Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, have you ever had the time here where you basically are having to take on two things that push against each other, that create a real math problem, and that telling the truth about it--how do you say it?--oh, yeah, gets the crap kicked out of you? Let's have at it, though.

President Trump stood there just a couple days ago, and within his speech, when you talk about some of the policy to help our brothers and sisters in this country, there was the discussion of no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, these things, and the pushing to get us in Congress, the Senate included, to move the extension of the 2017 tax cuts. I am going to show you why that is so important.

However, at the same time, within almost the same breath, the President looked out at us and said he also wants a balanced budget.

Okay. Now we need to deal with the reality of how hard that math is, but there is a way to do it. I just don't know if intellectually, when you think about the things you heard behind these microphones this last week, how many of our brothers and sisters here, how many of the public, how many of the armies of lobbyists that are in the hallways here lined up saying they want more spending, more money, more regulation on their competition understand this. Let's go through some of the basic math facts, and then let's have a brutally honest conversation of how we stabilize and how far we can actually go.

All right. An oldie but a goodie, and the numbers are actually worse, but I didn't want to print another chart, so we have been using the same one from last year.

Do you see all the red in the chart? That is what we call mandatory. It is automatic. It is earned benefits. It is, you served in the military, your pensions, those things. Interest is automatic. You have to pay it.

Do you see the blue? That is military and what we call nondefense discretionary. A Member of Congress, other than in a reconciliation opportunity--we are going to come back to why it is so important--only votes on this blue. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on, other than that moment of reconciliation, is borrowed. It is all borrowed money. Last year, for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we borrowed $1.39.

Look, the number of times I have come before these mikes, and I have done the charts and shown, in times when we have had very high marginal tax rates, we take in about 17, 18 percent of GDP in taxes. When we have had very low marginal tax rates, we take in about 17, 18 percent of GDP. It is the seesaw of lower marginal tax rates, the economy grows; higher marginal tax rates, the economy shrinks. We are getting basically the same percentage of the economy in tax receipts.

There is an article on the Manhattan Institute's website that does an aggregation of a lot of studies, many of them from leftwing groups, showing that if you raised every tax that functionally the Dems have offered that has gotten scored, and then you adjust it for its economic effects, you get about a 1.5 percent of GDP in taxes, additional taxes.

The cuts we had been talking about were now actually getting much broader, but let's go back to that point and a half. We are going to borrow 7.25 percent of the entire U.S. economy this year, so when the President turned to us and said he really wants a balanced budget, that is a tough one.

Now, his Treasury Secretary has talked about if we could get down to 3 percent stability. Ray Dalio, who is talking about a book he is giving away, talks about his incredible fear of the squeeze that is happening around the world because the countries in the world are bingeing on debt and that there may be a shortage of borrowable capital, which will cause us, as he says, a heart attack. He says it would be good if we could get back to 3 percent of the size of the economy.

Okay, maybe that should be our goal, but, once again, remember your government is functionally an insurance company with an army because the vast majority of our spending, the vast majority are things like Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits you get either because you hit a certain age, you worked a certain number of quarters, you fell below a certain income, or you are part of a certain Tribal group, but they are automatic. The one time we get an honest opportunity to really look at them is when there is this reconciliation. You are able to open up and look at the formula spendings.

Let's actually walk through this for someone like myself, who basically is

intellectually whipsawing, just beating the crap out of myself.

Mr. Speaker, I do not want and believe it would be a horrible thing to allow taxes to go up at the end of this year, particularly on small businesses and the working population.

This is the average. Understand that I represent the Phoenix and Scottsdale area. For my folks, our math is $3,300, almost $3,400 a year for my average family in tax hikes. For the country, it is $2,850.

That is the tax hike that is already in the law. That is already what is coming at us. That is what the Democrats have been arguing, saying we shouldn't extend these tax cuts, and then they give these beautiful speeches about defending the working class.

This is coming to us. This is part of the battle. Understand those tax hikes aren't just going on rich people. Mr. Speaker, 62 percent of the tax-paying population actually see their taxes go up. I am going to show some distributional charts later.

After 2017, remember we actually made the tax code in the United States more progressive, meaning with a higher income, we are paying a higher percentage of the Federal income tax. What we also did was we functionally took half of our brothers and sisters who make much more moderate wages and pulled them off the tax system. They are still paying payroll tax, which is Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and disability, paying into those as sort of a retirement account. Think of it that way. They pay almost no income tax.

We are going to focus on these charts about the income tax side. Once again, remember this is coming at us at the end of the year. This is what the budget reconciliation ultimately is about.

For some of us, we are stressing about: How do I not let the taxes go up? How do I not play the scam of, ``Here, we are going to extend the tax cuts,'' and, ``Here, give me a credit card so I can charge it to you''? That is the scam.

Mr. Speaker, is it really economically honest? We have a great set of data that shows if we borrow the money at the end of the decade, it actually costs those working families more because we have slowed down the economy and raised interest rates, those things, instead of saying I extended your tax cuts but because I charged it to you, your retirement account, your kids' future--understand that borrowing money is a tax. It is just not collected right now. It is collected in the future with interest on it.

Let's actually walk through a chart that has upset a number of my fellow Republicans, but the math is honest. The day we were elected this November, we publicly borrowed--let's do a quick explanation. When we hear someone say our total debt is $37 trillion or 36-point whatever, a portion of that we borrow internally. We reach into the Social Security trust fund and borrow that money.

We pay interest. The Treasury gives them special T bills. We pay interest on it. In some years, the interest we were paying to the different trust funds we have borrowed money from was actually a pretty good interest rate. That is internal borrowing.

Then, there is the public borrowing. These are the options. This is the note, T bill, or bond that is in a retirement account. Another country may buy it to hold in their version of their Federal Reserve.

Remember, China is not our number one buyer of our debt. As a matter of fact, China has been rolling off its debt for years, the holdings of U.S. sovereigns. They are actually somewhere under $900 billion now. It should make us a little nervous that certain foreign governments are no longer bingeing on U.S. debt because we would love to get their money. Most of the debt we sell to the retirement, to the business, to the bank, and other things.

The day we were elected, publicly borrowed debt was about $28 trillion. Let's do a math experiment. Baseline borrowing for the next 10 years is $22 trillion. If we were to do the tax extensions--and this is going to make sense. When we hear people running around here saying let's just use current policy, let's just pretend our spending stays the same, our tax policy all stays the same, and we don't have to pay attention to the actual law, that would be $5.5 trillion plus another $1.3 trillion on top of that in interest.

Then, let's add in some of the President's priorities: no tax on tips; no tax on overtime if we could find the mechanics, which is a little harder because we can't actually do it in reconciliation; no tax on Social Security. If we add those all up, it would mean, at the end of 2035, the amount of debt that has been borrowed from the public--one of the reasons the public number is higher is, in 2033, the Social Security trust fund is empty. We don't get to reach over there and keep using that as a piggy bank, even though we pay it back every month because the tax receipts from FICA taxes don't match the checks going out the door.

Here is the punch line. It took us 240 years to get to that $28 trillion. We are basically talking about doubling it in 10 years. The publicly held debt is not exact, but it is close. It is math I can do in my head. We are talking about almost doubling the publicly held debt in the next 10 years.

When we hear those coming behind the microphone and saying DOGE is horrible and evil. Really? Federal spending this year will be about $7 trillion, but we are only going to take in $5 trillion, so we are going to borrow about $2 trillion or $2.3 trillion. If I came to a business and said they are bleeding, for every dollar of revenue they are taking in, they are spending $1.36, $1.39, wouldn't that business turn around and try to find some ways to reduce spending and to modernize on how they do business?

Think of this, if we are going to spend 7, could we find 15 percent savings? Maybe. It would be really hard. People would complain. It will screw up some people's business models. Some of the public employee unions will be cranky. If we can find 15 percent, that would be $1 trillion a year.

It still doesn't get us to 3 percent of the GDP borrowing because, remember, again, 7\1/4\ percent of the entire economy will be consumed by this government in borrowing this year.

When idiots like me hold up charts like this and I get complaints that I am hurting people's feelings, the fact of the matter is this is why we have to thread this needle and do really hard things. How do we extend the tax cuts, the tax reforms, the tax benefits, and the baseline economic growth of what we accomplished in 2017 but find ways to offset as much of it as we possibly can?

Once again, even CBO and some of the outside studies made it very clear: If we offset the spending so that money stays in the economy, instead of being borrowed by government here, by it staying in the economy, we maximize economic growth because it gets lent to this business, lent to this new construction project.

When we take it out of the economy--remember, our baseline, we are already borrowing $22 trillion over the next 10 years. How many more trillions should we stack on top of that? If we don't find offsets, it means we doubled U.S. publicly held debt in 10 years. It took us 240 years, and then we double it again in 10.

This is how insane the chart looks from the people running around this place and saying just use current policy because it is easy and so I don't have to say no to the army of people sitting in my office and wanting money for whatever their cause is.

Mr. Speaker, you do realize when you start looking at this stuff, you are talking about 140, 150-plus percent of debt to GDP. It goes from a 100 today to almost a 50 percent increase in the next 10 years. It is uncomfortable. The primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is interest and healthcare costs.

The people who run around here and just want to pretend the law doesn't exist and that if we were already doing it, we should just pretend and look the other way and just keep doing it. If we do that, that means in 9 budget years, just the interest--and this was assuming the interest rates from last December--we spend over $2 trillion a year in interest.

When we hear members from the different committees around here talk about how hard this is, how difficult it is, when the Democrats are saying how dare we talk about these benefits, help us. Where is the creativity? Where is the modernization? Where is the use of technology to disrupt the cost but

make it better, faster, and cheaper? Help us.

That doesn't give us the dopamine hits and the hope to win back the next election to take the majority because winning around here is more important than doing what is moral, right, and economically rational.

This is important. Are we ready as a country? My math for this year is we are going to spend about $1.2 trillion in interest. Dear Lord, please don't let interest rates move against us.

Also, just an economic concept I need everyone to process is to think of a seesaw. When we see interest rates going down, yay, except the problem is that it typically means the economy is slowing down. There is less demand for debt in the markets, and the economy is slowing down.

What happens, Mr. Speaker? What happens to the U.S. Treasury? It means tax receipts are going down. They may not go down immediately. We often don't see the lag for three quarters, sometimes a year. We can see it in the growth calculations that interest rates are falling, the economy is slowing down, and we are going to take in less tax receipts.

Oh, good, the economy is growing. Interest rates go up. We are now paying it because this year or in the next 12 months we have to refinance $9 trillion of U.S. sovereign debt, plus probably add another couple trillion on top of that of what we call new issuances.

We are going to take in higher tax receipts because the economy is doing well, but it all gets consumed by the higher interest rates.

The center of this seesaw--it is a technical economic term--we are screwed. There is no free option anymore. When we walk around with $37 trillion of debt, when our baseline adds another 22, and that is with none of these policy discussions, why aren't more people around here just terrified?

Is it that our constituents are so desperate for more money from the Federal Government that explaining that we are not giving them something free, that we are putting it on their credit card, that they will pay this back in some fashion will deflate the value of the dollar so their savings crashes and raise the cost of goods, or that, at some point, we are going to brutalize their kids, their grandkids, and their retirement? It doesn't have to be that way.

God knows that, over the last couple of years, I have showed how we can crash the price of healthcare by using technology. Then, the lobbyists are in our offices, saying that would mean they have to change their business model.

Yesterday, on CNBC, Eric Cantor was, in many ways, almost mocking us. He is a former majority leader here. Now, he is on Wall Street. He said: Do we really think the bond market isn't going to notice if we just do this pretend thing and say let's call this thing current policy, so we will keep the current tax regime. Yes, it means financing another $5.5 trillion, plus another $1.3 trillion of interest on top of it, and the bond market won't even notice that.

We have the greatest fragility right now to this country. We are on the cusp of putting the bond market in charge of this country, not President Trump, not Congress. If we borrow about $60,000 or $70,000 a second every day, what happens when we pull up the next bond option and not enough people show up for it? It would create chaos around the world.

It is a dangerous, dangerous game we are playing around here, but we go home and talk to voters. They want things. They need our help.

Please understand this is a dangerous, dangerous game we are playing.

I was just trying to make the point that if we do all these things without financing, we are basically over 150 percent of debt to the

Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

To the chairman and the minority, I first want to apologize to everyone. I have one of my crappy lung infections, so at some point, I am going to start coughing and doing an inhaler. Just ignore me. Somehow, I thought that would be funnier.

Mr. Chairman and my good friend, Mr. Beyer, I think this is somewhat of a unique opportunity. Those of us from the Joint Economic Committee actually take math seriously. We don't always see things alike, but the fact of the matter is the Joint Economic Committee I think started in 1956. It has this remarkable history of some of the world's greatest economists coming and speaking before walking us through it. That is why, at this moment, we are going to try to do something that is special. Instead of just sort of sharing feelings, I am going to ask us to share math. Within that, we are going to walk through what is actually in the budget resolution.

This is a reconciliation budget. It is not a regular budget. This is a budget that opens up the ability, because of the insanity we go through, of moving something through the Senate and its 60 votes. With the 1974 Budget Control Act, this is the dance we go through.

The other thing I am going to try to walk through is where the actual math lays in the box that has been given to us by the Budget Committee, and then the part I am going to do, the Schweikert little bit of hope, is: Is this the moment? Is this the moment of policy that actually forces us, both the left and the right, that if there are cuts, modernization, changes, updates in methodology on how we deliver services, is this the stressor that makes us do something that is hard but also do something that is truthful.

I am also going to try repeatedly to make the point, Mr. Chairman, and show why we are primarily doing this. We have a bunch of provisions of the 2017 tax reform that begin to expire. Most of those provisions actually are to the benefit of small businesses and the working class. I will show that over and over and the distributional effects.

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

Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I have to figure out, do I sit here and just spend my time correcting things that are mathematically not true or not in the design of what is actually here or just over and over say how much I like working with Mr. Beyer

because one day he will be the chair, and I will be in his position.

Let's actually walk through some basic math together. What will our spending be this year? It will be $7 trillion. What is actually in the cuts--remember the horrible draconian cuts--is $120 billion in a year. So, $7 trillion--a trillion is a thousand billion, for those of you who are math dysfunctional--let's walk through it, and $120 billion is the Armageddon.

I am probably going to end up using these a couple of times here because I think they make a point.

The way a reconciliation budget is laid out is it creates a series of boxes. Here are all of these authorizing committees. We need you to find savings. We need you to find those savings through modernization and waste and fraud.

We are going to spend a little time actually talking about some great documents even the Biden administration produced on waste and fraud, and I am sure every Member here has actually read them. We have some other articles from The Wall Street Journal on Medicare Advantage and all these others. Many of them, when all added up, are a trillion-plus dollars. Are we capable of actually being intellectually honest and walking through?

One of the charts--we are going to come back to this again--you have been hearing the Armageddon being said, that it is Medicaid.

I used to do my State's Medicaid budgets. Arizona has a somewhat unique system. We actually buy managed care capitated policies for our indigent population. It is remarkably effective, and we deliver remarkably effective healthcare cheaper than almost every other State in the country, demonstrating that planned design, managed design, can both be much healthier for our society and save money. You don't start to have those revolutionary conversations in Congress until you have moments of stress like this.

Once again, I want to add, in the document, 96 percent of the budget authority within Energy and Commerce is not touched. We are talking 4 percent of their budget authority, and that is spread over a decade. If we can't find 4 percent of modernization in these programs, we are actually in much more trouble than even just the brain trust here as we tell our stories.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I love public policy by storytelling, but this being the Joint Economic Committee, let's actually go back to math.

Madam Chair, I would say to Mr. Beyer that I want to make sure I am communicating right, but at least we are down to, instead of the Armageddon, his number was, well, if you cut $2 trillion over 10 years, that is $200 billion. He is right, but that is actually not what is in the document here. It is functionally 1.2 with a shock absorber. Once again, I will give you the shock absorber, depending on what Ways and Means ultimately does. I thank the gentleman again. It shows we actually are fairly close on math.

Another thing, and this is just someone who actually had worked on the tax reform in 2017 and the storytelling that has existed, particularly with my brothers and sisters on the left--Madam Chair, how would you feel if I could document to you that the post-2017 tax reform was more progressive? They were lower rates, but the top portion of income earners actually were paying a higher percentage of Federal income tax.

When you start looking at this, remember, this is the distributional problem that I was going to try to walk through. I believe when you do the math here, 5 percent of the population are people making stunning amounts of money. If we want to have a discussion about whether they should pay more--guess what?--this opens up that discussion because there are no rates locked in to this. It just creates the capacity to now have the discussion.

The fact of the matter is that the top 5 percent pay 38 percent of all Federal income taxes. Functionally, half of the workers in the United States pay less than 1 percent. I will take a correction if someone knows the actual number, but I think the bottom 25 percent receives more because of the earned income tax credit, which is the old negative income tax model. Look, we have a distributional problem.

If you want to have a discussion of wealth and income equality, I have some great charts to show you what inflation did, what the previous functionally 3\1/2\ years of inflation did to wealth and the working class. When you inflate up people who have assets and crush those who are trying to survive, congratulations. Remember, before the pandemic under the TCJA, the tax reforms of 2017, it was the fastest closure of income inequality in American history.

What is being discussed here is whether you allow those very tax benefits for small businesses, for individuals, to expire. We don't get a huge economic pop from continuing them. You maintain consumption. We know if you don't do them, that loss of consumption in those populations actually really hurts us economically.

I am going to reserve in a moment, and then, we are going to come back and talk about some of the other provisions that are just, once again, Madam Chair, trying to create the capacity so we can actually have the more elegant debate of what should the distributional effects be and where do we get the most economic growth from?

The next time I come back, let's actually do a bit of where the economic growth can come from, and we will walk through the model of expensing and those things.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I actually made a board for what the gentleman's point was, showing, within this reconciliation budget document, how much additional tax cuts are there for C corporations. There is your board. I am being a little sarcastic, but that is sort of a personality trait.

The fact of the matter is, once again, the talking points don't match up with the reality here.

Everyone in this room, your taxes go up at the end of this year. If you run a small business, a passthrough, not a C corporation, a passthrough, your taxes go up. If you are part of an employee-owned company, so you have come together and you are managing yourselves almost like an employee co-op, your taxes go up.

Also, I hope but don't know if the capacity that this creates will allow us to do it, but I sure hope so. We have some great data, and I won't make you live through my charts that show expensing, research and development expensing and expensing. It has a cost in the 10-year window.

Hopefully, everyone has listened to my dozens and dozens of speeches walking through what expensing is. Expensing is nothing more than depreciation. Do you take the expense in 1 year or, let's pretend, 7 years? You still get the exact same amount of reduction on your taxes. It is a timing effect. The difference is if you can't take it in the first year and you do it over 7 years, you have to finance it.

We have great economic modeling that shows when you do expense research and development, when you do expensing, you get a virtuous cycle of: We bought the piece of equipment, so we do it better, faster, and cheaper. Our competitors just did it, so the next year, we have to do it again.

That was one of the reasons, particularly prepandemic, we had that sudden spike of capital expenditures and productivity. The punch line on that is that does not exist now. It is our fading out for those C corporations, which had their rates already locked in, but also for all those other small businesses to make those capital expenditures.

Why is this really important? Well, there is a lot of data that shows that part of the tax code actually does, from an economic growth standpoint, create incredible vitality. It is a timing effect. It is the tyranny of living within a 10-year window in our models. I just hope that starts to elevate a little bit of the economics discussion instead of the storytelling.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, the average family would save $2,853. That is your crumbs.

I would argue, for the average family that has been crushed by the previous 3 or 4 years in inflation, if you don't make 27 percent more money in my district, you are poorer today than you were 4 years ago. They were having their taxes go up $2,853, and that is the average.

I promise you, Madam Chair, I think in my district it was closer to 3,300. I am blessed to have a more prosperous district. That is not crumbs, Madam Chair.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, may I inquire as to how much time remains.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chairwoman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Chairwoman, can you believe this? We broke our printer. However, thank heaven we didn't break the markers.

So I thought actually just because we are trying to do fact-based, the average family's taxes are going up at the end of this year $2,853, and 62 percent of taxpayers will see hikes.

I am sorry, we just didn't have time to make a much prettier chart for everyone.

Remember that after 2017 we actually moved up, some of that were some of the deductions and things that were added, we moved up the threshold, so almost one-half of our taxpaying population actually didn't pay income tax. They still had payroll taxes and FICA and those things.

A bunch of that population that has not paid taxes in years and years and years will be getting tax bills with the opposition to this.

Madam Chair, we are going to come back and go over more.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Chair, once again, here is the budget document. Here are spreadsheets. I keep hearing: You are giving away to billionaires.

Where is that?

Where is it?

Madam Chair, it doesn't exist because this is a box that allows us-- and understand, Madam Chair, I am passionately concerned about debt and deficits, but this may be, for an idiot like myself, the first opportunity where members of leadership and those are ready to allow people like me to come in and walk through how we can improve and change the costs of how we deliver services, and we need this type of document to do it.

Madam Chair, you deal with the reality of what we are allowed to touch. You do realize the majority of mandatory spending we are not even allowed to touch in a budget reconciliation because it is interest and Medicare is the majority. Every day we wait to modernize, we are in that much more trouble.

The last thing before I do a yield here. We are going to spend $86 trillion, and I am partially doing this off the top of my head, over the next decade.

This budget reconciliation we are hoping to get, let's say we are blessed and we get $2 trillion in offsets, so that creates a couple trillion dollars in additional borrowing, we are talking a fraction, a couple percent of the spending, Madam Chair.

I would argue this is the moment for us where it is not about cuts. If any of us has ever just even bothered to look at the MedPAC reports, and this was done by the Biden administration, we have potentially over a decade hundreds of billions of dollars in here that aren't going to services. They aren't going to make our brothers and sisters healthier.

Help us. Help us engage the morality of doing this better, faster, and cheaper.

Madam Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Valadao).

Madam Chair, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Scalise).

Madam Chairwoman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chairwoman, economic literature and, actually, I think even the board here demonstrated that, if we go back to the original TCJA, over 70 percent of those corporate tax cuts show up in wages. That is one of the reasons there was such remarkable wage growth without inflation. If workers are cared for, tax policy becomes correct.

Madam Chair, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Scalise).

Madam Chair, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, let me have just a couple of moments of joy here. A reconciliation budget that only touches individuals and passthrough businesses, so there are no shareholders who are getting-- that is actually already locked in.

That is one of the reasons we are doing this is because you want to see distortions in the economy, have a world where small businesses, passthroughs, employee-owned, their taxes shoot up, but the C corporations are down here. What distortion did you just create in the world?

I am a C corporation. I am buying everyone else. You want to see the big get bigger? It is one of the reasons you have to do this. Also, I beg my brothers and sisters, have a different view but actually just try to get the most basic facts correct here.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, apparently, the Democratic position is the $2,000 you get per child, which was the doubling of the child tax credit in 2017, should go away and go back to the $1,000? Wow. I think that is what I just heard.

Those of us who have adopted kids, those who have children, congratulations, your child tax credit is going to get cut in half.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I would inquire once again on how much time is remaining.

Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chair, just as some of my Democratic colleagues have done, I was just thumbing through the actual document. I know this is crazy, and literacy being sort of a lost art, but I am trying to find where this heresy, these cuts are.

There is a discussion here that basically says we need not to just purely stick this on the debt and deficit. Okay.

In the Energy and Commerce instruction, I think it is 4 percent of the area of authorization, you are telling me after the hundreds of hours idiots like me have come behind this microphone and done presentations showing the distortions, the waste and fraud, the misallocations, the lack of use of technology, the duplications, you can't produce 4 percent?

Why is the left so terrified of the moment where maybe a document that forces us in some ways to listen to each other, to maybe say: How do we do this better, faster, cheaper? I am going to say this three or four more times. Does the left really want to raise taxes on the average American family by $2,853? Is that the plan here?

This says that 63 percent of those who are tax filers will see their taxes go up. Is that the plan here?

