Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, one of the magic things about Debbie Lesko is she has proven you can be conservative and not be angry about it. You can actually be joyful and kind and sweet and just a decent human being. I have learned more things about urban chickens from her, because I have a 9-year-old that really wants daddy to build a chicken coop. Don't laugh. She really does.

Just an observation, because we sit on this airplane every week, flying back, and I often sit next to Debbie. Other Members, you see them on their computers, watching movies. Debbie has a stack of things because she doesn't use her computer. She has a stack of papers. You know, they do make these things called laptops.

She is there with her highlighter for hours on the airplane. That is the sort of thing you notice. You can be kind. You can be loving. You can be joyful.

Debbie, I think you are going to have an amazing experience with the leadership of Maricopa County. Remember, Maricopa County is right now the fourth most populous county in America. I actually still believe it is going to cross over Harris County's population. If there weren't so many hurricanes in the area, we probably would have already.

I used to be the county treasurer, and trust me, after some years around here, I miss those days when you could actually do things.

I am going to miss you. I am going to miss the times when you were my guiding light. When I am just mad, because I seem to be mad a lot, you just sort of smile and say, well, that is sort of how it is.

I think you are going to do amazing things for the people of the West Valley as their supervisor. We are going to make some very tough decisions here in the next couple of years where we are going to need the leadership at our State and local levels because we don't have a lot of dollars to send. So we are going to send a lot of our problems to you soon.

We love you, Debbie.

Mr. Speaker, first, I am going to ask everyone's--let me extend an apology. I have fairly severe asthma and just got off an attack, so I am pumping down some inhaled steroids, just routine.

Also, last weekend, I lost my voice. Should I be worried that my wife said it was the best weekend of our marriage and that staff was thrilled and upset I got my voice back?

Here we go. This is like my therapy hour, because I have some things I think we need to share. One of the number one things I want to accomplish tonight is please let there be some of our incoming Members' future staff and the Members themselves listening.

I know there is no one in the room. That is the way it is supposed to be. People are supposed to be in their meetings and reading and trying to understand what is going on. Don't fuss at people for not sitting here. We are on probably a thousand televisions around the Capitol campus.

One of my frustrations is--we just got off election season. Would you believe during elections, people--what is the term? Oh, yeah--make crap up. We need to have an honest discussion about something called math. Let's actually have some fun.

Have you ever had someone say that we are going to grow ourselves out of the debt and deficit?

Let's actually do some math off the top of our heads. This year's debt is going to be $2 trillion. How much does the economy have to grow to produce enough tax receipts to cover $2 trillion? It is actually fairly simple math.

Mr. Speaker, 1 point of GDP is about $300 billion, so you get about 17, 18 percent of GDP in tax receipts. So let's see if $300 billion, 17 percent is $48 billion, so if 1 percent of GDP growth only gets me $48 billion, you do realize that means you, in a single year, have to have 40, 41, 42 percent GDP growth to cover the debt and deficit of this year.

It is absurd. I beg of people: Learn your math. Mr. Speaker, don't let the political consultants make crap up and then put it on our brochures and then tell you to go out and say it.

It is now time to do adult-like math and the understanding--and I am going to do this three or four times tonight--every dime of deficits from today through the next 30 years is the very thing we are not supposed to talk about.

It is demographics. We got older as a society. Our brothers and sisters who worked their 40 quarters and who paid into the system now start to get their benefits.

Mr. Speaker, if you actually look at the inputs of debt the last decade, but particularly what we expect the next three decades, healthcare, Medicare, interest--then, 9 years from now, do we backfill Social Security or do we double senior poverty when the trust fund is empty?

We are not supposed to talk about those things. Actually, I need to share something. I believe the Democrats engage in something--I won't call it evil, but it is absolutely dystopian and cruel when they basically attacked members of the Republican Party for actually talking about ways to save Social Security. Even mentioning it and having the conversation, they do an attack ad on you, and then you wonder why they come back and say that we need bipartisanship, that we are going to work together--except you are not allowed to actually say anything that actually has a basis in a calculator. It is perverse.

Mr. Speaker, is the left actually okay, in 9 years, doubling poverty of seniors in America? We already have reports right now of baby boomers who have retired and are becoming homeless because of the inflationary cycle we just went through not being able to pay their rent. It is just this level of cruelty.

The solution isn't spending more and more money because we don't have it.

Let's actually walk through a couple of the other bits of math here. I was talking to some constituents this week. Actually, I was listening to them because I had almost no voice. One of them was talking about some things they saw in the press: What would happen if we got rid of this department or this department? I did the math for them.

For the entire civilian nonuniform workforce in America, last year's salary cost was about $213 billion. Think about that, Mr. Speaker. If we are borrowing $2 trillion, if you fired every nonuniform person in the Federal Government, every one, they are all gone, you just covered 10 percent of the shortfall this year.

There is a lack of understanding of the scale, so we are going to actually do a little bit of that.

First, I thought tonight I would come to the floor and say that we just crossed $36 trillion. We are close. We are very close. It looks like the Treasury may have reached into a little bit of their cash supply.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, Treasury sometimes keeps from $400 billion to $800 billion of cash. $500 billion is more normal, but we will hit this before the week is over.

Think of that, Mr. Speaker. We clicked off another $1 trillion, from $35 trillion to $36 trillion, and we did it in about 113 days. The projection is that we will go from this $36 trillion to $37 trillion in about 100 days.

Think of that, Mr. Speaker. We are functionally borrowing about $70,000-plus a second.

Walk through this math. Let's actually try to get a sense of what is going on. This chart is a little hard to read, but I want to make a point. I have done entire floor presentations here of showing here are all the tax hikes that the Democrats have proposed and have been scored, and then you do the economic adjustment and functionally get about 1.5 percent of GDP. The things we want to cut, if you go to nondefense discretionary, Mr. Speaker, and cut almost one-third of nondefense discretionary, it is about 1 percent of GDP. You have our 1 percent, their 2.5, you add that together--excuse me, 1.5, our 1 percent, you have 2.5 percent.

We borrowed just a little under 7 percent of the economy this year. Does anyone see a math problem when the left's tax hike solutions and our cut solutions get you 2.5, and we are borrowing close to 6?

The reason I have this chart here, functionally, in 9 budget years, we go from a little under 6 percent of the entire economy being borrowed money by the Federal Government to 9.2. That basically means, in about 9 budget years, we are borrowing close to $4 trillion a year, and that is on the baseline right now. That is with all of our taxes going up after next year. That is with none of the new programs and none of the new spending. That is just where we are at today. That is current law.

Does anyone see a math problem? At what point does the bond market come in here and say that you guys are, by the end of the decade, approaching 9-plus percent of the entire economy in borrowed money, so maybe we need a higher interest rate?

Has anyone paid attention to the bond market the last 3 weeks? Mr. Speaker, have you noticed that even though the Fed started to lower interest rates, we are still sitting 4.4 or 4.5 on a 10? Does anyone understand that is almost a full point higher than we expected at this point in the cycle?

Mr. Speaker, do you understand what 1 point of interest means? Today, interest is the second biggest expense in the Federal Government. Last fiscal year,

14.1 percent of all of our spending was just interest.

We have an economist as part of the Joint Economic Committee, and we are trying to model at what point does interest and the obligation to pay it start to consume so much of our future.

Then, you get yourself in the debt spiral where interest rates keep going up because you are considered riskier, and you are in this interest trap. You almost don't have enough to cut. We are going to show that to actually deal with the interest trap.

A point of reference, think of this, Mr. Speaker, the United States is number 14 on the credit stack, meaning there are 13 other countries that can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than we can. When Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States, when Greece today is actually paying down its debt from the last decade, and we are borrowing $71,000 a second, does anyone see a problem?

How many people have you seen come behind these mics and how many people on the election trail stood up in front of you, Mr. Speaker, and said that we have a problem?

I can stand here and promise you all sorts of stuff, buy your vote, that we have actually no money to pay for so we are going to just put it on your retirement or your kids' credit cards because that is what we are doing.

Understand, Mr. Speaker, we have almost made a decision that, in the next couple of years, Congress isn't going to run this government and the President isn't going to run this government. The bond market is.

Last year, we had to bring in almost $10 trillion to market, $2 trillion new issuances, and everything else was refinanced.

If anyone is a finance or bond geek, the bonds we are issuing, we have been staying very short in the curb, meaning we refinance and refinance. It means you become very fragile to little hiccups in interest. God forbid the bond vigilantes figure out there is some way to start to screw with U.S. sovereigns.

This is important. This is just the baseline math. In 9 budget years, 9.2 percent of this economy will just be what we borrow in debt, and this is a calculation with no wars, no pandemics, and no recessions.

Mr. Speaker, do you really think we are going to go the next decade without a moment when the wheels are coming off?

We are living on the edge, yet do our brothers and sisters and does our new incoming freshman class understand how dangerous and fragile we are about to make the greatest republic in human history?

Remember, Mr. Speaker, the world, not only the United States, but the world needs the United States to be prosperous. Prosperity is moral, and we are squandering it.

Let's actually just work through some basic math. Here is one of my great, intense frustrations. Here is basically fiscal year 2024 to date. We shouldn't have done to date. We should have just done the whole date, but we didn't want to reprint the board.

The ratio I want to point out is that everything you see here in the red, Mr. Speaker, is individual income taxes. We are a country that lives on individual income taxes.

Do you see this big blue there? That is functionally Social Security, but we don't touch Social Security. Social Security functionally goes to Social Security. A bit of it is unemployment, and a little bit of Medicare, but we don't get to touch the FICA tax. The fact of the matter is every month what we collect in payroll taxes for Social Security actually isn't enough money for the checks that go out that month.

Every single month, we collect the payroll taxes from your labor. It comes into the Treasury, actually, and then it is sent over to Social Security. Then, Social Security sends a little note over to Treasury saying: Hey, I am holding a couple trillion of your bonds. I need you to cash in $50 billion, $60 billion--whatever they are short--and send us the money so we can get our checks out the door.

That is why the trust fund continues to shrink. They are cashing in every month because payroll taxes don't cover all the benefits going out the door, so you don't get to touch that.

Over here in the powder blue or whatever color that is, it will be in about $450 billion when it is all done. This is corporate income tax. What I want you to understand, Mr. Speaker, is if you take a look at all of these tax revenues, when you strip out Social Security, and then you realize that almost all that revenue barely covers our baseline spending, meaning every dime a Member of Congress votes on this year, every dime in defense and every dime of nondefense discretionary, will be borrowed money.

So you have a Member of Congress here, a brand-new Member of Congress: I get to go vote.

Every dime is borrowed.

The way structurally we are, we are also going to have to borrow probably $300 billion of what goes into earned benefits.

Does that sound screwed up to people? Have you had other Members explain this to you, Mr. Speaker? Think of that. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed.

If you come to me and start to say, let's do this exercise--look, these charts are going to be unreadable, but I want to point out that I am trying to make a point. This is actually a bunch of the outlays. Go through all the outlays, and we are going to basically do it chart by chart.

Then, the next outlay, what would happen if I came and said that we are going to cut, but we can't cut Social Security, Medicare, and mandatory spending? Those are earned benefits, but we are going to get rid of all defense. All right, defense is gone.

Then, we will go to our next chart. We will get rid of defense, and let's just get rid of a whole bunch of the discretionary budget. We go through and get rid of foreign aid, not just Ukraine, all foreign aid is gone. Let's close the IRS. Let's close all these programs. Go through and basically wipe out--can't touch Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt.

Remember, interest on the debt last year was almost 14.1 percent of all our spending, but you have to pay your bills. You continue to just get rid of all government.

At what moment are you in balance? It turns out--and I know these are unreadable, but trust me on the point--you can get rid of every dime of defense, every dime of discretionary spending, and if you keep your promises of paying back your bonds, keep your promises to Social Security and Medicare and a couple of the other mandatory programs, so you just got rid of all government, got rid of all the military, Mr. Speaker, you still would have to borrow money.

When you get the brain trust that goes: If we just got rid of foreign aid, we would be fine, and you do the math and show them it is like a week, 1\1/2\ weeks of borrowing, and they just look at you with these daggers because they saw it on some brilliant Russian-sponsored X or Twitter saying that if you just got rid of this, you would be fine.

Learn the math.

You will hear the Democrats say: Well, we are going to cover it with a tax gap. We will give $80 billion to the IRS, and we will just raise more. We came here a couple of months ago, and we have done that for 2 years now. It looked like we had spent $13 billion or so, so far, in trying to do tax collections of people over $400,000, and they collected $1 billion. They had raised a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, what they were able to get the Joint Tax and CBO to score.

One of the first things we have to do when we start is we have to go back and rescore all of the frauds because it turns out there may be a tax gap out there. However, you are not going to do it with an army of people you can't hire; you are going to do it with technology.

I am going to show you the board that I get the most complaints about because almost no one wants to hear this, but how do you fix things if you are not willing to tell the truth?

Think about what a crap place this was last week. We had people come to the floor here and spend $200 billion without offsetting it, and they go: But I had constituents that wanted this money.

Great. Find a way to pay for it. In our own, we added earmarks again. We chose not to prioritize the Debt and Deficit Commission because those things would be hard.

You get up in front of a room and say: Every dime of debt for the next 30

years is demographics. As soon as I say it, you can actually see people running for the exits because, if you don't know it, you don't have to go tell the truth to your constituents. It is math. It is not Republican. It is not Democrat. It is demographics.

This is Medicare. This is Social Security in 9 years when the trust fund is gone, but this is the rest of government. This is the CBO's score on baseline right now, where the taxes are going up next year, where there are no wars, no recessions, no pandemics. This is the baseline. They still functionally have us at $115 trillion of debt.

Do any of you have kids?

Do any of you have grandkids? Do you like them?

Is it moral?

I have a 2\1/2\-year-old. Yes, I think that is moral. It is the greatest thing that has ever happened. I have a 9-year-old also, same birth mother. My wife and I, it is the greatest thing that ever happened to us, to be able to adopt these kids.

How do I explain to that 2-year-old that, when he hits 21, 22 years old, baseline says United States has to double every single tax--every excise tax, every corporate tax, everything--just to hold current services, and that our kids will be the first generation in American history to be poor?

This is the morality of this place, and it doesn't have to be that way. There are incredible solutions to disrupt the cost of government. For a bunch of the Members here, it almost seems easier for them to go cut something or raise a tax than actually pass pieces of legislation saying: We are going to adopt technology to crash the price of government. Even though it would be moral, you could make people healthier, you could make the air quality cleaner, and you just change the current bureaucratic model.

We all walk around with these supercomputers. You do realize this is part of the solution?

If anyone is listening, the four or five people who may give a damn enough to watch this, environmental crowdsourcing--YouTube Schweikert, I have a little YouTube video that is 90 seconds that I did 7 or 8 years ago. I have been trying to do that as a piece of legislation that says: Why don't we just crowdsource air quality?

You could wipe out the bureaucracy like this.

You could have a building permit, but if you screw up, we catch you instantly. It would be really good for the environment and really pro- growth and it would wipe out the absurdity that shoving paper in file cabinets makes the air look cleaner. It is basically documentation for the trial lawyers.

Do you think I could ever get a hearing here? It is creative, it is disruptive, and the air quality engineers are going to come lobby against it.

How about the ginormous drone that flies the pipeline path? We all have had this conversation over and over. We need permitting reform.

Great. Let's do permitting reform. You have to change the inputs on how you do your NEPA, your environmental study.

What happens if you could have that ginormous drone, put ground- penetrating LiDAR under it, and it runs back and forth over the pipeline path, the power line path, and it does your archeologicals, it does your soil, and it does your plant inventory? With technology, you could get much of your NEPA report written in 6 days by AI. That is thinking disruptively.

I am incredibly hopeful that our incoming President really will follow through with the brains of people like Elon Musk and others who are willing to think, saying: Is there a better, faster, and cheaper way where it is moral, our world gets better, healthier, but we crash the costs and crash the size of government?

When you show charts like this, the Democratic solution always turns out being: Well, the way we will take care of healthcare is we are going to subsidize it more.

How about if we embrace the technology that made it less expensive?

The thing you blow into that tells you, you have a virus, that orders your antivirals. Do you know that technology exists?

It is just illegal because we are allowing an algorithm to write a prescription.

We can crash the price of healthcare. Remember, the ACA, ObamaCare, was a finance bill: Who gets subsidized, and who has to pay?

The Republican alternative was better. Actuarially, it was better, but it was still a finance bill. The Medicare for All Act is a finance bill. They are not discussions of what it takes to lower the cost of healthcare.

My Joint Economic economists did something we thought was really risky, and it was shocking. We even had Democrats and Republicans who said: Yeah, you are going the right way.

Last March, we did a study. What do you think obesity will cost in America over the next 10 years?

It turns out we calculated it could be $9.1 trillion in additional healthcare costs, plus the fact that our brothers and sisters are dying. This may be the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger.

The concept of making America healthier, it may mean having to do things that are hard. It may mean reexamining the farm bill, what we do in nutrition support, how we help our brothers and sisters, but our brothers and sisters are dying.

Also, it would be great fiscal policy because it turns out obesity is the single biggest cost in government. It is moral.

Is that Republican, or Democrat?

I am sure we will make it partisan because someone will contribute to one side or the other and then we will go to war over it.

The fact of the matter is there are actual solutions that are not hacking apart government or raising everyone's taxes, but it is changing how we do things.

Right now, when 31 percent of Medicare spending is just diabetes, why do we do this to ourselves?

Why is it so hard to think disruptively, to think morally, to challenge the armies of lobbyists who are walking up and down our hallways--remember, those lobbyists aren't always corporates. They are good government groups. They are societies that just want to be subsidized. They are bureaucrats--and basically looking at all of them and saying: What is more moral: Making people healthier, or sticking more cash into the maintenance of your misery because the model right now is we spend a fortune maintaining your misery?

Put the money in things that produce cures. We are going to talk a little bit about that.

Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about how serious we are on this. We have been trying to do simple things. If you read some of the stories, The Wall Street Journal gets amazing credit. Over the last few months, they have done amazing stories on Medicare fraud.

We have pieces of legislation that functionally would use AI because it is data science. The fastest way you find fraud in government, particularly in things like Medicare and Medicaid, is data, not an army of lawyers. It is data scientists. We think we can get you $60 billion a year just on that.

Clean claims. What would happen if, just by using technology, the constant battle between the doctor and the insurance company and the healthcare provider, we just say: Look, we are going to use technology that meets the doctor's notes, meets the insurance contract. Pay it. We think we can get you $31 billion a year just doing that. It is technology.

We have looked at other things. This is already a piece of legislation, just wiping out some of the fraud in some of the employee retention. We can still pay the people that we owe the money to, we wipe out the fraud, and we think we just got you $79 billion a year.

Those are just a couple of the bills we already have. You add that up. Didn't I just show you almost $150 billion?

We need $400 billion a year to cover the tax hikes that are coming.

My point is: The way that you cut the price of government, yes, there are a whole bunch of programs we need to get rid of, but you have to understand that some of the discussions are much tougher.

If you take a look at the $800-and-some billion that is in the nondefense discretionary, you realize about 38, 40 percent of that is money we take, we borrow, and we send it to entities around the country--your city, your town, your State--that have their own taxing authority. They are programs

we love, such as justice grants, other things. They are good programs, but we are doing it with borrowed money, and we are giving it to entities that have their own taxing authority. That is a tough conversation.

Mr. Speaker, when we get back in December, I am going to do a much more detailed presentation on this because this is one of those topics that most idiots like me that are in public office are terrified to talk about.

We actually spent part of our summer really digging into the math of immigration and illegal border crossing and what it does and affects because you are seeing these articles, particularly in the leftwing press: Hey, these several million undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers, look at the economic growth we are getting.

Then we overlaid it with: What is the cost? The social services, the populations, and where you are in the tax--it is not personal. It is just math.

Well, it turns out, when we dug into it, let's say you did a talent- based immigration system in America, like Great Britain, like New Zealand, like Australia, like Canada, basically the rest of the world. Okay. Let's make a point.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the world fought for hydrocarbons. Remember, no war for oil. In the last decade, it was rare earths.

