually subsidize these people who should be running wire; or do we actually want these communities to have telehealth, tele-schools, and tele-monitoring of their lives to help them? Adopt the technology. Make it so it is actually useable. Instead of saying we will never get that wire out to our rural communities, put up a satellite dish.

Why does this scare people? It is because there is no good lobbyist running around here saying: Have ever thought about doing this? What we do is archaic.

Another example is millions of taxpayers call the IRS for help. Two- thirds don't reach anyone. Think of this. The auditors of the IRS last year put out a report that only 31 percent of phone calls were getting answered at the IRS.

Folks are trying to fill out a tax form and give the government money. They call and call and can't get the phone answered. There was a little pilot program done. It was an experiment. Let's actually do a chat, like a ChatGPT, that picks up the phone 24 hours a day, will stay on the phone as long as the caller needs, will help them fill out the tax forms, will actually email or text the PDF of the form, and maybe even send the YouTube video on how to fill out the form.

Why does this scare the hell out of the IRS? It is because the IRS is the second most unionized bureaucracy in the Federal Government. It turns out the union loses its mind when we start talking about technology to take care of the American people. Wouldn't we like to pick up the phone and call, whether it be the Social Security Administration or the IRS, and get the phone answered?

How do I get my brothers and sisters here to help us adopt this technology? I have a handful of articles here using AI to functionally crash parts of the cost of delivering healthcare. Here is one about actually making the environment much cleaner, much faster, much cheaper, and actually identifying bad acts with almost no bureaucracy. Here we have ability to fix our logistics.

We live in a time of miracles. When we start to say just our baseline, just a couple of the pieces of legislation we have, we think we can get $100 billion a year just using technology and healthcare.

How about another $100 billion to $150 billion to actually step into supply chains and these others? With the adoption of technology, we can crash parts of the price of this government. Is that a cut? Is that a chain saw? It is just doing things that aren't scary.

Mr. Chairman, the last one I will talk about is in the MedPAC report. The majority of Medicare recipients in America now use Medicare Advantage. For those of us in the Scottsdale-Phoenix area, we actually have a much higher penetration.

According to the report and even with the adjustment of the portion of the population that only takes the Medicare part A, which is the hospital portion, the trust fund, and which also runs out in 12 or 13 years, it is 20 percent more expensive than fee-for-service.

If we take it back to the fact that when Medicare Advantage was designed and it was supposed to come in at 95 percent of fee-for- service, do that delta. That is approaching $100 billion a year.

Mr. Speaker, what if we got together--and we have been working on this for months and months--and we said we need to align the incentives with the insurance providers, with the healthcare providers, and with the person receiving the benefits. How about if we make the profit by helping the population be healthier?

A capitated model or something of that nature, which actually I think a capitated model makes the most sense, is here is our cost; and we make more money by helping our population be healthier than what is happening today, according to this report, saying we sign the public up and then we spend lots of time and resources to score them as sicker and sicker because we get spiffs the sicker we score them.

Is that a cut? In today's world, when we know diabetes is 31 percent of all Medicare spending, let's get the incentives aligned so it cuts the cost, cuts the debt, but we end up with a healthier country.

There are solutions here. The problem is it requires doing difficult things and thinking. I beg my brothers and sisters. Let's go do the hard stuff. If you have ideas, bring them to us. We are working our hearts out right now on everything from technology to auditing the Pentagon because we had our eighth or ninth year where the Pentagon was not auditable. We are trying to design a talent-based immigration system that maximizes economic growth from tax receipts for the country.

How about saving Medicare Advantage for everyone who loves it but in a way where it also will provide hundreds of billions of dollars of savings? We can do this. We can do this. We just have to do hard things.

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 5 o'clock and 38 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, March 26, 2025, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Mrs. Fischbach).