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

Mr. Chairman, just because I want to help out-- because I know this is heresy around here. Truly one of my favorite Members to work with, even though we are on different sides of the aisle, he may want to retract the words ``Social Security,'' which he just said, because he knows Social Security cannot be allowed in any of this package.

Oh, no. Who else has been working for a decade now to save it?

Remember, in 2033, about halfway through the year, the trust fund is gone. Is that a Republican or a Democratic problem? I would say it is a morality problem. We will be doubling senior poverty in America in 8 years.

How often are we allowed to come talk about it?

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

Mr. Chairman, I am prepared to close, but I would like to inquire on how much time is remaining.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time to close. I know it is painful to listen to an idiot like me for 5 minutes, but let's have some fun here.

First, I want to say to everyone who has spoken, I love the passion and I love the caring. I just, once again, have to come back. This is a reconciliation budget. It basically builds boxes. This box here is for your authorization. You can go more, but you can't go less. Okay.

I am on the other side. I actually believe there should be more cuts in spending because I think we can achieve that by modernization, changing processes, and the adoption of technology.

Last week, I believe I was behind this very microphone, and we were showing charts of, hey, this is Medicare, how many billions and billions do we spend every year on duplicative MRIs, ultrasounds, x- rays? Does that make someone healthier? Does that make them better? No. It is basically waste and fraud.

We have the ability to use technology to get rid of that. If we all agreed to do something like that, then we are going to get rid of these duplicative services. We are going to get rid of some of the--we like to say waste and fraud, but the fact of the matter is there are design problems in the model. You didn't cut a single service. You didn't take anything away from someone, but what you gave is my kids a chance to survive.

Look, part of this I don't like. I am going to be brutally honest. I wish there were more cuts. I don't like the amount of borrowing here, but if this is the moment that opens up a chance for someone like myself, who has spent a decade here passionately trying to say it doesn't have to be cuts. It is actually the adoption of technology.

I am going to go slightly off track, then I want to get back into the distribution. If I turn to my brothers and sisters and anyone willing to listen right now, what is the single biggest cost in our society? This is where Schweikert soaks himself in kerosene and plays with matches, Mr. Chair.

It turns out it is obesity. For our brothers and sisters, we calculate there will be over $9 trillion in additional healthcare costs over the next decade. What would happen if the left and the right actually said we are going to fixate on the way we deliver healthcare, the way we deliver nutrition support, the way we do agriculture policy, that we are going to help our brothers and sisters be healthier, and, by the way, family formation, the use of healthcare, the ability to have a life.

Maybe it is moments like this where we go to battle in the committees. We

have really smart people, but armies of lobbyists outside these hallways look at us and stress out when we start saying it is time to modernize, time to find a better, faster, more elegant way to deliver services and slow down the piling of debt because the math still comes back to 63 percent of our tax-paying brothers and sisters will see their taxes go up.

Now, for the comments you have heard over and over here about the distributional effects. Okay. Mr. Beyer and I are both on Ways and Means and battle in the committee.

Remember, there is no bill coming out of the committee yet. What is it going to look like? Do we actually have to make elegant changes? Are there things we can agree on as a body that will maximize economic growth?

At some point you have got to look--and I am sorry I have beaten up this chart, but we have been trying to model what happens to the economy if we allow these tax hikes to come in automatically.

It turns out the economy is also benefited if we maximize how much we pay for at the end of 10 years. I know changing spending policy is hard, but if we were to maximize both, at the end of the decade we are more prosperous.

Mr. Chairman, at some point that is the ultimate question here: Is prosperity moral? Is there a way we can actually do our work here where we maximize the prosperity for my 2\1/2\-year-old but also the person heading to retirement, to our brothers and sisters who are out there working their hearts out? There is a way.

The hardest part is we are going to have to do things differently than we have done in the past.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my good friend, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Wilson).

Mr. Speaker, first, is there a chance to get the amount of time that we are splitting so we have a sense of the run time here?

If we are all blessed, I won't use it all.

Mr. Speaker, have you ever had a moment where the first words in your head are: I am damned if I do and damned if I don't, but is there a chance?

For a decade, I have been coming behind this very microphone and walking through demographics, debt, and the deficit and trying to explain something that the left doesn't like and the right doesn't like, that almost 100 percent of the growth of the deficit for the next three decades is demographics.

We don't like saying that because it is harder to play the politics of blaming each other. There have been dozens of things said. That is just the nature of it in regards to the reconciliation budget resolution that was just passed.

I managed part of the Joint Economic Committee time, and my job there as the chair of the Joint Economic Committee is I represent the committee, and now I get to represent myself.

I worry, but the opportunity is having basically authorizing committees do what is necessary to save our future.

Mr. Speaker, a little while ago you saw a beautiful little baby here. Last week, when we were here, I had my 2\1/2\-year-old that we have adopted with me.

Here are some basic pieces of math. For my 2\1/2\-year-old, when he is 24, 25 years old, every U.S. tax rate has to have been doubled, all of them, just to maintain baseline services.

The whole presentation of walking through what happens when you get a moment to actually disrupt policy and do things that are better, faster, and cheaper--because I will argue the army of lobbyists, basically the rent seekers, if you remember your high school economics, who are around us all, despise the concept of reform. They despise the concept of modernization. That is actually some of the basic things I want to go over tonight, and I will try to do it efficiently.

First off, I know I used this board a little while ago, and I am sorry it is handwritten. I broke the printer. It is just simply making a point that for the average American at the end of this year, if we don't fix the expiring provisions, their taxes go up $2,853, and functionally 62 percent of all taxpayers will be subject to higher taxes.

Now, we actually have our friends on the left basically saying: You are going to give away to the millionaires and billionaires. It is not the distributional effect of 2017.

As a matter of fact, one of the great trivia points--and I actually had some fun with this one because it comes from my progressive analysis from a few years ago--is that after the 2017 tax reform, the U.S. tax regime actually became more progressive. There were lower rates, but it meant the top-tier

of taxpayers were paying more of the Federal budget.

You walk through saying: Okay. Can I show you? Well, you gave money to corporations. Yes, but we can show you that the vast majority of that actually went to wages.

People forget many of the things we did to force the repatriation back of capital, intellectual property, expensing, and R&D expensing. As a Republican, don't ever tell anyone this: A bunch of that was in the Obama budget.

They were in many ways bipartisan ideas from back then because we were bleeding out productive capacity in this country. We were transferring productive capacity and our assets overseas because of our tax regime and the ability to compete.

Now, it looks like the reality of sounding like an idiot economist around here doesn't buy you a lot of friends, Mr. Speaker. Yet, the fact of the matter is the budget box that was just offered is an opportunity to--Mr. Speaker, forgive me, my asthma and my lung infection are going a little nuts right now--it is an opportunity to stop our taxes from going up.

What I am actually more interested in is what I believe are solemn promises I got from the leadership about many of the things I have come behind this microphone for a decade talking about as to how we can adopt technology and how we can adopt models to lower costs and yet cover our brothers and sisters and give them more access and more opportunity to be healthier, because the way we deliver services as a government is archaic.

Right now, Mr. Speaker, if you were designing a system, you wouldn't do it this way. We are all terrified of whether it be the bureaucracy and their lobbyists and their unions, you know, something the left has to deal with. Many of the businesspeople that have learned how to make money off these programs are a problem. They come marching into our offices all upset because we are going to change their business model and make them compete.

Guess what, Mr. Speaker. That might be what we just accomplished in this vote, which is less about fixing the expiring tax provisions, which we are going to do, but maybe it will also give us that window where we can change and improve the way we deliver these services.

I can't figure out why this place is so intellectually calcified that they are terrified of changing it.

Mr. Speaker, let's once again walk through some of our basic math. This is just a pie chart--yes, it is a pie chart--yay, we love pie charts--for the estimates for this fiscal year. Basically, I want to take a look at it. It is a little less than 75 percent, but it is close. Actually, it looks like that may be. What is seen in red is mandatory spending.

Well, guess what. The blue is all I get to vote on as a Member of Congress, and every dime of the blue is borrowed. What happens if I come and say: Well, net interest? Well, we don't get to vote on the interest. My personal math is closer to almost $1.2 trillion in interest coming in this year, but I have been doing a running calculation of a higher interest rate.

We don't get to touch Social Security. Social Security has its own trust fund, which is gone in 8 years. Then, all of a sudden, we have to figure out--what is it, the first full year of Social Security trust fund being empty is $600 billion or $609 billion, something of that nature. It depends on workforce participation at the time that is done. That makes the dollars we were talking about today tiny.

Well, we have Medicare, Medicaid, and some other mandatory programs, so why am I showing this? What is so difficult here? I know this is geeky stuff, but this is why there is such a fraud in the debates that happen around this place, is we don't treat the voters like they have an IQ. Stop talking down to America. I will argue that many of them are a hell of a lot smarter than people like me.

We don't get to actually put net interest into our reconciliation budget. As a matter of fact, there is nothing we get to do about it. There is some things we could have if we could actually work together on the way we sell debt, or maybe the types of interest.

Professor Shiller of Yale wrote an article 10 years ago about trills, which is an equity interest in tax receipts, and other things--there is ways to break up the concentration on debt, making society less fragile--are subject to possibly bond vigilantes.

Social Security, it is illegal. It is part of the 1974 Budget Control Act. It can't be touched. Yet, I saw half a dozen Members on the other side go behind the microphone and say: Whoa, Social Security.

What is a good word for an absolute untruth? Oh, okay. I will work on that.

What we have is less than half of the red portion that we can even work on in a reconciliation budget.

This is an incredibly important moment. Will the standing committees, which have gone years and years and not been able to actually provide improvements, redesigns, and modernization, be able to look at things like The Wall Street Journal's five-article series and also the ones this weekend on Medicare Advantage?

Mr. Speaker, one of their headlines said--I think it was actually more than a single-year period, but $50 billion of fraud. Are we allowed to work on that? Is that Republican or Democrat, or is it just time to find a better way to actually think about these things?

That is maybe what we just opened up, assuming that my own leadership and my own committee chairman are ready to do hard work, really difficult things that, just like that baby, just like my 2\1/2\-year- old, maybe we could save their future. Maybe I could save their retirement without ever cutting a service.

There have been a number of Members who have come up behind the microphone and said that we are cutting Medicaid, and we are cutting this.

Really, find me that word in here.

It doesn't mean it is easy. For the Energy and Commerce Committee, they have to find 4 percent of their entire committee's authorization over 10 years. Are Members telling me they can't find 4 percent of improvements in this place? Yet, the sound of Armageddon, that is why this slice is so incredibly frustrating. We are trying to save the future. I am not bouncing around. There is a linear thought here.

Mr. Speaker, believe it or not--promise me you won't ever tell anyone this--I was reading an article from The New Yorker that just came out. Don't tell anyone that, as a conservative, I actually look on occasion at The New Yorker: ``The End of Children.''

Realize that the Census Bureau of the United States says that in about 7\1/2\ years this country has more deaths than births. Tell me as a junior actuary, or someone who wishes he was smart enough to be one, how I make the math of the future work in a society that has a shortage of young people.

Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just demographics, but we are not allowed to actually do difficult things here because, Mr. Speaker, it would require math, and then the harder part is it would require us to tell truth.

So many people, like this very moment, there will be someone on cable television on the left and the right doing their talking, getting people's dopamine to hit, but it is not honest math. The math is really hard. It is really complex. There is a way to make it work, but we have only a couple more years, I believe, to provide the stability. Maybe that is what we just did a few minutes ago.

Once again, this is the single board that gets me the most hate mail. It also is the truth. This is the 30-year projection. If my colleagues look at the 30-year projection from the Congressional Budget Office--I didn't produce this. They did, and we believe it is already way out of date because of the change in interest rates--Social Security and Medicare and their interest carry are responsible for almost functionally every dime of debt from today through the next 30 years. It is $116-some trillion of debt.

The rest of the budget actually has about a $9 trillion positive balance because its growth is slower than the growth of tax receipts according to the Congressional Budget Office. This is the thing the left, in my particular case, loves to run hate television commercials: He dared to talk about saving Social Security, saving Medicare, reforming how we deliver services so they are stable and so people have a future.

If Members want to understand why this place is so damned toxic, those of us who are actually trying to fix things also write the attack commercials for the other side. It is a sickness, but the math is the math, and the math will eventually win.

Mr. Speaker, understanding what will happen if we don't modernize how we deliver services and, through that, start to stabilize everything-- it is not just the benefits, but it is the growth of debt, convincing the bond markets we are going to be stable so they don't raise our interest rates.

A couple of weeks ago, we showed a chart that, if this place does stupid things and we make the bond markets nervous and we were to get a one-point increase in U.S. interest rates, we showed that, in 9 budget years, the additional interest is bigger than everything we talked about today.

My colleagues have to start processing how fragile we have made our future, and Members will start to actually look that, if we don't start to actually use this opportunity to say that we are going to use the reconciliation to open debate, we are going to not raise people's taxes, but we will get to have a robust debate, discussion, and ideas with the left, the right, particularly those of us on Ways and Means Committee, Energy and Commerce Committee, those things, saying: Here is what the mix should look like.

Maybe we don't extend everything. Maybe we mix them up. Maybe we find where there is leakage. Maybe we find where there is economic growth opportunities. Bring proposals. Bring economics. Bring statisticians. The debate is on, and now we get to actually have an honest debate based in statistics and math and maybe a future because we so rarely do that around here.

We are going to publish a couple more versions of this in more detail. I am blessed to also chair the Joint Economic Committee, so I have people who are much smarter than I am.

My colleagues will be happy to know that all of our economists now bathe. It is a running joke, particularly if Members know economists.

We work through the math that said what would happen if you did both things and paid for as much of this reconciliation budget, the spending, the extension of the tax cuts as possible, and you do it. That is how you get your maximization of growth.

Turns out, if you don't do it, you actually get probably a small retraction, maybe a small recession, because people's taxes go up rather dramatically.

Remember, for the average family, didn't I just show you--$2,853. In a district like mine, it is somewhere in the $3,000 range. I have a higher income district. You also had the other thing. The most we can do to try to find ways to pay for that.

Turns out, there is this concept of capital stack. The United States Government is not the only one bingeing on debt. Look at China and other countries, this and that. As the demographics of the industrialized world start to functionally get really ugly, and we are having to provide services, the amount of savings is starting to be chewed up.

One of the benefits we had in the previous decade and the decade before that is there was fairly substantial savings stacks that went into U.S. sovereigns and other things. We expect, in the next few years, we will actually start to see that roll over. Then, you get the concepts of term premiums and those things. I know it is geeky, but the fact of the matter is, if you don't have a substantial modernization of government, you can't make this math work.

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

Mr. Speaker, my best guess is I will use about 6 or 7 minutes of it.

Mr. Speaker, do you remember the hair on fire comments that people said that mathematically had no basis? They are not actually in the budget documents. Let's understand the size of these committees are vastly different, but the one people were focusing on, E&C, the Energy and Commerce Committee, still has 96 percent of its spending authority within its jurisdiction. That is going to continue.

This little wedge here is what they are being asked to work on. I will promise you if I am given the chance, if my economic team is given the chance, and if leadership in Ways and Means and E&C will work with us, I can get every dollar of that by just modernization of delivery of services.

Remember, at one time, I worked on my State's Medicaid budgets. It has been a long time. I actually chaired for a little while my State's health committee, so I have some experience on Arizona, which has a very unique Medicaid system. We buy basically managed care policies for our indigent population.

It is remarkably good. It is remarkably efficient. It may have the highest satisfaction rate in the entire Nation. It is something worth thinking about.

Let's get down to the brass tacks here on a couple of last bits.

Look at the next decade of spending. We don't get to touch interest. We don't get to touch old age survivor fund. That is your Social Security.

Matter of fact, what we should be doing is having really interesting conversations, mathematically honest ones, not in front of the microphone, but probably in a back room with actuaries, on how we are going to save it considering the fact that Social Security's own actuary report says now, I think, in mid-2033, the trust fund is empty.

For my Democrat friends who keep saying what we need to do is just do a bunch more taxes and enhance the benefit, you do realize you just chewed up every dime of your seed corn, if that is a colloquialism, for everything else.

We have a chart we have brought here multiple times showing the proposals saying to take everyone over $400,000 and just raise the cap, so every billionaire pays their full Social Security, both the employer's side and the individual's side.

I think our math says that it only took care of 38 percent of the shortfall, helping folks to understand the scale and also the rhetorical solutions that are so often thrown out are not mathematically honest.

Then you come over here to discretionary. We can take a run at that. Do you know what discretionary is? It is defense. It is everything you really think of as government. Other mandatory and then Medicare and Medicaid basically sit in this area.

What would happen if our brothers and sisters on the left would actually, instead of defending the inefficiencies, the distortions--I despise using ``waste and fraud'' because I think everyone is against waste and fraud. Even if you read the articles, the ProPublica and The Wall Street Journal on the extortion of bad acts, if that is a way to phrase it, that are going on in these programs and the willingness to fix that, should that be Republican or Democrat, or should it just be our attempt to do good governance?

Remember, we are the board of directors for the biggest concern in the world. It is malfeasance the way we run this place. Our rhetoric is often completely intellectually vacuous. There are solutions.

For any of you who have staff, do you have a nice highlighted copy of the MedPAC report from top to bottom where they walk you through lots and lots of solutions? I will send you over the stack of The Wall Street Journal articles. I will even send you the ProPublica on durable medical equipment fraud and how there are ways the doc and I could simply fix that with about a three-paragraph bill. People would have better access and better health, and we would save potentially a hundred-plus billions just on that one line item over the 10 years.

I believe, Mr. Speaker, that is the opportunity we may have just unlocked. I also think sometimes I might be delusionally optimistic and hopeful. I am 62 with a 2-year-old. That is actually funny, but I don't think we have a lot more time to play this treadmill game.

For my brothers and sisters in the majority, we are going to have to carry this. We are going to have to do the hard things because the left has decided they want to burn us down. That is fine.

I wish I could be honest and say we didn't try to do the same when they were in the majority, but we are at a moment when the morality of protecting the society, protecting this

country, and protecting the American Dream is growth moral. It is also the next generation not being, as the economists keep telling me, the first generation to live poorer than their parents because that is what is coming.

Let's use this opportunity to do hard things.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Moore).

Mr. Speaker, I have a handful of things we need to do. A little while ago, we had an Oversight Subcommittee hearing--I chair the Oversight Subcommittee on Ways and Means. Some of the things that get said around here, we just shake our heads. Think about some of the things we hear from the press, from the Democrats, they are just panic-stricken.

I need to actually walk the American people and our own staff through a little bit of the facts and a little bit of the truth.

We have done multiple presentations here, saying if we want to find waste and fraud, if we want to find programs that are mis-designed, and other things that are going on, don't hire a bunch of lawyers. Don't actually hire a bunch of investigators. Hire data scientists. It turns out the truth is in the math. The math can tell us.

What is amusing is listening to some of the Democrats talk about how we

don't want people seeing our data. Maybe they should actually pay attention to the current law.

When we hear certain leftist groups--and most of these are actually fairly left--saying we did an analysis of U.S. taxpayer data and blank, blank, blank is getting this, actually understand--the IRS is one of the things I oversee. For decades, apparently, they have data-sharing models for researchers. Not to give out the names but Harvard, University of Sydney, so they are not even domestic; some are out of the country. Yes, there are some rules.

The fact of the matter is, with this sort of hyperventilation going on around here, has anyone wondered if it is because the ability to mine data is how we find bad acts?

Look what The Wall Street Journal did over the last year in looking at Medicare. It wasn't about people's benefits. It was about people being defrauded on durable medical equipment. Other groups out there also did data-sharing, modeling, and research agreements with CMS and they found bad acts.

A simple question is: Why has the left become terrified of data?

Aren't they the ones who preached to us in the previous years about science? Why don't we believe in science?

Guess what? Now science is being used to protect the U.S. taxpayers and Americans' future. Instead of being used to research things to write papers to support a leftist cause, maybe it is actually now being used to actually find out how the American people are being cheated.

When we hear them hyperventilating and reading the talking points from the Public Employees Union, maybe take a step backward. Let's deal with the fact that much of what is being put out is clickbait, and understand these research agreements have been going on for years and years. What is going on now is these folks are designated as special Federal employees with an even higher level of standard fiduciary responsibility.

This is just part of the things around here that when we get something we don't like or when we start to expose decades worth of bad acts, fight like hell because the Public Employees Union functionally supports one side here. We are trying to find out what is going on.

One of the things I want to also accomplish in today's floor speech is--and I am sorry. I know I am a broken record, but I am trying to break through. Let's actually deal with a couple of things here.

Before I go to the boards, I made the mistake of looking at some of the comments from last week's speech.

Notice there are almost no people here. That is how it is supposed to be. If this room is full of people listening to an idiot like me give another speech, they are not working. They belong in their committees, in their working groups, in their offices, meeting with either constituents or their staff or other people.

This is where we come to actually have our final debate and vote. The vast majority of work done in Congress isn't done in this room. It is done in the dozens of committee rooms and offices all over this campus. When we see the room, stop falling for the clickbait.

Why is the room empty? It is supposed to be.

One of the reasons we get behind this microphone is we are probably on a thousand televisions around this campus and here in D.C. and around the country. This is our chance to talk to those staffers and help them understand how dire the math is and how intense the battle ahead of us is.

How do we communicate with Members who are maybe new to Congress and get them to realize much of what they are being told may not be mathematically honest or true?

Let's actually, once again, set the baseline. This one is about a year or so old. The numbers are actually slightly uglier. The blue is nondefense and defense. That is all a Member of Congress gets to vote on. A Member of Congress doesn't actually vote on the interest payments, the Social Security, the Medicare, Medicaid, or other mandatory because those are formulas now. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money.

Last year, every dime we voted on was borrowed money and maybe $300 billion or $400 billion of what we didn't vote on was borrowed money because we actually borrowed more than every dime on what we call discretionary. Defense is discretionary.

Remember that in today's world Social Security is the number one spend. It is about 1.4, 1.5. Interest is number two. Medicare is number three. Defense is actually number four. The next time we have some brain trust saying, if we just cut defense--I am sure there are efficiencies that we may find in defense.

I have been pushing for--this my third Congress in a row, trying to get an AI audit because the Pentagon has failed their audits for 8 years. It is unauditable is the report we get back. So use AI at least to go through and stack the asset list because we can't audit it if we don't know where the trucks are and other things. In the security areas, do human auditing of those.

Help us because it has finally actually risen to the surface of people saying maybe technology can help us save our science and our future and our economy.

When we take a look at what really goes on here in Congress, we have to understand: Our government is functionally an insurance company with an army. Almost 100 percent of the next 10 years of borrowing is interest and Medicare. Yet, we are terrified to tell the public the truth. It is math. The math will win, but we have to stop being fearful.

I am going to show you some of these. Stop saying crazy stuff. If your mission in life is to fill out comments or put out things on X and this and that and say things because your life's mission is to be clickbait, don't you care enough about this Republic to tell the truth of the scale?

It is debt, deficit, and demographics. We have a country that in 8 years, less than 8 years now, will have more deaths than births.

We have a shortage of young people, and it really screws up the long- run math and ability to be productive, the ability to actually raise wages, all those things. There are ways to make this work. We just have to do hard things. You see how difficult it is just to have an honest conversation about the math around here.

Look, I showed this last week. I am only going to do it for a second. This is for those people that run around this campus saying: Let's just use current policy because that way I don't have to deal with actually telling someone no.

Baseline, by the end of this fiscal year, CBO says we will be at $37.2 trillion in borrowed money. Then CBO tells us over the next 9 budget years, 10 calendar years, we are going to borrow another $22 trillion. That is $37 trillion, another $22 trillion, and then if we were actually going to do the expiring tax provisions, without finding a way to pay for them, that is $5 trillion to $5.5 trillion. Then there is another $1.3 trillion of interest on top of that. Then many of the President's priorities are another $8 trillion when you add in the interest. You are functionally at $74 trillion of borrowing in the next 9 budget years. You basically have doubled U.S. debt.

Is that really what is going on here? It took 240 years to get where we are at. Once again, for the people who are listening, those are the gross numbers because we borrow from the trust funds. The other problem you actually have, if you really want to geek out, is by the end of this budget window, so the next 8 years, 9 years, the trust funds are almost empty.