The literature makes it very clear that, from today through probably the next 20, 30 years, nations are going to battle for smart people.

Remember, there is math out there. If you go look at the data on the Census Bureau's own website, it could be from 11 years to about 16, 18 years where the United States will start having more deaths than births.

We are a dying society. If we don't fix things, we are a dying society. Think of that. The shortest on the numbers is 11 years, more deaths than births.

What if I came to you and said we are going to move to a talent-based immigration system because it turns out people with advanced degrees pay a boatload of taxes, they grow the economy, and they expand GDP?

Our brothers and sisters, they may be wonderful people, but it turns out the economic effects of those without a lot of skills when they come into the United States, they actually squeeze out and lower the labor value of your domestic population that is often in those lowest quartiles.

You are the couple that didn't finish high school, but you are out hanging drywall and you are working your heart out. All of a sudden, you bring in how many people with a similar skill set. What happened to your labor rates?

That is the cruelty. What this administration did on the border was incredibly cruel to the working poor.

What if I tell you, if we do some things right in the tax code fixes, like we want expensing on research and development so we are always innovating; well, it turns out, for that to really take off and grow the economy, we need a lot more smart people.

Is it sane to be a country that invites people from around the world to come do your graduate degree, get your college degree, and then say: Congratulations. You learned the American technology, the American ethos. Oh, you have got to get the hell out of here; send them back home?

We are out of our minds, but we are the last country functionally on Earth that still has a familial immigration system, where you come to America because of who your family is. I know that seems compassionate, but, right now, I am trying to figure out how to pay for the promises we have made.

Ideas like we need to move to a talent-based immigration system while doing other things because it is a unified theory. I need this to make this work so they both raise money for the government so we grow.

Mr. Speaker, thank you for being patient with me losing my voice. The point I will make is, there is hope. There is a way you can make the math work, but you can't continue to live in this fantasy world of, oh, don't worry about debt and deficits, that it is somehow magically just going to disappear. It is magically going to do this. It is magically going to do that.

There is a way to make the math work and this becomes another American century, but we can't keep doing public policy by our feelings. We actually have to do it by a calculator and good quality economics. It is how we will stay a free people because do you understand the dystopian life our world will be when we smash up against the debt crisis?

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

Madam Speaker, we have 30 minutes here, and I am trying to do sort of a wrap-up. As folks know, the House actually passed a continuing resolution. I personally wish we had battled it out and stayed and just tried to see if we could get the Senate to do some of the work.

I have been trying to find ways to get this place and the U.S. Senate, but also voters and, Heaven knows, the Presidential candidates to take seriously the demographics and what is going on in our country but also the world. We are not the only one.

I am going to bring, as I often do, the boards, but let's try to put this in a type of perspective. This article says that the world has now surpassed its record of debt. Believe it or not, it was during the Napoleonic wars that the amount of debt in the world actually skyrocketed.

Congratulations. Right now, I think world governments are $312 trillion in debt. Why is that important?

Well, the burn rate of the United States, we are burning right now-- remember, this is a fairly decent economy, and we are borrowing about $70,000 a second, every day, $70,000 a second. I am going to show you some boards to sort of walk through this.

Do you think there is this ocean of capital in the United States and around the world that is really excited to keep buying U.S. bonds and just keep buying them and keep buying them and keep buying them?

When you read the stories about how many Americans are struggling right now and struggling with their own debt, how much liquidity is there to keep consuming our bonds?

One of my pitches I keep trying to sell here is if we keep up what is going on right now, where we are borrowing in a good year a couple trillion dollars--we will borrow a couple trillion dollars this year-- Congress has made the decision that those who will really run this government, those who really run this country will be called the bond market.

If you need to refinance, like we did this year, you are subject to the fragility of the bond market. This fiscal year we have refinanced about $8 trillion and bring to market an additional 2, so you are basically sitting on $10 trillion. That is not even counting the short term where it was a 30 day and 6 months, and those things that had to be rolled. Refinancing makes you subject to the fragility of the bond market and what interest rate and how much liquidity and how many idiots like me come behind these microphones and try to explain the world debt markets to you.

Take it seriously. It is not a game. The United States is now number 14 on the credit stack. That means there are 13 other countries today that can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than us. Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. Think about that.

I am starting to pick up the first warnings in some of the financial press. Now, this is sort of the deep bond articles and those things. When Moody's is starting to allow their people to leak out information saying, yes, last November we actually put the United States on a negative watch. Remember, we are still an AAA negative watch. That is what they did to us a year ago.

Stories are starting to circulate, if the United States doesn't look and act like we are taking our debt seriously, we are going to get a downgrade. Now, you go, well, who cares? You are the reserve currency.

Guess what? There are 13 other countries with better credit ratings than the United States. If you get the downgrade, if two of the three major rating agencies were to downgrade the United States and no longer it is all AAA, you know actually in our own statutes and a number of State statutes, they wouldn't be allowed to buy U.S. sovereign debt.

Are you ready for the interest rate? The Federal Reserve starts lowering our interest rates. Actually have you noticed? Has anyone been paying attention? Just go on the bond market. Have you noticed that U.S. sovereigns aren't going down the way--I mean, the yield curve is starting to look normal again, semi-normal. Why aren't they going down? I am going to argue our voracious appetite for debt and consumption because this place won't tell you the truth.

Once again, I am going to do this a little bit backwards. For every dollar this year we take in, how much do we spend? Come on. Let's make this a play-at-home game. Figure in your own head: When we take in a dollar, what is spent? If you said $1.39 for every dollar of tax receipts we take in, you would be right. You have got to understand, this will get dramatically worse in a decade because the Social Security trust fund will be depleted. Medicare part A covers, what, 38 or 40 percent of Medicare? The rest is really coming out of the general fund, which will be depleted. In 10 years, we will have 22, 23 percent of Americans 65 and up ready for their earned benefits, and we have got to figure out a way to finance it.

Let's sort of make a point here. I typically used to start with this board, trying to say: Do you see the blue area? This is defense. This is nondefense. That is what you, as a Member of Congress, get to vote on. Every dime you as a Member of Congress get to vote on is borrowed.

Understand, the borrowing is actually bigger than the blue here because that is 1.8 trillion. This year we are going to borrow $2 trillion. If you want to put in the interest and money we are paying back to the trust fund, it is, what, 1.2 trillion, 1.3 trillion--$2.3 trillion.

What that means is every dime of defense is borrowed, every dime of nondefense discretionary is borrowed, and let's call it $400 billion of your favorite earned benefit. Let's call it Medicare because that is easy.

I know this place loves to come behind these mikes and speechify--I am going to cut so-and-so's salary because they are a crap administrator. Great. You just took an hour of our time that if we are borrowing $70,000 a second, did you help us? We seem incapable of doing things that are serious. Hell, we are incapable of telling voters the truth.

This weekend, I had a wonderful woman come, if we would just get rid of foreign aid, we would be fine. Then you show her that every dime of foreign aid, where the money actually goes, is a week, a week and a half of borrowing at most, and that is every dime. Most of it is extra money that comes back because they buy our stuff. A week of borrowing. She just looked at me with these daggers because she had a text message from someone she never knew basically telling her if you got rid of foreign aid, you could balance the budget. No, it is about a week.

Get rid of congressional salaries. I did this math. It is like six seconds of borrowing every day.

Please stop bathing in the clown show. This is for Members and staff and the public. We need to be educated. You need a well-educated electorate to pay attention because we are going to have to do some very difficult and complicated things.

If you think there is a simple solution--when every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed, if you think that is a simple solution, it turns out you have got to revolutionize the cost of healthcare. You can disrupt it with technology, with other processes. You can adopt technology to crash the price of government. You are going to have a discussion about talent-based immigration.

Remember, in 15 years, the United States has more deaths than births. I believe we are about to have the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger. In the last six years, 390,000 Americans have died of fentanyl. It turns out next year, we might have a fentanyl vaccine. You go, oh, I don't like that. In 6 years, 390,000 people have died. You are not willing to deal with the moral imperative of saving our brothers and sisters? We need to think differently.

The fact of the matter is, you are living in a time of miracles. We can cure hepatitis C. We can cure hemophilia. There are things that are coming out, there is the Vertex experiments that look like they are about to cure type 1 diabetes. If diabetes is 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending, what is the morality but what is also the amazing economics if we would fixate in the farm bill, nutrition support in the way we deliver healthcare to get our brothers and sisters healthier?

It turns out the single biggest thing you can do for stabilizing U.S. debt is making America healthier. How many people have you heard come behind these microphones in the last year be willing to say that? You upset the lobbyists walking up and down the hallways that need people who are sick.

Look, we will do better, we are working hard on this chart. I swear if there was someone out there, if someone out there knows where I can find it, call my office, but we are trying to actually build a chart that shows all the outlays because I keep getting people saying, well, if you just cut this, cut that, and I am trying to show you, oh, that is great, you just got rid of 3 days of borrowing, 2 days of borrowing.

We actually did a little contest earlier in the year and we added up everything, and it was about 3 weeks. We published that. ``Oh, it can't be,'' I was told that it is just waste and fraud or, as Democrats say, we don't tax rich people enough.

Once again, I have done multiple presentations on this. I have actually

brought the boards and did all that. Every tax that has truly been proposed--so it is written out--where you tax income, you tax capital gains all up and down for people $400,000 and up, when you did the economic effects, you got 1\1/2\ percent of GDP.

If all discretionary is like $860 billion, could you get rid of a quarter of it? Could you get rid of a third of it? Okay, let's pretend you can get $300 billion of it. All the things we have truly talked about cutting, all the Democrats' tax hikes, all of our cuts, you get 2\1/2\ percent of GDP.

We are going to borrow in a good economic year. The reality is that tax receipts are pretty good this year. We are still going to borrow almost just a little less than 7 percent of GDP. Think of that. What the hell? Excuse me.

What happens if there is another pandemic? If there is a war? If there is a recession? We would barely have the capacity now to cover our current spending.

Part of the reason for a chart like this--and I know it is unreadable from a distance--but we have been trying to put in that the Department of Agriculture is 1 point, this energy program is 0.12, trying to basically explain that the theatrics of this place don't come close to adding up.

Mr. Speaker, 100 percent of borrowing from today through the next 30 years--this doesn't mean that you don't revolutionize government every way you can, but the big number says every dime of borrowing today through the next 30 years, 75 percent of it is healthcare, mostly Medicare. We got older.

In 9, 10 years, when the Social Security trust fund has been depleted, are we going to reach into the general fund and backfill it? How are we going to cover that? Are we going to allow the doubling of poverty of seniors in America? We already have a crisis right now of the number of senior baby boomers that are ending up on the street. This is really screwed up.

Yet, this place, when you say we engage in this theater--``Well, I am going to cut this program. I just got rid of 15 seconds of borrowing.'' Okay, maybe we should do that, but don't think you actually accomplished something because, in the time of that debate, we have often borrowed more than the debate would have saved.

Now for a couple of the punch lines. I am going to do this three or four ways because I am trying to get it to burn in.

Remember I was telling you for every $1 we receive in taxation in the Federal Government, we spend $1.39? Here is one of the punch lines you need to have burned into your consciousness: About 18 cents of that $1.39 borrowing is just interest. What did the interest buy?

Look, there are some economists that say you put on interest, someone got a rate of return, so they are going to spend it, but in many ways, it is not money that went to build a healthier military, dealt with poverty. It is going to continue to grow and continue to grow.

You try to help folks understand if we are borrowing $1.39 for every $1 we receive and then try to show a little dotted line here is basically--let's call it the break-even line.

If you are in the orange, that is mandatory spending. We don't get to vote on it. It is a formula, and many of those formulas haven't been looked at in decades. Do you see the blue? That is interest. That is a huge part of the growth, interest and that healthcare. See the gray up here? That is all discretionary. All we actually debate around here is a fraction of this gray.

You look at it and you get over here so even when you get away from the pandemic and start to look into the future--now, I don't know if you notice the tiny improvement right here in 2025. That is where we are still banking on no recession, no slowdown.

In `26, it will get also a tiny bit better because working people are going to pay about $400 billion in additional taxes.

Remember, a whole portion of the 2017 tax reform expires and some of my friends who are running for office on the other side and made it clear they do not support anything from that tax reform in 2017. Just be prepared.

I have a higher income and very well-educated district. Look, I am blessed. We calculate it is an almost $3,000 per family tax hike if we don't fix this next year.

This isn't a game. Can you imagine what the economic impacts are going to be if you do that to working people? Yet, you continue to show chart after chart.

I want to make a point. I have done presentations here where you show, here is years--75 years, here is years where we had very high marginal tax rates. We get about 17, 18 percent of the economy in taxes. Here is where we have had low marginal tax rates. We get about 17, 18 percent of the economy. Your solution, if you actually wanted facts in economics and not political rhetoric, is adopt regulatory policies, tax policies, trade policies that maximize economic growth.

Do you want more tax receipts? If you actually care about the debt, stop living in this fantasy that we are just going to tax rich people and that takes care of everything. If you look at some of these proposals, they have already spent the money three or four times.

I keep trying to present over and over that when you start to realize the amount of our spending, and by the end of the decade--think of this, 10 years from now, if you add in the debt, we will owe to the trust funds or what is left of them--we are at $56 trillion. What happens if interest rates move against us? Remember, interest today is the second biggest expenditure in this government--Social Security and then behind that is interest, then Medicare, then defense. Defense is now the fourth expenditure of this government. Social Security and then behind that is interest.

You try over and over. So you see right here 2024, `25, you see the little, tiny movement we get in `26 and a couple years after that? Boom. This here is because the tax hikes that are coming--they are already in statute. They are coming. It is not a vote. We are not going to take a vote and say we are going to raise these taxes. It is called tax expirations. It is already coming. It is math.

After 3, 4 years, you are back and the curve is back in. We don't want to tell the truth. It is demographics. Starting in 1990, we started having fewer children. Why can't we start to tell the truth that here is what we are going to do in our regulatory code, our tax code, to promote investments and things that make us more productive?

We are going to do things that actually close income inequality. Turns out, we have datasets that say the key driver to income inequality in America is actually health. Then think what we do in our nutrition policy, ag policy, other things. I mean, we are killing ourselves.

Mr. Speaker pro tempore, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

Mr. Speaker, for everyone's sanity, I promise to use only a couple minutes of it.

Mr. Speaker, this is 2024. We functionally are going to take in $4,898,000,000,000. We are going to spend $6,880,000,000,000. Anyone see the math problem?

Then, if you want to tell the truth about actual debt and actual budgets, where you actually say, okay, here is the interest we have to pay back to the Social Security trust fund, here is the Medicaid trust fund, the other things, you are functionally looking at a $2 trillion, $2.2 trillion deficit in a year that things are good.

The other point back to this board, how many Members of Congress will stand in front of you and say: Do you understand every dime--so like my friend, Mr. Green, and I get to vote on--every dime we vote on is borrowed.

When 14.1 percent of all Federal spending is just interest, it turns out the most powerful thing you and I can do to stabilize borrowing--I have done hours on this floor trying to present it. Am I just an idiot for trying? Showing debt can't come from tax hikes--okay. Fine. Do that, but it is marginal.

Many of the things we want to cut--I actually believe government is dramatically too big and too intrusive. Cut them. Unless you tell the truth about the primary drivers of U.S. debt, which is demographics, healthcare.

Are we going to change the rules so technology, so cures are moral? Fixate

on those things. Turns out, those are what you do to bend the debt curve. Yet, I will give this speech over and over, and maybe it just doesn't satiate the dopamine hits. Maybe it is just not trite and easy enough because it turns out doing some of this will be really hard, but it is doable. There is a path.

My 2-year-old is running around here somewhere. Yes, I have a 2-year- old and an 8-year-old, and my wife is exactly my age. Yes, I am pathologically optimistic. I always think that is funny.

My little boy, when he turns 21, 22, every tax in the United States has to be doubled. Every tax has to be doubled just to maintain baseline spending. Absolutely immoral what we are doing. We have set up the first generation in U.S. history to be poorer than their parents. Doesn't have to be that way, but this place needs revolution in the way it thinks because you can't keep being absolute dumb--you can't keep doing it the way we are doing it.

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

Mr. Speaker, I think I heard applause and happiness that I am only allowed to go for 13 minutes.

For anyone that is paying attention, it is because of the lateness of the hour. My brothers and sisters on the Democrat side, we have to split the remaining time.

That is what is about to happen, so I am going to talk faster than normal. I apologize to those trying to take our words down.

Let's see if I can make the point. I actually edited my boards down because I wanted to go through, once again, the actual mathematical facts and my intense frustration that our brothers and sisters around the country running for office are promising things that there is no mathematical way to make them work and a complete void of an honest conversation of demographics and debt and the reality of what is going on. Let's actually race through this because I think I now have 12 minutes.

Please understand this. For every dollar of tax collection this year that your Federal Government takes in, we spend $1.39.

Now, work with me. I used to come behind this microphone just a little while ago and say: We borrow 30 cents out of everything--no, we borrow 39 cents. If you remove interest, for every dollar we take in, we spend $1.21. I need you to process this.

Please process this. For every dollar of tax collection the United States takes in, and that is this year, in a time when the economy has actually been pretty good. GDP growth has been pretty good. Tax collections have actually been pretty good, and we spend, meaning we are functionally borrowing, 39 cents for every dollar we take in.

Here is the point. How many of you, as Members of Congress--and if someone's watching, if you don't see people in the room, that is the way it is supposed to be. People are supposed to be back in their offices or other places actually doing their work.

One of the reasons you do these presentations is you are probably on a thousand televisions around this campus, and hopefully there are still some minds that are open to math.

Do you see this chart? Do you see the blue? We call that defense and nondefense. That is all I, as a Member of Congress, get to vote on. It is 26, 25 percent of spending.

Back to this board. For every dollar of tax collection, we have to borrow an additional 39 cents on top of it. Does someone see a math problem?

If what I get to vote on is 26 percent of the budget, it means every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed as well as a big chunk of what we call mandatory spending.

How many people are willing to tell that story, whether it be on the left or the right? The hallways in this place are full of people begging us for more spending. It is an investment, David. We need the money.

I have done chart after chart after chart over the last few years, coming in here and showing when we have had very high marginal tax rates, we get about 17, 18 percent of the economy in taxes. When we have had very low marginal tax rates, we get about 17, 18 percent of the economy.

Will this place start to take it seriously? You have to adopt tax policies, regulatory policies, and code policies that dramatically do growth. Understand, what is the biggest change that has happened the last couple of years? What is the thing that has moved these numbers so dramatically?

I am going to play with this just a little bit.

Interest. The fact of the matter is, Social Security, $1.460--480 billion. Total interest, because remember you have to pay the interest back to Social Security, the pension plans, all those things, and then interest to those who bought our bonds. Remember, the vast majority of our bonds are actually bought by Americans.

Interest now is the second biggest expenditure in the Federal Government. It is going to come in total gross interest maybe $1.140-- 160 billion.

Then the next biggest, the third biggest expenditure is now Medicare, and number four is actually defense. The thing that is in the Constitution now is number four.

One of the points I want to make here is I was just showing you a chart that about 25 percent of what we get to vote on is defense and nondefense, and we are over 14 percent is just interest now. Understand, in about 10 years that a little less than $1.2 trillion is going to be approaching $2 trillion a year.

Tell me how many things we got to buy with that interest when for every dollar of tax collection we take in, $1.39, so 39 cents on top of it is borrowed. That is the mathematical reality. This is the thing that I get booed at, I get people online saying: Oh, that hurts my feelings.

One hundred percent of the debt for this country from today through the next 30 years--go look at CBO's reports, Medicare--sorry, I don't mean to get so agitated, Medicare and the interest. In 9 or so years when the Social Security trust fund has been depleted, do we reach in the general fund and backfill it?

The insanity is, you hear the debates here: We will just tax rich people.

Even documents from the left say, well, if you do every tax that has been proposed on those over $400,000, and

you adjust for the economics, you get about a point and a half of GDP. A point and a half of the size of the economy. For those of us who want to cut spending, add up everything we have talked about cutting, it is about one point of GDP. You have got a big 2\1/2\ percent there, 2\1/2\ percent for every policy on the other side, every policy on our side.