Congratulating Moorhead Spuds Boys' Hockey Team

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try something this evening. The thesis I am going to try to sell tonight is that data is substantially a solution for us. What? I am going to walk through a number of things that just came out in the new Med Pack report. I have only just started reading it, but there are a couple of interesting things.

I am going to try to walk through the reality of what drives debt and deficits like I do every week. I am going to try to walk folks through some of the actual math instead of some of the hysteria that is modern politics where we make crap up because we don't tell the total details, and let's see if we can actually make any progress here on sort of the intellectual capital of this place.

So just off the top of my head, Mr. Speaker, you have seen the stories of the butchering of Federal employees.

Okay, let's walk through just some of the math. You have got 3 million Federal employees. If 77,000 have decided to take the early retirement offer, let's see, that is, dear heaven, I should have calculated this before, is 3 percent, 3 percent of the Federal population.

I have a chart we are working on, it did not make my stack, to show the growth in the number of Federal employees in the last decade. It is a little rich how many folks run around here and they want more spending for their projects, so they don't want this or they don't want that, but at the same time, they are lined up at our doors and want more spending.

Mr. Speaker, if I could come to you and say: Guys, we are going to try to find a way to make the way we deliver services much more efficient and much more rational. So let's actually sort of walk through a couple of the boards.

This is one we start with a lot. The number now is a bit more dour. This board is 1 year out of date, but I didn't want to spend the money to reprint it.

Mr. Speaker, do you see the blue portion?

This fiscal year, about 25 percent of all the spending is in the blue. That is what we get to vote on. That is military. That is what we call nondefense discretionary.

We borrow about, let's see, last year for every dollar we took in in taxes, we borrowed or we spent $1.39.

So functionally, 39 cents this year, it will be a little better, we think it will only be about 36 cents for every dollar we take in in taxes. So what that basically means is everything you and I as Members of Congress vote on is borrowed.

However, we have this reconciliation budget. It is one of the few times where we actually get to talk a little bit about what is in the red, but we don't get to touch net interest. Interest is interest, and some of the math coming in right now says that interest this year, this fiscal year, could be about 1.1 to 1.2. I actually am a bit more dour, $1 trillion, making interest functionally the second highest expense in the Federal Government.

Until this reconciliation budget makes it through, defense is like number four on spending, so Social Security, interest, Medicare, Defense.

Take a look at what we are even allowed to talk about, Mr. Speaker, in a reconciliation budget. You know why we do the reconciliation budget, it is so we can get around the 60-vote rule in the Senate. So we are doing all this dancing and stuff because of the Senate rules, but we can't touch net interest and we are not allowed to go near Social Security.

So think about that, Mr. Speaker. That area on that last chart I just showed you that was red, the majority of it we are not even allowed to talk about it. We can't touch it, and we can't do anything about it. So when you see the authorization, Mr. Speaker, that is actually why committees like Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce have such a lift.

So what happens if I come to you, Mr. Speaker, and start to say: You have this country that is binging on debt.

We are in extraordinary measures right now, so some of the daily debt calculations are a little screwed up, but before we went through extraordinary measures, we were in the 60, $70,000 per second, every day, every second. If my math is correct and we come in about $2.2 trillion, maybe $2.3 trillion of borrowing this year, then we have to start thinking about that.

So we take in about $5 trillion in tax receipts, we are going to spend about $7 trillion, meaning about 7.25 percent of the entire economy is borrowed this year, and if we don't get our act together, in 9 budget years it could be 9.2 percent of the entire economy is borrowed.

I just wanted to make the point because I have come here in the past, interest rates have fallen dramatically in the last couple of weeks which, remember the seesaw, we have talked about the seesaw, when the economy is really strong or there is a shortage of capital to borrow, interest rates go up meaning United States pays a lot more in debt servicing. When interest rates go down, it typically means the expectations of the economy are slowing down meaning our tax receipts fall. So the middle of the seesaw stays the same.

I saw some people getting giddy: Look, interest rates are down.