One of our models basically says in mid-2033, the Social Security trust fund is empty. It is not because someone stole your money. It was demographics. We haven't had enough young workers, and Social Security was always designed as a pay-as-you-go system.

The money that comes out of the Social Security trust fund and is loaned to Treasury. Treasury pays in interest. In the past, it has actually been a little above even some of the market interest you would have gotten. The problem is, every single month, Treasury gets a little note from Social Security saying: We got our FICA tax collections. It is not enough for all the checks going out the door. Treasury, we want some cash; so they cash in what we call special T bills.

Since the brain trust in this place decided in lame duck that we were going to extend some additional Social Security benefits without paying for them, we actually shortened the life of the Social Security trust fund. Some of the math, in 2033, looks like the trust fund will be gone. If we don't fix it, we double senior poverty in America.

This is the morality of this place. The Democrats right now are writing an ad to attack an idiot like me for telling the truth because they care so much more about winning the next election than doubling senior poverty in America. They are going to try to scare the hell out of you instead of stepping up and saying: Here is how you do it.

Understand, in 2034 or 2035, when you have a full year and the trust fund and Social Security are gone, we calculate that it is like $600 billion a year.

Think about what we are fighting over here, it may be $400 billion a year to extend the tax policy so people's taxes don't go up, but by the end of this window, you have got another $600 billion a year to deal with.

It gets worse every single year, and that is not even dealing with the fact that a couple years outside the budget window, the Medicare part A trust fund is also empty.

Is this place capable of dealing with difficulties?

For everyone out there, when your reaction is: Well, just raise taxes. I have done it a half a dozen times on the floor. The staff is telling me the six people that watch this are bored with it.

Go on the Manhattan Institute's website. I think it's Riedl has a great article from a year ago who took all of the tax-hiking policies that have been offered by the Democrats and scored them and said: Here is the economic effects. Here is what you get if you tax the rich, everyone over $400,000. At the end, the calculation came out to you get about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. Yea.

We are going to borrow close to 7 percent of the entire economy this year. Does anyone see a math problem? When your default is: We are going to tax rich people more. It doesn't get you close to where you have to be.

That chart I just showed you a moment ago, if we were to do these things without offsets, in 9 budget years we are no longer borrowing about 7 percent of the entire economy; we are borrowing close to 9.2 percent of the entire economy.

It is not popular because the folks out there want their feelings satiated and don't own calculators. I am sorry. I know I am being a bit of a jerk. I am just tired of dealing with lunacy. The primary driver of debt is demographics.

What happens if we can clean up ourselves? What happens if we are able to squeeze waste and fraud and find more modern ways that are more compassionate, more efficient to actually deliver the benefits to our brothers and sisters?

This is just a thought experiment. We have been working on list after list after list after list of things you could modernize, reduce spending, and never cut someone's benefits, never cut their services.

We have one project we are doing in our office. In Medicare and Medicaid, Indian Health Services, DOD, and VA, how many duplicate scans are there? How many people go get an MRI, an x-ray, an ultrasound? What if you take that and then immediately attach it to someone's phone so that the scan is mobile with them? We are seeing numbers where it is billions and billions and billions of dollars being spent in duplicative scans.

Is that cutting someone's services? Of course it isn't. The lobbyists get upset because they make money on how many times--or at least their clients do. I need you to think about how you modernize to do it better, faster, cheaper, and more compassionately.

We have done entire presentations here on the floor over the years trying to demonstrate that maybe the most moral thing we can do as a government is actually help people to be healthier. If we are seeing data that says 5 percent of the population with multiple chronic conditions are over half of all healthcare spent, what would happen if we focused on them being cured?

If diabetes is 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending, should we actually think about that? If it is over $600 billion, 16 percent of U.S. healthcare by people crashing, having a stroke because they didn't take their calcium inhibitors, things of that nature, are there things we can do to help our brothers and sisters be healthier?

It turns out a year ago, the Joint Economic economists actually did a study that obesity in America may be an additional $9.1 trillion in healthcare over the next 10 years. Turns out that becomes the number one spend in the U.S. Government.

How do we make our brothers and sisters healthier so they can participate in the economy? Maybe they can actually have families. There is suddenly this awakening in America. It is not Republican or Democrat. I would argue it is just moral. We want our brothers and sisters to not only live longer but more vibrantly. Are we willing to do very difficult things in farm policy, in nutrition policy, in how we deliver health services? It is worth thinking about.

Being in this stupid town, instantly, the partisan rage is: Oh, how is that going to get me elected? How am I going to use it as a wedge to beat the crap out of other side?

Maybe the morality is helping our brothers and sisters and not having this country be crushed in debt when the bond market is the most influential group in America today, not Members of Congress.

Let's actually take a quick look. I am trying to find the nicest way to say this. If we were just to do this TCJA extension--which we believe we need to do. We are not going to raise taxes on working people, but we need to find a way to pay for it. It is not only the $5.5 trillion that CBO is now scoring if you did it to 2035. It is the $1.3 trillion financing cost of doing that. That is the interest.

How about no tax on overtime pay? It is a passion of the President. We need to come up with $3 trillion to cover that cost over 10 years. If we don't do that, it adds another $700 billion of interest cost.

If we do no tax on Social Security, that functionally comes out to almost $1.8 trillion. Almost all of that money goes to Social Security and Medicare. We have got to find a way to cover that if we are not going to have tax on Social Security.

How about SALT for the folks in California and New York who are saying they will not vote to extend the tax policy unless they get something for their areas. That could actually be another $1.2 trillion over 10 years and another $300 billion in interest if we don't pay for that.

No tax on tips, actually turns out that one is fairly easy. It may be $600 billion over 10 years. Our math is a little higher, but that is the number we have been given.

You have to understand, everyone has these wish lists. The President, Members of Congress, our constituents, everyone wants something. We need to look at the fact of how does it help the society grow economically. Prosperity is moral. How do we pay for it in a way-- because if we keep pushing up the U.S. debt--I showed a couple weeks ago that if we were to make the bond and the debt markets nervous, a single point of interest over the next 10 years costs the average American family $30,000. You would have a higher car loan, higher home loan, higher credit cards, higher student loans, everything else around you.

You have got to think about it. There is no free option here. You need to do the data to find out where there are bad acts and things we can make more efficient. Then we are going to have to make hard decisions saying: That policy is 20 to 30 years out of date. We need to end that program or we need to modernize it.

If you don't, if we just do the expiring tax provisions and don't pay for them, understand that in 9 budget years, interest alone is over $2 trillion a year, and that is on today's interest rates.

Mr. Speaker, if you are one of the people like me who believe if we make the debt markets nervous and they start raising our interest rates, you are walking right into that thing they call a debt spiral.

This is current policy if we just do it without paying for it. That is assuming interest rates don't go up on us.

I have shown in the past a chart that basically says if U.S. interest rates--I said this last week, and I need to drill

it in so maybe someone hears it. If U.S. interest rates went up to a 6 handle, which we have been close to before, in 9 budget years, 45 percent of all U.S. tax collections go just to interest.

This isn't a game. This isn't a wish list of: I don't want to do difficult things. Do difficult things today, because if you blow this up in the near future, it gets almost impossible to deal with. The dystopian crap you would have to do to the American people will make today's tough decisions look like a walk in the park.

I am going to breeze through this, just because I find some of this fun.

Did you know a penny actually costs like 3 cents to make? Okay. Great. Get rid of them. I don't care.

A nickel actually costs almost 9 cents.

You'll be happy to know that we make money on dimes and quarters and half-dollars.

These are tiny. I am going to make an argument, as I walk through these boards. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of little things that really don't add up to much, and you should absolutely do them. However, if you are the politician, if you are the press, if you are the staff, if you are the talking head on cable television, you are saying: Well, if we just got rid of pennies, we are going to balance the U.S. budget.

Stop saying insanity. One of the problems is people like us, we go home and we talk to our voters, and they have heard these things, they are saying: If you just got rid of the Department of Education, we would be fine. Then you show them the math and they look at you like: Well, I heard it on television. Please, I beg of you, take this seriously. There is a way to make this work. We just have to do really hard things.

Let's take a look at this one. This is one of my favorites. This is as of last Friday. I think there were 45,000 folks, according to The Wall Street Journal, who said they would take the early retirement. The reality of it, with the technology we have today, you could have a revolution in the Federal workforce. You could dramatically change the number of people.

How many law firms today actually have a fraction of the people they had 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, because of the use of technology? Why wouldn't you accept the same thing for your Federal Government? Remember, you are paying for this.

You have got to understand the real math. If 40,000 Federal workers-- and I am not actually talking about the buyouts, it's just the base salary, the average salary is $106,000. Then we added in wages and benefits; multiply it times 40,000, that is one day of borrowing. On average right now, we are burning about $6 billion a day. If 40,000 Federal employees are gone, we covered one day of borrowing.

You absolutely are going to need to do things like that, but don't act like you just solved the U.S. debt problem. It is dozens and dozens of these things you have to stack up.

I am trying to tone down the sarcasm, because we have got to do these things.

Let's get rid of foreign aid. You just covered one week of borrowing.

Can't tell you how many times I am at home and people say: If we just didn't have foreign aid, we could balance the budget. It is a week of borrowing.

The U.S. will waste billions of dollars on the United Nations. We get rid of the United Nations. That is 2 days of borrowing.

Let's take a look here. The U.S. spends too much on the Smithsonian and national parks. If we are borrowing $6 billion a day and the Smithsonian cost $1 billion a year, you have basically covered what, 4 hours?

Maybe you don't want the museums. Maybe you want to create entrance fees or you want to do something else. Don't act like you just balanced the budget by doing something like that.

Let's do another one. Cutting congressional salaries would solve the deficit. Look, we are probably overpaid for the quality of our work, but if you are borrowing $6 billion a day and you do that, if you got rid of congressional salaries, I think it is 20 minutes for an entire year. Take an entire year of borrowing, you just covered 20 minutes. Stop saying crazy stuff.

These are serious problems. Maybe we need serious people to start actually thinking about these things.

Let's take a look at another one. The government spends billions on unused Federal office buildings. Absolutely, we need to clean this up, and it would be about, oh, let's see, 6 hours, maybe 7 hours of borrowing.

Close them up. Get rid of all the unused office space, which we should do. We absolutely need to do that, but it is like 6 or 7 hours' worth of borrowing because we are burning over $6 billion every single day.

Am I making the point? Are you starting to understand the scale of what Members of Congress have to take on?

These trite little sound bites don't get us anywhere. Cutting funding to NPR, PBS, and the National Endowment for the Arts would save billions of dollars. It would cover 4 hours of borrowing. Maybe we should. Maybe we should actually turn those into public trusts and let the public pay rather than taxpayers and have a fundraiser. That is fine, but don't act like we just solved the national debt problem. It is 4 hours of borrowing.

Let's do one or two more to get this off my chest.

Presidential travel, one of the Democrats was going after President Trump. All the Presidential travel is like $350 billion, so you have 1.4 hours--yes, about 1.4 hours. That is less than 2 hours for an entire year's worth of borrowing.

Let's have one or two more for fun just because I have them done. Department of Education salaries, let's just get rid of the Department of Education salaries. Yay, but we covered 9 hours of borrowing.

Emergency services for undocumented--these are people here illegally. They walk into hospitals and get a Federal subsidy. Let's make it so it just becomes uncompensated care of a hospital. Fine. That covers 9 hours of borrowing for an entire year.

The reality of it is that it is not these crazy, little trite things. Yes, they are problems, and there may be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars out there that we need to crush and get rid of. We are going to borrow about $2.3 trillion this year, and in 10 years, that number is up dramatically.

It is demographics. If you look at the 30-year data, everything that is in the Federal budget, except Medicare and Social Security, actually is designed to grow slower than tax receipts. We modeled that, in 30 years, we will have about a $9 trillion surplus, as we have counted. It grows slower than tax receipts. Medicare and Social Security, my math is actually much more dour, but this board is about 1\1/2\ or 2 years old. It is probably about $116 trillion in spend and interest.

We can make this work. We can do this without cutting our brothers' and sisters' benefits, but we have to be willing to think disruptively. We have to be willing to think creatively. We have to be willing to think morally. We have to be willing to think how we modernize the world around us.

What would happen if we could change the cost of delivering services to our brothers and sisters by getting rid of the archaic designs of many of these programs?

My 2-year-old is somewhere in the back. Yes, I have a 2-year-old. My wife is exactly my age. We adopted a little girl years ago, and the same birth mom, the phone rang--so I have a little person.

I have said this repeatedly, and I am trying to have it break through: Is there anyone out there who thinks morally?

When my 2-year-old is basically 22, 23 years old, every U.S. tax has to be doubled just to maintain baseline services. The math is very clear. It is left math, and it is right math.

Mr. Speaker, every economist who is honest basically says that my kids, your kids, and your grandkids are going to be part of the first generation to actually be poorer than their parents and grandparents.

That is not America. This was the country of aspiration. We were the ones who always knew we were leaving the next generation an opportunity to be more prosperous. It can be that way, but it can only be that way if this place stops acting like intellectual

children, the bedwetting--I am sorry; I take that back, Mr. Speaker-- the fear, just the fear of going home and explaining to our constituents the truth.

Mr. Speaker, you see how the Democrats are acting right now just by data scientists digging through and looking for perversities in the datasets. You would think there would have been joy because those aren't cutting services. Those are finding people who are exploiting us and taking advantage of our country, but because it is being done by President Trump, it must be opposed.

How do we fix things? How do we save Social Security? How do we save Medicare? How do we save the future when it is not a loyal opposition anymore? It is basically anything to burn the place down to take power.

For anyone who really doesn't have a life and is watching this presentation, I beg of you, get good at the math and stop making crap up because if you get good at the math, then it provides us the opportunity to have the building blocks to actually produce a solution.

There is hope. There are ways that work.

We also have some economic data that basically says if we don't do it within about the next 4 years and interest rates start to move against us, then we are in for a long, slow rest of the century. That is worth thinking about because the debt starts piling and piling.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, in the previous year, I think we had 3 months when we had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing. For every dime we will take in in tax collections this year, we are going to spend I think it is $1.36, which is an improvement. Last year, it was $1.39.

It doesn't have to be this way. We just have to start telling the truth about the math, telling the truth to each other, and toughening up.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 3 o'clock and 56 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, February 12, 2025, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, forgive us, as we are getting ourselves organized. The gentleman from Texas ended a couple minutes sooner than we expected.

Mr. Speaker, for anyone listening, whether it be staff, another Member, anyone that actually gives a darn, give me your first 4 minutes because in the first 4 minutes, I need to explain why we have been joking about it, in a dark way, that we are in the budget wars.

It is about reconciliation. Why is there such angst by some of us-- Mr. Speaker, I chaired the Joint Economic Committee, so I am the idiot with all the economists. I am number four on Ways and Means. I am not good at many things in life. I am okay at math. What is going on that is stressing us?

Last night, I could barely sleep because I had read report after report after report and the math was devastating.

This is what we need to understand.

Here is our reality. Forgive us, we have been going as fast as we can in our office to find some way to explain what the hell is going on.

At the end of this budget year, September 30, the United States debt by Congressional Budget Office is projected to be $37.2 trillion. They are projecting over the next 10 years, we will add another $20 trillion.

The debate that has been going on is, we have these provisions of the 2017 tax reform that are expiring at the end of this year. If you go take it to 2035 because that is sort of the 10-year window, in 9 budget years, it is another $5.5 trillion. Then you add on to that the interest because it turns out if you were to finance it, not pay for any of it, that is another $1.3 trillion on top of that. Then if you were to come in here and then take the President's requests--we have a couple Members here that say, just do everything. Make everyone happy. Screw my retirement and the next generation. America will be fine.

If you add it all up, by 2035 you have over $74 trillion in debt. You are somewhere in the 155 percent or so of the entire economy is borrowed. Today, we are a little less than a 100.

The point I am trying to make here is, even if you do the calculation of publicly sold debt because, as I have tried to explain, you have the Social Security trust fund, which is gone in 8 years. We borrow the money out of that and we do pay interest on it, but if you take everything where we sell bonds to the world, to each other, to our retirement accounts, to pensions, the day we got elected, Mr. Speaker, a long time ago in November, U.S. sovereign debt that was held by the public was around $28 trillion.

These numbers right now say that number that took 240 years of publicly held debt, we intend to double in 9 years. In 9 years, we are going to functionally add another $28 trillion of publicly held debt. Actually, it will be a little more if we finance them and don't try to pay for them.

This is my 4-minute spiel. When you see some of us stressing out, when you see some of us--he is being disharmonious, maybe it is because I own a damn calculator. If these numbers don't make you pucker up and scare the crap out of you, you don't understand. Yet the hallways around here are full of people demanding we give them more money or they want more barriers to entry or they don't want to change their business model. They want to do it in archaic fashion because it might make them have to compete.

This is no longer the next generation. This is your own retirement. Look, I accept that I traditionally tease behind this microphone that I am pathologically optimistic. My wife and I are both 62 years old, and we have a 2\1/2\-year-old we have adopted. We also have a 9-year-old. When my little boy is 24 years old, the math says every single tax in America needs to be doubled just to maintain baseline services.

The wheels are coming off. Do you really think the bond market will say, ``Oh, we want to keep buying U.S. sovereign debt even though you have gone and doubled it in 9 years''?

We did a math problem a couple of weeks ago on this floor and showed that if we stress the bond markets, if we got up to a 6 percent handle--and it wasn't that many decades ago U.S. sovereign debt was kissing up around 6 percent--in 9 years, 45 percent of all U.S. tax receipts went to interest.

Do you think this is a game? The bond market is on the edge of running this country, not us.

If you are a Member of Congress and claim that you care about debt, deficits, the next generation, working people, and people's retirement, and you don't have this poster up somewhere in your office, how do you understand the math?

The wheels are coming off. I am going to show in a bunch of these slides that there is a path. We can produce some level of stabilization. It means doing really hard things, which you know how good we are at doing hard things because, once again, there will be an army of people outside the door all upset with us because we are trying to do hard things.

You have known this has been coming for decades. When I was an idiot kid in the 1980s, I remember my statistics professor basically did a chart in, like, 1983, saying: Okay, here are baby boomers. This is going to happen. There is this huge bubble.

The thing we weren't prepared for is that U.S. fertility rates started to collapse in 1990. We don't have enough young people. I am going to show some charts of how hard it is to keep up productivity and growth, and it is not just in the United States. It is all across the world. There is a shortage of young people, but we are going to pretend that we can just grow our way out of things. That is a complete untruth.

If we do what a handful of our Members are asking and just look the other way, just give everything to everyone without paying for it--and, look, I think it is outrageous there is a discussion. It would be immoral, I believe, to allow the tax rates to go up on working people, but it is also immoral not to find a way to pay for it.

Are you ready to condemn this country in 9 budget years, 10 calendar years to functionally a financial Armageddon? This is actually in the 10-year window now. This is not some theoretical number years and years and decades from now. It is here.

If interest rates were to move against us, it is functionally almost Armageddon.

I am going to bounce around a little bit.

Think about this: Why are some of us trying so hard to get as much in the way of modernization, cost changes, those things, so we have $5\1/ 2\ trillion, if you do 2035, of expiring provisions that would raise taxes on our brothers and sisters in this country.

We need that not to happen. Understand its actual cost. It is not only the $5\1/2\ trillion. If you just did it, if you just pass it, it is another $1.3 trillion of interest over those 10 years. That means, in 2035, the interest handle for America is $2 trillion a year. Just interest will be $2 trillion a year in 9 budget years if we don't find ways to do offsets.

How can this not terrify people? Are there people in the White House who have calculators? Our brothers and sisters here, do they really think the debt markets want to buy that much more U.S. sovereign money?

Look, there is a funny--an interesting fact. It is not necessarily funny. The world today has the highest ratio of debt since the Napoleonic wars. If you remember your history, after that, there were years and years of misery as governments tried to figure out how to unwind and go to war with each other and those things because of the depressions that it caused.

We are not the only country bingeing on debt. I will say this a couple of times, and it is the one thing that gets me really hateful emails and text messages: Almost 100 percent of the next 10 years of debt is interest and demographics. Almost all of it is Medicare.

Our brothers and sisters, people like me, baby boomers, gray hair, we are moving into our earned benefits. We didn't set aside enough money, and we have been unwilling to modernize how we deliver services because it annoys the lobbyists and the people at home. People get uncomfortable. ``Oh, David, you want to use technology.'' You don't have a choice. You just don't have a choice.

It is not my feelings. It is math. You start to look at this, if you look at the data right now, if we were to do the expiring tax provisions within the budget window, the United States would pay $2- plus trillion a year just in interest. That is at today's interest rates. That is without even a calculation of interest rates going up.

I have been trying to figure out how to explain it. I can say this one easier. We are going to come close to spending 7 percent of the entire economy this year in borrowed money. If we do these things without paying for them, in 10 years, we are not going to be borrowing 7 percent of the economy. We are going to be borrowing up around 9.2 percent of the economy. This is not a game.

Let's walk through one or two more of these to try to get our heads around what is actually going on. You have to understand--do you see the blue here? Okay, dark purple, if that is purple. This is interest. That is our debt we are at, and here is our problem. What happens this year, if we borrow a couple trillion dollars this year, realize half of that is interest. Half of it is now interest. Interest now is the second biggest expense in the United States Government. Defense is actually number four.

I always love it when I am having a conversation with one of my friends on the left. ``Well, if we just cut defense.'' Defense is now number four on the spend stack. Interest is number two. There are a couple of models that if we keep borrowing and interest rates move against us, in a decade or so, interest could be the number one expense in the United States Government.

I have done presentation after presentation of this concept called interest fragility. I think I am probably the only one who listened to it. Sometimes I wonder if I even listen to myself.

This isn't a game. There is a reason the British Government collapsed this summer. Remember Liz Truss? Yeah, we are a hell of a lot bigger economy. Do we really think because we have the two great, extraordinary privileges of the reserve currency and being a country that people want to do business in, live in, prosper in, do you think we keep those things if we keep this sort of clown show going?

Let's actually walk through a couple more of these, and then I am going to try to have a little fun mocking some of the suggestions that keep coming in.

Debt held by the public under alternative conditions, trying to make--increase in primary deficits--I need to explain. This is going to be a little tricky. In 2033, because of what was done in this body in lameduck, where we functionally took another couple hundred billion dollars out of Social Security and paid it out without replacing the money, now it looks like, in mid-2033, the Social Security trust fund is empty.

Now, the law for Social Security says you cut seniors' benefits. The math is about 20 percent. So, we will double senior poverty the following year, but that is not how CBO is forced, under the law, to do the math. There is an actual law that says you are not allowed to show a zero balance. That is why we are doing this.

That means, in 2034, there is $600 billion of borrowing that is shoved in that is actually to make up the shortfall in Social Security. The next year it is more. If you add up 2023, 2024, 2025, there is like another $1.7 trillion because Social Security is empty. You don't want to double senior poverty, but we are also far too fearful to actually tell our voters the truth.

The fact of the matter is, every time one of us idiots--excuse me, me--gets up and tries to find a way to stabilize the Social Security trust fund, that side starts running attack ads on you because they care more about winning the next election than they do doubling senior poverty in America.

The math, you start to look at what is going on here. If we are really heading toward a time where just the primary deficit that is publicly sold without the other requests from the President, we are at $55-plus trillion. We are playing a very dangerous game here. My sense of frustration is off the charts.

Look, this one is very simple. Within the budget window, publicly held debt--not also the borrowing from the trust funds--publicly held debt, if we were to do the expiring tax provisions without paying for them, we are at 149 percent of debt to GDP. We will functionally have raised U.S. debt by 50 percent in 9 budget years.

How many Members here ran on a promise that we are going to save America, save our retirements, save our kids, save the future, and we are going to pretend math doesn't exist? This is what is going on.

Let's walk through some of the ideas that have been coming into our office. When I do this, yes, there is going to be a little tone of sarcasm, but it is more for my own personal amusement. I am trying to help people understand how big 12 zeros is and how difficult this math is because if I watch one more idiot on cable television saying, ``All we have to do is this,'' ``Look how wonderful that is,'' that is not the math.