We are borrowing just a little less than 7 percent of the entire economy this year, and the economy is healthy. Dear Heaven, what happens if there is a war? What happens if there is another pandemic? What happens if parts of the economic clouds come and we have a recession? This is the time when things are good. We should be paying things back.

You look at the math. I know some of these charts are impossible to read from a distance. I am trying just to make the point that interest is our fragility. I have said it here multiple times. Do you want to know who really is about to run your country? It is not the Democrats; it is not the Republicans. It is not rich people; it is not the unions. It is the bond market. If you are borrowing seventy, eighty thousand dollars per second every day and you have got to go to the market, remember, this year, this fiscal year we will bring $10 trillion to market. About eight of that is refinancing of the bonds that roll over. It is actually a little more than that.

If you look at the short end of the curve, they have to roll over a lot. Then there are a couple trillion of new issuances. If the world, if the bond vigilantes say, well, we don't want those things, we want a premium, you look at the charts, and this is actually assuming everything is wonderful.

When you see the CBO projection, and they talk about debt coming into the future, this is no pandemic, no war, no recession, yet if you listen to these microphones, it is person after person after person coming up with new brilliant ideas to spend money. Many of them you love. They are moral, they are helpful, and we have no damn way to finance them.

This delusion that we will just tax rich people, I have already shown chart after chart after chart, you confiscate all the wealth of those designated rich, you run the country for a few months. You crash every market, there is no retirement accounts, but you wipe out everything. It is just sort of a mathematical delusion.

There are ways to make this work, but are we going to legalize technology?

Last week, I actually did a presentation, and I was trying to show that all these projections of: We are going to take in this much money in additional enforcement at the IRS, and we have only hit like a fraction, a fraction of what was promised.

Remember, we are 2 years in. Remember, we originally appropriated 80, then it went down to 57. According to CBO, we were supposed to be up around 10, 11 billion of additional tax collections coming in from the rich. We have hit 1, so we have hit basically 10 percent of the promises. That is story after story after story, we are not coming anything close to our fantasies.

Remember, the Inflation Reduction Act was going to pay for itself, and then we realized, hey, the subsidies, the planned economy, the new managed industrial policy that is America now, it is turning out to cost dramatically more. The tax collections didn't come anywhere close.

We are really bad at math here. We are really good at making public policy by feelings, but just try to say, let's have thought experiments. What would happen if the IRS used Chat and other things to answer the phone, customer service, so the vast majority of people who call the IRS could actually have their phone answered? I remember one person online said: Well, that would lose jobs.

I tried to show all that money we set aside for the IRS; it went down. Their auditors went down by 8 percent. We gave them billions of dollars, and it turns out we have a demographic issue.

Remember, starting in 1990, birth rates in the United States started to roll over. It turns out a lot of people don't want to work for the

Madam Speaker, I may have a slightly different experience. Bill was my senior Democrat for my subcommittee. You actually could not stop yourself from at least liking him because he was just brutally honest with you. He would say: David, I really think that is stupid, or on occasion, which was actually joyful: David, we can make that work.

Why this is important is so, often particularly in the Ways and Means Committee, which I still believe is culturally a unique committee--you know, we are tough on each other, but I think actually we are sort of intellectually fair. A number of the oversight hearings we have had even this year, they weren't adversarial.

Something that is important that I want to make sure I say before I ramble on too much, Bill's staff really should get some special kudos because even when you could tell he wasn't feeling well, when he was sort of in angst, his staff did a remarkable job of keeping an eye out on him, keeping him ready to go because you always knew, no matter what you said, he had an answer to it.

It was really a neat experience, as this is the first time I have chaired something in Ways and Means, to have my counterpart be someone with that history who was tough as nails on me. When he thought I was doing something fair for working men and women, he was all in with me. He wanted to move forward. When he wasn't happy with it, yes, he would beat the crap out of you.

Actually, in a weird way he epitomized what, in my mind, was the classic defender of working-class Americans. He is the image I have in my head because that is what he was.

Madam Speaker, I am going to try to do something a little backward tonight from what I have typically done.

One of my great frustrations here is sitting on Ways and Means, having the Joint Economic Committee economists as part of my team, and the number of times this place makes promises that the experts around us say: You know, they are complete fraud.

Then, somehow magically, we never sort of come back a couple years later and say: Hey, here is what you were promised when the Democrats did their Inflation Reduction Act. Here are the actual outcomes. Should we hold people to their own language?

There are a couple of things I wanted to do here. I am going to walk through a few boards and try to give some examples of how this place engages in theater that is mathematically void, and what is the term? Oh, yeah, we lie to you.

So how many remember a couple of years ago: We are going to put $80 billion into the IRS. Yay. And we are going to collect money on those people making $400,000 and up, and there were Members of this body, of the White House, and others saying crazy things.

The press--excuse me--the scribes who basically, in many ways, should have to file with the Federal Elections Commission because many of the press around here act more like a PR department for the Democratic Party, says: Better tax enforcement could raise $700 billion over the decade. The White House in 2021.

Some of the others: Some Members of Congress think you can get $1 trillion from finding and taxing delinquent rich people.

Okay. Wouldn't that be neat? Wouldn't that make our job so much easier in a Congress that is borrowing close to $80,000 every second? Remember, this was what you were told.

How come no one ever comes by on these microphones 2 years later and says: Okay, do we hold you to your language? You built budget documents. You built things on these numbers. Even when I go back to the CBO--and these are the updated numbers. Remember, CBO, the one we keep relying on, says: Hey, high of $851 billion over the 10 years, and additional collections on those $400,000-and-up rich people, and the low: $390 billion.

This was one of the excuses the Democrats had for the trillion-plus-- depending on how you look at some of the other CBO numbers, so you can see how accurate it is--almost $1.9 trillion in the Inflation Reduction Act, basically how much of it was giveaways to big businesses, environmental groups, other things.

Okay. You told us this. Well, it turns out we are 2 years in now. We are 2 years in, so let's hold them to, okay, you are going to get their average sort of number that became refined as late as this February. We are going to get $400 billion.

So, for the fun of it, because I am a pack rat, I saved some of the articles. Here is a fine scribe--I mean, excuse me, reporter: IRS says its hiring surge and funding boost could generate $560 billion more than it thought, $560 billion over the 10 years from their Inflation Reduction Act.

Then, 30 days later, the same reporter--that first one is February. This one is March--applications for revenue-generating IRS jobs are far below agency goals. Then, if anyone actually reads this stuff, oh, it turns out they had fewer revenue agents, tax collectors at the IRS than they did before because apparently, if you have a good accounting background and you are a tax lawyer and those things, IRS is really where you want to work.

The fact of the matter is that the beauty here is actually, in the very article, they actually went down--let's see if I could find the percentage. They had several or 8 percent fewer. This is after billions and billions of additional money was being given to the IRS.

Now, it started with 80. Remember, we used parts of the IRS money as pay-fors last year, so I think they are still sitting on about $57 billion additional on top of their baseline budget for customer service and tax collections.

I saved these articles. Well, what would happen if, annually, the Treasury has to update: What are the real numbers? How are they doing?

Well, Madam Speaker, you might get a kick out of this. It turns out, over the 2 years, they have brought in an extra $1.3 billion. That is a lot of money. Now, we are still trying to figure out how much of that money would have just organically, eventually come in. It might have come in slower, so they moved some of it forward.

If I take $1.3 billion over 2 years and then divide that in half, multiply it by

10, what happened to the $400 billion or the trillion dollars or the $700 billion that the Democrats from those microphones were telling us they were going to get by going after the $400,000-and-up rich people?

My point here is so often this place, because it is mathematically vacuous, builds these promises that are complete fraud. Now, do I think people who have high incomes should pay their fair share? Absolutely. Actually, it is not even their fair share. They should pay what the law tells them they have to pay. Okay, that is fair.

It turns out there were lots of articles that had been coming up saying it was a fraud, but no one around here was willing to pay attention to it, saying: The Department of the Treasury, IRS announces 1.3 recovery, high income. It is not anything close. Treasury raised nowhere near what Democrats expected from tax enforcement.

One of the reasons I am doing this sort of backward is I come behind this microphone week after week sort of showing, saying: Here is the scale of the debt. Here are the drivers of the debt. The drivers of the debt from today through the next 30 years are demographics. I get screamed at when I am home saying: David, stop telling us the truth.

From today through the next 30 years, about 75 percent of all the debt--remember, we are expecting, in 30 years, to be about 116, $120 trillion in debt, and 75 percent of that will be functionally Medicare, and in 9 or 10 years, when the Social Security trust fund is gone, do we backfill that and have to use the general fund for it? That is math, but it doesn't have to be that way. You can't fix things if this place keeps making crap up.

The other thing I found--and I am just adding some irony to parts of this discussion because this is way back, June 26, so not that long ago. It turns out only 31 percent who called the IRS could get someone to answer the phone.

We gave them billions and billions and billions to do this. Is it time to stop attacking people like me who say that it is time for a revolution using technology?

The fact of the matter is, you could actually adopt the very technology, saying if I need some information, I am going to call--and, yes, I am talking to a ChatGPT, but it can stay on the phone with me. It can help me fill out my forms. It doesn't want to hang up on me. It can text me the video I need to help fill it out.

The fact of the matter is, the IRS is the second most unionized agency in the Federal Government. They don't like the fact that technology could really improve customer service.

It turns out that technology could actually be fairer, more accurate. You don't run into the Lois Lerner problem. That is way back. If you don't know the name, Google it. You can audit an algorithm. You can audit AI. You can audit those things and see if it is being bias and chaste.

I can't audit a leftist IRS employee who is going after certain conservative groups. You want a fair tax system. You want an efficient tax system. They are sitting on $57 billion 2 years in, and it is still not working.

I chaired the Oversight in Ways and Means. I meet with some of the IRS officials. They actually have some competent people over there, but I can't figure out what is going on when these things just aren't happening.

I want us to understand that I can't fix the math if we are going to keep lying about it.

Here is another article I just grabbed from Politico, and I think it was from yesterday.

As part of the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act, which is a completely Orwellian named bill because you have all seen the articles. It did just the opposite to the economy. It extended the inflationary period. ``How politics hung up a $42 billion Biden internet buildout.''

Here is the thought experiment, and, once again, when I am done saying this, tomorrow there will be lobbyists in my office angry that I actually talked about this.

Remember, everything in Washington, DC, is actually about the money. It is. Let's be brutally honest about it.

Here is $42 billion that was supposed to help bring broadband to rural America. Come with me some time to my Navajo Nation in northern Arizona, which is bigger than some of the States back here in the East Coast. I have chapter houses and communities out there that have been waiting decades to get a broadband line. Yet, if you take a look, there have been millions and millions and millions and millions spent, in this case, billions were appropriated.

If I came to you and said, if we really want to have telehealth, if we want to have digital health, if we want to have the living classrooms where the greatest science teacher is available to the entire country because you are doing it through the internet, broadband is moral.

Is it moral waiting decades? Is it moral subsidizing and subsidizing and subsidizing and somehow that bit of fiber, that wire, never gets there.

Hopefully, everyone around here is smart and said: We can't keep doing this. What would you do?

Here is a crazy idea: Go out to the middle of nowhere and put this little satellite dish and then a couple repeaters around that provide WiFi, and guess what? Forty-eight hours later, boom, you have broadband at a fraction of the fraction of the fraction of the fraction of the cost.

Welcome to this century.

Oh, we hadn't thought about that. Well, I have proposed it. It is never going to move forward because the other side makes lots of contributions, lobbies around here. It is another example of trying to burn into this place to join this century of technology.

Unless it is better off to keep subsidizing, subsidizing, subsidizing, and then waiting a couple more decades so you can get broadband to your rural community, or you could have it this week at a fraction of the cost to the U.S. taxpayers.

I have a whole presentation. Some of you have seen it before where one of the things the Democrats did 2 years ago is, we are going to lower insulin prices. You know what they actually did is, they functionally took $16 billion, handed it to Big Pharma, the very pharma they attack all the time, and said, wink-wink, nod-nod, we are going to attack you--you give us contributions, of course. Wink-wink, nod-nod, here is $16 billion to buy down the price of insulin.

They didn't actually lower it. What they did is, once again, the Democrat theory is everything is up for subsidization. Subsidize your way because it makes the receivers of that cash beholden. They are rent seekers.

All of a sudden, you notice that all these folks that are receiving these subsidies happen to keep showing up supporting the left. What was immoral about that is 75 miles from here, there is something called Civica RX. Anyone who is crazy enough to watch something like this, look it up. There are three types of generic insulin. It is a co-op. It is a co-op with, I believe, the California Medicaid system, some private insurance companies, some healthcare providers, some hospitals, and they are selling those three generic insulins cheaper than the $16 billion subsidized.

Why wouldn't this place have done something saying, these things are off-patent. We can actually incentivize groups that want to come together and make them cheaper, better, faster, more available. What a crazy idea to want to lower drug prices, create competition, but make everyone compete against each other. Make those companies that want the cash subsidies say screw you, we are going to actually encourage the co-ops to make it. I have made these proposals. I get stared at and told, no, David. You don't understand. We are Democrats. We do subsidization.

They don't actually want competition. They don't actually want lower prices. They want people beholden to them. Then they could take part of that cash, part of that $16 billion and go--I will give you a company name, but I believe there is multiple firms doing that.

It is Vertex. Read the articles of what they are doing for type 1 diabetes. They apparently have a number of folks who have actually been cured of type 1.

Isn't the cure the morality? Instead, this place is fixated on maintaining

your misery. It is immoral, but that is not what this place does.

I believe the intellects around here somehow need your misery. They need you to be attached to the system. If 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare is diabetes, why isn't literally every other speaker behind these microphones talking about how we are going to save our brothers and sisters?

I accept there is type 2, type 1, autoimmune, but the concept and the discussions if you actually read the academic papers, what would happen if just a fraction of that cash went into actually pursuing a cure. The cure is the morality.

Let's actually walk through a bit more of my rage. Please forgive me, Madam Speaker. In some ways, this is my therapy because I get so angry all day long listening to crazy and folks that are a decade out of date and what they think they know, and I am just saying, but there is a solution.

``Economy could be $29.5 billion larger if all opioid deaths since 2018''--that is functionally 6 years--``were avoided.''

Anyone that is following me right now, if you are the opposition researcher for the Democrats who want to just beat the crap out of me, if you think it is moral, go look up fentanyl vaccine. I think it is going into 2A trials very shortly. Apparently, it is a protein attacher. It makes it so it can't go through the brain-blood barrier.

In the last 6 years, 390,000 of our brothers and sisters have died of fentanyl. I think one of my boards here is going to say 345,000 prime age Americans died of fentanyl. That is the morality of this place. Let's give some more money to doing the same things we have been doing over and over. Think of it as everything from border security policy to the firefighter who is just trying to save someone who gets exposed.

In my county, I had someone tell me that, at least in my city of Phoenix, there may be two or three dead people every single day from fentanyl.

What would happen if I came to you tomorrow and said they think they actually have--it would be once or twice a year. It is not a traditional vaccine. That is just the language if you look it up. It basically has your body attach to the protein so it can't pass the brain-blood barrier.

For a number of narcotics, apparently, this type of technology appears to be working. Take a little bit of that money and help bring it to market. We could save people's lives. We live in a country where we may be about to have the fifth year in a row where prime age males are dying younger. In 14 or 15 years, America has more deaths than births.

Six years, 390,000 of our brothers and sisters are dead. How many times have you seen someone come behind this microphone and even talk about it? If you want to think like an economist, just think about what you can do to grow the economy. You see the theme I am trying to sell here.

You are going to have the Democrats come behind these microphones and say--maybe even in the debate tonight--we need rich people to pay their fair share, those people over $400,000.

This was a factoid I got from Virginia Foxx a little while ago and it screamed in my head. If I came to you and said: The student loan forgiveness that the administration is desperately pushing because they desperately need the votes--remember, it is vote buying. It is functionally pay-for-play. Here, now vote for us. Madam Speaker, 750,000 of those individuals make over $312,000, yet every dime of this is borrowed money. You are going to take working-class people, many of them that did not have the blessing like I have had and others in this body to go to school, to university, to go to grad school, things like that, you are going to ask working people who don't make anything close to 300-plus thousand dollars to subsidize. This is the morality of this place, but it is great vote buying.

Now we are going to do some of the financial. Over 14 percent--the actual real number is 14.48 or something like that. Over 14 percent of the entire Federal Government's spending this year is interest on the U.S. debt.

Once again, this is important. Social Security, number one spend. It is self-funding at least for a little while. Remember, when we say self-funding, most of it comes in as the FICA tax, the 12.4 we all pay. The employer typically pays half, you pay half, and then a little portion where the Treasury has to go sell debt to pay back the money they have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund.

In 9 years or so, that money that the Treasury has borrowed is all gone and now we have got to figure out how we are going to keep our Americans from having a 17-plus percent cut, doubling senior poverty.

Madam Speaker, 14.5 percent of all of our spending today is just interest. Social Security, number one. This year, I believe, it is $1.460--80 billion in interest. If you do total interest, interest we owe to the trust funds, interest we owe to anyone that bought one of our bonds, whether it is your union pension fund, our nice family on the other side of the world, that is actually the number two expenditure in this government. Interest is number two.

Medicare is number three. Defense is actually number four. The next time you are with your liberal relatives and they say to just cut defense, remind them the thing that is in the Constitution is now number four.

In some of the projections over the next 10 years, that number almost doubles on interest because we have this insatiable appetite, and I need to keep showing some of these numbers so they make sense.

This one seems to hit home. Think of this. In 2024, the fiscal year we are in right now, gross interest comes in at $1.14 trillion. Madam Speaker, 45.68 percent of every income tax dollar--so when you pay your income taxes, almost half of it, a little less than half of it, is just paying interest.

Think about that. When you are out working your heart out, and you see that income tax bill you have on your paycheck. A little over 45 percent of that is just paying the interest of this government.

How many times have you seen people come behind these microphones and talk about this? Remember, interest is the fragility.

If the bond market gets cranky because we do something stupid and interest rates spike up, I can make you an argument that, over the next few years, you want to know who really runs this government? It is not us. It will be the bond market because you want things.

I need to show the next board. This is this year's budget. Madam Speaker, 26 percent, the blue, I get to vote on, yet we are borrowing 30 percent.

Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed. Medicare or anything in the red is on autopilot. That is what we call mandatory. It is earned benefits.

Some benefits you get because you are part of a certain Tribal group, you fall below a certain income, but this is on autopilot. This isn't voted on.

Remember, I showed a board a second ago that over 14 percent is just interest? Well, think about that. If 26 percent is what we call discretionary and defense spending, next time you are at home talking to your voters and they say: I want to you balance the budget today, okay. I can do it, but are you ready to get rid of all the defense of this country?

It is a constitutional obligation, but we will just get rid of it. How about all of nondefense discretionary? That is the Park Service. That is the State Department. That is the FBI. It is all gone. Tell me what part of mandatory spending you want us to get rid of.

There seems to be this lack of understanding of the reality, both on where is the spending and the danger, the fragility, this country has from the debt.

Tonight, I had only half an hour, and I have a stack of these things where particularly the 2 years the Democrats ran this place, they didn't tell the truth. They made up fake numbers. We haven't hit anything close to that, and CBO seems to be sometimes months, if not years, behind on telling us the truth on how we make the numbers work.

There are ways you can make this another American century, but you have to do it through a calculator. You have to stop trying to legislate around here by people's feelings.

Yet, if you want to be on television tonight, say something theatrical, say something over the top, say something

that is a great dopamine hit. If you want to save the country, learn the damn math.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in recognition of Michael Bernardino for his extraordinary dedication and service as a high school chemistry teacher for 30 years. Mr. Bernardino, a proud Arizonan, has not only imparted knowledge, but he also has encouraged countless students to pursue their passions.