It also means actually some of our modeling in the future quarters of tax receipts also are starting to fall now. So there is no free option anymore. However, Mr. Speaker, you have seen some of the discussions. Ray Dalio has been out there talking about the heart attack of debt and what happens to other countries and the history of that going back, I think in his book he is going back a couple thousand years.

Here is functionally the world borrowing. China is borrowing about 17 percent of what we call the available capital for sovereign borrowing. Japan is borrowing about 10 percent. We are borrowing 40 percent. We are about 25 percent of the world's GDP, but we are borrowing 40 percent of the money that goes to sovereigns. Mr. Speaker, you have to understand the scale, the binging on debt.

Mr. Speaker, when I get to the very last board, I am going to show again the chart that just seems to upset people, but it is math. Over from today through the next 30 years, discretionary spending, according to the CBO's 30-year model, actually ends up with a growth slower than tax receipts, but it is Social Security and Medicare. It is demographics. It is not Republican, and it is not Democrat, it is demographics.

Where it becomes partisan is where it is the unwillingness to tell the truth about the math and then actually the creativity of how we disrupt the cost.

How do you actually find some of these things?

This chart is a little awkward. I would have designed it a little differently, but sometimes you are running around.

The point we are trying to make is here was the effective interest in 2014 to the United States. Now all of a sudden we are up here, and the actual market rate we expect in the future to actually continue to consume, meaning interest is our great fragility in this country.

I have told the comment many times that at our current rate of borrowing, we have almost put the bond market in charge of this country because, Mr. Speaker, if you have to bring hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to market every month, you screw with your banker. In many ways that bond market now is our banker.

For my brothers and sisters on the left who often want to attack the tax reform of 2017, attack tax receipts, I have done presentation after presentation behind this microphone using the stuff from the Manhattan Institute that basically shows if we do all the Democrats' tax hikes and then do the economic adjustments, often from Democrat groups, you get about 1.5 percent of GDP in new tax receipts.

Okay, maybe we are going to be pushed against the wall and have to do that, but we are borrowing over 7 percent of GDP. So it is like on Social Security, it is common that the refrain is we will just raise the cap. Okay, in 2033, the Social Security trust fund is empty.

Our brothers and sisters on Social Security will take a 17 to 20 percent cut. We double senior poverty in America. When someone says: Well, just raise the cap, our model is in that next year, 2034, raising the cap only covers about 38 percent of the shortfall, Mr. Speaker, and you have wiped out the cash and other things you actually need to also save Medicare, which actually that trust fund runs out 3 years later.

So one of the reasons for this chart is trying to demonstrate something very simple that back when before TCJA, the 2017 tax reform, the actual projection of what tax receipts would be, so before the tax changes, we are right on track.

Do you see the weird blip there, Mr. Speaker? That was a remarkable amount of spending that happened during the pandemic. We actually just went back to nominal.

So what happens here? What happens when there is this intense hunger to play this weird blame game instead of being willing to tell our voters the truth?

The vast majority of debt this decade will be interest and healthcare costs, mostly Medicare.

So one more contribution to the increase in spending from 2024 to 2035, interest, so remember why this chart is important. Let's put it in perspective.

Baseline, this is actually with the taxes going up at the end of this year, just baseline. So sort of following current law, not the clowns who actually run around and say: Let's just avoid the law and let's just pretend what we spend we spend.

The law says we are going to borrow $22 trillion over the next 10 years. That is baseline.

Here is the mix of that borrowing: 24 percent of that will be interest of the additional borrowing; old-age, survivors, Social Security will be 31 percent; discretionary 13; other mandatory 4 percent; and Medicare 28 percent.

Now, the fact of the matter is old-age, survivors, and Medicare have their own trust funds except for the fact that within that 10-year window, at least, this trust fund is now empty.

Are we allowed to talk about it? Are we allowed to do the moral thing here and maybe stop the doubling of senior poverty?