Let's actually have a little fun here. The Wall Street Journal yesterday said, hey, there are 40,000 Federal employees who have said they will take a retirement package. Okay. I am ignoring, hey, if they took the package today, we pay them through the rest of the year. I am just ignoring that math. What is 40,000 Federal employees times an average salary? I think we used $106,000, which we got from one of the reports, and just multiply that. Understand, this is the conservative number. We are borrowing about $6 billion a day. The 40,000 Federal employees leaving is a single day of borrowing. For an

entire year, all those folks leaving is a single day of borrowing. You have 24 hours of borrowing by 40,000 Federal employees leaving.

Yet, I watched someone on television last night saying, wow, look, we are going to make a huge dent in the U.S. deficit with these 40,000 taking early retirement. It is 1 day of borrowing. That is not spending--borrowing. Remember, by the end of the decade, that borrowing is up per day dramatically.

Take this in. This is one of the grand solutions.

Now, the point I want to make is, we probably have to do it. You have to do all of them. It is going to be dozens and dozens of things all stacked up just to provide some stability because can we, as a country, get back to just borrowing about 3 percent of our economy a year instead of 7 or, God forbid, a decade from now over 9.

You have to stop lying to each other. Our staffs have to stop lying to us. The press has to stop making crap up. We have to help the public understand the scale of what the hell is going on. With 40,000 employees taking early retirement, the salary savings is 1 day of borrowing.

Let's have a little more fun. Yesterday, someone said: Okay, let's get rid of the Federal subsidy on tax exempt bonds for stadiums. Okay, great.

We calculate that is about 6 or 7 seconds of borrowing for a year. Mr. Speaker, 7 seconds, but this is worthy? Yeah, I am going to throw it in the stack, but is this really your debate line? We are not going to subsidize tax exempt interest for billionaire sports team owners? Great, okay. Fine, but it is 7 seconds.

Let's do a couple of the really popular ones. Absolutely, we are going to have to do some of these things. The Department of Education salaries: If we get rid of the Department of Education salaries--I think this is all of them--is about 2.75 billion.

Remember, we still have got to transfer the loan portfolios and all of those things, but we just got rid of the employees. That just covered 9 hours of borrowing. Am I starting to make a point on the scale of what we actually have to tell the truth and deal with?

Let's have a little more fun here. One of my favorite ones. I had this the other day. Let's get rid of healthcare for those who are here illegally.

Most of the math we did here is Obamacare subsidies for DACA recipients.

Sorry, this is emergency services for the undocumented. We calculate that to be about 2.1 billion a year. This is the emergency healthcare on undocumented. That will give us another 9 hours.

Let's actually go to something a little bigger. Let's get rid of the foreign aid. Foreign aid is gone. We get ourselves a week.

How many times have I heard--those of us on the right, I have been in debate with another Republican--if we just didn't have foreign aid, we would be fine. We have got to deal with the reality of what that does to our military, our footprint in the world, protecting the reserve currency.

Why are we the reserve currency? We are the reserve currency because we have a footprint, we protect the trade routes. We should know that from our history. If it was just wiped it out, a week of borrowing is covered. Am I starting to make a point here? This is why it is hard.

Close the carried interest loophole. My math is not 12; it is 13 billion over 10 years. It is 13 billion over 10, so I get 1.3 billion. I am going to talk around the chart. Mr. Speaker, 1.3 billion in a year. We borrow about 6 billion a day. We get an hour, a couple hours, but it is a great talking point. We should get rid of that carried interest for those rich people. Fine, but don't act like it actually solves something.

Back to interest fragility, Mr. Speaker. This discussion is a little geeky, but it is really, really sort of important. About half of our debt is in what we call notes. Look, there is bills, notes, bonds.

It is the hierarchy to this. A bill is very short-term. It can be under a couple years. The notes are in the middle term. Right now, half of our debt--actually, more than half of our debt--actually, about 72 percent of it is really short-term.

I was doing this calculation in my head. We are going to borrow about 2 trillion virgin this year, and we are probably going to have to refinance 9 or 10 this year. That is not the roll. We have a lot of roll where it goes 30 days, 90 days, 6 months.

If interest rates move against us, it moves into U.S. debt calculations. Within a year or 2, it is all in there. That is why we keep having this discussion of: Could we go out further? If you want to know what others are, those are the inflation adjusted bonds.

That is why you talk about interest fragility. If suddenly the world goes a little haywire on us, our inflation ticks up and interest rates go up. It pounds the United States because the previous administration and the one before that and Heaven forbid back into the Obama administration, they stayed very short on the curve because it was a little bit cheaper.

The danger of that is if interest rates move against us, it is a technical economic turn. We are absolutely screwed. Back to the point on all the notes. They are all the way down around 2.8. The actual cost of a 10-year is 4, 4\1/2\.

All this is going to move into being dramatically more expensive. They say: Who cares? By the end of this year when you have close to $30 trillion that has to be borrowed from capital markets from people around the world, this is a big deal.

I showed a little while ago if we were to just finance the 5\1/2\ trillion of expiring tax provisions over the 10 years, that is just 1.3 trillion just financing that. Imagine the movement on everything else.

You will be happy to know, actually I think a little while ago, the U.K.'s 10-year bond moved cheaper, less expensive, lower interest rate, than United States. I think we are back to being the 14th best bet of substantial countries in the world. Meaning, there is 13 other countries with better credit ratings. Their 10-year bond sells cheaper than the United States. Greece today can sell a 10-year bond almost a full point cheaper than the United States. Doesn't that set off an alarm in anyone's head?

Am I the only idiot--sorry. I don't mean to be going there. I am trying to find some way to say this. I will get these criticisms. David, you talked about math. I don't like math. You may not like it, but the math will always win.

Back to a couple more points. The famous pie chart. Everything a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money. Every dime of defense is borrowed money. Every dime in nondefense discretionary is borrowed money. I think last fiscal year $300, $400 billion of earned benefits.

Look, what we call the mandatory, the red, most of it is earned benefits. It is your Social Security. It is your Medicare. It is your VA pensions, and those sorts of things. There is a portion that you get because you are part of a Tribal population, part of a treaty obligation, or you fell below a certain income, Medicaid, or those things.

You are basically now in a world 75/25, but the numbers are actually better now. In fiscal year 2024, for every dollar the United States took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.39. Mr. Speaker, $1 in, $1.39 out. It is better now. Tax receipts are actually up, so for every $1 we get in, we spend a $1.36.

How do we go home and tell our folks the scale, that the simple solutions are absolutely wrong? They are not truthful. It turns out we have a brutally complex problem. It is going to require a complex solution, and it is going to require doing hard things. We have people who will say: I will only vote for it if I get this.

Those are the very people who I promise you aren't watching this presentation. This isn't a game. These numbers keep getting uglier and uglier.

Let's go back to the thing that gets me screamed at. This board is getting old, and the numbers are actually worse.

Over the next 30 years, we believe the total debt number over the next 30 years is now substantially higher, but this is the one I have. Your country spends about $124 trillion in deficit, but the things we vote on actually grow slower than tax receipts.

Here is the crazy thing: The defense and discretionary, if we had actually followed the sequestration--which we will bust those caps. As a matter a fact, that is part of the discussion we

are having right now is it makes some of our folks unhappy, so we are going to bust caps--but if we followed the actual wall, in 30 years, defense and nondefense discretionary actually have what we would call a $9 trillion positive.

They grew slower than tax receipts. Medicare and Social Security together actually produce about $115, $116 trillion in deficit. It is just those two programs, and they are interest. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is demographics.

Telling the truth about demographics isn't great politics. Our job is to blame the other side and them blame us, and then we will go back and forth and have these incredibly petty, childish, mathematically void debates.

Debt deficit and demographics, it is what we are. The difference is, I believe, those of us on the right, those of us who are Republicans, have the absolute moral obligation--we are supposed to be the math people--to fix it. Let the other side lie about it.

We campaigned. We won. The American people gave us the House, they gave us the Senate, they gave us the Presidency. Suddenly, the obligation--you know, we did all this moralizing, and now we have run away from the difficulty.

This is other thing where I am going to start to really make a couple of my brothers and sisters annoyed around here. The United States, according to the Census Bureau from last month, will have more deaths than births in 8 years.

Not a single country in the world--and this is not just the United States, it is basically all the industrialized countries, and much of the world is way ahead of us in this almost dystopian collapse of there being young people--no other country has been actually able to change natalist, fertility rates, whatever pop culture word you want to use.

There are countries out there that will buy you a house after delivering your third child. And all they did is move fertility forward and, boom, a couple years later they just move back to the mean. Why is this a big deal?

When you start to understand total fertility rates and what it means to being able to grow an economy--I am begging you, give this a chance. If you are watching this, you are obviously unusual. You are smart.

If you have a shortage of young people in your country, how do you grow? How do you reach productivity? There becomes--we can do it by policy. You are not going to have more children, but are you willing to make it easier to adopt technology?

Are you going to be fearful of AI, machine learning? Are you going to allow synthetic biology to cure diseases? Are you going to promote automation everywhere you can because you are going to have a shortage of workers?

Mr. Speaker, are we going to remove the regulatory barriers and financing barriers to basically have a much more productive society? If we don't, there is absolutely no way we can make the math work. This is the reality.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a whole series of charts showing if the United States would take on the rest of the world--because we have to understand, besides the tax arbitrage the world uses by refunding their value-added tax--yet when we send them something, they put it on. There is already this tax arbitrage the world uses on us.

The other stupidity we engage in, in this country is we educate people in our fine universities, and we send them home to compete with us. The Wall Street Journal today actually has an article on drug discovery and drug research and how fast China is basically competing with us now in new biologics and those things.

The basic premise is that we educated the very people who are competing with us because we sent them home because we are idiots. Yet, I will get folks who are pounding out texts, saying they don't want foreigners in here. Do they want us to pay their Medicare bills if we don't get the growth?

What are the two extraordinary privileges of the United States? It is our currency. The world borrows and trades and denominates in U.S. currency. The economists will tell us what is worth even more than being the reserve currency of the world is that people want to do their business and investments, and bring their intellect, their passions, and their entrepreneurialism, to the United States.

In the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the world was nice to each other for hydrocarbons and oil. In the last decade, we competed, whether we know it, for rare earths. The rest of the world figured this out 10 years ago when Australia, Great Britain, and Canada all moved to a talent-based and STEM-based system of saying they want smart people to continue to grow.

I think the United States is the only major country still doing a familial-based immigration system. This upsets people when I say this. ``I want to be able to sponsor my grandma.'' That is great. I am sure she is lovely.

From an economist standpoint, if we are going to survive as an economy and particularly if we are about to put together a package on how we are going to cover the $5.5 trillion of expiring provisions by saying here are the cuts and we are going to build growth in, are we willing to do the things required to hit that growth number?

It turns out that, yes, modernizing regulations is great. It turns out an economist can't hit the number without a talent-based and STEM- based immigration system. We just can't.

Here is the problem. We have built the model. If we are going to extend expensing for research and development so we are doing things better, faster, and cheaper, what happens when the very companies that are doing that and the research labs that are doing it continue to show up in my office and say, ``We can't get enough people. We are being squeezed. We will have to do part of the research on the other side of the world. Have we lost our minds?'' ``Oh, but, David, you can't say that. That will upset someone.''

The chaos created at the border the last 4 years crushed the working poor because the working poor sells their talents and their willingness to show up. Now, we have millions and millions of other entries. There are a number of great articles out there that basically talk about the working poor's wage growth, which will probably be flat for the next decade.

Part of that same report says we are getting close--I think it was $900 billion. It is almost a trillion dollars over 10 years of new tax receipts if we move to a STEM-based, talent-based immigration system. In the next decade, it is parabolic. It just explodes because that way we are integrated in the economy.

Mr. Speaker, are we allowed to have that conversation saying that we are going to do this? We are going to tell ourselves we are going to start growing at these great rates. Are we going to do the very tools that allow us to grow, that allow us to prosper, to allow us to raise the productivity?

I know this chart is almost impossible to read. Its punch line is very simple. Unless we have this productivity spike, we are going to get poorer. We see it around the world that productivity and the ability to have that productivity growth is how we keep up standards of living.

We have had a great pop the last couple of years with the investments in AI and those things. Are we going to keep it up? Are we basically going to give our competitive advantage to the rest of the world because we are going to educate the very talent that is bringing them to us and send them home?

Mr. Speaker, I hope I accomplish three things here. One is to give everyone a sense of how absolutely brutal the math is and why it is absolutely necessary we do the moral thing of reducing the spending, modernize the way we deliver services, make the tax code actually grow. Then, we deal with the reality of what drives our debt and deficits and then deal with the reality of how we maximize growth, productivity, and wealth.

Prosperity is moral. I actually believe it is the American ethos. My kids, our kids, deserve to be more prosperous than the generation before them. Every data point we hold says our kids will be poorer than our generation. Is that the morality we have decided to bathe in?

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

Mr. Speaker, tonight is going to be a little thick, so I apologize to everyone, but we are going to actually try something a little bit broader. We are going to actually play economist.

I am going to try actually to walk through three or four themes here of why what we must do is so difficult, why it absolutely has to happen, and the truth about the math. Let's have some fun here.

Since I know everyone around here is a genius and we spend lots of time reading difficult things, I am sure every Member of Congress got their hand on the latest McKinsey report that came out a few days ago that actually walked through in beautiful detail what is happening in the industrialized world with the lack of young people. Okay. Let's walk through this.

Idiots like me have been coming behind this microphone for almost a decade talking about the morality of prosperity. I don't care if you are on the left or right, but having a society that grows and becomes prosperous and becomes more and more productive and can provide better things is moral, but, also, why is it so hard?

Look, this was done by our own CBO, taking updates from the data from the Census Bureau. In 8 years, the United States has more deaths than births. Last year, we had 17 States that had more deaths than births.

Okay. If Members read through, the term now has become ``absence of young people.'' There is lots of crazy discussions. There are entire books. I have all these things on my shelves about natalist policies and how many countries have tried to encourage higher fertility rates, and all failed. There really is no success in the entire world.

They have been able to move forward some of the fertility rates spiking up, and then they go back and fall back to the mean. It is the nature of wealth. It is the nature of modern societies, but then my colleagues come to me and say: David, you are on Ways and Means, chaired the Joint Economic Committee, so all of these economists work for you. Show me how we are going to have 3 percent GDP growth every year.

I can show Members how to do it. I just need my colleagues to understand that the United States is better off than so many countries, but the fact of the matter is we are having fewer children than countries like France.

In 8 years, we have more deaths than births. Remember the first year of economics class where they walked through the formula and said, well, population growth, then capital expenditures for plant and equipment that are more productive, then spikes in technology. That is how the wealth of a nation is built. We are losing one of the things.

When people like me walk behind these microphones, my colleagues need to hear coming out of their mouths: I am willing to actually deal with the reality of how do we make capital investments in equipment that makes us more productive? How do we encourage the synthetic biology that makes us not only live longer, but able to survive and do well and enjoy life? How do we actually deal with not being fearful of AI and artificial intelligence, but use that to make this another American century? I can't make the math work without the adoption of labor substitutes.

I am going to actually show something here that seems to make people mad when I get to it. Let's wait, I am going to actually make a pitch that what are the two extraordinary privileges of this country?

Okay. Members are going to hear monetarists come behind the microphone all the time and say that people want to use the U.S. dollar and that people must use the U.S. dollar to borrow, to trade in, and to hold assets.

As an economist, what is actually more valuable than having the world reserve currency is that smart people, entrepreneurs, and people with wealth want to invest their lives, their time, and their talents in the United States.

We hold the two greatest extraordinary privileges from a worldwide economist. We have to start understanding the math and what we are up against because it is not us.

Start to take a look at what is going on. I know some of these charts are almost impossible to read, but the basic point of many of these is we have all talked about, in a couple of years, all of the baby boomers are 65 and up, and we have this huge population bubble.

We hate to say this because we get booed at our townhalls when we say this: The fact of the matter is, in the next 10 years, almost 100 percent of U.S. debt is interest and the growth of the cost of Medicare.

How many years have we known that baby boomers were going to turn 65? It has been 65 years, but we didn't plan for it. We didn't set it aside. One thing we weren't ready for as a society is, in 1990, fertility rates started to roll over.

As the McKinsey report goes up and down, it is the absence of young people. Now make an economy grow.

Some of the points I am going to try to make here is this one. I need people to think. There was the kerfuffle last week when Elon Musk and some of the others got into the H-1B visas, bringing talent into the country. I am actually not even sure I liked the H-1 process. I would like to move maybe to a talent-based system.

The entire industrialized world is going through things very similar to us. China's numbers look--it is the craziest charts you are ever going to see. It is like a boom.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the world competed for hydrocarbons, oil. We remember the oil.

The last decade, we sort of battled for where we could have supplies of rare earths. Some of the smartest economists who actually do demographics are now saying that the industrialized world is going to knife each other for smart people.

Now, maybe a smart person is the great carpenter or the synthetic biologist, but we need to start being honest with each other that my colleagues want us, particularly my economic team, to say: Build us ideas. Build us a plan. As we get ready to do reconciliation, do the things that provide us the growth so we can still be Americans, that sort of beacon of prosperity.

Mr. Speaker, you have to understand that, in 8 years, there will be more deaths than births.

Are we going to be willing to do very difficult things and move to a talent-based immigration system that doesn't care about your race, your gender, who you cuddle with, or anything else? It cares about the talent.

I have actually done entire presentations here where I have shown that what happened at the border over the last 4 years will make the working poor poorer in this country. It is math. It is not my opinion. I am not demagoguing. It is math.

In part of our society, we have what is called the quartiles. I sort of despise that term. It is people who didn't graduate high school, so what they do economically is sell their willingness to work. They go out and hang drywall. They bust their backsides, and then, tomorrow, they are competing against millions of other people with the same skill set. Look at how our economy works and the fact that, let's be brutal, populations under a certain income will receive services from our society because we are a compassionate society.

When you start to see a talent-based immigration system, you have people here because of the productivity they bring to society. It turns out that when you look at their career, they pay a boatload of taxes and actually help us grow. We need to deal with the math, and the fact of the matter is, we look over and over at these things.

I am just using Japan because it is easy. Japan has almost 300 percent

debt-to-GDP, but it is a unique society because their corporations, their individuals, actually finance almost their entire debt, where the United States is chewing up much of our capital stock now. We are borrowing somewhere between maybe, if you actually just take this fiscal year, as high as $80,000 every second. We borrow $6 billion, $7 billion every single day.

I have done the chart before, but think about this. We click off an additional trillion dollars of borrowing about every 125 days. Do you think it is going to go on forever?

I am going to show you, in the second part of this, a number of the biggest bond traders in the world, and Larry Fink and Ray Dalio are basically saying you guys got a problem, and it is coming fast. They are actually taking billions of dollars and starting to hedge even the U.S. bonds and saying we think you are going to 5 percent, 6 percent.

Please understand that if the United States ever went back to what was normal before the Great Recession of 2008, if we went back to a 6 percent handle on U.S. debt, in 9 years, 45 percent of all tax collections are interest. Why doesn't that scare the crap out of people?

Then, we are going to engage in policies where we are doing our best to scare to death the very people we are turning to, saying to please buy our bonds.

How do we do what is necessary, particularly in reconciliation, to not hurt working people by having their taxes go up because of the expiring provisions of TCJA, and then also, at the same time, deal with the math. If we finance everything, because we are already scheduled to borrow about $22 trillion additional between now and, I think, 2034, is the intent to stack another $5 trillion on top of that?

You don't think the bond markets aren't going to punish us? Little bits of interest just crush not only the U.S. Government but also working people.

How many people can afford a mortgage right now when it is over 7 percent? How many can afford a car loan? We just went through, functionally, 3, 4 years of inflation where, in my community, if you don't make 27 percent more, you are poorer today.

Isn't the employment rate great? It is, but it is wage growth, and wage growth goes up by two things: inflation, which means you are not getting ahead and are just treading water, or productivity.

When you are lacking population growth, how do you get productivity? Regulatory policy, good trade policy, great tax policy that makes it so you are investing in plants, equipment, and research and development to do it better, faster, cheaper. That is how you make people less poor.

This one is a little tricky, but it is fascinating. If you actually dig into the article, if you are out of your mind or geeky or you just don't have a life or you don't have a Netflix subscription, you sort of dig into what level of productivity growth you actually need just to sustain your lifestyle.

It is all sorts of different countries, and for the United States, you need almost about 2 percent where we are looking at the different years. Do you see the pink line? We calculate if you are not having at least a 1.8 percent productivity gain, which is a lot, you are functionally poorer. You become poorer.

For all the people who complain about, well, don't do tax cuts for business. Okay. Don't do regulatory change for business. Okay. Now, go read the literature.

We know that, in 2017, when we did the change in the corporate tax rates, getting companies to move their money back here, getting them to invest in productivity, those things, we calculate from 60 to 70 percent of every dime they got went into wages because, once again, the primary way people make more money is productivity.

This is the chart I am sure will show up in an election ad beating the crap out of me, but you see this spike? That was the years of the open border. We go back to normality where the immigration system-- except we are the last country really on Earth that uses a familial system.

In a familial system, you sponsor someone because your grandma was here. Your grandma sponsors her sister, and they sponsor theirs. That is a familial immigration system.

My argument is, as part of when we are starting to deal with productivity for the society, we actually have to start thinking about it from top to bottom. It is not just great AI policy, great synthetic biology policy, great regulatory policy, great tax policy. It is also going to have to be immigration.

Now, on to sort of the reality of where we are at. We actually got, I am going to call it, better news. CBO actually did some calculations and said we expect tax receipts to be up in this fiscal year.

I have come here repeatedly and shown my chart that says, for every $1 the United States takes in in all sorts of tax receipts--remember, most of those tax receipts are going to Social Security, Medicare, those sorts of things, but for every $1 we take in, $1.39 is spent.

Guess what? The good news is that now it is no longer $1.39 of spending for every $1 we take in. Now it is $1.36. It got better, but it is still terrifyingly bad. This is the improvement that so many people are running around being giddy about.

Let's actually sort of walk through some of these numbers as quickly as we can.

This chart says Federal spending as the share of total tax revenue. The reason I am showing you this is to give you an idea of the scale we are up against. If you actually take all of our tax receipts, every dime, and say here is what we call mandatory spending--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits, and interest because you have to pay your interest--we are the ones who basically binge on debt. It consumes every dollar of tax receipts plus some.

We actually don't collect enough taxes to pay for our mandatory spending and our interest. That is our basic problem. If you do net interest and mandatory spending, it consumes everything.

Mr. Speaker, the point from this chart is very simple: Everything you and I vote on, everything a Member of Congress votes on, is on borrowed money. That is every dime of defense and every dime of nondefense discretionary.

We are going to do theatrical things like go on our local talk radio show, go on cable television, sometimes stand behind these mikes and say things that may be great policy, but we act like it actually will make a difference to these sorts of numbers. It doesn't.

I have heard my brothers and sisters here say things like, okay, ObamaCare subsidies for those who are here illegally. I am fine with that. Go ahead and get rid of them, but it is 9\1/2\ hours for an entire year's worth of borrowing.

In an entire year, you just covered 9\1/2\ hours. Don't act like it is a solution. It is one of a thousand things you have to do.

Here is the classic problem on the way this place thinks. It turns out that fixing things is complex, and we live in a society with these things where we want something that is simple, flashy, short. It turns out that complexity often requires a complex solution.

It is hard. We will have the armies of the lobbyists in the hallways mad at us. They don't like it when we tell the truth, Heaven forbid.

Have you ever gone home and talked to your voters and they think if you just got rid of foreign aid--and then you show them the chart. It is about a week of borrowing, and they just stare at you with daggers, like, how can that be?

It is not their fault. I believe the political class, the commentary class, and the partisan media class have just made up crap for years.

I challenge my brothers and sisters on the left and the right to know your math and start telling the truth. If you look at charts like this where this right here is breakeven, this is where the dollar is. Even this year, every dime of discretionary and a little sliver of mandatory are on borrowed money, once again.