Beginning his career 30 years ago at Apollo High School and ending his career at North Canyon High School, Mr. Bernardino has been a beacon of excellence and a pillar of his community. His direct, honest, and charismatic style helped him connect with students and often inspired them to be better people and not letting themselves or him down.

Because of his innovative and fun teaching methods along with his unwavering commitment to student success, Mr. Bernardino cultivated students into productive citizens, one of whom worked for me for the last few years.

In his own words Mr. Bernardino shared: ``It has been fun, rewarding, exhausting, and sometimes heartbreaking. In short, it has been a career that mimics everyday life in repeating 60-minute blocks.''

Mr. Bernardino spent roughly 5,400 days teaching young students, molding minds to be independent thinkers and cultivating good people.

Today, we honor Mr. Bernardino for a remarkable career and express our deepest gratitude for what he did for the community.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Alford).

Mr. Speaker, sometimes I come behind these microphones and often what I share, what I need to share--it is my therapy--is a bit dour, and it is sometimes fun to listen to someone who actually is happy and joyous.

Now that the uplifting portion of this program is over, let's get to the facts.

The number, $35 trillion, guess when we hit it. We should be very excited and proud of ourselves. We did something that so many economists said we would never get to this quickly. My math says, this coming Friday, 3 p.m., the United States gross debt will cross over $35 trillion.

Now, understand that is not the way Europeans calculate our debt. They calculate our debt dramatically higher because of our obligated unfunded liabilities, but watch the Treasury, Friday, about 3 p.m., post up a number, $35 trillion. We did it. Congratulations.

How many people have you heard come find the microphone today or this week understanding and wanting to talk about that? What we have gotten is people coming behind the microphone and not telling the truth. We all want to protect Social Security. The way you protect Social Security is you know the math and how it actually works.

We are on track in a decade to double senior poverty. God forbid if any of us tell the truth about math because the truth gets you unelected and a bunch of really angry ads at home, so this place runs around and avoids telling the truth.

Let's walk through another little factoid. My math basically says this year 45.68 percent of all the income tax collections, receipts your government takes in, just cover the cost of interest.

I have been coming from behind the microphone and saying interest in 2024, this fiscal year, would be somewhere around a little less than $1.2 trillion. I apparently have that wrong. It is probably going to come in at about $1.140 to $1.160 trillion. Either way, I am off a fraction, but 45.68 percent of every dime we are collecting in your income tax now just pays interest.

I have tried to say it over and over and over at home and other places and you get people that just stare at you and go, huh?

Who really runs this government? Seriously, it is an honest question. I need you to think like adults, maybe those who actually went to a finance class.

Who actually now runs this government? I am going to argue the debt markets, the bond markets from around the world. If you have to bring almost $10 trillion to market this fiscal year--2, 2.25 trillion virgin new issues because we are borrowing--that is like $75,000 to $80,000 a second right now. The economy is good. The actual baseline data on GDP is good, and you are still burning almost $80,000 a second in borrowing.

What happens the second you have a U.S. debt auction that is undersubscribed or there are not enough people there? What happens to U.S. interest rates? How much of the world goes into depression? Are we going to talk about that?

Oh, God, no. No, because that would require math. That would require being serious.

We passed a bill here earlier today. I voted no on it. They worked hard on it. They lowered the top-line spending, but you have got to deal with a really uncomfortable discussion: every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed.

Let's process that. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed and, depending on some of the projections, about a quarter of Medicare.

Social Security has its own trust fund. It runs out in like 9, 10 years, and then we have got to figure out what is going to happen there. We will continue to get Democrats coming behind the microphone lying about it, which makes it almost impossible to actually lay out the math and try to fix it.

Remember, raising the cap, doing the Democrats' plan of $400,000 and up and just raising the cap, only covers about 38 percent of the shortfall.

You had the President in that debate last month saying if we just tax rich people 1 percent more--and I have a chart in here that will show it is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the shortfall. Remember, if you take $400,000 and up, the Democrats' definition of rich, and you tax them at 12.4 percent, you will only cover 38 percent of the shortfall.

This is the nature of our discussion. When every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed, is it moral to borrow money here to send it to entities around the country, even though there are many programs I love? I think they are the right thing. I just think the way we finance it isn't. Is it right to send cash to that city, to that State, to that county, and they have their own taxing authority? They may have more cash in the bank than we do as a percentage.

Do you borrow money? That is what we are doing today; we are borrowing money. The crazy thing is when you do the adjustment for the ability for interest to be tax exempt from municipal debt, we have municipalities in this country that have a better credit rating than the United States.

Remember, Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States today. We are number 14 on the credit stack, meaning there are 13 other countries that can sell 10-year bonds cheaper than the United States.

If you read the instruments, if you read the Moody's, the S&Ps, their documents and their reps and warranties and their analysis on U.S. debt, they don't trust this place. They do not believe Congress. We are supposed to be the adults in the room. We make policy. The White House carries it out.

Remember that little thing, the Constitution. Maybe someone should try reading it. They don't trust us, and they have no reason to trust us.

How much discussion have you heard, anyone that has been listening to these microphones this week, heard people like me--which maybe I am just an idiot for actually giving a damn--get behind these microphones and actually walk through the math and explain there is a way we keep our promises.

There is a way we meet our obligation from the earned benefits. There is a way to make this work. You don't have a lot more time to keep screwing around, but if you do it in the next 3, 4 years, this is another American century.

I have my 8-year-old sitting over here. I also have a 2-year-old. My wife is exactly my age. Yes, I am pathologically optimistic. The math says her generation will be the first generation to live poorer than her parents. Great morality, Madam Speaker. I am very proud of us.

Madam Speaker, I thank anyone that listens to my diatribes here. I think this is almost like my therapy session because I get angry all week long listening to the absurdity and people saying things that mathematically have no basis in fact.

One hundred percent of the debt--and this makes everyone angry, and it is factual--100 percent of the U.S. debt from today through the next 30 years is demographics. Huh? What are demographics? This is your country's leadership. It is demographics. We got old as a society and we didn't set aside the resources to keep our promises.

Since 1990, U.S. fertility has been falling. I won't use the word collapsing, but last year, we estimate, 2023, 1.63 percent, maybe 1.62 percent fertility. Meaning, the United States now has fewer children than much of Europe.

Now, tell me how I build a pay-as-you-go system to keep our promises to those who paid into Social Security, to those who paid into Medicare? Remember, the Medicare taxes you pay only cover about 38, 40 percent. Why don't we do this right now?

Social Security does not add to the U.S. debt technically but paying back the money that was borrowed from the Social Security trust fund does. There is some $3 trillion that has been borrowed out, and for the last few years, every month, there are not enough tax collections coming in on the FICA tax, that 12.4 percent, to make the payments to Social Security recipients.

I want you just to visualize this. Every month, Social Security says: Hey, Treasury, I am holding a bunch of your bonds. You owe us some money and they cash them in, then Treasury goes and borrows money and pays interest for that borrowed money.

Social Security doesn't create the debt, but Treasury does because the Treasury has to go out and borrow money to pay back the money they have taken out of the Social Security trust fund.

If you add it all up, plus interest--forgive me, I am partially doing this off the top of my head. I calculate maybe $6 trillion, 3-plus in principal, then over time the interest paid back is probably another 3.

How many times have you had anyone just try to be honest about it? It is not Republican math. It is not Democrat math. It is just math to be avoided because we are terrified to tell our voters the truth because we have lied to them for so long.

How many times have you had a Democrat go around here and say, what if we just tax rich people more? I have done entire presentations here and for those of us on the Republican side, if we just cut discretionary spending, damn it, I can come up with about $300 billion in discretionary that can be cut down. They will be screaming, but that is still 1 percent of GDP.

For the Democrats, every tax hike they genuinely propose that could be executed, when adjusted for its economic effects, that would be about 1.5 percent of GDP. You have 1\1/2\ there on tax hikes, you got 1 percent in cuts over here. It is a big 2\1/2\ percent, right? Right? It is 2\1/2\ percent. We are borrowing 7 percent of the entire economy this year.

Madam Speaker, we are doing a great job. I guess part of my anger is, I love some of the people I work with here. They are smart. They care, but they run away from me when they see me coming because I want to talk about this stuff. This chart is the pie chart of America's spending.

Do you see this number? Seventy-four percent is in the red. The red doesn't get a vote from a Member of Congress. That is on autopilot. It is called mandatory. It is earned benefits.

Some of the benefits you get because you are part of a certain Tribal group or you fall below a certain income, but this is earned.

Do you see the blue? It is defense and nondefense. Every dime of defense is borrowed. Every dime of what we call nondefense discretionary is borrowed and a wedge of this over here is borrowed.

When we say net interest, I have tried to explain the difference between net interest and gross interest. Net interest this year will be $892 billion. That is interest we pay to people out in the world: your pension fund, a nice family on the other side of the world, the union retirement fund over here. They buy U.S. debt.

The other debt is what we owe to the trust funds. We have borrowed the money from the trust funds, but we still have to pay it back. We still have to pay interest. It is one of the great cons we do in our budgeting here. Well, gross interest is only $890 billion, Schweikert; why do you keep going around saying $1.2 trillion?

Interest just this year is because of that other chunk of interest we have got to pay, and we are going to have to pay back the principal. The same as I just explained on how Social Security works.

Once again, if you are a Member of Congress and you are doing a townhall or putting out something and you are not showing this chart, you are not helping our brothers and sisters across the country understand how serious this election is, how serious putting people in office that will stop pandering to your need for a dopamine hit in your brain, but maybe own a calculator.

Once again, I can make this math work. You can't pretend that we can tax rich people, and we can just cut our way there. You may have to do a bit of both of those, but it is policy.

I have done presentation after presentation after presentation on how you could crash healthcare, how you could adopt artificial intelligence to reduce the size of this government dramatically and still have better customer service. How the mechanics of talent-based immigration could actually grow the economy but shutting down the border--stop importing competition to our working poor, making our working poor poorer.

You have got to think like an economist. The folks here want to talk down to you. They talk to you like you are a child and say, well, if we just did this, we would be fine. It doesn't work that way.

We are now so upside down debt-wise that unless you do something that is holistic with lots of moving parts, none of the math works. We are uncomfortable telling that truth.

Let's actually walk through a board I don't think I have ever shown before. Fiscal year 2024, here is where we are at to date. We have taken in $3.755 trillion.

Do you see the red here? The red is the individual income tax. Your country is an income tax-based economic system where other countries may rely more on a value added tax, which is a really regressive tax and crushes the middle class.

The blue over here, when you start to look at that, we call it social insurance and retirement programs. It is Social Security. That is actually going out the door immediately, and we have to borrow some to cover it.

The blue over here is actually corporate income taxes. Remember, the United States, back in about the late eighties, early nineties, changed much of the corporate tax structure when we started having passthroughs. Do you remember LLCs, subchapter S, partnerships, those things? Much of what is corporate activity in the United States flows through to that individual tax line.

When you get the brain trust here that says we are going to raise corporate taxes, great, okay. Is that going to solve something?

We are trying to vet the paper I got the math from, but we have a paper from about a year or year and a half ago that said, in the 2017 tax reform we did, 67 percent of the corporate tax rate reduction went to wages.

When you have someone from the left who runs around here saying we are going to raise corporate taxes, what they are doing is basically screwing over the working men and women of the country. That is how it works.

When your wages go up, the old saying used to be it is inflation-- that doesn't get you anything--or it is productivity because you built a tax code that said we can afford to buy the next better piece of equipment, build better processes, build better supply chains, become more productive, and workers get part of that.

Part of that productivity also is a tax system that maximizes economic vitality. Economic growth is moral. If we want to have fewer poor people in society, if we want to close income inequality, don't do it through transfer payments. We have data over data that many of the transfer payments, at the end of the decade, make people poorer because you dissociate their lives from being part of the society, part of work. The secret is having an economy that grows, that needs them. Getting economics right is moral.

This is the reality. Do you see these tiny little wedges there? That is excise taxes. Some will think of it as tariffs, when you actually see some miscellaneous. Society is functionally financed by income tax. This is FICA, and this is corporate.

Mark my words--and I will probably be long gone from this place-- because of what the Democrats are doing policy-wise and, honestly, the Republicans' unwillingness to actually do tough things, at the end of this decade, we are all going to be having a discussion of having a national VAT, a value-added tax, just like the rest of the world.

All of the crap discussion that it is not progressive enough, that it is regressive and hurts working men and women, working men and women are going to get their heads kicked in because it is the only way to start to confiscate enough resources from people.

Let's actually talk through and knock down some of the craziness that keeps being said around here. This is a brand-new chart for me: U.S. fiscal dynamics, now and then. We are going to go way back. Let's actually do from 1984 to 2023 and then current.

Our tax revenues are up. We are taking in more receipts. Technically, they are not revenues. Revenues are what you earn. Receipts are what you confiscate. That is just a little bit of tax lingo there.

You see tax receipts are up, but our spending is way up. When you see the white line over here, deficits, it is just basically the derivative of tax receipts are up, but we are spending faster than those receipts are going up. Therefore, you get a deficit.

If someone says those 2017 tax cuts--no, tax receipts are up. I have another chart I am going to show. Corporate tax rates, corporate tax collections--don't think about the rate; it is about what you take in-- are actually above the mean.

How much of this spending is the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act? The Democrats lost their mind when we did 2017 tax reform. Remember, it was actually a few trillion dollars--$5 trillion, $5.5 trillion--but functionally $4 trillion of it was also covered, direct taxes.

We just moved things around to maximize productivity. It was about getting companies to move back to the United States, move their organizations, their intellectual property, the things they were making money on, getting them back to the United States. We had to become competitive in the world again.

The other $1.5 trillion, the Democrats say that is the driver of the debt. No, it is not. It turns out it wasn't $1.5 trillion. The latest data is almost $900 billion of that has been covered by economic growth. Yet when the Democrats controlled this place in the last session, they dropped $2 trillion in subsidies, handouts, to big business. All of that is borrowed money.

When was the last time that a reporter actually covered this fairly? When was the last time you met a reporter who owned a calculator? The public has no understanding of what is going on out there.

I keep trying to provide this chart over and over. This is U.S. Government revenues. The sign should say ``receipts.'' This is mislabeled. Green is individual income taxes. Remember, we are mostly an individual income tax country. When you see spikes like this,

this is the dot-com bubble of 1999, 2000, 2001, the dot-coms. That is capital gains.

This spike here is actually people were getting lots of COVID money, so it was direct spend from the Federal Government. We borrowed it, gave it to them, and they had to pay taxes on it.

This line here, the blue, is FICA taxes. That is your Social Security and Medicare--very stable.

Down here, this is corporate taxes. Do you see the line? Remember, this is the regime of the new corporate tax rate since 2017. Tax receipts, the actual tax dollars, are up. It is above the mean of the last couple of decades.

We need vitality, dynamism. There are lots of things we can do policy-wise. The United States is becoming a bit more of an oligopoly. Many of our businesses are becoming far too big and far too protectionist. That is government. Government likes big organizations because they are easier to manipulate to get them to do what they want. Here is a subsidy, wink, wink, nod, nod. Engage in our social policy, engage in our political policy, and we are going to hand you billions.

Instead, what you do is tax reform for everyone. Knife fight, battle it out, the best product, the most dynamic company, the one who moves the fastest and most innovative wins. That is the way a market economy is supposed to work.

Instead, now our brothers and sisters on the left here go behind these microphones and use: Our industrial policy is this. Our planned economy is this.

I keep waiting for them to build a 5-year plan and hold up little red cards. If you don't get that reference, go look it up.

This is the driver of the debt. Remember, I showed tax receipts are up, but our spending is up more. Where is that spending? It is in what we call mandatory.

In many ways, this isn't Republican or Democratic. It is what we are as a society. We calculate in about 10 years, 22 to 23 percent of our population will be 65 and up. The politics will weaponize that very sentence I just gave, but it is math. It is what we are. It is demographics. We are having and have had, for the last couple of decades, dramatically fewer children. We got older. If we tell the truth about that, we can look at what the cost driver is. Then, folks come in and say: Well?

Almost all the cost driver is interest and healthcare costs. A decade from now, when the Social Security trust fund is gone, do we backfill it? The brain trust here will say: Let's do this. We will do the ACA, ObamaCare, the Republican alternative, or Medicare for All.

Those are financing bills. Once again, if our body here would tell the truth, that is who gets subsidized and who has to pay. They don't change what we pay.

Technology, cures, disruptions are better ways to do it, but we keep much of the technology that could crash the price of healthcare here illegal because there are armies of lobbyists in our hallways who don't want to compete against your ability to use technology to keep yourself and your family healthier.

I have been able to attach a handful of AI and algorithm bills to provide customer service at the IRS, the VA, or other things, and then we have gotten hate from the government employees unions.

The fact of the matter is, it is moral. It would be better customer service for our constituents. It would be faster, better, and cheaper. The fact of the matter is, there is no pension with it.

There are solutions that are not tax or cut and burn. It is a policy. This place won't engage in the policy because we are afraid. We are protectionists. We are protectionists of the government bureaucracies and incumbent business models.

Is that Republican or Democratic? It is math. Not going to bother you with that.

Madam Speaker, may I ask how much time is remaining.

Madam Speaker, for those trying to take down my words, I am sorry for talking so fast.

Tax revenues are projected to be billions of dollars. Once again, I want to make the point that individual income taxes are projected to be up dramatically. Payroll taxes are up fairly substantially. Corporate income taxes are fairly healthy. Other types of receipts are also up.

Where I really want to get back to is trying to make this point, and then we are going to do some actual tax history.

This is from the CBO, Congressional Budget Office. This is not Republican or Democratic. It is math. One hundred percent of the next 30 years of debt is healthcare and interest, and then, in 10 years, if we backfill Social Security. The rest of the budget is calculated to have an almost $9 trillion positive balance.

When was the last time this place actually was willing to have one of the most difficult discussions? About a month, month and a half ago, the Joint Economic economists on the Republican side took the leap and told the truth. We wrote a detailed report about demographics, tax policy, maximizing economic growth. Then we talked about health.

This is where I get the crap kicked out of me for telling the truth. Obesity in the detailed line item--and we spent months and months working on these numbers and vetting them--could be as high as $9.1 trillion of additional healthcare costs over the 10 years.

Having a society where we are about to have the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger, is that moral? Having a society where we calculate, in 3 to 4 years, 50 percent of America will be obese, is that moral?

What we do in the farm bill, what we do in nutrition support, and what we do in trying to have a healthier society, is that Republican or Democratic?

I often accuse my Democratic friends of wanting to engage in policy to maintain people's misery, where others, at least myself, want to cure the misery. I want to end the misery, cure diseases, move the types of investment but also the policies so the FDA can use technology to bring cures to market faster. We have a whole portfolio of these ideas. Not one of those was a tax. Not one of those was a major cut.

We calculate that 16 percent of all U.S. healthcare, $600 billion, is people not staying on their statin or taking their insulin improperly or their calcium inhibitors so they are having a stroke.

There is a 99-cent pill bottle cap that beeps at you, and I can't get a damn hearing on that for years. These are simple ideas that could crash the price of healthcare.

Our society is dying. In 15 years, we calculate that we have more deaths than births. Oh, but that doesn't work in the next election. That is not what I am going to use in my propaganda. The attack ads that are going to come at you, Schweikert, well, we are going to say you mentioned the words Social Security and Medicare, but we are going to lie that you are one of the few idiots here trying to find a mathematical way to save it. This place is absolutely immoral.

I have done this before; I have tried to walk through the actual cost to the poor on what we are doing at our border. I will do this quickly. You are the individual or the couple who didn't finish high school. What you sell is your talents. You are willing to go out and hang drywall, you work yourself off as hard as you can, and then you get a White House that engages in border policy where millions of people with the same skill set as you have come in, and they consume the housing stock. You want to know why the lowest tiers, the least expensive housing has had some of the highest inflation, why they can't find a place to live, and now their wages are going down because you are competing against millions of people with the same skill set. The cruelty of the current border policy crushes the working poor.

Can we have a discussion like economists instead of ``Well, you are immoral, you want to . . . `' No. Then on the flip side, we have entire charts that talk about how talent-based immigration--and talent could be a skilled carpenter or synthetic biologist--grows the economy.