Yet, the fact of the matter is maybe I am an idiot for getting behind the microphone and actually mentioning the word Social Security because there is someone writing an attack ad on me right now for trying to save it. It is just the sickness of this place.

So let's actually walk through a little bit.

I saw a number of folks who actually have been attacking DOGE and the attempts to use data.

Understand, Mr. Speaker, that some of the communication skills are haphazard, but if I came to you today and said: Let's strip any partisanship, we need to find waste, fraud, and abuse modeling issues where we are doing things the wrong way, where we have models that are sometimes decades and decades out of date, would you hire an army of auditors, an army of lawyers, or would you hire data scientists, Mr. Speaker?

It turns out several years ago Congress started requiring agencies that send out payments that cover healthcare costs, that send out checks, these things, start telling us your error reports.

Okay, so for 2023, the reports come back at $236 billion of improper payments. Okay, that is a stunning amount of money, but that doesn't mean there is $236 billion of improper payments that have been stolen. There is a bunch of it that has been, but it is more complex. An army of auditors it would take years to grind through this. That is why actually the miracle of technology right now--hire some data scientists. They are really expensive. Most of them actually I have met recently are bathing, that is both funny and shockingly true. I met one who is an MIT dropout. Apparently MIT wasn't hard enough for him, but that is actually what he does.

The failure to access data information, well, it turns out a whole bunch of what we label as improper payments we lacked data on understanding.

So what happens when it is the data scientists who will help us grind through?

I just grabbed this one because Treasury itself, not just CMS and all the other agencies, Treasury itself has $21 billion of improper payments. When you walk through what those were, Mr. Speaker, and why they are improper, they didn't verify household size, they didn't verify the qualifications. They didn't verify these things that is basically data.

So let's actually have a little more fun here. Types of improper payments. Okay, we actually estimate of that $236 billion--and actually this was for 2024, the other chart was for 2023--$135 billion are overpayments.

Now, understand for a lot of those that maybe come through CMS, a Medicare reimbursement. CMS has the ability months and months, a year later, to try to recapture those moneys. We are trying to get the data scientists to build us models to understand, okay, if there is $135 billion of overpayments, how much of that comes back to us and how much is we will call it leakage, even those leakage is with a b. Then we have 12 billion unknown payments, we know payments went out but there wasn't enough data telling us what they were.

We had almost $8 billion of underpayments, where we underpaid people.

Mr. Speaker, what I am trying to provide here is that we know that we have a problem. We have known that we have had this problem for decades. For the last decade, we have been tracking the problem, and it has only been the last couple of months where we are beginning to tackle the problem and try to use technology to dive into what these categories are and to understand.

Mr. Speaker, some of this, you will notice the huge spike in improper payment amounts. That is actually mostly from the pandemic when we were pushing money and shoveling money out of this place like crazy, but we have been tracking this since 2014.

It has taken until now to find the technology and to find the talent to start diving into this math. Why is this just so important?

If you are someone like me, who believes that there are trillions of dollars over the next 10 years that we can save by just modernizing the way we deliver services, you first have to identify the outliers and identify what is going on.

Why is this so incredibly important? You have to understand what we are up against.

Outlays of the largest mandatory programs are projected to massively increase.

A moment of brutal honesty: This is 2025. This is 2034, so functionally 9 budget years. Social Security will have a 61 percent increase in spending. These are our demographics. I am going to try to explain these numbers a little bit more.

Medicare will have almost a 78 percent increase in spending over those next 9 budget years. There is a little more for this because this has none of the offsets, so I will try to provide a level of brutal honesty.

Remember, on Medicare, on some things, you have a portion of copay, those things. Yet, it is still a 75 percent increase, but it goes from $2 trillion of spending. In 9 budget years, Medicare itself will be a couple trillion dollars, just the spending on that. If you do the offset, the payments that the senior makes, that is about $400 billion. That is still a 75 percent increase in spending.