The only reason I threw this chart in the way it is, where we did '24, '25--you see this. That was with the CBO's calculations that the law says next year they get to take in some $400 billion additional taxes because Americans' taxes go up. We don't want that to happen. We want to protect hardworking people.

The very last board I am going to show here is the way you protect American people is you offset as much of that as you can because you give it to hardworking folks and then take it away from them in higher interest costs and higher financing costs. You smile at them and hand them a dollar in their face while you are grabbing their wallet from behind and stealing it from them. That moment of telling the truth about math is really important.

I brought a lot of the boards just trying to explain that, for the last couple of years, for every $1 we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.39. This year, we will spend $1.36, which means all that differential.

This is a little complex, but this will make it super simple, as best I can.

You are going to hear particularly Democrats and others say the tax reform caused this or that. You have to work through the incredible craziness of the pandemic, but if you look at the charts and actually take a look at the matching of TCJA and what we expected to be inflation-adjusted tax receipts--I am not playing the scam of looking at how much more money we are getting, even though we have had 25 percent inflation. For an honest number, when you actually calculate it and normalize it, guess what? Tax receipts are pretty much right on track.

We have a couple of these to give you sort of a sense. When you take a look at annual revenues match pre-TCJA projections, this one is important, and we often don't actually talk about it. Go back to the baseline numbers of CBO and Joint Tax before we did tax reform in 2017. Then, step up to where we are today and take a look where baseline is. If you adjust for inflation, it is normal.

The math is normal. When someone says, well, it is because you did this tax reform and you helped the economy, I am not standing in front of you and saying tax cuts pay for themselves. What I am saying is that the scale of the economy actually today is right on track to what the projections were before tax reform.

It is a complex calculation of everything from technology adoptions to new ways we do things to productivity gains, but the baseline number is the baseline number.

Now, back to trying to make the point. What is the issue with the United States bingeing on debt? Is it that we don't collect enough taxes, or is it that we spend too much money?

I have done entire presentations here where I have shown high marginal tax rates, low marginal tax rates, and we seem to hold about 17 percent of the size of the economy in taxes. You will often hear 17 percent of GDP.

It is historic. Somehow when you raise up the marginal tax rates, you are getting 17 percent of the economy. Part of that is an offset because the economy slows down. When you have done low marginal tax rates, the economy grows, so you are getting 17 percent of the economy because the economy has expanded.

In trying to make the point that growth is moral, it is also great economics. How do you grow, grow, grow? I just showed you, in the beginning portion of this, we have an issue. In 8 years, we will have more deaths than births. We have a demographic issue--debt demographics. Demographics are your destiny.

I am just trying to point out on this, over the last 4 years, we functionally have borrowed $7.8 trillion in deficits. That borrowing functionally is a current stimulus effect, but you are going to pay for it. It is coming out of your retirement, whether you know it or not. It is coming from your kids.

I am 62, and my wife is 62. I have a 9-year-old daughter and a 2\1/ 2\-year-old son. They both have the same birth mom. We have adopted them. My little boy, when he is 24, to keep baseline services, just to keep things even--what was that fancy word? Ceteris paribus--the United States, in about 22 years, would have to double every single tax. The math basically says my kids will be part of the first generation in America that will be poorer. That is the morality of this place.

They will say, David, adopting modernization and cutting spending is really hard, and we are going to get someone who is going to say mean things about us. Instead, you are willing to screw over your kids? That is the morality of this place. How is that Republican or Democratic?

Then, once again, to my friends on the left over here, I have done a whole presentation on it. Go to the Manhattan Institute right now. Look up Riedl's analysis. Every tax hike--and there is a dozen of them--on those $400,000 and up, when you do all the economic effects, produces about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP.

For those of us on the right, here are all the things we are willing to cut. It is about 1 percent of GDP.

If my math is right, that is--what?--2\1/2\ percent.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to borrow about 7 percent of the entire economy this year. Does anyone get the fraud? ``Here are the tax hikes. It is rich people,'' or, ``We are going to do these cuts.''

We are not willing to do the hard things of modernizing how we deliver services to our brothers and sisters in this country because we are going to make some bureaucracy, some union, some company out there that lives off delivering the services the way they were doing it 30 years ago modernize.

Once again, over the last 4 years, we have gone from--what is it?--4 years ago, the debt was $1.52 trillion. Last year, it was $1.9 trillion. Now, you have to understand that that number also is a bit of a fraud.

The United States is one of the only countries that doesn't actually put in its internal borrowing. We borrow money from the Social Security trust fund, from the veterans trust fund, from all these things. Are we not going to pay it back? You know we pay interest to those.

That is why the real number for this year is going to be closer to $2.3 trillion because there is about another $300 billion out there that we borrow internally that we also have to pay back and also have to pay interest.

Budget deficits are headed to--I have to make the point. If there is any staffer who actually writes memos for their boss, this is the one I want them to memorize. If we do the tax hikes that are coming and don't offset them--we don't pay for them--in 9 years, we are no longer at 7 percent of the economy in borrowed money. We are at, I think it is, 9.2 percent of the economy in borrowed money.

When the smart people are starting to tell us that small changes in interest rates--are we really dead set on trying to freak out our bankers, the people we turn to, and say: Please buy U.S. bonds. Help us finance the fact that we can't stop spending.

Let's say this again. If we went to a six handle on U.S. debt, so 6 percent, which I think, before 2008, we were at 5\1/2\, 6 percent, somewhere in there, in 9 years, 45 percent of all tax receipts would be just interest.

We are playing with live ammunition here, and we seem terrified to own a calculator.

You are going to tell our brothers and sisters, the hardworking people of this country, that we are not going to let your taxes be raised. Absolutely. But we don't want to do things that are hard and get yelled at by a lobbyist or some group back home, so we are just going to borrow the money. We are going to give it to you, and then a few years from now, you will find out that productivity in the country has slowed down because the capital stack, another $4 trillion we have sucked out of the economy, doesn't get lent to your business, to you buying a house, to the new piece of equipment.

The economists have already done the calculations basically saying--I am sorry, it got crumpled as I was marching over here--you want to maximize the economic growth and the wealth of this country. There is a CBO report that has been vetted by my economists on Joint Economic. You want to maximize prosperity and the curve. You offset the spending because you are screwing up the available capital.

The reason really smart bond houses are now writing articles is the bingeing on debt that is going on in this country but also China and so many other places. Why do you think Great Britain this summer took down their government? Their bonds exploded; they lost their government. What the hell do you think is going on in France? What do you think is going on in Germany? What do you think happened in South Korea? What do you think was happening in Canada?

All these countries, even Germany, are just trying to deal with the financing costs of their pensions. The United States is much better off than many of these countries, but it is coming fast for us.

Do hard things today. Maximize prosperity tomorrow for every working person but also for my kids and maybe for your pension, your retirement.

Mr. Speaker, getting older isn't Republican or Democratic. It is math. Go to CBO's data and tell the truth: 100 percent of the debt for the next 30 years is Social Security and Medicare. The rest of the government actually grows slower than tax receipts. It is like $124 trillion of borrowing, but everything is basically what we call discretionary. Military is actually squeezed to grow slower than the tax receipts. It actually has what they calculate as a positive balance.

This isn't mean because, the fact of the matter is, we have demonstrated here over and over that you could modernize how we deliver so many of these things to our brothers and sisters who have earned their benefits. You just have to be willing to tell the bureaucracy and the deliverers of those services, saying: We expect you to modernize.

Those of us with a fixation on watching the bond futures, the debt markets, today's interest rates are almost a full point higher than they were December 1. If that 1 percent works its way into U.S. bonds over the next 10 years, it is almost $3 trillion of additional spending. It is almost everything we are talking about trying to cut.

Grow up. Figure out how to actually act like we are the board of directors of the biggest economy in the world, understand math, and start being fiscally disciplined. It doesn't mean cruel. It is not cutting and slashing. If you don't communicate to the world, who we ask for money, they raise our interest rates, and those interest rates are much more cruel than anything we could possibly do.

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

Madam Speaker, I think we are going to try to do a bit of a continuation of what we were doing last week. If you don't like math or economics, please turn off C-SPAN.

There are a couple of things that we have to walk through. Last Thursday, I think I took 38 minutes here, and the two concepts I was trying to walk through were, one, the demographics of the United States being the primary driver of U.S. debt--it is not that complicated, but it seems to really bother people--and the second thing was this concept called interest fragility. That is a big word.

What it basically means is that when you have $36 trillion in debt, $28 trillion to $29 trillion publicly financed, and when, over a year, you are going to refinance almost $10 trillion, bring maybe $2 trillion to $2.3 trillion new issuances to market, that little movement in interest rates could be a boatload of cash.

What happened last Friday? We got a knockout jobs report.

Here is the irony that people need to understand: The United States and a few other governments, such as China, are bingeing on so much debt that they have a ravenous appetite to grab people's savings and borrow it around the world. When the bond markets see that the U.S. economy is actually doing okay, which means more individuals and more businesses will be in the market to consume debt, we are going to raise interest rates. The United States gets its head kicked in when our interest rates go up.

I think I was trying to show a chart the other day. It doesn't completely work this way because you have to refinance into it, but if we went to a 5 percent handle on U.S. sovereigns--that means, from the short term to the 30 years, you had a 5 percent interest rate that was our mean interest rate on U.S. debt--it is almost $9 trillion of additional borrowing, spending, and interest over that next 10 years.

Functionally, going to 5 percent is double everything we are pretty much talking about in the extension of the tax reform. There is this lack of understanding. We are on the cusp of the bond market, the debt markets, actually being the number one influencer on U.S. policy, not Congress.

When you borrow $70,000 a second--and I have charts, which I didn't bring this time, but I have done it in the past. Where we are in 9 years, it is no longer $70,000 a second, but it is almost doubled.

How many of you understand we borrow $70,000 a second? The math will tell you almost 100 percent of that borrowing from today through the next decade is interest and healthcare, but we don't want to tell people that.

Of the $2.3 trillion that my math says we are going to borrow this year--and CBO is going to publish something in the next day or so, and we will see how close my math got to what their prediction is--half of it is interest.

Even when we do all sorts of things to reduce spending, to modernize on how we deliver services, to change the costs, we have this interest monster because we have $36 trillion and, basically every 125 days, Madam Speaker, we click off another trillion dollars.

To the poor Clerk staff, I am so sorry. You have to be so tired of hearing idiots like me--well, me--getting up and saying some of these things over and over, but it doesn't seem to sink in around here.

Look, one of the reasons I am here today is I am trying to sell a concept.

This is a chart and it is almost unreadable. I accept that, but what it was saying is, we are up against a series of tax expirations at the end of this year. $3.7 trillion of it is individual. Your individual taxes are going up at the end of this year, but then we have estate taxes and passthroughs and LLCs and partnerships, all those other things.

I think the Treasury Department a couple days ago scored it not at 4.6; they scored it at 5.5, which is a timing effect because it is a different year and higher interest rates.

There was an economic study done by CBO and a couple outside groups saying, if Congress can find a way to offset it--and that is hard. You are talking $400 billion a year we would have to find in modernization and changing spending. If Congress could step up and pay for it, you not only maintain current tax policies so our brothers and sisters, all of our taxes don't go up but you get additional growth in the economy because you didn't just pull that much more money out of the economy and then have interest pile up on it.

I think it was a year or so ago or 2 years ago, we had, I think, 3 months where we had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing.

When we go home and talk to our voters, how many of them will look back at us and understand the scale?

You get these responses, well, if you just cut this or that--I am going to show a couple of those charts again, and they are rounding errors. Sometimes they are just a few hours of borrowing from an entire year, but that is what we speechify because it is easy to understand, it is a great sound bite on talk radio, and it is crap math.

Once again, the basic premise of this chart--and it was reconfirmed by the Joint Economic Committee and the baseline math was also done by CBO. It said, if you want to maximize economic prosperity in the United States, extend current tax policy, fix depreciation--we call it spensing; research and development expensing because that is actually where you get the productivity curve because God knows you will hear the Democrats come behind the mike and talk about look how good the job market is.

Many Americans are actually poorer today than they were 4 years ago. They may be employed, but they are poorer, and that is because inflation went up faster than their wages.

I represent a district in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area that had, I believe, 27 percent inflation over the last 4 years. So unless your wages are up 27 percent, you are poorer today.

How do you raise wages? How do you raise purchasing power?

Two things: Wages go up with inflation. That just means you are treading water.

Productivity. There are things we could do in the tax policy that is coming to fix the things that create the productivity boost, the things we can do in regulatory reform, in modernization, the adoption of technology as a regulator.

You get people here that go around saying, oh, we are going to deregulate. Fine, but how about doing smart regulation. We are all walking around with these supercomputers in our pockets. The idea is that you could crowdsource certain data, crash the size of the bureaucracy, make them less intrusive, and yet air quality, water quality, and all these other things can be much safer.

It costs a fraction of what we do today, but you just have to be willing to think like a scientist, a data person, and deal with the army of lobbyists that are outside in the hallway who are upset that you are making them change their business model or their unionized bureaucracies, they show up here angry at you saying, what do you mean you want to use technology at the IRS?

Remember, Madam Speaker, the IRS is the second largest unionized workforce in the Federal Government. I believe the VA is the first one. Every time we try to add modernization to do it better, faster, cheaper, and fairer, can you believe they get cranky?

The math is the math. If you want to maximize economic vitality for this country, do your very best to offset as much as you can of the tax policy extension.

The other thing I have to give you that is going to make me sound a little cranky is when you hear a Member of Congress, particularly a couple of our Senators, running around here and saying, we are just extending baseline. Huh?

It is a whole made up term now. The law is the law. The law says the tax cuts for individuals, passthroughs, estate, and alternative minimum tax, all those things, expire at the end of 2025. We have made up a term around here saying we are just going to extend current policy. I heard someone this morning say we are going to extend current law.

Current law says it expires. Take a look at all your CBO and your debt projections. It has the expirations in there. You take it away, fine. Be honest about what it means. It is another few trillion dollars of debt over the next 10 years that we have to pay interest on.

Here is the fragility, and we are going to do this on a chart or two here. When you do that, you are going to go home and tell your voters, I extended your tax cuts. Great. I don't want to raise taxes on anyone, but if you do it without paying for it, when the interest rates go up and that family's credit cards, car debt, mortgage, and everything else gets more expensive, when the economy slows down because interest rates are up, it is because you have made the bond market nervous.

Oh, but David, that would require thinking like an economist. I am going to get re-elected by telling people I just extended their tax benefits from the 2017 TCJA. Great.

How do we explain to people that there are no free options anymore? We have the moral obligation to not make the world debt markets nervous. You have got to understand--and I need to double check my math because Great Britain, you saw what they did. They were doing all sorts of tax policy this

summer and the pound crashed and their interest rates exploded, but most of the industrialized world actually has lower interest on their 10-year bond than the United States.

Greece today can sell a 10-year bond almost a full percentage point cheaper than the United States.

Let me repeat that: Greece today can sell a 10-year bond almost a full percentage point cheaper than the United States.

Does anyone understand there is a risk premium? If you screw around with this stuff, there is a thing called a term premium. It is a fancy way of saying, we actually want a little higher interest for the risk.

One of my predictions for 2025 is Moody's, which is the last of the three big rating services. I think we are going to get downgraded if we do this stuff without even an attempt to pay for some of it, offset some of it, modernize our costs in how we deliver services. If we do that, we are going to get downgraded by all three rating services. The other two have already downgraded us.

Does anyone here care, or do we just want to do happy talk and sugar highs? We just want a good dopamine hit on social media, but don't give a damn about the math.

The fact of the matter is most of the industrialized world today has a better credit rating. You see it not by the credit rating services but by the way they can sell their debt cheaper than the United States.

When you hear people talk about the extraordinary privilege the United States has, there are actually two of them. The fact that the world uses the U.S. dollar as the ultimate arbiter of exchange. Great. Let's not screw that up.

The other one we often never talk about it, and I am going to do it in a future presentation, it is actually from an economist's standpoint and may be bigger than the fact that we get to buy and sell in our own currency. This second extraordinary privilege is that smart people from around the world, entrepreneurs from around the world, investors from around the world want to do it here. They want to live here, go to school here, produce their products here, invest here. From an economist's standpoint, the United States has two remarkable, extraordinary privileges: our currency and people want to be with us.

In a couple of moments, I am going to show you why that is so important, but back to a baseline.

If you are one of our new Members, please, you have got to memorize this. You see the blue on the chart that is upside down so I look like an idiot. Let's get this right. That is discretionary. All defense we consider is discretionary.

Everything most people think is government: the FBI, the Park Service, the foreign service, those things. That is blue. We call that nondefense discretionary.

Everything a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money. If I do the math off the top of my head, it may be $400 billion of what is in the red, which is mostly earned benefits. That is your Social Security, your Medicare, your veterans benefits, your Federal pensions, those things.

Functionally, I think this year it is like 75-25, 75 percent of all spending is on autopilot. We don't vote on it.

I shouldn't be yelling. I have had a lot of caffeine.

What we do vote on, what we give speeches on, which we screw around with all the time, is discretionary and in the scale of what we can reduce, it is almost--a lot of what we debate here is rounding errors. We have actually had debates on the floor here where the amount of money that we are trying to save, we borrowed more money during the time of the debate than it would save that year because we don't understand if you are clicking off $70,000 of borrowing every second--I wonder what this speech is costing. If I go a full hour, you start to see the idea.

So far this fiscal year, we are borrowing about $10 billion a day. I think it will come in at $6 billion, $7 billion a day once we get tax receipts in April. I am trying to explain the fragility.

Here is the point I was just trying to make a couple of moments ago. If we went back to a 5 percent interest rate, it is just shy of $9 trillion over 10 years. Just the interest rate move is double everything we are talking about. How many times do you hear idiots--I mean, excuse me--elected officials like me get behind these microphones and talk through--it is not only having good fiscal policy but we are also going to be disciplined because how are we going to communicate to the bond markets that we are worthy of future investments?

Where this gets really dangerous is--remember how I was just criticizing people walking around here saying, let's just ignore everything. Let's just keep doing what we are doing, don't have any offsets. If we do that, in 9 years, 9.2 percent of the entire economy is borrowed.

This year, my math is, we are going to kiss up, around 7 percent of the entire economy is going to be borrowed money.

What happens if we have some large disasters? Can you imagine that happening? What happens if we have another pandemic? What happens if we have a war?

Do you understand how fragile you are making the greatest country on Earth because we are not willing to tell the truth about the fiscal situation?

For my friends on the left who go, well, let's just raise taxes. I can bring my charts over and over, as I have in the past when we have had high marginal tax rates, we get about 17 percent of GDP. When we have had low marginal tax rates, we get about 17 percent of GDP. I think we have 75, 80 years of history of that showing it always falls back down to that margin.

The secret is grow. The other side should stop lying about growing. One percent of GDP--and I am going to do this and double check myself in my head--1 percent of GDP is $300 billion. If you get 17 percent of that, that is about $48 billion.

If you are borrowing $7 billion a day and you did all these things to get another point of GDP, you have covered yourself for a week. You get these folks who want to say, happy talk, we are going to grow our way out. To cover this year's debt, you would need almost a 50 percent GDP growth. Come on. Join reality world with us. Put batteries in your calculator. We can do this. We can do this together.

One point I wanted to make for our brothers and sisters on the left, I have done multiple presentations here showing that if you do all their tax hikes for $400,000 and up, you get about a point and a half of GDP.

If we do all of our spending cuts in the nondefense discretionary, which is what most of us have talked about for the last couple years, you get about 1 percent of GDP, so you have a big 2\1/2\ percent.

We are borrowing 7 percent of the entire economy this year, so all of the left's solutions and the things we as conservatives often talk about don't get you actually anything close to what is necessary. It is terrifying.

Madam Speaker, I am having a sort of personal crisis of confidence because I do this every week. My math is good. We do our best. We make mistakes on occasion, but we try to double, triple check it. No one seems to care. Is it really that terrifying to tell the truth to our voters?

The press around here has no interest in telling the truth on the math. I have a couple Bloomberg reporters, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and, on occasion, believe it or not, a public television reporter seem to be the only ones who ever want to look at these charts. Everyone else, they basically want to write a gossip story.

Yet, these things decide if my 2\1/2\ year old has a future. It also decides if your retirement becomes a miserable disaster.

I hear a little person up in the balcony. If that little person is 2 years old today, when that little person is 22, his or her taxes have to be double what they are today, a 100 percent increase.

When my 2-year-old is hopefully finishing up his university and going into grad school before he does his post-doctorate doctorate, I have high ambitions for him. We actually are trying to put into the family rules he is not allowed to run for office. The same thing with my 9- year-old daughter. That is both funny and actually true.

Think of this: A child born today, when they are about 22, 23, the United States has to double every single U.S. tax--tariffs, income, corporate, everything--just to maintain baseline services. The math says a child born today

will be part of the first generation in U.S. history who will be poorer than their parents and grandparents.

Great morality around here. Let alone our inability--we are not allowed to talk about Social Security even though the Social Security actuaries, the CBO, the outside groups, the left groups, the right groups, all say, hey, 9--now 8\1/2\ because we just gave away a couple hundred billion dollars out of it--9 years or so, we double senior poverty in America because when the trust fund is empty, and you all get a 20 percent cut in Social Security, we double senior poverty.

How many people do you see coming behind these microphones and saying, we need to fix it? It is immoral where it is going. If you do that, the left now has a political consultant writing attack ads on you because they care so much more about winning the next election than saving the society and not doubling senior poverty.

We already have the trouble after the inflation cycle how many baby boomers are now living on the street because they can't afford their rent. The math is the math, and the math will win. If we continue current policy and not follow the law, in 9 years, 9.2 percent of the economy will be borrowed in U.S. debt. This chart doesn't even factor in the new higher interest rates because we are up a full point from early December. Great job, guys.

Look, I have done this chart the last couple weeks because it seems to have an impact. For every dollar we take in in tax collections, we spend $1.39. Huh? Take in a dollar, spend $1.39. By 2034, if we went back to a 6 percent interest rate. I know that is a couple points higher than we are at right now, but 6 percent, I think that is sort of what we were paying in the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s up to the Great Recession. If we go to 6 percent, think of this, in 9 budget years, 45 percent of all tax collections go just to interest.

Does anyone care? No, because we would have to tell people the truth.

This is a new chart, and I am trying to actually sort of explain. Our brothers and sisters on the left who want basically a socialized, planned economy, industrial policy, they did on the CHIPS Act and then their version of I guess they call it the Inflation Reduction Act, there is some good economic data now that says if you want to do something much less expensive, created much broader economic growth, and created much more productivity, you should not do what the Democrats did, which is let's thank some of our favorite industrial entities. Their executives, their investors will write us political checks.

However, if you had done something like research and development expensing, and expensing when a company buys a piece of equipment to be better, faster, cheaper, it is dramatically less expensive, and it actually has more economic value, more economic growth, and it is spread throughout the economy.

The problem with the Democrats' industrial policy, we are going to give all this money to certain green technologies, we are going to do CHIPS Act, is you often are writing checks, so you get rent-seeking, writing checks for last-generation technology. There is a little part of that I would have voted for, for primary research and development to do it better, faster, cheaper.

It is like the old joke, what is the fastest way to make every computer in America worthless? Have someone invent a quantum computer, and suddenly that leap. It is like when all of a sudden you have a new photovoltaic panel, if it goes up 20 percent--there are experiments in the lab right now--all the other ones now are out of the money and don't make economic sense anymore.

That is the concept. Creative destruction is one of the hallmarks of a society that becomes more productive. The way you get that is not the arrogance.

When I first got here, I think I stole this joke from my wife--she looked at me, what is the two times in life, Mr. Speaker, you think you know everything? When you are 13 years old, and the day after you get elected to Congress.

Oh, come on, guys, that is funny stuff.