I will argue a number of the economic policies I propose I cannot make work math wise unless we actually--because in the 1970s, 1980s the world fought for hydrocarbons. Last decade

we fought for rare earths. I can build you the math model that says this decade and the next three decades, we are going to fight for smart people, the entire world. We educate people here, and then we send them away. Are we out of our minds?

Madam Speaker, I am going to skip a bunch of the boards and just try to close this out with just a couple more. This is 2023. Total outlays, total spending, $6.1 trillion; total receipts, $4.4 trillion. What is that? $1.7 trillion borrowed. This year, borrowing is going to be about two-and-a-quarter, and this is a time when the economy is doing remarkably well. Now, it is subsidized, so it is basically a sugar high, but it is still doing well.

Now, our problem is, in 2023, gross interest was about $700 billion. This year, we are heading toward $1.14 trillion, $1.16 trillion, but this differential here, almost every dime of that $1.7 trillion borrowing, the growth on it--now, much of it is Inflation Reduction Act, the shortfall from tax reform, but we have never been given the run to show how it is growing tax receipts. I am showing you even corporate tax receipts where the different rates are up.

It turns out it is healthcare and interest now. As we are moving back to more normalized interest--How many of you live in a fantasy world where you think interest rates are going back to 0? You realize the current interest rates on 10-year notes still aren't at historic norms when you take away the years of suppression on the rate.

For my brothers and sisters on the left, who like to say, well, you gave away to rich people, today, the rich, as defined by you, pay a higher percentage of Federal income taxes than they did before. The Republican tax reform was more progressive than the previous Tax Code.

When we get to some of the other charts, here is my chart showing that President Biden in the debate said something insane about covering Social Security. Let me see if I can find one. In 10 years, gross debt will be $56.8 trillion.

However, here is one of the points I desperately want to make. Historically, when we have had very high marginal rates, we get 17.6, 18, 18.2 percent of GDP in taxes. When we have had very low marginal rates, we get 17.6, 18.2 percent of the economy in taxes because the economy changes in growth. When you look at it, the black line is receipts, revenue. The line above it is interest and healthcare.

When our friends keep saying, well, we are going to tax the rich more. Great, but I have already shown you if every tax worked absolutely to its maximum efficiency, you get a point and a half, a percent of GDP, and we are borrowing 7 this year.

We will make this the last one. Until we are actually willing to first have the same definitions of here is the drivers of debt, here is the innovations we are willing to bring into our society, this is our future, our future is just absolutely crushing, and it is percentages of GDP. We expect Social Security and Medicare outlays, as we start to head to the 30-year budget, 17.6 percent of the entire economy, where revenues are 6.3. Okay, no one has any idea what you are talking about. My basic point is, today through the next 30 years, it is demographics. It is mostly healthcare, and then the cost of financing that shortfall.

Helping people live longer, live healthier, live freer of disease is moral. It isn't Republican moral, Democrat moral, it is just moral, and yet every piece of legislation I have brought here over the last few years can't get a hearing or gets shot down because the bureaucracy despises it. The interest groups care more about their money than they care about my 8-year-old's future.

There is a path where the math can be made to work, but for everyone around here, you think there is a simple solution. My father used to have this great saying, for every complex problem, there is a simple solution. That is absolutely wrong. We will have to do complexity to save our future, save my retirement, save my children.

We have put it on paper. We have done economic modeling; we have had multiple Ph.D. economists do the math. There is a way it works. Will this place step up and buy a calculator and put batteries in it and then sit down with those of us who want to save our future and make this another American century? Instead, we run around terrified from doing what is hard.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the therapy session of letting me vent. I am going to bite my tongue from saying what I have to say, but I am going to throw one last thing. There are a number of people who watch these presentations on YouTube. Half the comments are bots, they are fake, they are Russian troll farms. Half the remaining half are people who care more about saying ideological insanity, but there is about a quarter of them that help, that actually have sometimes brilliant ideas, are engaged in saying, what if you did this, what if you looked at that? We are diving into ideas on things of consolidation, things that are mandatory. Those ideas actually came from the population that has been willing to watch these presentations over the years.

One of my last great hopes is when I would do these economic presentations 5 years ago, 12 people would watch them. Today, I will have several hundred thousand. Maybe, just maybe, Democrats, Republicans, the people who are Independents are tired of being treated like children, and they are ready for us to start talking to them like honest brokers of policy.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Mooney).

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Carl).

Honoring Baldwin County Sheriff Huey ``Hoss'' Mack

Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do something a little tricky this evening. You are going to see the continuing theme of, hey, here is where we are borrowing and here is where the borrowing is coming from.

Then I am going to hit on some of the things that--what is the next one--drive me almost insane on the questions I get here, the things I get on this stupid thing. I have come to this conclusion: We live in a world where the propaganda, the fake information, and the distortion fields around us actually do not want America to succeed.

That is a pretty dark thing to say, but let's actually walk through my theory. I am going to make the point. On some of these presentations, I have been blessed. If you go on YouTube, I had one a couple months ago, I think there is, like, 1.3 million views. Go look at the comments section. I will argue about half those comments are bots. They are fake.

You see things like: Well, if you just didn't give any money to Israel, we could balance the budget. You start to realize that there is a world out there that takes advantage of our open society, that comes at us with things that are lies, and the poor person out there who is just trying to take care of their family, on occasion, grabs their phone, tries to read little bits of news, maybe reads a comment or two, and they don't realize the information coming at them is absolute crap.

Then the other problem that I am going to show here is when I have my own President get behind a microphone, look at the American people, and say things that are absolutely not true. Then an idiot like myself tries to come up and say: I have a path. There is a path. If I can get my brothers and sisters on the left to work with us on the right, there is a path to save this country.

It is really hard when the State of the Union goes on that podium right there and says things that are absolutely not true.

Does that mean they are also a deliverer of fake information because math is hard? Math is uncomfortable. Telling the truth is hard. Maybe this place has lied for so many decades that the public says: Look, we are just going to believe whatever is comfortable.

Let's actually walk through, first, a little bit of reality here. I will start with this chart because it sort of lays out where we are at today. Do you see the red? That red area is 74 percent of the spending, and 74 percent of the spending in this place is on auto pilot. We don't get to vote on it.

Do you see the blue? That is what I get to vote on. That is defense and nondefense discretionary. I get to vote on that. Every dime of it is borrowed. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money. Also, guess what--we are in so much trouble--I have net interest on this, which I think is unfair because there is this thing called net. That is the publicly borrowed. That is where the Treasury sells bonds.

I think, this week, we are selling $111 billion--maybe it is $112 billion or $113 billion--in three different auctions this week just to finance our insatiable spending because, remember--this is one of the things I find is uncomfortable even at home--100 percent of the borrowing from today through the next 30 years, according to CBO, is interest, Medicare, and if we backfill Social Security in a decade from now. It is demographics.

Yet, how do you make policy? There are ways to fix it with policy. When the leader of the free world looks into a camera and says things that are just insane when it comes to being on a calculator.

Take a look one more time. Nondefense discretionary, defense, all of that is borrowed, and a wedge--I should do a chart that shows you how much is borrowed money. I originally thought we might be at $2.5 trillion borrowing this year. Some of the tax receipts are a little bit better. Some of the spiking growth that we had in the first part of the fiscal year on healthcare costs have flattened ever so slightly, so we are probably going to end up borrowing around $2.3 trillion this year.

What that means is even part of the mandatory spending, Medicare, because remember, Medicare isn't all on the trust fund. The trust fund only covers 38, 40 percent. The rest comes out of the general fund. Once again, look at this chart and understand your government functionally is an insurance company with an army. That is meant to be sarcastic, but it is meant to sink in.

Let's actually walk through. I am going to walk through a couple of these just to sort of lay out where we are actually at. CBO predicts by 2054, so 30 years from now, budget deficits are entirely driven by Social Security and Medicare shortfalls.

We are not allowed to say that, are we? Does anyone remember the State of the Union? There was a handful of us, Democrats and Republicans, who had been quietly working for a year trying to put together a plan to save Social Security in the long run.

The President gets there and says: Promise me you won't talk about Social Security or Medicare. People look terrified and go: Okay. Yes, good campaign issue. They care more about winning the next election than protecting seniors. It is the great lie around here. You talk about it saying: I want to find a way to modernize and save, and you will get the crap kicked out of you. You also told the truth.

You have to look at the data, the charts. Remember, the SSA, the Social Security Administration's actuary numbers are actually substantially more optimistic than the Congressional Budget Office, so we are going to

use the more optimistic numbers. When you start to realize and when the outlays are, over the next 30 years, starting to hit 17 percent of the entire economy and revenues don't come anywhere close to that, there is your crisis. We can just pretend because getting through the next election is more important.

Look, you have all seen this chart over and over and over and over and over and over that interest continues to grow, and we think actually the interest calculation--this is important. Let's do this right now. The hierarchy right now, today, Social Security will, this year, be $1.480 trillion. The total gross interest because, remember, just a couple days ago, I think we sent $36 billion to Social Security because we borrowed the money. Treasury had borrowed the money from the trust fund. We pay it back with interest. Total interest to the United States will approach $1.2 trillion this year.

Then you have Medicare, and then you have defense. Defense is functionally sitting as No. 4. How do you have a society that runs around thinking, well, if we just cut some defense? I showed you the chart before. You can get rid of every dime of defense, every dime of nondefense discretionary. That is the Park Service. That is the FBI. That is the Foreign Service. That is us. If you get rid of everything, you still have to borrow money.

You look at the charts over and over, and when we have had high marginal tax rates, we get about 18 percent of GDP in taxes. When we have had low marginal tax rates, we get about 18 percent of GDP. You have a long history--and I have done floor presentation after floor presentation--that when you lowered the rates, you grew the economy, you got about the same percentage of GDP. When you raised the tax rates, the economy shrunk a bit or slowed down, and you got the same percent of GDP.

The idea is grow the economy as much as possible, and then cut spending everywhere you can. I have some charts, and I don't know if I should do them again--actually, maybe I will just jump to them in a moment--where you lay out almost every tax hike that are the dreams of the left: Let's tax rich people who are over $400,000. Let's do this tax and that tax.

I come here with the academic papers and showed you, when you maximize all those tax rates, capital gains, income tax, estate tax, just do it all, you get about 1.5 percent of GDP.

For us on a cut side, it is brutal, but I can come up with almost $300 billion in nondefense discretionary. That is 1 percent of GDP. So, hey, together, we came up with 2.5 percent. We are borrowing 6 or 7 percent of the entire economy, and we have used up everything.

I mean, understand what is going on here. Just another chart that basically gives you a sense: Rising Social Security and Medicare shortfalls driven entirely or nearly the entire 2019 to 2034 deficit hikes. That means, in a 10-year window, almost all the growth of the debt and deficit during that time period, interest, Medicare, and then at the end of the decade, Social Security trust fund is gone. Right now, you will get a Democrat saying: Well, Social Security doesn't add anything to the deficit. They are absolutely correct until the trust fund is gone.

There is the part that enraged me the other night. If any of you were able to watch the Presidential debate the other night, my phone lit up at one point by a bunch of reporters who wanted to double check a number.

The President was asked about Social Security. I begin to make the wealthy--okay. I begin--and this is his actual quote, so it is disjointed, but this is what he said: `` . . . I begin to make the wealthy begin to pay their fair share, by increasing from 1 percent beyond, to be able to guarantee the program for life.''

He is talking about Social Security, so 1 percent. Then he went on to say: ``Well, that one enough will keep it solvent.''

The left's definition of wealthy is over $400,000 income, right? The President just told the American people 1 percent. I will fix Social Security by taxing them 1 percent.

We have a math problem. The problem here is, the blue you see here, that is not 1 percent. I had to make it 2 percent because the 1 percent was so small we figured you couldn't even see it. I doubled what the President said.

This is the shortfall. Half of this is what the President told you would work.

I am enraged by all the fake crap that comes into my phone in my office, our phones, our publications, all the things that you see on Twitter, or X, or whatever we are supposed to call it today, that are just made up by bots particularly and foreigners.

What happens now when my own President does it? How do I show up here? How do I get my brothers and sisters here to actually make policy? How do you make policy when the leader of the free world says things that are mathematically just insane?

The immorality here, functionally 9\1/2\ years, we double senior poverty in America. If we don't fix this, we double senior poverty. The Democrats will weaponize it because they care more about winning the next election.

We have a President who could have just looked in the camera and said: Look, we haven't had the number of children, therefore, the number of workers. We started the rollovers in 1990. It is just math. It is not Republican or Democrat. Demographics are what we are.

Last year, the United States had 1.62 children fertility rate, meaning, functionally, now our math is, in about 15 years, the United States will have more deaths than births. I say that over and over trying to get people to think.

If your brain is trapped somewhere in the 1990s' policy sets, none of that math is real anymore. It hasn't been real in 30 years.

This place is absolutely immoral. I brought charts here over and over and over, the Democrat solution saying: Instead of the President's 1 percent proposal, if you do the--what is it--the 14-point-whatever percent, 14.4 or 12.4 total Social Security tax, not the Medicare, not the unemployment, those things, and you put it on all income over $400,000--I have shown a number of charts--if you use the CBO math, it covers about 38 percent of the shortfall.

That is using over 12 points, both the employer and the employee's portion. I have a President who looks in the camera and says 1 percent. Now, let's come together at a townhall or a meeting here and say: Hey, guys, let's have an honest conversation because every day we wait, the on-ramp is harder to save Social Security.

Oh, David, the President already told us we are doing 1 percent on rich people. I can show you with the 12.4 you are covering only about 38 percent.

Why is this place so absolutely immoral? Do they really care that much more about winning the next election?

After the President said that, I started to dig through the stories other people had sent me. I had this woman text me weeks ago saying, did you know that with the money in Ukraine that the First Lady of Ukraine bought almost a million-dollar Bugatti, or however you pronounce that car.

Well, the BBC did a very long article about how much is absolutely fake coming into the U.S. marketplace of ideas. There are bot farms. There are troll farms. They created fake photos, which turns out that is what actually helped BBC identify that this is all fake stuff.

How do you make policy in a world where we are awash in things coming in from our enemies, from the countries that want us at each other's throats, make it impossible to do basic policy to save the Republic, and then my own President is making crap up?

Article after article of disinformation that is crashing in, the things I have that come into my office about Israel that are coming in from bot farms.

We have article after article that Microsoft did an analysis of how much was coming in from Chinese bot farms, Chinese servers. Apparently, we just had a major disruption by stopping 968 Twitter accounts that were completely fake and they were all coming from a bot farm in Russia. That happened this week. The State Department just identified that bot farm and got it shut down.

Mr. Speaker, I say now to my Democrat colleagues that we have actually had a couple stories come out that have some real fun stuff. It turns out a

number of the Democrat activists are actually setting up fake newspapers. Now, if that wasn't bad enough, one of these articles in there actually has a section talking about that in American small town newspapers as many as half process this, as many as half are actually fake.

My wife pointed out to me that there was a newspaper from southern Kansas, where she grew up, that went out of business decades ago that somehow popped up in her news feed and it had this crazy stuff in it. Turns out, that was on the list of the ones that had been spoofed. A spoofed URL that looks like it is from Russia.

Think that about. In America, about half the small town online newspapers you see are actually fake.

How many of our constituents know that? It looks like the Democrats actually have decided, hey, this is a great business model. Let's make up fake newspapers online, have it laced with leftwing propaganda, and we will do it under a newspaper masthead.

How is this not a violation? Once again, the left proves they are a hell of a lot smarter than we are when it comes to being mercenary on campaigns. They figured out a way to get around the campaign finance laws. Spend money, but it is free speech. It is fake, but it is free speech. Then idiots like me get here and try to walk through the math.

Look, this is the MedPAC report. It is not that hard to read. You have quotes in here that in 2022, 13 percent of all personal and corporate income taxes collected by the Federal Government were transferred to the Medicare trust fund.

By 2030--so that is how many years? 5 budget years? 4 budget years?-- 22 percent of all tax receipts from corporate and individual income tax, 22 percent will just go to Medicare.

Functionally in a decade, you have gone from 13 to 22 percent of all tax receipts. It is demographics.

Why isn't this what we talk about around this place, how are we going to save these programs? Oh, you can't do that because you are going to have a President who is going to knife you by saying crazy things.

The Joint Economic Report we published a couple weeks ago, we tried to provide brutally honest math, brutal detail with actual solutions. Will anyone actually read it?

This one my staff was particularly fond of. It turns out that one of the new spoofings out there that are coming into young people's phones are celebrities with quotes that the celebrities have never said.

Are you all ready for this election cycle where you have AI memes looking like a Member of Congress, looking like a President, looking like a Senator, looking like a celebrity, saying things that are completely fake?

Now come here and try to do difficult policy where you are going to have to take on some bureaucracies, take on certain business models, adopt technology to crash the price of healthcare. Are you going to get hit by an army of bots, an army of fake videos, an army of fake postings, saying they can't do that, because some group has figured out that winning the election is stopping us from saving the country from its debt spiral?

I am trying to explain it is bad enough having to take on the bureaucracy, it is bad enough having to take on the calcified intellect, of particularly some of my friends here, that say we can just fix everything by taxing people more.

What happens when our voters have to face millions of absolutely fake information videos that are crashing at them? I can't wait to see the bots and the comments they put in the video below this posting.

Take a look here: ``Not touching Social Security means large benefit cuts.''

When you start to actually take a look--and I think we did this before. Remember, the number goes up and down depending on employment, but we were working on one the other day from last year's CBO number that basically showed the average couple would take about a $17,400 cut in their Social Security a decade from now when the trust fund is gone.

This is immoral. Shouldn't this actually be a place where we actually work on these things? Then you start to actually look at the lies-- excuse me--the misinformation that our brothers and sisters on the left keep saying.

Oh, when we did tax reform, it was a gift to the rich. Okay. You got a math problem. The higher income, the top 20 percent today pay 69 percent of all income taxes. It is more progressive today than the tax code has ever been. The wealthy pay a higher percentage of Federal income taxes today than ever before. The lower quartiles today pay the lowest Federal income tax rates since income taxes, 16th amendment.

How often do you hear this? But that doesn't fit the narrative. Then you have the jerks actually say things like this: Well, you guys had $1.7 trillion spending. Yes. We got $900 billion more revenue than expected, but that was horrible. We are going to spend about $2 trillion in grants and gifts and those things to big business because they do clean energy stuff. It is like they don't look at themselves in the mirror.

Once again, I have done entire presentations here going through every leftwing tax idea trying to add it up. Even when you don't do economic effects--if you do economic effects, these numbers--and then try to say, hey, you guys are only getting about a point and a half or so of GDP out of these numbers, you are not getting anywhere close. You got to do it through policy.

Then the fragility that no one was prepared for--well, some of us were prepared for--are interest rates. How many of you think interest rates are going back down, particularly in the long end of the curve?

Remember, what the Federal Reserve does is on the short end of the curve, meaning shorter term bonds. When you start to look at 10-year debt and up, some of the best bond traders and economists right now are saying it is not going down. You might get a little bit of a tick.

The United States is now number 14 on the credit stack, meaning Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than we can. You read the notes on the S&P's and the Moody's, it is not--we have one of the healthiest economies in the industrialized world, but one of the things that is going on is they don't trust us.

Will our governance be disciplined enough to actually take on the spending and the debt? The fact of the matter is, we are paying a premium now. The United States now pays a premium on our debt.

This week, I told you we are borrowing about--there are three auctions this week--$111 billion, and we are going to pay a premium on that debt. Sometimes this place doesn't look like we are serious about taking the debt on and managing our fiscal affairs.

First off, we are having great difficulties selling long-term bonds. Do you remember a few months ago we had sort of a bond tantrum? Why do you think Treasury moved things down to sell short-term, short-term, short-term? A lot of investors out there don't even trust this government enough to say, I am going to buy a 30-year U.S. savings bond and I am going to be safe.

Once again, even a 100 percent tax rate on small businesses and upper-income families could not come close to balancing the long-term budget in this country.