What would happen if I could come to you and say: If we would use technology, if we would modernize--here is the MedPAC report that came out in the last couple of days. I haven't read the whole thing. I read part of it.

Here is last year's MedPAC report. We read all of it, highlighted it, and we actually make our staff read it.

Well, it turns out, around here, actually reading the actual math and the concepts--if I came to you right now and said: In here, there is a whole paragraph that is saying there is something wrong in Medicare Advantage data.

Mr. Speaker, the MedPAC report says that Medicare Advantage is a really important program. We need to keep it, but we are going to have to dive in on how to modernize how it works. They made the adjustments for coding intensity, but it basically translates into a projected $84 billion, or 17 percent, of total payments. Meaning, Medicare Advantage is coming in at $84 billion this year. That is more than fee for service. That is with the adjustments for renal failure and other things.

I am already starting to have the MedPAC report fall apart, so if any of you talk to the MedPAC folks, ask them for better binding on their reports.

What would happen if I came to you right now and said: By changing the incentives, we can do things to fix these outliers and costs and never cut a service? Instead of the incentives that the MedPAC report talks about of scoring people as sicker and sicker and taking that additional spiff, spending, how about a system that says: Why don't we incentivize the providers in this program to help our brothers and sisters who are seniors be healthier? And that helping your population be healthier is actually your profit.

Is that heresy? I would argue that it is just good design.

We don't have a choice because, last week, the Joint Economic Committee published a report. I chair the Joint Economic Committee, and I appreciate that we have remarkably hardworking economists. We are trying very hard, but we are willing to go to places that are politically dangerous but mathematically honest, which is something that rarely happens around here.

Yet, we tried to touch on things like how fragile is U.S. debt to higher interest rates? The fact of the matter is I

did a chart a couple of weeks ago that showed if the United States went back to a 6 percent handle on U.S. sovereign debt--you would say that is a lot higher than we are at today. Yeah, but go back to the early 2000s, we were right up against 6 percent. We have to realize, in 9 budget years, if we are at 6 percent, it would mean that 45 percent of all U.S. tax collections go just to interest.

We do a chapter here on the effects of obesity on our society, on spending, on longevity, and on family formation. Last year's report came in over $9 trillion. This year, we even define it more to understand what happens when the single biggest spend in our society could actually be mitigated by helping our brothers and sisters in the country be healthier.

Are we allowed to talk about that, or is that just heresy? Once again, I have to tell the truth.

Over the next 30 years, Social Security and Medicare represent all of the borrowing. It is about $116 trillion of borrowing.

Discretionary, which we talk about a lot because that is where you find some of the really stupid spending, the shiny objects, is projected to grow slower than tax receipts.

My point is, for everyone out there who wants to be enraged by the White House, enraged by those of us who are trying to find solutions, bring us ideas. Bring us actual math. Stop making crap up. However, if you are going to give us ideas, actually maybe read your subject area first.

You would be amazed how many things we get where, if we just didn't have foreign aid, and then we show the chart that it is a week of borrowing. Understand that you have a country where our baseline is going to be borrowing about $6 billion a day. How long do you think we can do that?

First, if we can find ways to do it better, faster, and cheaper, read the actual reports that we have been given for a decade that actually have ideas for this and be willing now to do the hard work of just using technology and data and modernizing.

Mr. Speaker, one of the insane things around here, when you meet many of the folks who are in our hallways and demanding more spending, demanding more regulations, demanding more barriers to entry to protect their business model or their bureaucracy, they actually hate the discussion of modernizing.

You are a medical professional. You know what you are doing. The fact of the matter is that there is hope. I don't think there are a lot more years that we can wait. There are ways to do this.

How do we get this body, both our brothers and sisters on the Democratic side--if they would be willing to work with us--saying let's modernize, let's embrace the technology, let's do the things we know that, if we were actually caring--it may not be great politics, but it is really good economics and really good for the future of this country.

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