The fact of the matter is, when you see these sort of policies coming from Democrats where they are so smart, they get to choose the industries that get the corporate handouts, the cash handouts, and you can't imagine that there were strings attached. Yet, if we had just done an egalitarian tax policy, say we want to maximize productivity across the society because we are smart enough to know what the breakthrough is tomorrow. That breakthrough tomorrow is the thing that raises all boats, I guess that is the saying, and makes us productive.

What do you get in a society that is more productive? Wages go up.

All right. I just want to make a point, and I did a little bit of this last week. We held a little bit of a contest, I think back in December, where we asked, give us your ideas of how you would modernize or improve or reduce spending, these things.

So far this budget year, if you got rid of foreign aid, this is for the 2025 fiscal year, all foreign aid, get rid of it, it is one week of borrowing.

Get rid of all the salaries at the Department of Education. Okay, I am fine with that, but you have got to understand, it basically comes out to 9 hours of borrowing for an entire year, and that is not spending. That is borrowing.

You have these people like me who get behind these microphones and speechify: If we get rid of the Department of Education, we are going to balance the budget. No, all the salaries just covered 9 hours of borrowing. There is a scale problem. I know seeing 12 zeroes, when you start talking a trillion, is hard. It is also our job. It is our job to understand the complexities here.

One of the complexities that we are terrified to talk about is, if anyone is interested in what we are really up against, go online, grab Congressional Budget Office's report from yesterday. Every year they do an estimate on population, fertility, growth in the society. We were using the Census Bureau's data.

I have come here behind the microphone and said, hey, our quick look at the Census Bureau data was in 11 years the United States was going to start to have more deaths than births. CBO came back yesterday and said, no, the way they are calculating where fertility rates are in the United States, in 8 years the United States will have more deaths than births.

Demographics is destiny. You want people like me to figure out the financing of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, which were all designed systems for population growth. Remember, today's worker pays for today's beneficiary. Even when we do the adjustments for net immigration, you pick up a couple more decades.

Think about that, living in a society with more deaths than births in 8 years. Matter of fact, I believe there were 17 States that last year had more deaths than births.

This goes back to my productivity argument. If you want a society and a country that still economically grows, that can still defend itself, that still is the envy of the world, that has the extraordinary privileges, are we going to adopt regulatory tax policies that maximize economic growth?

It turns out, you are going to have to do things that maximize productivity, maximize labor substitution, use that technology, use the supercomputer in your pocket. It is shocking how many people freak out every time I start to talk about using AI and these things. You don't have a choice. If we are going to keep growing, we have got to thread a needle here while jogging. We have got to manage the debt. We have got to convince the debt markets we are serious, so don't raise our interest rate because if interest rates go up a bunch, it is almost too late because we are carrying so much, our demographics are against us.

We have to have this productivity spike, and it is going to come through functionally two things--AI and synthetic biology--but I will save that for another speech. However, there is a way it can work. There is hope. There is only hope if this place sharpens its intellect. You can't keep saying the same things you were saying in the 1990s or a decade ago. The world is different.

I hope the staff, the voters, others start to really think this through and start demanding, saying, I need intellectual robustness, if that is a word.

Learn your math. Learn the opportunity, but also learn to think like an economist.

Let's put up the one chart that gets me the most hate, and it is more than a year, year-and-a-half out of date. The numbers are worse today, but it is the truth. For anyone crazy enough to watch, how many Members of Congress are willing to show this to you?

This is directly from CBO, numbers from about a year-and-a-half ago. They update it every year. CBO projects $115 trillion debt over 2024- 2054. Social Security and Medicare account for $124 trillion of deficit. The rest of the budget has a $9 trillion surplus. Let me walk that through. It basically means everything when we talk about nondefense discretionary, defense discretionary, all those are projected to grow slower than tax receipts, but Medicare, Social Security, and the interest that goes on top of their deficit financing produce about $124 trillion of borrowing.

How many of you think the world is going to lend us $124 trillion over the next 30 years?

This is based on current interest rates. Actually, it is sort of based on last year's interest rates. I was playing with a calculator a couple days ago. With my math, I have this going to $135 trillion, not $124 trillion.

It is not Republican. It is not Democratic. It is demographics.

The fact of the matter is that you could substantially change much of Medicare's costs and make services better, faster, and cheaper. Just join this century of technology in taking care of people.

The ring I am wearing that does my vitals or the technologies to incentivize things, do we pay a Medicare provider to help people be healthier instead of making more money when someone is sicker?

We did a whole presentation multiple times last year showing obesity in America is an additional $9.1 trillion of spending over the next 10 years. Maybe as a society, we should consider changing the farm bill nutrition support to help our brothers and sisters because it is both moral and great economics.

Suddenly, people can come back into the labor force. They can form families. They can do all these other things. We have States where more than half of the population is technically obese, and we are paying for it. It is government policy in many ways that is doing it to these people. It is immoral.

I am going to get hate texts saying: You can't talk about that. Screw you.

Let's do what is right for our brothers and sisters in this country. We are Americans. Don't hide from the math. Embrace it, and fix it.

This one is the last. If you saw my staff, they were slipping me this because we were sort of speed doing the math. Let me explain.

We are trying to do this more often. We will get these questions that come in on the comments. Someone asked this, and they actually did it as a legitimate question: Foreign aid over 4 years is $198 billion. Think of that. Every dime of foreign aid, if you said for the last 4 years and took 4 years of borrowing, it would cover 8 days, 8.2 days of debt. Those of you who get up in front of these mikes and say that if we got rid of foreign aid, we will balance the budget, even when I do the average of the last 4 years, it is just a little over 8 days of borrowing.

It is hard when you get up in front of an audience at home and tell them the truth when it is not the same thing they heard 10 minutes earlier on a talk radio show or on a cable television show.

This isn't about ratings. This isn't about today's dopamine hit of you being angry because you saw something on the Drudge Report. This is about saving this Republic.

If you are like I am, you believe this Republic was divinely inspired. If you believe like I do, do you not have a moral obligation to save this country?

How about being a dad? My wife is my age. We were blessed. We got to adopt a couple of kids. Should they be part of the first generation that is poor? They don't have to be.

There is a way the math works. It just turns out, Mr. Speaker, that it is hard.

We have to do complex things. We are going to have to tell lobbyists and people from home that you have to modernize, join this century, and change your business models.

They are going to be mean to us. They might not even contribute to us, but there is a way to make the math save our future. I am going to argue that in the next 6 weeks around here.

We are going to make some decisions. Are we going to modernize the delivery of government? Are we going to find a way to offset? Are we going to convince the bond markets that we are serious about the future?

For everyone out there, watch us. We all give these beautiful speeches about the morality of what an amazing country we have and our place in the world and our place in history.

Mr. Speaker, these are the weeks we are going to make that history or have to live with the sins of what we do.

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 3 o'clock and 49 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, January 15, 2025, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, for the gentleman from Pennsylvania, a bit of reference, in the old days when we were put in the chair, particularly when we were freshman, it is because we had been annoying to the Speaker. I don't know if anyone remembers that.

I love the clerk staff, I appreciate them, and I am sorry to say we are about to do a whole bunch of math and a lot of numbers really fast, but it is where we are at.

Mr. Speaker, one of the things I am going to try to do today is basically sell two ideas. One is--and I want to be honest and careful in this because my goal is not to be sarcastic, not to be a jerk, but walk through the scale--just the scale--of the borrowing, the debt problem of our demographics, what is really going on.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to walk through just a couple of examples of solutions we get from our wonderful, brilliant constituents and sort of explain there are probably things we should do, but they are tiny rounding errors.

People don't understand. Annually, I think we expect to borrow about $7 billion a day. I think, so far this fiscal year, we are borrowing about $10 billion a day.

The second thing is incredibly important. If there is a staffer out there or a freshman Member of Congress, burn what we are going to talk about into their consciousness. In the United States, what is the greatest at least economic threat I think we have for this government, in many ways, for the country? Interest. We are what is called interest fragile.

I am going to show you some charts where tiny movements on U.S. sovereign debt become trillions and trillions of dollars. Our model basically says we are going to refinance almost $10 trillion this year and add another--what?--$2 trillion, $2-1/3 trillion of virgin or new borrowing, small bits of interest.

When you hear someone talk about things like the debt ceiling, you have to understand that you are weaving a needle while jogging because you have to deal with it in a way where you communicate and do actual policy that communicates to the world's debt markets that the United States is taking its debt seriously and understands the scale of the problem and then also while extending that debt ceiling in a way that also doesn't blow you up.

Some of my brothers and sisters will go: Just don't raise it. Okay, great. Do you think you are ever getting a mortgage again? Do you ever think you are getting a car loan again? Do you understand what would happen to the world economy going boom and interest rates exploding when all of a sudden the United States is no longer credit worthy? That is what it means.

Remember one of my predictions for this year. There are three big rating agencies, S&P, Fitch, and Moody's. Moody's is the only one that has not downgraded U.S. debt yet. I predict to you that, before this year is over, Moody's or all three will have downgraded U.S. sovereign debt.

My other prediction is, before the spring is over, the United States will cross over to 5 percent interest. If it holds there, I am going to show you how devastating that math absolutely is.

The clown show has to come to an end. People need to understand that if you are a Member of Congress, you are the board of the biggest economy in the world. You have to start learning your math because, at the end of the day, the math will always win.

Let's do some basic things. The reason I am doing this is because I want to make the moral argument of doing the really hard thing in reconciliation. It is also the best economics. If you give a darn about your retirement, my 2\1/2\-year-old boy's economic future, the country, you have to do the hard thing.

CBO and then my Joint Economic Committee economists actually worked through some math saying what would happen because we have all these expiring provisions of TCJA, the 2017 tax reform. If you extend them all--the individual, the passthroughs, the small businesses, the subchapter S's, the partnerships--if you extend those tax provisions over 10 years, it is about $4.6 trillion of revenue that would have come in because of the increased taxes because of the expired provisions.

What is this body able to do to find policies to offset that spending? It turns out CBO, and I know this chart is a little hard to read, but the punch line on it is, if you functionally extend the tax policy but you pay for it, through the decade, you actually get more economic growth. The economy actually grows.

People say, oh, but you reached in and pulled money out to pay for the offset. The idea is, by doing that, you haven't deficit-financed it where you are paying interest, where you are making the debt markets more fragile, and you are also pulling $4.6 trillion additional capital out of the debt markets that could have gone into you buying a new car or the business buying new plants and equipment.

This is hard because, around here, talking about modernizing how we deliver healthcare, modernizing public agencies, reduce spending by doing it better, faster, and cheaper, there is an army of lobbyists outside in the hallway here who are paid to protect their current business models.

How many folks do we meet from the agencies and the public employee unions that get all upset, particularly at me when I am doing these presentations of, here, we can use technology, we can use AI, these other things to reduce the size and cost and make government much more responsive? Then, they send nasty letters and those things into your district and complain about you. We don't have a choice.

Let's walk through. The facts are on our side. Those folks that run around here and say we need to extend tax policy, protect the border, actually do all these things, you can't create an additional fiscal rathole and expect you are going to throw this back onto the world debt markets.

The reason I want you to think about this is I am going to show you a couple of charts in a little while where interest rates were on U.S. sovereigns way back when. Let's go back to December, a few weeks ago.

Yesterday, the 20-year U.S. bond actually crossed over 5 percent for a while. If 5 percent--anyone with gray hair, you understand 5 percent is actually lower than the historical average of the previous few decades. If we would just go to 5 percent, you are going to see that is almost just shy of an additional $9 trillion in debt, double of everything we are talking about doing in reconciliation.

Just do this and communicate to the debt markets that we are serious about what is going on because the uncomfortable truth is that--and I am going to show it again, and it seems to hurt people's feelings-- almost 100 percent of the debt for the next 10 years is interest and Medicare.

We got older. Baby boomers are moving into their earned benefits. We didn't have enough children to backfill. Starting in 1990, fertility rates started to roll over. Healthcare got much more expensive. We are almost terrified to basically say almost every dime of debt from today through the next 30 years is interest and demographics.

The political class, the press, the dopamine hits on cable television, this and that, telling true math doesn't make you popular. It does make you honest.

Let's walk through a couple of examples. Once again, I have to be careful. These are not meant to be snarky.

They are basically a thought experiment of what you hear Members walking behind these microphones and saying that things are great, wonderful, maybe we should do them, but they have tiny effects on the survival of this Republic.

Let's walk through and explain what I am talking about. Let's walk through the impact of borrowing where we are using this fiscal year, what we have been borrowing per day, per hour, per minute, per second. We are going to walk through, and I am using the clock thing. These are 12-hour clocks. You have to picture two clock faces. I am trying to make some way where you make things with lots of zeros understandable.

This is one of my favorite ones. Back in December, we did send out some things, and we got members of our communities to throw back ideas.

One of the favorite ones was to get rid of congressional salaries. Okay. In my heart of heart, I think we are overpaid for the quality of our work product. Maybe that is what we should do. Get rid of every congressional salary--that is, the Senate and here. Just get rid of all of it. Over a fiscal year, it is about $1.9 billion. That is a lot of money.

For an entire year's borrowing, for the entire year, it would cover 6.4 hours. Yay, we made a big impact. We covered 6.4 hours of an entire year's worth of borrowing.

That is sort of silly, but that is one of the key responses we got. I think it may say more about what they think about me.

Let's do another one that came back to us from our constituent survey. Emergency services for undocumented migrants, this is basically ObamaCare subsidies, healthcare spending for those who are here undocumented. They are illegal. Most of this turns out, we believe, to be ObamaCare subsidies. You will hear Member after Member and people on television, the talking hosts, on conservative talk radio, if we just didn't spend that money. Okay, we actually did this thing called research where we looked up the actual facts of the math. It is about $2.7 billion for the entire year. We get rid of it, and we probably should, but it is 9 hours of borrowing for an entire year. Yet, how many times will you hear people say this in front of microphones? Stopping healthcare subsidies for those who are here undocumented, here illegally, is 9 hours of borrowing for an entire year.

There is our problem. We have people doing theater over honest math.

Let's do another one, one of my particular favorites. Let's get rid of the Department of Education. Actually, I am a big fan because if you believe in the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, why is this here at the Federal Government? A big portion of their 4,500 employees is actually debt management, but that can be done by other agencies we have that have high-skilled folks to manage receivables and those things.

If you got rid of all those 4,500 employees from the Department of Education, great. It turns out to be about $2.75 billion over an entire year you just covered. Functionally, that is 9 hours of borrowing.

How many people have you heard come behind these microphones or on conservative talk radio or other things that are saying that we are going to get rid of the Department of Education? Great. Then, the conversation moves on to something else because they act like they have covered the debt. There is this lack of understanding. We are borrowing about $70,000 a second.

Let's go on and do another one we can get rid of. Let's get rid of the U.N. I have done this a couple of times. When I did it before, the total spend on the United Nations was $18.1 billion, but that was in the 2023 fiscal year, but that had a bunch of the new construction. For the 2024 fiscal year, which has ended already, we spent $12.9 billion on the U.N., or maybe it is in this fiscal year that is what we have appropriated. $12.9 billion is a lot of money. Let's just get rid of it.

I am not going to even give you the other chart that shows you how much all of these foreign diplomats and stuff pay into taxes, into the things they buy, the rent, those things in New York City. Who cares?

That $12.9 billion gets me 43 hours, so basically a day and three- quarters of borrowing.

My point, as I am trying to walk through, is that we are probably going to have to do lots and lots of these things. Start demanding from the people who are standing up in front of you saying, ``Here is what I care about, and we are going to take on the debt and deficits,'' have them understand their math.

How about Ukraine aid? I think this is for this fiscal year. The appropriation lineup is $21.8 billion. That gets us 3 days of borrowing. You hear these crazy numbers being thrown out. It turns out now this is both humanitarian and, I think, actually the other term--it is things that provide equipment. Often, it is equipment we depreciated out and we are going to get rid of it. We send it on to them.

This is both categories in that number of the 21.8, but it is 3 days. Let's actually even add a little bit. Let's go grander. Let's go much more bigly. I think that is a pop culture term these days. Let's just get rid of all foreign aid.

I cannot tell you how many times I run into folks back home who say: ``David, I am so concerned about the debt and deficit. We can balance everything if we just get rid of foreign aid.''

Okay. Interesting math.

We did the math. Here is the 57.25 that is going to foreign aid. It is a week of borrowing. Does anyone see the point I am trying to make? You start to add up all of these, and I think in all of those, we have got ourselves to what, a week and a half? We added up all the ideas that came into our office, and I think we got up to 3 weeks of borrowing.

There seems to be this lack of understanding. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money. Every dime of defense is borrowed, every dime of nondefense discretionary, and this year--I am doing this off the top of my head, which is always dangerous--I think it is $400 billion of what we call earned benefits, mandatory spending, is borrowed money.

I am trying to just demonstrate--there is this term we do called ``on-budget receipts.'' You get your paycheck. You look at your paycheck. Here is what went to FICA. That is the Social Security contribution, a little bit of your Medicare part A contribution, maybe a little bit of unemployment disability. That is sort of considered off-budget tax contributions. That is coming from your FICA tax.

The other part is your income tax, capital gains tax, all the other things. That is this blue here. To give you an idea, this is the net interest this fiscal year, the interest we pay back to the people who have been kind enough to buy our bonds.

Remember, China is not the number one owner of bonds. I think now it is Japan. China has been actually rolling off its bonds for 3 or 4 years. I think they are somewhere now in the $900 billion range of the $36 trillion in debt we have. Remember, about $28 trillion, $29 trillion of that is what we sell off to the market. The other we borrow internally. We borrow from the Social Security trust fund, and we borrow other moneys internally, but we still have to pay interest.

Remember, we are one of the only countries in the world that engages in this scam of saying it is only the publicly borrowed money. No. You are not going to pay your interest back to Social Security? Of course you are.

The point of this chart is trying to say accounting accounts for 24 percent of all those tax receipts we take in that aren't Social Security, aren't part of those payroll taxes, 24 percent, is just going to pay interest, and that is this year.

The crazy thing is that these numbers were scored when we thought the mean interest on U.S. sovereign debt was going to be somewhere around 3 to 3.25 percent.

Have you seen what has happened in the last 3 weeks? Did I mention a moment ago that the 20-year bond yesterday went over 5 percent?

This number is about to explode on us. It is called interest fragility. Yet, how many idiots like me have come behind the microphone and said: Do you understand how dangerous it is if we make the debt markets nervous because we are incompetent?

Let's do one more of these just to make the point.

This is tax receipts for fiscal year 2024. It is a fixed number. That is the last fiscal year. The red here, that is the Social Security taxes, Medicare part A, et cetera. This was everything else. Even in that case, it is still basically 24 percent of all--it is still 24 here. I just did this chart so you can see, when you hear someone talk about total tax receipts, this is obligated to earned benefits.

Oddly enough, this number isn't big enough to cover the earned benefits. That is why every month Social Security has to present its special T bills to Treasury, cash in. Remember, Social Security does not add to the debt. Cashing in their special T bills and the Treasury having to finance it and give the money back to Social Security does add to the debt. Remember, there are two steps in there.

Back to the oldie but goodie. Everything in red, that is on autopilot. If you remember, Congress doesn't vote on it. What is in blue, nondefense and defense, is all borrowed along with a whole wedge of this over here.

You have to understand the scale. It is hard to see 12 zeros in your head, but it is just a trillion. We are probably going to borrow $2-\1/ 3\ trillion this year.

We have these debates and discussions about we are going to have reconciliation. Yes, of course we are. We still don't have 60 votes in the Senate. If we are going to move policy, of course we are.

Understand the fiscal implications. If we don't do it right, do the debt markets demand a premium? Because you see what is going on around the world. What happened in Great Britain this summer? What did they do to the gilt? What happened in France a couple weeks ago? What is happening in Germany right now? What is happening in Canada? What happened in South Korea?

All over the world, you see governments falling. One of the primary reasons they are falling is they actually tried to engage in some fiscal constraint.

Are we going to be elegant enough to do it in a way where we can explain to the American people that if we do something smart today, we do not get crushed tomorrow?

Small movements in interest rates start to consume everything in this government. Here is an example. I told you the 20-year yesterday went over 5 percent. If anyone is a real geek, if you take a look at the futures market on the 10-year sovereign, some of the futures market between now and through spring actually expect a 5 percent interest rate. Remember, that is still a point, point and a quarter lower than the historic average when you get rid of the previous decade, which was sort of fake interest rates. If we were to go to 5 percent of U.S. debt, that is actually fairly normal and that gets built in. Remember, we bring about $10 trillion to refinance.

Let's look at 5 percent. We go from a $13 trillion, almost $14 trillion debt expectation at current interest rates over the next 10 years to $22.7. It is almost $9 trillion additional from where interest rates were in December to where it looks like interest rates are going to be this spring. You just added $9 trillion in additional interest. That is called interest rate fragility. That is double. Just the interest rate exposure going back to even something that is below a historic norm is double everything we are talking about doing in tax reform, of extending the TCJA 2017 tax policy. It is double.

This should be scaring the crap out of people around here. Why am I the only idiot running around with charts saying: Are you paying attention to this? Are you watching what is happening in world debt markets right now? Does this make anybody nervous?

Some of the articles are basically saying bond markets around the world are getting nervous loaning to sovereigns because they keep borrowing like crazy. What is going on in China where they are borrowing like crazy? We are borrowing like crazy. There is only so much borrowable money in the world, and we are chewing it up.

The point of this one was if we were to ignore the law and just extend our spending policies we have today, in functionally 9 budget years, 9.2 percent of the entire economy is just interest.

We expect almost 7 percent of this year to be borrowing, but the concept of just--let me rephrase it, because I just screwed that up. 9.2 percent of the entire economy will be debt, not interest. It will be debt.

A couple of our economists basically say we are going to borrow about 7 percent of the entire economy this year. If we don't start to stabilize that and roll it down, you hit this interest spiral into the ground.

I am going to show you a couple of charts here, that should scare the crap out of you, of how much of the taxes we take in from hardworking people is just paying interest.

Let's make that a little more understandable.

Mr. Speaker, some of us with gray hair remember--as Mr. Green laughs at me. There is this thing called the seventies, eighties, nineties, even the 2000s before the Great Recession, and the mean interest rate on U.S. debt was about 6.

This is just an example of what it means when you are carrying $36 trillion in debt. Understand, we are adding another trillion of debt about every 125 days. Let me say that again. Every 125 days, we basically tack on another trillion dollars of borrowing.

If we went to a historic average of 6 percent, it would be 11 percent of GDP in a decade. What if we went up to 9 percent, which we had back in the seventies and eighties? You are at 18 percent.

We are playing really dangerous games here. We have almost made the decision to make the world debt markets the ones in charge of America.

Every second, we are borrowing about $70,000. Do you not think the retired couple, the foreign government, the big business, the rich people who are buying U.S. savings bonds--are you pretending they don't actually care about what we do here and that we are going to make sure they get their money back, or is it all just magic money?

Understand what that 6 percent--this is sort of the punch line of what I am trying to communicate here. By 2034, 9 budget years from now, debt servicing at 6 percent, so back even below the historic average rates, interest would consume 45 percent of all tax receipts.

Let's do that again. Imagine a world where 45 percent of all tax receipts that come into the government are just for paying interest.

Take this seriously.

I have a 9-year-old. And my wife and I, who is exactly my age, we also adopted another little boy from the same birth mom. He is 2\1/2\ years old and the cutest kid you ever met. Our little girl is brilliant and very loud.

The math basically says my kids and your kids will be part of the first generation of Americans to actually be poor. To give you an idea how that math works, when little Matthew, who is 2\1/2\ right now, is 23 or 24, if you wanted to maintain baseline services in America as they are today, every U.S. tax rate, tariff, corporate, individual, everything, has to double, a 100 percent increase. It is not pretend. It is called math.

These are little things. You punch it, and you can put batteries in them. Hell, Mr. Speaker, you probably have one in your phone.

It is math, but we are terrified to tell our voters the truth because people raise their eyebrows and get upset when you say: Look, we got old as a society. We didn't have as many children, we made lots of promises, and we never set aside enough money for them. However, we can disrupt the cost if we are willing to adopt modernization. You can cut stunning amounts of money from delivery of healthcare not by cutting services but by adopting technology. Except, once again, the lobbyists are in the hallway to stop you from doing that because it would make them change their bureaucracies and the business models.