Stop thinking you are going do it with tax hikes or even for those of us who want to cut the size of government, you need to have revolutionized the cost of this government. Stop being afraid of technology. Stop being afraid of the things where we could change the cost of this government because it might affect your business model.

Look, I was going to try to put up one or two slides last for happy talk, until I realized one of the slides I wanted to show you was, once again, another concept of why the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act is the most Orwellian named piece of legislation in modern history.

They are very proud, saying we are subsidizing electric cars. My wife has an electric car. She loves it, but the data basically said--when they passed that, I came here to the floor and showed, hey, here is the survey data. Almost everyone that is going to buy an electric car is buying them with the subsidy, without the subsidy. It is a lifestyle. It is almost a status symbol, but let's give away billions and billions of dollars.

Now you actually have breakthroughs. Could you imagine if just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that resource had gone more into primary research? Looks like there has

been a breakthrough on solar cells, an additional 25.7 percent efficiency, except the problem is it was developed in China.

The very people who preach at us to subsidize all this stuff, but let's subsidize less generations or maybe even the generation before that's technology.

You want me to put solar panels on my house, you want us to drive electric cars, make it so economically sensible and make it so economically affordable that it is the disruption.

Why did you stop going to Blockbuster Video? Because you had this button you could hit at home and stream videos right to your home. Was that subsidized by the government?

The fact of the matter is that there are technology disruptions. Why didn't we fixate on that? Well, it turns out that maybe the disruptions don't write checks to your campaign.

The Democrats' planned economy, the control of the marketplace, the arrogance that somehow they think they know what the future looks like instead of building a tax system or regulatory system that is competitive, that is disruptive. Some are winning; some are losing. That is the way the American economy is supposed to work.

In many ways, we have now built a society of oligopolies, thanks to Dodd-Frank and Democratic policies. They have made the big bigger, the big really powerful, and the really big and powerful now your constituency.

It turns out now that if you look at who votes for Republicans, it is entrepreneurs, working people, and those who are being crushed by those they have to compete with who now get subsidies from their political allies.

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

Madam Speaker, Congressman Al Green and I are almost oceans apart, as a traditional Democrat and a conservative Republican. Yet, since the day I have been here, he has always been remarkably kind to me. He is one of my little girl's favorite people because he is sweet to her.

I think it is a demonstration that we may see lots of the world differently--and he knows I am passionately trying to convince him that the morality of making people healthier is the most powerful thing we can do on income inequality and some of the afflictions that exist in our society today. One day, I am going to close that deal. I thank the gentleman for being so kind to my family and me.

Madam Speaker, this one is going to be a little thick. I apologize right now to the person who has to try to take these words down.

Last Friday, we issued the Joint Economic Report. The Joint Economic Committee has a really neat history. In 1956, I think, it was chartered. Right now, I am finishing up the autobiography of Milton Friedman, and he talks about the number of times he came in front of the committee and presented ideas.

It is a unique committee. It is Senate and House, and we rotate the chairmanship back and forth between the Senate and House. So, this year, Mr. Heinrich in the Senate has the chairmanship. I have the vice chairmanship. If we are blessed to remain in the majority and the Speaker so chooses to let me keep the chairmanship, it comes back to me.

As Republicans, we tried to do something last year and this year, which was, instead of just taking shots at the President's economic reports, the President's budget, we not only pointed out where they were wrong mathematically, but we also pointed out solutions.

The hardest part here is trying to get the heads around this place, the thinking around this place, the intellectual calcification that is this place, and get them to understand the baseline math and how incredibly difficult it is.

I am going to say this three or four times as we are going through this. I know we are in the time of election year math, so like last night's debate, there were a couple of moments when I

had to shut the television off because I am bouncing off the ceiling, saying that is my President, like what he said about Social Security, that if we tax rich people by like 1 percent or so, we are fine.

I have done presentation after presentation after presentation here with five Ph.D. economists showing, hey, raise the cap for everyone over $400,000, you cover about 38 percent of the shortfall.

Mr. President, learn your math because when you say that in front of a national audience, you steal away the seriousness of how we have a discussion, a debate, a mechanism to fix the real problem because now you have millions and millions of people saying that the President said it, so it must be true. You make our job so hard, trying to make a calculator do its job, because, at some point, the math is going to win. Your feelings are not.

Let's start to do some basic education on what is in the Joint Economic Report. I am going to walk through the scale that has moved against us, some of the things in the report that we find very concerning, and then we are going to walk through some of our solutions.

The point we have made over and over is the left's tax policy that they are going to tax people over $400,000, maximize their income tax, their estate tax, their capital gains tax, all these things. You can only get about 1.5 percent of the GDP of the economy.

For us on the conservative side, we want to cut, but if you limit your cuts to only nondefense discretionary, you can only get about 1 percent of GDP. Add those two together, every tax, every cut, and you have 2\1/2\ percent of GDP. This year, we are borrowing--what?--8, almost 9 percent of GDP. Does anyone see a math problem? It turns out what is great rhetoric, great campaign slogans, is crap math.

Let's do some real math. First off, for all of my brothers and sisters who--and if you are upset watching at home and see that the Chamber is empty, that is because we are on 1,000 televisions on the campus, and part of this presentation is not only to Members of Congress but to their staff because often the staff are the ones who are young. We are talking about their future, and maybe they will help their Members understand actual math.

We are now at 74 percent of all U.S. spending. Seventy-four percent is now on autopilot. Meaning, 74 percent is mandatory spending, so the next time you have someone from the political class say that if we just get rid of foreign aid, we will be fine, you can point out to them that it just covered maybe a week, a week and a half of borrowing.

If you are burning through $8 billion to $9 billion a day, you have to understand--stop lying to the voters. Stop making crap up because, at some point, the bond market will be the ones in charge of this country. When you are borrowing $80,000 to $100,000 a second every day, when you have to bring almost $120 trillion to market this year, both in virgin and refinance, when the bond market gets cranky, it gets really expensive for us.

Here is a point on this chart. Seventy-four percent is in mandatory spending. Madam Speaker, you and I don't get to vote on any of that. We have done it as a formula. Every dime a Member of Congress now votes on is borrowed and a sliver of Medicare. A sliver of even the mandatory now has to be borrowed money.

When we go home and talk to our constituents about balancing the budget, if I get rid of every dime of defense, we still have to borrow. If we get rid of every dime of nondefense discretionary, that is the State Department, the Park Service, the FBI, all of those, you just get rid of all of government and no military, those add up to $900 billion and $800 billion, so $1.8 trillion, to just make the math simple. We are going to borrow $2.3, maybe $2.5 trillion this year. Now, find me the half a trillion dollars in Medicare or other mandatory spending you want gone.

The next time you have someone say just balance the budget, that is not how the math works. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on today is borrowed, and a big sliver of mandatory spending now is on borrowed money. It is math. The math will win, but this place is unwilling to bathe in the facts.

We updated this chart. I don't know about the colors. This number got slightly better. I think there is a mistake in it because it is basically calculated that there are no recessions, no wars, no pandemics, nothing else in here.

From today through the next 30 years, the CBO update from last week basically says, over 30 years, you are going to borrow about $115 trillion, $116 trillion. One hundred percent of the borrowing over that 30 years is demographics.

How many times do you hear anyone around here say that? It is healthcare, almost all Medicare, and a decade from now, when the Social Security trust fund is gone, do we just borrow, use general fund receipts to make up that shortfall, or will this place have the guts and a President who stops making crap up and gives us the opportunity to have Republicans, Democrats, the White House, maybe some actual econometricians, and people who have calculators come up with a solution to fix it.

Social Security and Medicare run a $124 trillion deficit over the next 30 years, but the rest of the Federal Government has about a $9 trillion surplus because their growth rate is expected to run slower than the growth of tax receipts.

How do I get people to understand here that if you want to save the Republic, legalize the technology and bathe in the ways to crash the price of healthcare? We have done how many presentations here to say, here are cures, the cures are moral, and here is technology that would free you, give you more time, make you healthier, so can we legalize it?

As I have said over and over, this place has become a protection racket. It is a protection of incumbency, not incumbent Members of Congress but incumbent bureaucracies and often people's business models.

This board is really important. You can go to CBO and look it up yourself, or I think even Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute has tried to put out an updated deck of slides to make it easier to read.

Let's walk through a couple other things here. We worked through part of this in our Joint Economic Report, but this was basically straight out of CBO. CBO projects that net interest and mandatory program spending will exceed revenues--it really should say receipts because revenue is something you earn; receipts are something you confiscate-- will exceed revenues by $1.689 trillion over the next 10 years.

It is simply saying that if you put in the mandatory programs and the interest we owe, it consumes every dollar of tax receipts. If you come and say, David, tomorrow I need you to balance the budget, I can do it, but you have to be prepared to have no more military, to have no more government. We are just going to do the entitlements, the earned entitlements, earned benefits, and then pay the interest back to our bondholders. That is reality. It is called math.

What else was in both the Joint Economic Report and then also backed up by the Congressional Budget Office this last week? In 9 budget years, net borrowing--we are going to talk about the difference between net borrowing and gross borrowing--is $50.6 trillion. When we say net, this is the stuff we have to sell to the public, to the nice family in China that takes their savings and is willing to buy a U.S. savings bond, your retirement that goes out and buys a U.S. savings bond.

We are about to continue to consume--right now, China and the United States are basically consuming much of the world's savings, investment capital. We are just chewing it up. In 9 budget years, we are over $50 trillion in publicly borrowed money, but where I think that number is a bit of a fraud is because we also take things like the money in Social Security, U.S. Railroad Retirement, and all these others and borrow that.

Now, we do pay interest back, which is something that is a bit of a controversy for us on the economic side because we will show it as a benefit. ``Look, we have this money,'' but we often don't show the interest we are paying back, but we owe interest.

If you add in the internal borrowing, the gross borrowing in 9 budget years is $56 trillion. Why isn't there a sense

of panic around here? Didn't anyone bother to grab the Joint Economic Report or the CBO report? We went out of our way to write our chapters so they are readable.

Yeah, it is a funky-looking book. It looks like the type of thing where there will be 12 people that will read it, and it will sit on a shelf with dust on it. If you actually give a damn, learn the math because we talk in there about ways to help stabilize U.S. debt.

If I come to you right now and say: In 9 budget years, you are crossing $50 trillion in borrowing, why wasn't everyone who came behind these microphones this week talking about this? Am I just an idiot for coming behind this mike week after week, year after year?

I get people saying: Well, I am going to save a million dollars on this amendment, and you start to say: Great. I am proud of you. Thank you for doing it. Do you realize we borrowed more during the debate than the amendment saves because we are not willing to talk about the actual drivers of debt?

It is healthcare costs. It is our demographics. Now it is in the interest we have to pay because the United States is now No. 14 on the credit stack. That means Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States today.

I need you to process that. One of the reasons the United States bond rates are so high is, if you read the S&P, read the Moody's, since I am told a bunch of people here are literate, in there, it says: We don't trust the United States Congress' governance. We pay a risk premium because we don't look serious about our debt.

Think of that. There are 13 other countries that get to sell a 10- year bond cheaper than the United States, and we are the reserve currency. There will be some troll on some fake internet site saying: Well, if we just didn't give money to this, we would be fine. Grow up. Just grow up. Deal with the reality.

I am sorry. I have had a stunning amount of caffeine, and I am unwilling to cut back. If someone can start a 12-step program for coffee, I am going to be your first member, but I want to hold the meetings in a Starbucks. Actually, I have been backed off of Starbucks. Let's do Black Rock Coffee or something else.

Interest and mandatory program spending will exceed revenues for fiscal year 2024. Guess what fiscal year we are in right now. This isn't some projection for the future. This is today. All discretionary spending is borrowed. I just tried to create another chart to make the point. Everything you think of as government today is borrowed.

Also, in this, we actually think there are a couple of problems on those total receipts. It is a little quirky. We give ourselves credit for interest received but when we don't actually charge ourselves for the credit paid, that sort of stuff.

Basically, the point is: Everything you think of as government is borrowed. When I would talk about that a few years ago, I would have Members here saying: David, you have to stop making up stuff. You are scaring my voters. Ta-dah, it happened. It is real.

This chart is a little tougher, but I am trying to point out what the majority of income tax pays for. If you actually take every dime of income tax and you add it up, this year, 36.9 percent of all income tax will go just toward Medicare.

Then you add in another 36.5 percent. That is net interest. If you want to be honest, you will do the gross interest, which is closer to 40 percent. Start to think about that. In this year, almost all of the income tax is consumed by interest and Medicare.

When we go out in time, it starts being beyond that. In 9 budget years, you will start having 43.1 percent of all income tax that will go toward Medicare. Another 42.3 percent will just go toward interest. If you, once again, plug in all net interest, it is closer to 45.

That means, in 9 years--remember, we are an income tax-based tax system here and the majority of U.S. receipts come from income tax--we can't cover our interest and Medicare. We actually cross this threshold, I think, in, like, 5 years, meaning every dime of tax you pay will basically just be covering Medicare and covering interest.

Getting older, turning 65, and your earned benefits, is that Democrat? Is it Republican? It is just demographics. I am going to spend some time here talking about what has happened in the world since 1990. We spent a lot of time in the Joint Economic Report talking about this. We slowed down having children in 1990.

I am going to actually walk through a couple of things here in some of the updated reports. There is a very good chance the data is now looking like, last year, the entire world actually decreased in population. If any of you have your economics degree or actually read, you have to start to understand what happens to a world's growth, economic vitality, GDP growth, productivity, when the entire world may be starting to shrink populationwise.

Let's walk through a few more of these. Deficit reduction from granting permanent residency to legal immigrants with advanced STEM degrees. We are going to start to walk through some of the things. We say: We have to understand what is going on around us. If I come to you and say: The population in the United States has just flattened out-- and forgive the little Post-its here, but even our own charts were wrong--last year, the best data says the United States fell to 1.62 children fertility rate, basically meaning the United States population has flattened out.

I am going to show you one right here. Let's see if I can make this make sense. We are calculating that, in 15 years, United States will have more deaths than births. The United States, in 15 years, will have more deaths than births. We are a dying society. We need to grow up and accept it and realize the morality. We can fix it.

There is no society in the entire world that has been able to change its fertility rates. It is beyond me. Is it cultural? Is it economic? Is it technology? All I can tell you is country after country after country, they call it natalist policies. It hasn't worked, so maybe we should start to prepare for the morality of is it moral to live in a country where you are having your fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger?

We are going to talk about why. Be prepared. We are now looking at numbers that we were not supposed to see for a decade, and they are already here. Go to Mass. Go to your mall. Go to this. And realize when you look around that we are all gray hairs.

I accept. My wife and I, we are both 62, and I have a 2-year-old, who turned 2 this week, and an 8-year-old. We adopted. It took us 10 years to do that. Yes, I have the old dad problem, but maybe once you have the hug of that child, you start to say: Maybe I have a moral obligation because the math says my children, when they enter the workforce, will be poorer.

It will be the first generation in U.S. history which will be poorer than their parents. Is that moral because that is what we have done? Remember the charts I was showing you before of how much we are going to borrow to maintain the benefits? Remember, in 9 budget years, between 9 and 10 years, 23 percent of this society will be 65 and older.

It is coming. It is not a black swan. It is not going to sneak up and bite us. It is a white swan. We see it. We are just going to live in avoidance because we have people like last night, my own President, say things that were mathematically absurd instead of using the moral opportunity to basically say: We need to take this seriously.

Those children and this senior have the right to live in a society where they can prosper. There are things we can do policywise, but we are terrified to actually think because it requires thinking.

You don't need to see that one. It is basically a chart showing the collapse of populations.

Let's actually walk through solutions. We spent months with economists--many of these staff are much smarter than I am--saying: We already have things like the MedPAC report that was put out 1 month or 2 months ago that actually tells us that, by 2030, so just 5-some years from now, 22 percent of all income tax revenues are expected to be transferred to just Medicare.

It is here. I mean, if any of you act surprised a few years from now, it is your own fault. It has been being handed to us week after week by the economists who were warning us. If I came

to you tomorrow and said: All right, Schweikert. We are going to do things. We are actually going to find ways to actually deal with our population flattening out and the incredibly high interest because, in fact, we are just moving back to normal, interest coverage and costs.

By the way, we have a population that is getting older very, very fast, and they have their earned benefits. We made a deal. You earned your benefits. You worked your 40 quarters. You get your Social Security. You worked a certain amount. You get your Medicare. It is our societal contract.

How do we pay for it? If someone says: We are just going to grow our way out. Back to the math we already did. All the taxes at about 1.5 percent of GDP and all of our cuts, which we should do, about 1 percent of GDP, the baseline is borrowing about 6 to 7 percent of GDP. This year, we are just a couple of points above that baseline. You have a massive math gap there. Our rhetoric doesn't actually match reality.

Let's actually walk through one. One of the things we have talked about is, if this data is true, that the entire world last year may have had zero population growth, which is crazy to think about. Think about all the things. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, you had that book, ``The Population Bomb.'' The only thing that the author actually got right was the spelling of his own name.

It was wrong. The Malthusians have been with us for centuries, and they continue to be wrong. We are Americans. God gave us incredible talents and gifts to solve problems. Why don't we think about that?

I want to make an economic argument. In the 1970s and 1980s, the world fought for hydrocarbons. In the last decade, we fought for rare earths. In the future, we are going to fight for smart people. Why don't we start to fix our policies?

President Trump, to his credit, actually said last week: You know, if you had come to the United States and gotten a university degree and you can contribute to society, maybe we should keep you. That is from President Trump.

We have actually found the economic baselines that are saying you can grow by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars the size of the economy. Just keep the people who have talent.

My argument is that talent can be a skilled carpenter or a synthetic biologist. If you are going to grow with society at the same time the number of children--remember, we are closing schools all over this country, except we don't like to talk about it because we don't have enough children. Maybe actually keeping those who pay taxes, grow the economy, make your life better, and maybe make you healthier, we should fix our immigration system.

You lock down the border. You don't import poverty. All right. This is a non sequitur, but let's do it. The immorality of the open border and the cruelty, you are the family whose mom and dad didn't graduate high school. You basically sell your talents. You tell your willingness to work. You hang drywall.

What happens when, tomorrow, I add 4, 5, 6, 7 million people with similar skill sets? What happened to your income? The data is showing that what the President did on the border has made poor people poorer. We are working on a paper right now to also show that, when you add several million people with a limited housing stock, particularly the least expensive types of housing, much of the reason that inflation and that pricing went up: border policy. If you want to understand why you can't afford an apartment and you are working your heart out, it is border policy. It is economics. It is just math.

Oh, David, you are not allowed to talk about that. Screw that. Tell the truth.

Let's walk through a few other things here.

If I came to you and said, interest in healthcare costs are the primary drivers of U.S. sovereign debt. Why don't we find the most moral approach to help our brothers and sisters who are sick?

There is an entire chapter in here that walks through the math, and it has a point in here that drives people insane, but the math is good: Obesity may add $9.1 trillion of additional costs to the United States.

It turns out that the most powerful thing you can do to stabilize U.S. borrowing and the morality of letting people live longer is take on obesity.

Is this place ready to have a conversation about changing the farm bill and nutrition support? Is it moral or nutritional support to hand somebody an EBT card to go buy onion rings? What are we going to do on the healthcare front?

The technology is out there. We have learned that obesity is not just about willpower. Our brains are all wired differently. That is absolutely certified now. We need to help our brothers and sisters.

The sidecar to that is, we have known for decades that 5 percent of our brothers and sisters who have multiple chronic conditions are over half of our healthcare spending. The dataset for this 5 percent majority is obese. Help them. Don't mock them. Don't shame them. Help them.

Once again, when you are having your fifth year of prime-age males dying younger, we think it is drugs. No. We have looked at the data. Turns out, drugs are way up there. Just above drugs is obesity, actually.

I would argue this place is absolutely immoral because of its unwillingness to tell the truth.

If I come to you and say, the Joint Economic report spent years putting together the data and refining the data to demonstrate that the excess healthcare costs of obesity to this country over the next 10 years is $9.1 trillion. Why isn't this an alarm bell?