A number like this should make us all pucker, that if we just went back to normal interest rates, in 9 years, 45 percent of all of our tax receipts go into just interest. That is called interest fragility. The single thing that scares me the most in the society is that we are no longer in charge. We basically made the decision that the debt markets are.

So let's actually get a little more dystopian, and part of this is to make an impact.

What if we went to 9 percent interest?

It has happened.

What would happen?

Mr. Speaker, can anyone read this number?

Eighty-three percent of all tax receipts would go just to interest.

Here is the reality of today: For every dollar we take in in tax receipts, we spend $1.39.

Yet, what we call discretionary, military has been substantially flat, all other nondefense discretionary is basically flat, almost all the growth is two things: in healthcare and in interest.

We can't do anything about interest. The deal is the deal is the deal when we sell a bond. As far as healthcare, once again, there is an army of lobbyists, once again, outside these walls, who will beat the absolutely living blank out of us when we ask them to modernize and actually use technology.

Even our brothers and sisters here are often defending not the last decade, but the business models from the decade before that within healthcare.

We don't have a choice. Open up your brain, Mr. Speaker, hire a computer brain. Hire some kid who is a data analyst scientist and start walking through the facts of what is going on. Then we have to do hard things. We will have to do a revolution.

Have you seen the numbers coming out of Medicare Advantage?

Has anyone taken a look at those Wall Street Journal articles from last year of the billions and billions and billions that they are documenting that are functionally fraud and abuse?

Are we going to be honest about it?

There are ways elegantly to fix it without beating the crap out of everyone. We just need to recognize our own problems.

Once again, for every dollar the United States takes in in tax receipts, we spend $1.39.

Right now, I need to go back to an oldie but a goodie. I have done entire floor presentations repeatedly on this. You take all the tax hike proposals of our brothers and sisters on the left, Mr. Speaker, and score them for their economic specs, it will produce about 1\1/2\ points of GDP of new tax receipts. You take for our side, Mr. Speaker, all the cuts we have talked about, almost all of them being in nondefense discretionary, it is about one point of GDP. Add those two together and that is what, 2\1/2\. Congratulations.

So everything the talking heads do behind these microphones is 2\1/2\ percent. We are borrowing 7 percent this year of the entire economy, and here is your crisis: The solutions sound really good in a television commercial and maybe an interview on cable television, and they are crap math. They don't get us anywhere close to what is necessary because it turns out the actual scale of the math is so far beyond just raising people's taxes and just slash and burn this. You need a revolution on how we deliver on our commitments.

Why is that harder?

I still can't get my head around why that is harder. Once again, the single chart that makes people most angry, and it is already 1 year out of date, the numbers right now are much worse, CBO predicts that deficits of $115 trillion over 2024 to 2054, Social Security, Medicare, $124 trillion deficit, the rest of the budget has a $9 trillion surplus.

Do you see, Mr. Speaker?

The spending and the interest covered, the spending and the interest covered, remember, Mr. Speaker, Social Security has about 9 more years and the trust fund is empty.

Are we going to fix it?

Are we allowed to talk about it?

If we talk about it, then the Democrats will run nasty ads about you. So somehow, they are comfortable with the immorality that in 9 years we are going to double senior poverty in America, because that is what is happening. However, Mr. Speaker, you are not allowed to talk about it because they will attack you.

They spent about a couple of a million dollars beating the crap out of me because I care about saving Social Security, and I care about not doubling senior poverty.

Somehow lying about it is the political tactic of this place?

They care so much more about power than saving our brothers and sisters?

We already have a crisis right now of baby boomers, inflation pushing them out of their housing. I think it was last year I saw the statistic on baby boomers' doubling of homelessness, because they are being priced out of their homes because of inflation. That is the morality of this place because we do crap economics. It is because we make public policy by our feelings instead of math.

The reality of it, Mr. Speaker, if you look at the CBO projection, now this is 1 year, 1\1/2\ years ago, so inflation has trimmed off a bit from their numbers, interest rates are substantially higher, these numbers are going to pop when they redo them because of the higher interest rates.

I was trying to do it, it is dangerous when I try to do these things off the top of my head, but I was coming in about $133, $136 trillion of borrowing over 30 years because of the higher interest rates, and it could be substantially higher if we are actually truly at a five or six.

The point is, debate after debate after debate after debate, we stand here and we argue about the nondefense discretionary, which is like 13 percent of the spending, and even in this projection it actually grows slower than tax receipts.

So we are going to head towards doing reconciliation. We are going to try to do policy. We have a new President coming in who has a vision of growth for the country.

Are we, as the board of directors, as the Founding Fathers designed it, going to step up and do our job and actually save the future?

Are we going to avoid the hardest thing we do, and that is telling the truth to our voters, and maybe even telling the truth to each other?

There is still hope.

One of our economists actually has this chart he has been working on and he has been saying you may only have 3 or 4 more years if interest rates keep moving up where it is almost too late. You can't work yourself out of the higher interest rate cycle because the additional debt, the interest rate, the additional debt, the interest rate--and I think it was 1 year ago when we actually had a couple of months, 3 or 4 months, where we had to borrow money to cover our borrowing.

Mr. Speaker, there is hope. There is a way to make the math work. There is a way to do it in a moral fashion. It has been said that when you have a complex problem, it turns out the solutions are complex.

Is the modern Congress capable of doing complexity?

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

Mr. Speaker, for those of us from the Valley of the Sun, the Phoenix, Arizona, area, there is an excitement around us. Our college team, Arizona State University, which was predicted to be last in its first year in the Big 12, has made the college playoffs. As a matter of fact, they won the Big 12 and they get a bye in their first playoff game.

For the community, the excitement, the joy, and having one of the youngest coaches in America, I can only be thankful to the team. Being predicted to be last and coming out where they are, you have provided hope, joy, and excitement to our community.

I thank Arizona State University football.

Mr. Speaker, we have half an hour, so consider that a mercy for everyone who has had to deal with some of these presentations.

The original goal tonight was actually to do some things that were a bit more optimistic, some things that we have identified where you could actually modernize and cut the cost of this government and actually do the job that we are supposed to do here, but I need to clear up a couple of things.

First, I owe everyone--because apparently last week when I was speaking, I was speaking so fast that I didn't explain this particular chart, so I am making up for myself last week.

The point I was trying to make is, in the last fiscal year, our borrowing represented about 6.4 percent of the entire economy. When you have individuals around here saying we have these parts of our 2017 tax reform that expire at the end of next year, if we just extend those and don't pay for them, that is what drives us to almost 9.2 percent of the entire economy 9 budget years from now.

If we actually find a way to pay for them and still extend those tax reforms, we actually get some economic growth. If you just let everyone's taxes go up, you end up in about 9 years a little under 7 percent of the entire economy borrowed.

It is a little geeky, but the passion I have tried to show here is, I believe the moral thing to do is we don't let the portions on the middle class, their taxes, go up next year, but we also step up and find a way to pay for it. The CBO and the joint economic economists last week--and it is going to be one of the boards here--actually showed if you paid for the tax extensions at the end of the decade, the economy has gotten bigger and it will make sense.

You haven't taken, functionally, what would be $4.6 trillion out of the economy and used it for borrowing, you have left it there so the small business, the big business, your family, there is money that you can borrow to grow and at the same time your taxes haven't gone up.

It is just hard for us to do because if we do modernization, if we find things to cut, there is an army of lobbyists just outside this door coming to scream at us. Some of those lobbyists aren't the types of people walking around with Guccis, they are the people they fly in from our home districts saying, David, we want that spending and then you explain to them: Every dime--I will say this three or four times because for some reason, I can't get this to burn in. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed. Every dime of Defense is borrowed. Every dime in nondefense discretionary is borrowed. When you hear us all talk about the mandatory spending, and that is like three- quarters of all spending, believe it or not, there may be $300 billion or $400 billion of that that is borrowed money also.

I will apologize to everyone. When I was showing the 9.2 percent of GDP in 9 budget years, that is if we basically take these tax expirations and just ignore them and just continue current policy, we blow ourselves up.

There are a couple of other things I want to walk through. Apparently, yesterday, the President got up and was trying to tell everyone that this is the best economy ever. That is an interesting statement.

The economy is actually not bad. Now, there is some argument to be made about the amount of cash the Democrats did in their Inflation Reduction Act and other things that they have been, functionally, subsidizing and then borrowing.

Here is the reality: If the President is looking at you in the camera and telling you it is the best economy ever, well, that is not factual, but why don't you feel it? It is because much of America is poorer today than the day President Biden took office.

If you live in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, my home, if you don't make almost 27 percent more today than the day President Biden took office, you are poorer.

So having someone tell you the economy is great, yet you are having trouble paying for things--the reason we made this board is, functionally, for you to maintain your purchasing power, are you making, if you are an average person in average America--in my district, these numbers are substantially higher because I am from a district with some of the highest inflation in America, but if you are not making $1,115 more a month because that is what you would have to be having from 4 years ago, your purchasing power, you are poorer.

I actually think that is the reason that voters turned and said, I see these Democrats running lots of ads, saying crazy things, but yet it turns out the voters are actually really smart. They would look at their checking account, they would look at the cost of their kids' clothes, they would look at the grocery store and try to figure out why in the last week of the month they were losing their minds under stress.

There are a lot of folks here that say things that, just from an economist standpoint, are insane. But your wages, policies that we engage in that don't make you wealthier--because prosperity is moral. It is moral for the poor person to be less poor. It is moral for the working person to be less stressed. To not understand the average American in 4-some years, unless you are making about $13,000 more, you are poorer.

In my district, I think that number is closer to $18,000, $19,000 because I have one of the higher income districts in America, but also one with the highest inflation, and I think that is the disconnect. I think that understanding of, it's not enough to run around and tell people the economy is great, look at all the money we have handed out to big businesses, aren't you happy how much we subsidized of the economy, while so many Americans are just trying to survive.

Apparently, I did a horrible job trying to explain--and somewhere here in early January, I will do a whole presentation on this--one of the fixations of the left is, we need to tax corporations more.

Do you remember your elementary school economics class? I am being sarcastic.

Do you remember your high school economics class?

A corporation taxes you. Who pays it? Seriously, you don't think that doesn't pop up in the wages you pay your workers and the prices you pay as a consumer.

In many ways, corporations are nothing more than pass-through entities. When we did the tax reform at the end of 2017, there was data that was coming out in the next couple of years that

showed about 67 percent of those corporate tax cuts actually worked their way into wages.

Remember, before the pandemic we had some of the most robust growth of wages in American history where the poorer got less poor. The wealthy did well. Now, there is a whole discussion of--one day I am going to do a whole thing of what this government, the Federal Reserve did to inflate assets and that is actually where much of the wealth came from was monetary policy, not tax policy, but for the folks around here that don't do economics that is a different discussion.

What happens in a world where you can show we lowered taxes?

It actually turns out we did something more complicated than that. You do realize what we call the TCJA, in 2017, there was $7 trillion over 10 years of tax cuts. You know there was like $5 trillion, $5.5 trillion of tax hikes.

Because the idea was to modernize. It had been 30-some years since the United States had updated its tax code, and much of the rest of the world was kicking our heads in.

Do you remember the stories that President Obama said over and over and over, he talked about these companies are leaving America? They are moving their intellectual property to Ireland and these things.

We fixed that. We made it so you wanted to be domiciled in the United States. That is why we had the miracle of job growth, but also the wage growth.

Before the pandemic, we had the fastest closure of income inequality in modern history in America. I would argue that is moral. When you get economic policy, when you get tax policy, when you get regulatory policy right, it is moral. People are less poor. Yet, so often I watch these people come behind these microphones and they say things that aren't true.

I was trying to point out in last week's presentation, just if you look at expenditures on growth and growing businesses and investments, when we did TCJA, you can actually see--the G7, without the United States in it, they were growing about the same. They were investing about the same. We exploded in growth.

So back to your high school economics class.

What are the two ways you pay people more? Your wages go up. So you are out there in the private sector, not government because we are a distortion.

What are the two ways your wages go up?

Come on. You all showed up for your high school economics class.

With inflation, your wages go up. But that just means you are treading water. You got paid more because everything costs more.

It is productivity. Things in the tax code, in the regulatory code that get a business to buy the new piece of equipment that is better, faster, cheaper. Those investments in capital equipment, you are able to make more of whatever you do. Your employer is able to pay you more. It is how you create wage growth.

Some of the idiot class here say we are just going to tax businesses more.

You do realize every economic model says when I raise corporate taxes, it is the workers that ultimately pay for it because your wage growth flattens out, but it is great politics. It is crap economics.

I did this earlier in the year. I brought all these charts trying to show that much of the wealth of this country, thank heaven, before the insanity of the pandemic, we had had the tax reform, the regulatory reform, and a robust economic growth.

Could you imagine if this country was at an anemic growth rate when that happened, what our lives would have been like?

It is also one of the reasons we exploded out and we spent too damn much money. There was too much fear, a number of stupid policies that, hopefully, we will put into the history books that no one else will repeat.

The fact that we had modernized the tax code is what has given us a fight. When President Biden, yesterday was taking credit for a great economy, I sure hope he looked in the camera and said, thank you Republicans, for modernizing our tax code so we maximized economic expansion and had corporate stability.

Because much of the wealth that this country, much of the opportunity, much of the employment base, and the way we can afford that is because we have a competitive tax code now where the rest of the world stops stealing our jobs.

One other thing I want to help people try to understand--because every time I go near this subject I get people--because their brains are sort of caught--I don't mean to say this in a mean way. I am not trying to be mean.

All right, let me walk through a concept. Mr. Speaker, you are from a State that produces hydrocarbons, oil, things of that nature. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, do you remember the posters, ``No war for oil''? The world competed with each other for hydrocarbons.

I had a professor back when I was a younger student who was famous for writing these papers about peak oil, the world is going to run out of hydrocarbons. Well, it turns out that was completely wrong because he didn't understand the ingenuity that God gave us as humans and how we found technology to get to those hydrocarbons that in a previous decade were impossible.

The point where I am going on this rambling, in the 1970s, 1980s, the world basically fought for hydrocarbons. Last decade, in many ways, we positioned ourselves for rare earths because that was the future economic of the world economy.

Really, really smart economists right now are saying this decade, the next decade, and the decade after that, do you know what the world is going to compete over? Smart people. The entire industrialized world is starting to, if not collapse, dramatically fall.

You see the things going on in South Korea, Taiwan, and much of Europe. The numbers are happening all around us. The United States, if you look at some of the Census Bureau data--and I said this last week-- it could be as early as 11 years from now the United States will start having more deaths than births.

What would happen to you if I came to you and said, let's have an honest conversation--which is almost impossible around here--about the border and immigration, but we are going to talk about it like economists? Not our hearts, not our passions, not our anger. Economists.

What President Biden has allowed at the border, when you bring millions of people into the country with very moderate skill sets, what did you do to your domestic working poor? I have done a whole presentation here showing that that family, that young man, that young woman, they dropped out of high school. They sell their willingness to work. They are out hanging drywall; they are out doing this. What happens to their wage growth? You remember a moment ago we were talking about wage growth. What happens to their wage growth in a society when you have added millions and millions and millions of people with similar skill sets? You crush the working poor.

This is actually why, if you look a couple decades ago, it was the Democrats, back when they gave a darn about working people, that actually cared about locking down the border, about taking on low- skilled immigration.

Those of us from border States, you see the chaos we have had to deal with. It drives us insane. A bus showed up in New York or Chicago, and they lose their minds, and you look at some of the Members of Congress from those States, you look at them and you say, you have been doing this to us for years, and now you figured out what we go through every single day?

But back to the economists.

The morality of when you flood a country with a certain level of skill set, you just made your working poor poorer. There is an economic model out there that says it will be 10 years before the domestic working poor in America start to really see their wages go up outside inflation, and it is just because of population dynamics: How many other people are willing to sell their labor cheaper than they are willing?

Flip side--and President Trump actually hit this and hit this brilliantly--we are insane. We bring in smart people from all over the world to our universities, and we educate them. We

teach them our engineering, we teach them our biology, we teach them things, and then we send them home to compete against us.

In a time where you need the society to become more productive-- remember, back to our high school education. As society becomes more productive, our wages go up. When wages go up, we actually take in more tax receipts, but that is a side benefit. Wages go up in a productive society, and then there is a cascade event. You may not be the person with the Ph.D. in synthetic biology, but your wages go up when that person down the street is making a hell of a lot of money and changing the society and the economy for the future and the better.

It turns out this last summer we unleashed some of my Joint Economic economists to just try to do some of the math. Here is what I was talking about with low-skilled immigration. Asylum seekers, those, they consume hundreds of thousands of dollars of social services. That is the nature of our country. If you can't afford it, you get healthcare. If you can't afford it, you get these other type of benefits. If you can't afford it, we will get you housing. Our education system is based off the tax system.

High skill, we actually make millions--well, in this case $800,000, $900,000--in the tax receipts and those things over a full career. Now, the fact of the matter is, I have some much fancier graphs that also show the age spectrum. You have got to say a young worker compared to an older worker, the number of years they are able to participate in the economy at a higher wage level. Bingo.

That is actually why Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, the rest of the world we compete with have all gone to a point talent- based system. We are functionally the last country, last industrial country in the world that does a familial system.

I promise you, I will get some very angry things coming into my office, but I am being honest. Our immigration system is essentially based on who your family is: My cousin moved in, they are sponsoring me. It is a family chain migration system.

The rest of the world has figured out that as birth rates have collapsed around the world, people, we are desperate for people. I am going to show you some charts coming where, as a country, that our birthrate started to roll over in 1990. We need people.

Part of my job with the Joint Economic Committee, part of my job on Ways and Means is how do I finance all the things that people show up here wanting?

I know it is not something you hear a lot of Republicans talk about because so many people don't understand the demographics of our country. We are going to have to have an honest discussion that one of the most powerful things we can do for economic growth is actually modernizing our immigration system, not sending home people that we educate to compete with us.

There are models out there that say it would make our entire society more prosperous. It is worth thinking about.

Actually, can I give you just a thought experiment? I was trying to explain this to a reporter earlier today. One of the things that is expiring from our 2017 tax reform is research and development expensing. You go, huh? If you are a business and you are researching a new way to make something, a new piece of technology, a new type of biology, a new cure for a disease, in 2017 what we did was we made it so you could expense it right then.

In today's tax code, you basically depreciate it. It says, okay, you spend a million dollars trying to build a new tool, and you get to amortize that research over the next 7 years.

Think about this. If I expense it in one day or do it over 7 years, the government basically gets the same money, right? It is just the timing. If you have the ability to say, I spent the money, I expensed it immediately, what happens? You get this virtual cycle of, oh, I have a new tool that is better, faster, cheaper, and then you jump onto the next one, and jump onto the next one, and you get that productivity curve.

You get back to productivity again. How do you pay people more money?

One of the complaints we were getting after 2017 is that all this money was going into research and development to make a society more prosperous, more modern--you know, better, faster ways to cure people-- and we had a shortage of people with skill sets.

One of our economists is trying to model what would happen if you said we are going to do expensing of research and development, because we know that pops economic growth, but you also did talent-based immigration at the same time. You may get a multiplier effect. This is thinking like an economist. This is what we have to do to get ourselves out of this hole.

Remember, functionally, the first 2 months of what we call this fiscal year, we are borrowing about $10 billion a day. If you do the whole 12 months and be a little more honest about what you are doing, because here is the April tax cycle, we are still borrowing about $74,000, $75,000 a second. It just gets worse, and it gets worse because of demographics.

I am going to show this twice, but I have to say it again. Close to 100 percent of the debt for the next 10 years is interest and healthcare. It is people like me. It is baby boomers. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is math, except it is also the type of math we are not allowed to really talk about here.

Look, I am going to race through a couple of these boards just to make a point. For every dollar we take in in tax receipts, we spend $1.39. Does that give you a sense--when I have someone who comes to me and says, David, there is a continuing resolution coming.

Now, we actually, probably as Republicans, would want to move that continuing resolution when we have President Trump so we have unified Republican government so maybe we could do some of the policy changes, but how about the debt ceiling?

We are also going to do a slide here on talking about, do you understand when you say: David, I don't want you to borrow a dime. Great. I take in a dollar, I spend $1.39, but all I get to vote on is about 25 percent of the spending.

How much of Medicare, how much Social Security, how much pension benefits, how much of VA benefits do you want us to cut?

I have done these entire presentations at home where you show the chart, and people raise their hand. I get these suggestions. I will give you an example, I had one last night, a good friend sends me a thing: David, if you would stop funding the U.N., that would take care of our problems. Okay, we spend about $18 billion on the U.N. The economic effect, it is believed, it probably brings in about $9 billion a year, but let's just use the entire $18 billion. If we are borrowing close to $7 billion a day, getting rid of all the U.N. covers 2\2/3\ of a day worth of borrowing.

There is the problem. People don't understand the scale. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on--all defense, all nondefense discretionary--is on borrowed money plus a chunk of mandatory. You have got to see. When we do that presentation in our home district and you have people give their suggestions, we get up to maybe 3 weeks of cuts.

Then you start to say: Okay, are you ready to get rid of all the Defense Department? Are you ready to get rid of the State Department? Are you ready to get rid of the FBI? Are you ready to get rid of this, ready to get rid of that? You just see the eyes on people because they really do believe, if we get rid of foreign aid we can balance the budget. Then you show them that all foreign aid is about 9 days of borrowing.

I beg of the public, the way you influence Members of Congress is know your math and know the scale of how upside down we are.

Just trying to make that point once again, here is another chart. If we are spending $1.39 for every $1 we take in, this little dot line is the break-even point. That basically means every dime of discretionary--that is defense, too, and you have got to pay interest. If you don't pay your interest, you blow up the world and you blow us up because we have the bonds out there, so functionally we are so upside down, even part of what we call entitlements, mandatory, earned benefits is on borrowed money.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask how many minutes I have remaining?

All right, I am going to talk faster. Sorry about that. Oh, the poor people who try to take our words down. It is a punishment, I am sorry.

I have some other boards here, so I am just going to try to do two more boards in this 2 minutes.

Tax policy, you go back to functionally 1950, when we have had very high marginal tax rates, we get about 17, 18 percent of the economy in tax receipts. When we have had very low marginal tax rates, we get about 17, 18 percent of the economy in tax receipts.

The fact of the matter is, for some reason, the American economy for the last 75 years, we fall back into this mean, so you have Democrats running around here saying, we need much higher marginal tax rates. However, when we have done that, we still just get the same percentage of the economy. The secret, once again, is that productivity, have a bigger economy.

Our structural crisis now is if we are getting 17, 18 percent of the economy in tax receipts, we are spending about 24 percent of the economy year after year.

Back to the point, this is the pie chart. Every dime of nondefense is borrowed. Every dime of defense is borrowed. You have to pay your interest. Remember, interest is now our second-biggest expense in government. It is number two now. Part of this red here is also on borrowed money.

There are ways to make the math work--the willingness to modernize this government, the willingness to use technology to crash the price of this government, crash the price of healthcare, but make us a healthier society. There is a way.

I sometimes just feel like an idiot. I come behind this microphone every week. I do charts. I show these things, here are the ways. Last week, I showed I think $100 billion, $200 billion of savings we could have in government by just modernization. There is hope, but I only think we have maybe 3 or 4 more years to start to understand how upside-down we are.

Mr. Speaker, I know I am out of time. I thank you for your patience. There is hope, but there is only hope if the American people start to hear these words and start to push those of us in Congress to do the right thing.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 16 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, December 12, 2024, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, a couple things. First, I committed a sin last week. How many of us have always learned when you do one of these floor speeches, like I did a couple weeks ago--and I never ever ever read the comments, except over Thanksgiving.

First, I have to find a way to say thank you. You have a few hundred people who watch some idiot here try to sound like an economist and walk through what they see happening in the debt, deficits, growth opportunities, and the demographics.

Remarkable. A lot of folks have really smart ideas, then about half of them are probably Russian trolls. They really do need to work on their English, because they pop up saying--no, no English person would speak that way.