We have gotten some very nice editorials: It is neat that Mr. Schweikert is willing to tell the truth about where the real driver of debt and deficits are and things we could actually fix. Yet the brain trust around here just says, let's raise taxes, let's just cut things. It doesn't get you even close.

We need to change policy. Changing policy would require thinking and we would have rooms full of lobbyists that don't want us to change their business model. We need to have bureaucracies that will think differently.

I am going to show you in a couple other slides that you can replace much of the bureaucratics with AI, which is another thing we need to do.

I did a whole presentation a year ago which said in the United States, 33 percent of all healthcare spending is diabetes, mostly type 2. I showed you that Medicare is now the primary driver of U.S. debt, along with interest. Thirty-one percent of Medicare is now diabetes.

If we could actually help our brothers and sisters, why don't we do it?

Because we have an industry around us that needs sick people. It is about the money; it is not about solving their misery.

Instead of me being a complete jerk over here, if you look at the differences in how we approach policy, my brothers and sisters on the left want to build more clinics so we can help people manage their misery. On our side we keep saying we are seeing research that there is a cure.

Move the money and cure people. Ending someone's misery is much better than helping them maintain it. They are radically different views in the morality of cures.

When I come to you and say: If you took this number on, it would be one of the single biggest things you could do to save Medicare and its future and end a hell of a lot of misery for our brothers and sisters who are older.

Let's actually walk through actual solutions. If I came to you right now and asked: What is the single biggest thing you could do to disrupt spending? I am going to give you 6 months to do it. I need you to do a revolution today. I need you to actually think like a utopian economist, and you could execute it.

Sixteen percent of all U.S. healthcare is calculated to be people not taking their statins, their calcium inhibitor.

Can you believe I have hypertension, Madam Speaker? Can you believe I am wound a little tight? As long as I take my calcium inhibitor, apparently, I won't stroke out. The pill is just a few pennies.

It turns out we could help our brothers and sisters with a little $0.99 pill-bottle cap that beeps at you in the morning, saying, hey, you really

should take your drugs, so you stay healthy.

We calculate this to be almost $600 billion this year. Sixteen percent of healthcare is about $600 billion.

How about just the technology of having this stupid thing beep at you in the morning, saying, hey, did you check your insulin? Did you take your calcium inhibitor? Did you take your statin? We have the pill- bottle cap that beeps at you in the morning. This stuff all exists. It is incredibly cheap. We could do it.

Yet we have lobbyists here who oppose trying to get people healthy. It is just absurd.

Let's actually walk through a couple of other technology solutions.

Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to my time remaining.

Madam Speaker, what would happen if I came to you tomorrow and said: Hey, you know that thing you can wear on your wrist, the FDA about 3 weeks ago said it was for your heart, it is a medical device.

Apple got its watch certified as a medical device because the next generation is so at good managing hearts.

What if there is a Dexcom or something else you can put on your arm that is over the counter that helps you manage your blood glucose? What if there is something you can blow into that tells you you have a virus? We are going to order your antivirals.

Those technologies actually exist, and this place lays layer after layer after layer of bureaucratic crap down to make it unable to write you a script.

My understanding is that the AMA is going to oppose me in my election because I am trying to cut the price of healthcare and make your life healthier and better.

Unlike the Democrats who play these stupid games of we are going to help people get their insulin less expensive, let's give Big Pharma $16 billion and we will buy down the price.

How about doing things to actually make it so the co-ops, like Civica RX down the street that makes insulin cheaper, why would we have promoted crashing the price instead of subsidizing Big Pharma?

It is actually insane. The left basically wants industrial policy to control you.

We want markets to crash the price and make people healthier. Let's legalize the technology. It is moral.

People have the right to take care of themselves. They have the right to be healthy. They have the right to use this technology, and this place substantially keeps it illegal.

Let's do some other things. What would happen if I could adopt artificial intelligence to make your life of having to deal with government better, faster, cheaper, and a lot more accurate?

We are working on an experiment with the IRS, and it is still crap. There was a report that came out just a couple days ago saying only about 80 percent of the calls are getting answered, which is dramatically better than 4 or 5 years ago when it was 5 percent of the calls.

We have a level of AI chat--because you build a stack and it is just an expert on this; it is not terminator; it is not a generative AI-- that says, I just need help on this form. How do I fill it out? If you use technology, the voice will stay on the phone with you. It will help you fill out your form. It will even email or text you the form you need. Maybe even send you the video so you know how to do it.

You could crash the cost of government by adopting technology. The IRS has already hired 6,000 more people to answer the phone. What is the pension cost on that? I am not being mean, but at some point I have got to figure out how to finance these things when technology would have been faster, better, more accurate, and you could have called in the middle of the night.

I have gotten some of this. To my brothers and sisters here, they have actually helped me. For the VA, for the IRS, for the Pentagon, we have actually been able to get a number of our AI amendments to do things like this.

We actually got attached to the NDAA something called the AUDIT Act. Turns out, I think we are in our eighth year where the audit of the Pentagon has been incapable of knowing the assets. The audit of the Pentagon is a failure. They can't audit it. It is unauditable.

Turns out, we were able to get the amendments attached saying just use technology. Let the technology crawl through the data: Every invoice, every receipt, every this, every that, and find where all the assets are. We think there is $4 trillion of assets we can't identify in the Pentagon. It is absurd, and a technology package solves that.

I have offered this for years. All I've heard is: David, we can't do that. Turns out, this year--maybe I am making some progress because this got attached. We are finally going in the right direction.

Let's actually walk through a couple of other things.

AI's integration could add trillions of dollars to the global economy. There is a point out there that in the high end if we allowed technology to make governments more efficient, society more efficient, you could add a few trillion dollars in global expansion.

Remember before how I was talking about what happens if the world is flat population growthwise? Where do you get the productivity?

Remember your high school economics class? What are the two ways you are paid more? Inflation; well, that is crap because you basically tread water. The other is productivity. Your salary goes up because of productivity.

Help the productivity enter our country and the world and let's have a more prosperous country.

How many of you hear complaints over and over from patients, from doctors, from hospitals, from clinics, from insurance companies, everyone is mad at each other. They don't pay my claim. They don't do the claim right.

We have a piece of legislation called Clean Claims. Just use technology to do it. We estimate for many medical clinics and doctors, we can cut their costs in half. What would happen to your price of getting healthcare if the doctor, the clinic, the surgery center you go to its overall cost is half? You want to change the price of healthcare. Do you do it by just changing the financing? That is all ObamaCare was.

Remember, ObamaCare was a financing bill. It moved from who pays here to who gets subsidized. It just moved it to these folks get subsidized, so these people get to pay. In reality we just borrow the money now. Those are financing bills; they don't change what we pay. The technology changes what we pay.

We have had multiple amendments we put together to actually study how we can do things better, faster, cheaper, and healthier. Instead of just putting a roomful of people together, it turns out AI can do the study in days and tell us how we can help our veterans have better, healthier outcomes and crash the price.

We were able to get this attached. We are starting to make some progress. We did the same thing in other parts. We were able to move a million dollars around to actually administer veterans' benefits better, faster, cheaper, and you don't need an army of people to do it.

Madam Speaker, in a moment, I will yield to the gentleman from Texas because he needed a couple minutes to share some things.

I will make the point that the Joint Economic Committee Republicans didn't just do the typical sniping at the Democrats or the President. We worked through the math and the scale of the actual problems ahead of us, and then we actually laid out ways we could make it a better, healthier, more productive, more prosperous society.

Is this body actually capable of reading a couple chapters, working with us, and saying, okay, maybe we could adopt some policies that crash borrowing, grow the economy, and make everyone's lives better? There is a path.

The other dystopian part, though, is I think we only have 3 to 5 years, and then at that part, the bond market runs your country because everything we do will be to keep the bond market from ever getting nervous.

As we calculate this year a single basis point--one point of interest is 100 basis points. A single basis point is $800 million, meaning sometimes when the clowns show up--excuse me. The Members of Congress here do dumb things. We can actually see the market stressing out.

Sometimes just because someone here says something outrageous, the next day, it costs you a few billion dollars in additional interest. Remember, we are still borrowing $80,000 to $100,000 a second every day.

To those of us who are baby boomers, do I have a moral obligation to keep your retirement solid but also not destroy the future of the younger generation?

We can do it. You are just going to have to sort of realize the solution is complex. There is a way to get there.

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

Mr. Speaker, every week I come behind this microphone, and I walk through the demographics and the debt and try to demonstrate that the primary driver of debt is our demographics and our health.

I have brought lots and lots of charts here over the last couple years sort of demonstrating the death spiral the country is heading towards. Total interest this year is going to be maybe just a little shy of $1.2 trillion, making interest the second biggest expenditure in this government. Social Security will be about $1.480 trillion; interest $1.2 trillion, and then, believe it or not, Defense and Medicare are fighting for who is going to be third and fourth.

I thought it would actually be more honorable to come behind this mike and say, all right, we have defined the problem over and over and over and over. I don't seem to be making much progress with my brothers and sisters being willing to accept the actual math because our friends from the left say tax rich people more and that will take care of the problem. Then we show them the economic papers that make it clear that you can maximize people's taxes for those over $400,000 on their income tax, their estate tax, the whole list of taxes, and when you do economic effects, you get about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP.

For us on the right, we have all sorts of things we want to cut, but if we are limited to only nondefense discretionary, we come up with about 1 percent of GDP.

The problem is this year we are borrowing close to--I think our run rate in the last 365 days is like 8 percent of GDP. The long run is 6, 7, 8 percent over the years.

Does anyone see the math problem?

When the left's solutions and the right's solutions are combined, you get 2\1/2\ percent, and you are borrowing 6, 7, 8 percent of GDP, the size of the economy, maybe we need to have a brutally honest conversation of what is the driver of debt and the things that provide a solution that also have a chance of passing here.

Here is the board that gets the most complaints to my office, so let's do it again.

From today through the next 30 years--and this is in the President's math, this is in the CBO's math, this is in the outside group's math-- 100 percent of the debt from today through the next 30 years is interest and healthcare, and if in a decade from now the decision is, hey, the Social Security trust fund is gone, and we are not going to let people take a 21 to 25 percent cut and double senior poverty and we backfill Social Security.

So right here, the new number isn't 116. This is my older board. I think it is somewhere now in the 120, $130 trillion in 30 years. The rest of the budget is flat. It pretty much grows with the growth of the economy. It is healthcare. If you want to disrupt debt, make this society healthier or adopt technology that makes government smaller.

Let's sort of actually walk through some of these things. I brought this board again just to reemphasize what I was just saying. The new number on Social Security for this coming year is $1.480 trillion. My math actually has the interest being a little bit higher, and then you see Defense and Medicare.

Think of that. When you think Defense and Medicare are now down here third and fourth, and Medicare--I think Medicare is spending maybe upwards as much as 10 percent so far this year.

Let's see, if I came to you and said, all right, here is the stack of solutions, in previous years I would come here with all sorts of charts, and I would show sort of my holistic unified theory, saying you had to do things in immigration, you had to do things in fixing the tax code to maximize investment in growth. Over here you had to legalize adoption of technology to crash the price of healthcare. Over here you had to do things to make the society much more competitive and less oligopolies in our economy; you know, big players.

I kept trying to show--and we had like 20, 21 things you had to do almost at the same time. I felt like I was making no progress.

The reality of it is, we are in real trouble. A couple weeks ago I came here and did the demographics, and I knew everyone was right on the edge of their seats wanting to understand the demographics, except demographics is your destiny.

In 15 years, we model this country has more deaths than births. Understand what is going on. Yet, you have your Medicare system, your Social Security that are sort of a pay-as-you-go system, but the number of children, the number of young people, the number of future workers we are going to have in this society--we are in trouble.

You are going to have to do things like technology substitution.

What the hell does that mean? We are going to walk through some of that.

I have a stack of articles, some boards, and we are going to walk through one of those pillars that we talk about. The two biggest changes I expect in society, in the economy, and in the world over the next decade or two will be synthetic biology and artificial intelligence.

Let's talk about one of the things on our list of like 21 disruptions of what we could fixate on policy-wise to make government smaller, more efficient, and more moral, and maybe your retirement doesn't have to implode on you, and maybe my little kids--yes, I have young kids--have a future because the math says right now that child that is young today will be poorer than their parents.

It is the first time in U.S. history when the expectation is, the math says, this young generation is going to be poorer. Does anyone see just the apocalyptic immorality in that?

So what is going on here? Why are we so terrified to tell the truth?

Mr. Speaker, I will tell you one of the reasons you should tell the truth. You come here and walk people through the actual math of Social Security and Medicare, how we are going to save it, what we have to do, and you will get attack ads because, God forbid, you told the truth. This side particularly over there cares much more about winning the next election than saving this country, saving your retirement, the morality of you receiving the earned benefits you worked for.

It is because the politics are so much more important. Winning the next election is so much more important than doing what is right.

Let's actually sort of walk through some ideas here.

First off, I am going to do this in the next couple of weeks. There are now starting to be economic models and discussions talking about how the debt is going to make us all poorer and how it is starting to do that.

The fact is, as far as your taxes, I have shown things here where every dime a Member of Congress votes on today is on borrowed money. So far this fiscal year, every dime of discretionary, every dime of defense, and, actually, one-quarter of Medicare are on

borrowed money. The fact is that this year, you are going to spend about $1.2 trillion of your tax receipts in interest.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, over the last 12 months, I think we have had 1 or 2 months, maybe 3 months, where we actually had to borrow money to pay for our borrowed money to pay the interest.

Think about that, Mr. Speaker. The fact of the matter is that now we are starting to see the economists do articles explaining we are all going to be poorer because of the financing costs now on this debt and deficit.

Let's actually walk through what you would do if I came to you right now, Mr. Speaker, and said that you live in a time of miracles. We are curing diseases, and we are going to cure more diseases. We don't have to live with misery. We are on the cusp of having major disruptions in diabetes and other diseases. We could make government more efficient and smaller.

Let's actually just talk about artificial intelligence tonight. There is an article from Stars and Stripes talking about the Pentagon being substantially unauditable. We do not know where almost $4 trillion in assets are. There are parts of this article and parts of other articles here talking about the Pentagon buying things because they don't know if they have it in inventory.

There are other articles saying that we could actually use technology to crawl through government, and it would be the ultimate whistleblower.

Some of us have been trying, saying: Why don't we do something creative?

Mr. Speaker, I need you to think, if you watch too much cable television over here, AI is going to destroy the world. There is generative artificial intelligence that crawls through and can write its code. Over here is a stack that just wants accounting data, that just is looking for assets, inventories, liabilities, and those things. That is what we are talking about at this moment.

How about if we did something creative? If you have just had I think the eighth year where the Pentagon has functionally come back as unauditable because we cannot do the asset list, how about allowing an artificial intelligence crawler, an artificial intelligence accounting package, to go up and down those assets lists and identify what we own, what we don't own, what we think we have, what we don't think we have, and what we really own so you don't get crazy articles like this one from Stars and Stripes basically saying: This was not surprising. Pentagon again failed its audit, and $3.8 trillion in military assets, we are not sure where the hell they are.

We are going to offer this as an amendment in the next day or so on the national defense authorization bill. We will see if our brothers and sisters here are willing to say maybe some technology is better than building after building full of people looking at accounting lists unable to figure out what the hell it says. Maybe we should actually protect the American taxpayer but also protect our national defense by knowing what we own and what we don't own.

It is a simple solution. It is also the adoption and the future of what could we do in this government if we would allow artificial intelligence crawlers to go up and down inventories, assets, where there is misallocation, where there is proper allocation, and where there are people who may be playing games with resources.

Why wouldn't we do that? The Government Accountability Office can only do so much, but the crowdsourcing of the data, the constant crawling, this exists today. Let's do it. It is just, once again, the concept of: Can we use technology to make government smaller? Of course, we can.

Mr. Speaker, I have to be brutally honest. Here is an article that was talking about using artificial intelligence in certain parts of healthcare. It was a crash and burn, but if you actually get into the academic article, they were using ChatGPT. May I suggest you don't try to use chat as your diagnostician?

However, it turns out I have four or five times more articles talking about when they use specific artificial intelligence designed to look at cancer and other things. It was remarkable.

Let's actually sort of go on through the changing of government. What would happen if you have had the experience of trying to call the IRS and sit on hold, and then you get to someone and talk to someone who may not have the specialty, may not understand what you are asking.

There is an experiment. I have to give the IRS credit on this one. It is a small experiment. They did it last tax season and this tax season: For a small portion, when you called, you were actually talking to a chat AI.

Think about the experiment that they agreed to do and where this may take us. Imagine if you called the IRS, Mr. Speaker, and it stays on the phone with you because it picks up the phone because it has ultimate capacity because you are actually talking to a plain language computer that sounds every bit like a person. It stays on the phone with you, listens to you, and walks you through how to fill out your form. If you need the form, it can email it to you. It can text it to you. It can even walk you through other forms you might need because of what you are doing.

That is morality, and it would make government less expensive. It would shrink the size of government. This is heresy and brutal, but the fact of the matter is that people are really expensive in government.

One of the ways you can start cutting budgets, yet you still want efficiency and the morality of accessibility for the public, Mr. Speaker, is to start thinking about many government agencies because they are always marching in here complaining that they can't hire anyone. Well, let's replace those slots with technology that will give you the answers you are looking for because it has the full information set in front of it. This is the moral way to do it.

Let's walk through some of this more. If I came to you, Mr. Speaker, right now and said: What is the most powerful thing you could do if I only gave you several months and you had to come up with some way to disrupt the cost of healthcare?

We estimate and have multiple academic articles that say that about 16 percent of all healthcare spending is people failing to stay on their pharmaceutical regime. They have hypertension. They don't take their calcium inhibitor. They have cholesterol that is clogging their arteries. They don't take their statin. They don't adhere.

It turns out you could do things just like this where is it really artificial intelligence or just using basic technology where the pill bottle cap beeps at you and says: Hey, you haven't opened me today, and it is really important because this pill only costs 7 cents, but if you stroke out, it could be $1 million.

It turns out on my next board I think there is a math problem here. This one basically says that the estimate for people not taking their prescriptions is $528 billion per year. My math was closer to $600 billion. I think my math is right, because if it is 16, 17 percent of all healthcare spent, this is simple. It is moral. It is not really artificial intelligence, but it is use of technology to crash the price of delivering healthcare. We have had pieces of legislation in this place for years saying: Why don't we just start drug adherence so people stay healthier? David, we can't run a bill like that. We would have to explain it.

Mr. Speaker, here is an article I grabbed just 2 days ago about the largest ever antibiotic discovery by artificial intelligence. We just discovered a whole new category of antibiotics.

Mr. Speaker, do you remember the panic over the previous couple of years that so many of our antibiotics were becoming inefficient and superbugs? Guess what, Mr. Speaker? Artificial intelligence may have just discovered new ones to actually work through it.

This is an Apple Watch on here, but about 3 weeks ago, Apple just got its next generation of watch approved by the FDA for monitoring your heart. Now, the heart portion of it is a medical device.

Mr. Speaker, I want you to think about the morality. We keep talking about how we keep our brothers and sisters healthier, yet we are heading toward a world--and I am going to show some more boards in this concept--where you can have it on your wrist, the thing you are able to blow into, the thing you lick, the sort of personal medical lab you can have in your home medicine cabinet or on your body.

I met with some folks a week ago. Forgive me if I mispronounce this, sepsis. You had surgery, and once the doctors, nurses, and medical professionals see it, it is often really dangerous, but using AI and a couple sensors on your body, they can see the tiny movements in temperature and the tiny changes in respiration and know there is something going on and know there is something that has to be dealt with.

How much healthier would we be by just adopting that bit of technology? It is here. It is here already, and now we are living in a world where you can actually have a medical lab attached to you.

Why don't we actually legalize some of this technology? The thing you can blow into that has an incredibly high level of accuracy can tell you that you have a virus, can bang off your phone your medical records and know you are not allergic to a certain antiviral and order your antivirals.