The other thing that is frustrating is you get the folks you can tell who are intellectually trapped about two decades out of date. My favorite one is, well, you can save Social Security by just raising the cap. I did entire floor speeches earlier in the year showing the economics and the numbers that take people making over $400,000, $500,000, remove the cap, it was only covering 36 or 38 percent of all shortfalls, and now you have chewed up your seed corn. You have functionally no additional places to go to cover those other margins.

I appreciate everyone who is willing to comment. I appreciate the ideas, but here is an idea I would like to share for anyone on this campus and the Members of Congress. If you go to our Schweikert website, our official website, there is a place there you can sign up for what we call the daily debt.

Every day, we send you a text message. That text message--we built this whole system to reach into the Treasury's statements and tell you, hey, here is what we borrowed today. Here is what we borrowed this month. Here is what we borrowed every second.

Yesterday, we were, I think, at $74,500 a second over the last 12 months. Get that. Sign up for it. You are going to get a text message from us every working day. Those people who do not understand the gravity of the growth of the debt--we now have, I think, a few thousand people that get the daily debt text message from our office, and I think it is starting to change the culture around here to deal with reality.

I can give you example. Just before we went on Thanksgiving a couple weeks ago, I held up this board and said, hey, we are going to hit $36 trillion of borrowing in the next day or so. I stand here with the same board from functionally 2, 2\1/2\ weeks ago.

It is no longer $36 trillion. As of yesterday, it is $36.176 trillion. Meaning, in those 2\1/2\ weeks since we were last here, we added another $170 billion of borrowing. At that current rate, we are clicking off functionally a $1 trillion every 105 days.

In all the people you heard come to the microphone this week, how many of them came up behind the microphone and said: We are going to borrow, every hundred some days, another $1 trillion?

There is the crisis. We have people walking up and down the hallways--I just had someone out here grabbing me, begging me, saying: Now don't cut any of our things that the Democrats gave us a couple years ago.

Yeah. I know. Every dime of it is borrowed money.

Remember--and I need to--let's see if I can make this make sense. For every dollar of tax receipts we take in--last year, when we borrow $1.00, we spend $1.39. We take in $1.00, we spend $1.39. That $1.39 is borrowed, and these numbers just get worse.

This is the thing that makes people so angry. Every dollar of borrowing over the next decade is not some fancy this or that. It is interest and healthcare costs.

I think we are in a moment where baby boomer retirements this year will be about 13,000 people a day. They are moving into their earned benefits. Remember, we have a societal deal. You work so many quarters, you get Social Security. You do this, you pay in your FICA taxes, those things, you get Medicare.

Okay. This place is unwilling to have conversations of how to modernize the way we deliver healthcare to change the price, so every day this government is going to borrow $6 billion or $7 billion.

It is the math. Think of that. I added on here, even if I remove the interest we have to pay every day, for every dollar we take in, we spend $1.21.

The interest this year will be about a trillion dollars. A decade from now that almost doubles. It is our reality.

Let's actually try to make a point here once again. I am sorry for anyone who has been crazy enough to watch one of these presentations, but for some reason, I can't get this to sink in.

Take a look. This is 2024, so we have already gone through this-- mandatory 24 percent. What we get to vote on is about 26 percent of spending. What that means is you see here in the blue ``nondefense'' and ``defense,'' every dime a Member of Congress votes on here is borrowed. Every dime in defense is borrowed. Every dime in discretionary is borrowed. Remember the previous slide I showed you. For every dollar we take in, we spend $1.39. Do you know what that means? That is a chunk of what is mandatory.

People ask me: What is mandatory, David? It is those earned benefits. It is borrowed money. I need to explain this real quick because, back to the comments on last week's speech, Social Security does not add to the debt. Paying back the borrowed money from the Social Security trust fund does add to the debt.

Let's walk through this once again. Here is Social Security. They built up a trust fund of trillions of dollars, but today, the tax receipts that come in from your payroll tax--that 12.4 percent for Social Security, half paid typically by your employer, half paid by you; unless you are self-employed, then you pay for the whole thing-- those taxes don't cover the benefits.

This month all those taxes come in, and Treasury, Social Security calculates it. Oh, we are short this much. They reach over, call Treasury, and say--we have these special Treasury bills that we pay interest on, and they actually get a fairly decent rate of interest on--we need to cash in this Treasury. Treasury goes and borrows money to give money back to pay back the money they have borrowed from Social Security.

No one stole your money. Social Security doesn't add to the debt. Paying back the trust fund of Social Security does because the money is borrowed.

I hope I said that in the simplest fashion, but the point I am trying to make here is we are on the cusp of being able maybe to try to do very hard things, but the army of bureaucrats, the army of people who want stuff--and there is spending, here is our check, but there is also spending to the tax code.

Look, I am on Ways and Means. Give us this special carve-out. That is technically spending. Everyone needs to get their head around this. Every dime we as Members of Congress vote on is borrowed money.

All right, let's actually have a little something even more dystopian. It depends on how you like to calculate it. Most people are going to tell you that last fiscal year, which ended October 1, so in the 2024 fiscal year, the United States Federal Government borrowed 6.4 percent of the economy. If you put in the interest paid back to the trust funds, it may be like 6.8.

Think of that. The entire economy, you are borrowing that 6.4 percent of the entire economy that year. Why this chart is important, the baseline of law--and this is where I am going to make some people angry in a moment, so hang on--the baseline says in 9 budget years, we are not borrowing that 6, 6.5, 6.8, whatever it actually is. We are going to be borrowing 9.2 percent of the entire U.S. economy, that year's debt. The next year is bigger, and the next year is bigger, and the next year is even bigger. It is demographics. It is debt, deficits, and demographics. Debt is driven by us. We got older as a population.

A couple of weeks ago, I showed some of the--if you go to the Census Bureau dataset, you can see, if you do some of the math, it is somewhere between 11 and 16 years the United States has more deaths than births.

Process that. What are you willing to do policywise to deal with the reality that all across America, over the next decade, you are going to see schools closing because there are fewer kids? Sorry to hear that. Look, I am 62, and my wife is 62. I have a 2\1/2\-year-old and a 9- year-old because we are pathologically optimistic. When you look at this chart--I always think that joke is funny, but maybe it is a little too dark. This chart makes it clear. The baseline, in 9 years, we are borrowing 9.2 percent of the economy.

If you read the political Washington press this week, we all know we have a huge tax issue we have to deal with. Parts of the 2017 tax reform that I was part of from Ways and Means expire, meaning working people, LLCs, small businesses, partnerships, those things all have your taxes go back to the tax rates prior to 2017.

The first year, in 2026, it is about $400 billion. Over the 10 years, as we often talk about things here, it is--what?--let's use $4.6 trillion. Okay, we have a number of Members, more in the Senate, saying don't pay for it, creating sort of this language saying, well, we are going to say it is policy baseline. No, the law is the taxes are going up. We should find a way to pay for it.

If we do policy baseline, this is at the end of the decade. We are not borrowing 9.2 percent of the economy. You have to add about another point on that. You are somewhere in 10 percent of the entire economy will be borrowed every year.

I need you to think through for people who are interested who watch world markets and debt and what is going on in the world--how many of you remember last summer what happened in Great Britain? Remember, they were going to lower taxes? I love lower taxes. What happened to the British pound? What happened to British interest rates? Remember the bond vigilantes showed up?

What happened in France just 2 days ago? Remember, they were trying to do an austerity budget just trying to get back to where they are mandated under the European Union on their amount of debt they are borrowing, and the government collapsed.

What happened in South Korea? Remember, part of that battle was trying to do a budget because South Korea's population is collapsing.

Maybe we should actually have some introspection here of what is going on with us and the world. Do you think the people that we sell our debt to are going to keep looking the other way and just keep buying it? Are they going to want premiums? Or are we going to have taken so much capital out of the economy that there is almost no growth?

You actually have both models out there. You have where debt markets have charged very high interest rates because of the debt, and you also have the Japanese model. They had huge savings, but they also went almost two decades with almost no economic growth because the capital didn't go to new plant equipment to become more productive; it went to finance the country's debt. Both are miserable because both create the same amount of tax receipts. You have very high interest rates. I have to finance that, so here are my spendable dollars. You have very low growth, lower tax receipts. They both cause the same crisis.

If you are someone who likes to have the intellectual exercise, go read some academic papers. It is great, but the effect to our society is the same.

This is the baseline. This is without the games and the gimmicks.

Let's one more time do one of the most difficult boards here-- actually, no. I am going to skip one.

Let's finish this thought. Both CBO and one of my joint economic Ph.D.'s, basically, we are working on modernizing or updating the data that CBO put out a couple of days ago on what would happen if, that portion of the expiring tax provisions, we continue it. We continue the tax. This is for working people and small business people, but we find a way to pay for it.

It turns out, and this chart is a little hard to read because we printed it at the last second, but if you can see up here, what happens is if you pay for it, you actually get positive growth. You get to do the extension of the current tax policy, but if you pay for it, the size of the economy actually grows. Tax receipts actually go up.

If you just throw it on the debt bucket, you actually slow down the economy. You have stripped so much more capital. Remember, I just told you--what?--$4.6 trillion over the 10 years? You have just sucked that much out of available capital for you to be able to

get a loan to buy that plant equipment, to become a more productive business, to invest in your workers so you can pay them more. This is the battle that you are going to see around here for the next few months of: Do we look the other way and say, oh, let's just do what is easy, stick it on our kids, stick it on your retirement? Yes, we will pay all sorts of interest. Yes, the bond markets will punish us. Maybe at some point we will have the fun of a failed bond option because the bond market will realize we have no sense here of how fragile we are making the U.S. economy by the piling on of U.S. debt.

The economists said, Congress, Senate, if you are listening, try to do the moral work of let's extend those tax cuts. These are for hardworking people, small businesses. Extend them. Do the hard work and find a way to pay for it. That is how you get the morality of the benefit of additional economic growth and also communicate to those debt markets that the United States is actually serious about starting to provide some stability.

Remember, and it has actually been 6, 7 weeks since I last actually did this chart, but at that time, United States was number 14 on the credit stack. That means Greece could sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States.

You want us to still have the exorbitant privilege of the U.S. dollar being the dollar that denominates the world for trade, those things. Do you think we get to continue to hold that extraordinary privilege when we are crushing the debt markets with more debt, flooding the world with more of our bonds?

This isn't a game. I know it is hard to go home and talk to your voters and say, hey, we borrow $74,500 a second. Our expectation is, by the end of the year, that number may be somewhere in the mid-eighties, maybe approaching $90,000 a second.

What is the driver? This is the CBO number, and this chart is actually a little out of date. Mr. Speaker, 100 percent of the debt for the next 30 years is the very thing that Members of Congress like me aren't allowed to come behind these microphones and tell you.

Interest--that is the interest in blue, but it is Medicare. In 9 years from now, when the Social Security trust fund is empty, do you double senior poverty in America, or do you find some way to backfill that? Do you reach into the general fund and say we are going to supplement it, or do we actually have any people here--the problem is you are not allowed to actually talk about Social Security because the Democrats over there are going to run attack ads on you, making it absolutely toxic to have the morality of how you fix Social Security. It is math. The trust fund will go empty.

So, $124 trillion deficit, but guess what has $9 trillion of, we will call it, positive because the spending grew slower, grew slower than the economy. It is actually what we call defense-nondefense discretionary. Ultimately, it becomes $115 trillion of debt 30 years from now. It is 100 percent interest Medicare, interest Social Security.

Those are our demographics, and if someone around here goes: Well, they stole my money. No, they didn't steal your money. The average couple on Social Security gets a crap rate of return, but you get all the money you put into Social Security in like a $72,000 spiff.

It is Medicare that that average couple puts in, oh, forgive me, I don't have my chart, but it was like $280,000 over their work life, and they get like $600,000, $700,000 back. It is that that is the primary driver of U.S. debt.

My argument is: Don't talk about going in and cutting benefits. Let's talk about modernizing.

Mr. Speaker, do you not think the technology around us, the ability to make people healthier, when we have actually done whole presentations that obesity over the next 10 years is over $9 trillion in additional healthcare spending, wouldn't the morality of making people healthier, helping them be healthier be incredibly moral and really good for Federal debt?

That is part of the argument I use when I come here over and over and over. I am going to show some charts on that, modernize, modernize, modernize.

There are binary folks around here who say: tax more, cut more. I have a whole presentation I have done here multiple times. All the taxes the Democrats want to do we have scored. It is about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP when you do the economic effect. Almost every cut proposal that has been done on our side is about 1 percent of GDP. So you have 2\1/2\ percent. I just showed you in 9 years we are over 9.2 percent of the economy, 2\1/2\. Last year, we borrowed what, 6.4, 6.8, it depends on what you want to score.

Does anyone see a problem?

All of the discussions where people come behind these microphones and say: We are going to tax more. It is just a fraction of the problem.

We are going to cut our way. It is a fraction of the problem.

Until you modernize and have that modern revolution in how we deliver services, what we think of as government, and how we do it. You can't change the spending enough.

The problem is that requires thinking and reading, and it also requires our staff. For any staff who are watching this, read things that you normally wouldn't.

One of the things I am just incredibly hopeful about is when you have someone like Elon Musk and the conversations we had yesterday. You could tell, Mr. Speaker, he was saying: How do I deliver the service and use technology to do it better, faster, cheaper, and dramatically more? That is the morality of not destroying the United States economy.

That is because regarding this economy, when we hiccup, the rest of the world gets a cold.

God forbid if we had a debt crisis, how much of the world goes into mass starvation and poverty?

We don't think about the morality of our place in the world.

Let's actually do some things that are a little more difficult math wise. The U.S. will spend $1.39 for every dollar of revenue. Fine.

I am trying to point out in the budget year we are walking into now, Mr. Speaker.

Do you see the little black line?

That is the break even. So those are our tax receipts.

Mr. Speaker, do you notice a problem?

Now, every dime of the gray, which is what I get to vote on, is borrowed money, but now it is actually going into things that are mandatory. The blue is interest that we have to pay. So think of this all here as mandatory.

Last year and this coming year--and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger into the future--every dime of tax receipts is not enough to even cover the things that are on autopilot. Yet I will get some of the folks around here who will go: Well, you guys did tax reform in 2017.

Do you remember what was happening, Mr. Speaker?

Do you remember how many U.S. businesses were abandoning the United States?

Do you remember what growth rates were and what productivity investments were?

At some point here I know we will have to deal with the falsehoods, particularly as the left and the press walk through, it was tax cuts for rich people. Except it is more progressive than the old tax system, meaning the wealthy now pay a higher percentage of U.S. income tax spending than they did before.

We just threw this chart together just trying to point out: There is where we did tax reform.

Mr. Speaker, do you notice that in the entire world, industrialized world, what is the country that actually had investment in productivity and growth?

We are it.

Right today we actually have a pretty darn good economy. GDP now, I think, yesterday was projecting, we are sitting at about 3.2 percent GDP. That didn't just magically happen. We can also see some of the giveaway money that the Democrats did in the inflation reduction, which has had almost no true economic productivity impact. It turns out it was the allocations of the tax reform at the end of 2017.

The problem is those provisions that got us that productivity are expiring. Some have already substantially expired.

Mr. Speaker, how do you deal with the concept of we have no money but we need to fix things in the tax code

because we need the growth but we need wage growth because we just finished an inflation cycle?

In my community, the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, unless you make about 27 percent more today than you did the day Joe Biden took office, then you are poor.

Think of that.

Do you want to know why so many Americans are cranky?

It is because they are poorer.

It is not enough to take credit for the economy being good. That is great. However, if your wages haven't kept up with inflation, then you are poorer.

This is just a point because there was a Democrat Member earlier today behind one of these microphones saying: giveaways to rich people.

All righty.

Mr. Speaker, I would love to be one of the top 1 percent. Yay. They represent about 22 percent of all income, which is stunning. I believe we need dramatically more wealth income growth in let's call it the lower quartiles. Great. You get that through productivity and productivity investment. That 22 percent of income pays 40 percent of all U.S. income taxes.

One more time: Today's tax code is more progressive than before the Republicans' tax reform.

How many times have you heard Democrats come behind these microphones and tell the truth about that math?

Mr. Speaker, I think there was something on here saying if you actually did--the top 50 percent of income pay like 85 or something. Let me see if I can find it on here, as I am just standing here staring. I think it is on one of my next charts. We have a remarkably progressive tax system. That is on income taxes.

Often when you hear people talk about taxes, they conflate things.

Here is your payroll tax, but you are getting it back. That is actually to fund those retirement benefits.

How do you think you get your Social Security?

How do you think you get your Medicaid?

How do you think you get your unemployment?

However, the portion of income tax, is actually remarkably progressive.

The top 1 percent share of income taxes has increased over time. So this is sort of--let's see if I can make this work. So last year, and excuse me, in 2021, 45 percent of all income taxes were paid by that top 1 percent.

Now, Mr. Speaker, we may have the reality of having to deal with all these tax brackets. Yet it is so hard to make public policy when you have people polluting the minds of the American public with things that are fake.

Mr. Speaker, I think there was a Senator from New York that used to say: You are welcome to your own opinion, but you are not welcome to your own facts.

The facts are the facts are the facts.

If you are going to do hard things and hard math, then can we at least agree?

This one came from Tax Foundation. That is a nonpartisan group.

Mr. Speaker, let's actually walk through ideas.

We are going to have to fix the expirations on the tax code. We have an incoming President who has ambitions of how do we help particularly the working middle class. You have people like me who are terrified of the speed and the growth of debt for my own retirement let alone my kids. Remember, my 2\1/2\-year-old, the math says he will now be part of the first generation that will be poorer than his parents.

The math says today when he is 23 years old, 24 years old, all U.S. taxes, from tariffs down to income taxes, everything, will have to have doubled just to maintain baseline spending. It is demographics. We are getting older as a society and starting in 1990 the number of children we had started falling. It is math.

If I came to you right now, Mr. Speaker, and said: All right, let's think like economists. Let's do the morality that we believe growth is moral. It is also the American birthright.

One of the tax issues we need to work on is the two things that had some of the greatest impact in growing the U.S. economy, one was expensing.

You are a company, you are going to buy a new piece of equipment so you can make things better, faster, cheaper.

How do you pay people more money? Inflation won't get you anything.

You do it by productivity. You pay your workers more because they are more productive and investments in plant and equipment mean you are more productive.

We showed in all sorts of charts that the ability to buy that piece of equipment and expense it. That is not a tax cut; it is a timing effect. You can depreciate it over 7 years or take it right now.

If you do the long run, the Treasury still gets the same money, they actually get more by expensing because your investment cycle in becoming more productive is faster. Great.

There is a second half of that, and that was expensing for research and development. You are going to spend money trying to come up with a new pharmaceutical or a new piece of technology or a new, better, faster way to do something. It is expensive because often they fail.

Nevertheless, that is how you stay ahead of the world and you keep the United States as an innovation leader.

We are doing some math right now saying: What happens if you are to come back and reinstate that expensing for research and development?

However, now we are being told we don't really have enough people with the advanced STEM degrees to actually do some of that hard science.

What would happen if you said: We are going to do this as tax policy, but we need the other policy of we need to go to a talent-based immigration system.

As President Trump said: We are insane. We educate people, and then we send them home. That is the point.

We did some math over this summer, and we are going to actually do a whole presentation on it. This makes people mad, but it is math. It is good math, and it is well-documented.

Mr. Speaker, when you have inbound populations into the United States--I am not going to categorize whether they came in as asylum seekers or they crossed border illegally or they are on some sort of visa, whatever it is--but those with less than high school, our model and the literature says they actually cost maybe $360,000 to society because of the benefits we give.

Over here, the green, this is what happens if you bring people in who have advanced degrees. It turns out society takes in well over $800,000 in tax receipts over their time.

If I came to you, Mr. Speaker, and said: We need the vibrance of economic growth, we need to be innovators, and we need their money because we have to have a way to keep paying for the benefits we have promised.

What happens is, we start to do our tax reform and we say: Hey, we are going to do things that fix that depreciation of research and development so we can be an innovative leader and we are also going to do a talent-based immigration and attach that to it so we actually have the talent so we maximize the growth. It is just sort of a unified theory. They work together.

That is what I am trying to pitch here. Please think.

This place often is, I use the term binary, it is do this or do that. It is more complex. Sometimes it is four or five pieces of legislation that have to interact with each other, then some regulation, then some other policies that all come together to maximize the benefit of the idea.

To our brothers and sisters in the staff, start thinking like economists. The hole we have dug for this Nation is remarkably massive. If you think there are simple solutions to the complexity of the debt problem we have, you are absolutely wrong. It turns out the solution is going to be complex. It is doable. Time is just running out.

Let's do some ideas.

Hey, Schweikert, you always get behind the microphone. I am just going to race through some ideas. Some of them I have done before, but there is one I want to do backwards. Let's see, I skipped it last week.

Over the last 6 years, we have had 390,000 Americans die of fentanyl. We have had 390,000 of our brothers and sisters die. Some were accidental. Some were addicts.

I don't think society was ever prepared for a synthetic drug that almost instantly rewires the brain.

Do this thought experiment with me. If I came to you and said: There is going to be what we'll call a vaccine--it is technically not a vaccine--a vaccine for fentanyl that actually does a protein attachment, meaning it can't break the brain-blood barrier, and it lasts 6 months to 1 year.

With just that, we think we gain over $11 billion, and we haven't even worked in the cost estimates of what happens when you have 390,000 of your brothers and sisters dead over 6 years.

Start to think like a revolutionary. Instead of dumping more money into rehab, why don't we do the rehab and say: There is a chance here we can make it so the person addicted to fentanyl or the law enforcement or firefighter doesn't die from the exposure to it. Guess what. The idea is great economics.

This is an example of thinking differently.

What happens instead of spending the money to maintain people's misery? Money could be spent to end the misery.

We have done a number of different bills, from diabetes to other things, saying we need to help our brothers and sisters have affordable insulin. Wouldn't it be more moral if we could actually take on that 33 percent of U.S. healthcare spending that is just diabetes and dramatically reduce the number of our brothers and sisters who have the disease? That is moral. The other is just maintenance of misery.

Let's just run through a couple of other ones that we have been trying to model, such as the Medicare Transaction Fraud Prevention Act. It turns out there is a couple of great articles out there. If you dive into them, what is the most powerful thing that can be done to deal with Medicare fraud?

It is not a bunch of lawyers. It is not a bunch of investigators. It is a data scientist. The problem is data scientists are really expensive right now, and CMS is having trouble working out their pay schedule to hire them. This is the person who sits down and builds the model and says: Okay, this doesn't make sense. Go look at that. This doesn't make sense.

We believe there is $60 billion annually--not over 10 years--every single year in Medicare fraud, and you can find it using data scientists.

Remember how I was telling you before how we need to find $4 trillion or so to cover an extension of the tax cut? That is $400 billion a year. This is $60 billion from doing the right thing.

There are ideas here.

There is the use of technology that, hey, here is my doctors' notes and here is my insurance contract. Do you have a bunch of billers fight with each other over months and months and months trying to collect between the insurance company and the insurance company is saying you didn't document things right? Well, there is this concept of clean claims, where the AI says: Here is the doctors' notes. It matches the contract. Automatically pay it.

We think that saves $31 billion every year. Well, heaven, I am getting close to $100 billion just on those two things using technology.

We have already dropped a piece of legislation--this one is over 10 years--that just cleans up some of the fraud and sets some timelines on the employee retention tax credit. Well, that is almost $80 billion.

These are just a handful of ideas that we have actually had scored. How do I get the brothers and sisters around here, the Members who are elected, their staff, the press, the public to see there are solutions where you don't have to keep piling onto debt, but it is a revolutionary use of technology to make government better, faster, and cheaper.

There is hope. There really is hope. Why the hell is this place so terrified of doing anything different? So many of the solutions you hear around here sound like it is the 1990s. We are all walking around with a supercomputer in the palm of our hand. Use that technology to make this another American century.

Mr. Speaker, I am losing my voice, and I think I actually made the point. Thank you for tolerating my diatribe, and I also know the Speaker has an appointment to keep.

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