You know that is essentially illegal in this country. Your ability to have that breath biopsy, that flu kazoo, is functionally illegal, but it would help crash the price of healthcare, and you would be healthier.

There is an army of people in these hallways around here demanding that we need to subsidize more people because we don't have enough medical professionals because we are getting older. Yes, we have been talking about that for years. Maybe we could do some substitution effects with technology and the morality of having a healthier society.

Mr. Speaker, we are about to see a revolution in cures. One of our arguments is that the most moral thing this Congress can do is not help you maintain your misery. It is one of my great angers at our Democrat colleagues.

You realize they passed legislation that functionally hands $16 billion of your tax money to Big Pharma. Yes, I am using their language, not mine, their language, Big Pharma. We are going to give $16 billion to buy down the price of insulin. At the same time, 75 miles from here, there is a co-op making three types of generic insulin. Go look them up, Civic RX. Three types are cheaper than the subsidized price, but the Democrats have an ability to basically have it both ways: Big Pharma is evil. Here is some cash. Here is $16 billion.

Their idea of morality is that they are going to functionally finance your misery.

Over on our side, I have been passionately trying to get this place to fixate on some of the cures. We think we are getting close to a cure for type 1. There are some miracles happening on type 2.

Actually, in a week, this Friday, we are going to publish a report in the Joint Economic Committee that I am going to get crap for, but you are going to see a top line number that, over the next 10 years, obesity will cost this country as high as $9.1 trillion over the next 10 years, the single biggest spend in this government. Our brothers and sisters are dying. I think we are about to have the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger.

Think of that. You have a country where people's life expectancy is falling. We are going to pass a farm bill, nutrition support, and not actually think about should it actually be nutrition support, or is it calorie support?

This government fights against itself. We actually give you an EBT card to go buy onion rings, and on this side we are going to cover your healthcare costs when you are sick. Have we lost our--yes, we have lost our minds, but we are actually seeing all sorts of data, and I have some of the articles here.

AI tool finds variant for heart disease. AI figured out there are 17 genes to look at that will actually give us an indicator if you are going to have certain types of heart disease.

AI traces mysterious metastatic cancer to its source. This is one of the most fascinating, and I actually have almost a binder just on this one. How Google's new AI could revolutionize medicine, but if you go on there because I know all of you are really smart and you read this crazy stuff--I mean, you have all read about the Google Fold, folding of protein over certain things so it can be actually delivered and actually withstand in your body and actually start to help cure you.

You live in the time of miracles, and this place here is one of the biggest barriers to those miracles coming to market. It is absolutely immoral.

FDA does some amazing things, but it was designed decades and decades and decades ago. We have these things called supercomputers today. We have AI that can grind through data and look at article after article and population statistics and these things.

There is actually lots of data right now saying we can cut the time down in half bringing cures and miracles to market. I would argue this is our obligation. This is people's lives. Besides the fact of the morality, it is also really good economics and would be great for the borrowing.

Remember, we are hovering between sort of $80,000 and $100,000 a second in borrowing. The majority of that growth in borrowing is interest and healthcare costs. Crash the price of healthcare.

Incorporating AI creates cost savings. We actually had some success in this idea last week. We were able to get two AI amendments attached to the VA bill, just to actually start with the claims side, the bureaucracy side, to actually move some of that faster.

The vast majority of our brothers and sisters here, it started to pass. Even though maybe the union didn't like it, but this is the right thing to do. We started.

We actually got another one passed. This is just for the VA, but toward studying how we streamline and mitigate the financing mechanisms to make the VA more efficient and much more nimble and actually reduce the cost. These are just inch by inch by inch.

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

Oh, heaven forbid. I don't know if I could actually talk any faster. I'm so sorry. Sometimes I start to talk like a machine gun.

Mr. Speaker, another piece of legislation we have is you talk to doctors' offices, you talk to surgery centers, you talk to clinics, and they will tell you half their cost is just administrative, the people having to do the back paperwork, the people in the front office.

Just walk through a concept because this actually exists today. You walk up to the counter in your surgery center or your doctor's office. You talk to a screen, and it writes down. You don't actually have to fill out the little thing on the pad.

You say: Hi, I am David, and here is my number. Here is this. Here is that.

In the back office, they use technology, not a room full of clerks doing paperwork to fight back and forth with the insurance company. You could crash the price of a healthcare clinic in half. We already have some companies starting to do this.

Mr. Speaker, we have another one that starts to actually help the concept of telehealth. Why isn't it digital health, the ability to use technology to help you take care of yourself?

Then, article after article that we live in the time of miracles. How do I get my brothers and sisters here to help us realize if we would just change some of the incentives in this place? There is another generation of miracle drugs coming. There is actually the ability of another generation of things that cure people.

I keep trying to argue here. You want to crash the debt and deficits? You want to crash spending? Cure diseases. Make people's lives less miserable. There will be armies of lobbyists in our hallways because these disrupt their business models.

I am going to ask our brothers and sisters here to do the right thing. Don't be afraid of the technology. The disruption is the morality, is the future, and is one of the ways and just one of the levers that we save ourselves from this crashing and crushing debt.

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

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

Mr. Chair, I thank the Chairmen, and one of my favorite ranking members.

Mr. Chairman, part of what we are trying to accomplish here--we are going to have two amendments basically in different categories doing this--is if we look over some of the GAO reports from the last couple of years, some of the issues we have had in claims payment processing, if we actually look at the last GAO line items, long-term services support, GAO thought there was about $38 billion in questionable issues. If we come down on even some of the pension processing, there is about $10 billion in questions.

We are in the age of sort of a miracle of technology.

We also know, when we read over some of the reports coming out of the VA, there are issues on trying to hire staff, trying to hire staff that is qualified, to handle the amount of claims and data and those things that come in. All we are trying to do here is sort of push in the direction of using the technology that is now amongst us.

Many of us will refer to AI, but, in some ways, it is bigger than that. It is an algorithm. It is AI, but it is the ability to use data to mine through to see that this is where things aren't working the way they should, here is where we are missing, and here is where there is fraud.

The first amendment is on expediting claims. If you have claims and they are fitting certain formats, the fact of the matter is you should be able to go through them at an incredibly rapid rate with an incredibly high level of accuracy if you adopt the technology.

Our argument is that getting the technology right is moral. It is also fiscally really sensible.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) for the purpose of a colloquy.

You have a much higher degree of expertise. Both of you do in regard to VA issues. I do taxes and Medicare financing.

One of the reasons we were hopeful about this is because it is sort of a closed ecosystem. It gives us the chance, as we have learned with a number of pilot programs, to use this because we know the rules here, and we are saying: Here is a chance to do a test, a pilot program, and if it works with the VA, then, hopefully, our future is being able to move it into other parts of the government.

Am I being unrealistic?

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentlewoman being willing to tolerate me and engage in that.

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

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

Mr. Chair, this is sort of a derivative of the previous amendment. The previous amendment was to speed up and expedite claims. This one is actually now to crawl through, and if my colleagues geek out like I do on how the artificial intelligence crawls through data stacks and can identify outliers or patterns, this one actually utilizes that same sort of data to streamline oversight, to reduce fraud, to basically identify where you have areas that are saying: This doesn't look right. Why is there a difference between different parts of the VA or different parts of the country?

The amendment is specifically focused on financial management. Where one is moving claims and helping veterans be able to see what their benefits are and moving it faster, this one actually looks at the books because we have to have a moment of honesty.

If Members basically take the number of veterans that use the VA and divide it by the spending, you are somewhere around $38,000 per veteran that use the facilities. That is an outlier in any category of healthcare.

Could this help us understand what we are doing well, but also where there are outliers? In some ways, this was a way to help me deal with my discomfort with the costs per delivery. I couldn't identify what was wrong. This should help GAO and other experts simply identify that the VA is doing this great, but we have an issue here.

I am hoping this technology brings that to the surface.

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

Mr. Chairman, to the Members here: I appreciate the kind words.

Mr. Chairman, we are on the edge of a revolution of being able to understand these massive data sets. If we do this well, maybe the constant conversation we have here between the left and the right of government, the spending and lack of money issues--are we about to step up and start to embrace the technology that may make what we do, what we are responsible for, better, faster, cheaper, and maybe in some ways because of that efficiency, more moral?

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

Forgive me, Madam Speaker, as we get our boards all lined up.

Madam Speaker, I am going to try something a little different than starting with the debt pie. We are going to actually sort of walk through some of the chaos that is coming next year. For those of you who always hear the saying, hey, the next election is the most important election ever, what I am going to walk you through is going to show, yeah, it probably is, but let's walk through why.

How many of you understand that in December 2017 there was a tax reform bill? It was the first time in 30-plus years that the United States had updated its tax code. Now, within that, one of the basic principles is what could you do to maximize economic growth and what could you do to make the United States competitive again?

Do you remember before 2017 the number of organizations, corporations that were chartered in the United States that were saying, bye, we are going to Ireland, we are going to other parts of the world because the way we taxed international business and those things. We found a way to make ourselves competitive, and I believe since then we haven't had a major organization, major corporation leave the United States.

Could you imagine having gone into the pandemic if we hadn't done the tax reform in December 2017? Also, I have tried in previous presentations to come here and talk about the morality of 2018, 2019, even 2020. We had the biggest movement of closing income inequality in America. It was actually some of the fastest in modern history of wages going up without inflation.

If you love and care for people, particularly working people, particularly those who, as is common, have the lowest quartiles of income, go back to 2018, go back to 2019, go back to the beginning of 2020, and understand the morality of having a revised tax code work.

Here we are. There is something coming next year we need to understand.

Parts of the tax code changes will expire. The reason is the way the tax reform had to be done because our brothers and sisters on the left were not going to help us, and you had this 1974 Budget Control Act that said, hey, you can go around the Senate 60-vote rule if it reduces spending within a certain set of rules.

It is called reconciliation. It is a little bit geeky. Even people here, we all have to sit down with the Parliamentarians and work out the rules. What that meant is there was a budget box built in 2017, and we filled into that box, but to make that box work, because it is a 10- year number, we had some things that would expire.

Guess what happens next year? A whole number of those provisions begin to expire.

Let's actually start to work on what is actually coming for us next year. These are the expiring tax provisions next year. This is going to make sense in a little bit. Let's say right now you make $20,550 to $83,000, today your current income tax rate--not your social security, not your FICA tax, those things, your current tax rate is 12 percent of your income. It is going up to 15 percent. The next bracket goes from 22 percent to 25 percent, then 24 percent to 28 percent, 32 percent to 33 percent. We are going back to the personal income tax rates from 2017 and earlier. The crazy thing is these rates actually are less progressive than the current updated tax reform.

Most people don't realize, when the Republicans did tax reform, we lowered rates, we broadened the base, we did all these sorts of things, but it actually was slightly more progressive than the old tax code-- which our Democrat friends, it drives them insane when you mention that, so I always enjoy doing that.

This is coming. This is current law. This isn't a proposal. This isn't some sort of magic bait-and-switch discussion.

This is the current law. This is going to be part of the great battle next year doing policy here. I am going to show you three or four boards of what is changing in the tax code for all of us next year.

Understand, that math over 10 years is about 4.2 trillion. The first year it is, like, 380 billion. Let's just call it $400 billion because that makes the math easy to do in our head.

Let's walk through some other things that are changing next year. Expiring 2025 tax provisions. The child tax credit.

Yes. In 2017, Republicans, without a single Democrat vote, doubled the child tax credit to $2,000. In 2026 when you get ready to pay your taxes, that provision will have expired. Instead of getting $2,000 per child, it goes back to $1,000.

Here is one of the big differences when you can think about the inflation we have had since President Biden took office.

If you live in the Scottsdale/Phoenix area that I represent, if you don't make more than 26 percent more today than you did the day Biden became President, you are poorer. Think about that.

These provisions aren't adjusted for that inflation. Right now, it phases out at 400,000. You lose this child tax credit doubling.

Next year, when this starts to expire, if you make over $110,000, it begins to expire and phase out on you. Just be prepared.

The other thing is under current law, you get a $500 deduction per dependent. Next year, when you pay your 2026 taxes, it is gone.

Understand these are taxes on working people. This is already the current law. This is coming at you.

Let's do a little more here. Expiring 2025 tax provisions. Current status. If you are single, you get a standard deduction.

One of the ways the tax code works, the way you create sort of this progressivity is you say, hey, the first block of your income functionally has no tax, and then the rates go up as you get higher in the income bracket.

Right now, if you are single, the first $14,600, you functionally have almost no tax. If you are single when the provisions expire, that number gets functionally cut in half. It becomes $8,300.

If you are married today, it is $29,200. This is the standard deduction. It will go back down to $16,600 so no inflation adjustments. Your taxes are going up next year.

Understand, this is the law. Understand, what we are starting to discuss here is what does Congress look like next year? What does the Presidency look like next year? What is the need of the economy? What is the need of the debt and deficits? This actually becomes really interesting debate at the same time you are borrowing.

We are going to walk through, actually in a little bit, some good news on the economy, some stabilizing news in the debt and deficits, but for a lot of Americans, they are already just stressed out of their mind.

Once again, there has been 26 percent inflation for my community in functionally the last 3, 3\1/2\ years. What happens in that same environment when your taxes go up?

Let's walk through a little bit more here. I know talking about tax provisions is so exciting, but when you pay them, you understand why we wanted to get ahead of the curve and explain to our brothers and sisters in America this is the current law. This isn't a proposal. This is the law as it is.

Another 2025 expiring tax provision. Currently, 100 percent of first- year bonus depreciation. Now, this has been starting to phase down.

You have a small business. You buy a piece of equipment. I have done entire presentations on this. When we talk about research and development or expensing, you buy that piece of equipment so you can be better, faster, cheaper, and become more productive.

What are the two ways you pay workers more in America? Actually, in all economics? Inflation? I raise your salary because of inflation. That bought you what? Nothing. Productivity. You are making more stuff better, faster, cheaper. Your wages go up. That is real gain.

The idea behind the depreciation on both research and development and expensing was if I can get that business to buy a piece of equipment where they are more productive, they can pay their workers more.

In the coming weeks, I am going to come here and show some of the tax cuts that were given to businesses after 2017, the vast majority of that actually went to wages. It was wage growth. When you raise those taxes, you have to accept you will flatten out wage growth over the coming decade.

This is one of our biggest frustrations right now because this has been phasing down 20 percent each year for 5 years.

What is depreciation? You bought that piece of equipment. The government gets what in tax receipts? If you depreciate it over 7 years, 5 years, you get to depreciate it off your taxes, right? If you depreciate it in 1 year, you get to depreciate it off your taxes. It is a timing effect.

The government still gets functionally the same taxes. The difference is when you have to do it over time.

You, the businessowner, had to find a way to finance that piece of equipment over those years until you got the tax benefit, and you could use that tax benefit.

That is one of the reasons productivity has become stale in America. It is because this isn't really a tax cut. I would argue it is timing.

There is also some really interesting economic data that the expensing and the research and development expensing may have represented almost half of the economic growth after the tax reform.

Think about that, because it created a productivity capital cycle. In a world right now where we are 7 years later after TCJA, the tax reform, where you now have AI, now you have robotics, other things, there is an argument that that productivity cycle by being able to invest in capital equipment could even be steeper, meaning your wages go up.

We actually passed a short-term, couple-year extension of this. We got it through the House. It was even bipartisan. It has been sitting in the Senate for months.

It shows you how perverse this thing is around here when even the things that grow the economy and grow your wages and functionally have almost no cost to tax receipts we can't even get through here.

Let's actually walk through what these tax provisions expiring mean to

the people of my community. Let's do some math.

Here is the first one. Sorry. Some of the phrasing over here is a little awkward. It should almost reverse. Expiring tax provisions in 2025.

Right now, per child, when you get the tax credit per child, that is about $753. That is going away. Remember, it is getting cut in half, so you are going to lose that.

Let's do the next one. Expiring 2025 tax provisions. What does this mean to someone that lives in my Congressional District?

Before we do this, I think I need to have a moment of honesty. I represent a fairly prosperous district. I represent an incredibly well- educated district.

I represent Phoenix, Scottsdale, Fountain Hills, Carefree, Cave Creek, town of Paradise Valley, north central Phoenix.

If you live in my district, you likely have a college degree or you work your heart out. It is an aspirational district.

I have to accept I am going to have higher numbers than a lot of the other districts in the Southwest.

Think about this, just the income tax provision.

We are not talking about all the other credits that are expiring, just the income tax increase for the average family, and, typically, we model this as a family of four. Your taxes are going up $2,541.

If you live in the Phoenix/Scottsdale Congressional District 1 in Arizona, are you ready for $2,541? The punch line even gets uglier. That is just on the income tax portion, not the tax credit portion.

We added it up and figured out if we remove all the tax credits and everything else that are expiring in the 2025 year, here is our grand total.

The average tax increase in Arizona's Congressional District 1--once again, I need to admit mine may be almost double some districts around the United States because it is a more prosperous district--is $5,921.

Congratulations. This is what is coming at you next year. Top this on the 26 percent inflation that has been in my community.

You are getting your head kicked in next year. Start thinking about that is what this election is just in prosperity, just in opportunity, just in your ability to save for your retirement.

Someone like myself, I have young kids. Don't laugh at me. My wife is the same age as I am. We are incredibly blessed, and we have done okay in life.

We freak out on just trying to figure out how we set aside money for my retirement and their education. This isn't going to help. This is the current law. This is what is coming at you. Understand what is at stake.

I need you to see here is almost $400 billion just after the expirations in new taxes coming in, over $4.2 trillion over the 10 years.

In the same time, I have a society that is getting older very fast. I have a government that is basically buying love from what the Democrats did here in the first 2 years of the Biden administration where they bought and were subsidizing businesses and all those things to a couple trillion dollars.

You stack that on top of each other, and you start to understand: How do we do this? What do we have to do policy wise so your taxes do not go up?

You keep the economy growing, and you don't grow the debt anymore. You see the puzzle that I am throwing at you?

We are going to make an argument, and I have been doing this slowly on the floor, trying to roll out this concept.

If you are going to think about the tax cut expirations, if you are going to think about it as binary, just think, well, just extend them.

Well, that is about a $400 billion hit on projected borrowing. Come over here. Do you raise corporate taxes, because C corporations, their tax cuts are locked into the code. Well, you just slowed down the economy.

How about we do some other things? Instead of making it sort of binary about the tax code, why not change government? Why not make government dramatically less expensive?

We have done multiple presentations. I am going to do more in the coming weeks on revolutions you could have by adopting technology to reduce the cost of healthcare.

In the Joint Economic Committee, our economists on the Republican side are going to issue a report in the next couple weeks.

I am probably going to get my head kicked in, but we are going to walk through a series of things you can do to dramatically reduce the cost of healthcare.

Be prepared to see a number. We are not done with the final vetting on it. These are the things that are uncomfortable to talk about.

If diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spend and 31 percent of all Medicare spend, we have a country where our brothers and sisters are dying. This may be the fifth year in a row where prime age males have a shorter life.

Maybe the solution here is not only looking at the tax code but changing government, adopting technology so that government is smaller, changing healthcare where healthcare becomes about being healthy and dramatically reducing its cost substantially by legalizing technology. Then think about the tax code in a much more productive way.

How do you design a tax code? Do we have to do base broadening? Do we have to lower certain rates? Do we have to spread it out so you maximize economic growth? It is sort of the old Laffer Curve concept, but I need you to think about it on a grand scale.

Instead of this just being binary about taxes, I want you to demand that the Members of Congress think about this in a fashion of what policies are you willing to do to lower the cost of government, so we have the ability to extend these tax cuts without raising the debt and deficits. That is the great puzzle that is coming. You have got to decide when you go vote how your vote is going to manage that.

Let's actually talk through some things that are worrisome right now. You have these tax expirations already coming. It is the law. Remember how the Biden administration has been touting: Look at this great economy. We spent all this money. We bought prosperity. They basically bought corporate America by handing out cash. Let's be honest.

It turns out we got the math wrong. It turns out when you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we got another revision. I think it was yesterday or the day before. Turns out that real GDP growth for Nowcast wasn't 3 percent. It is down to 1.8. We are seeing a crashing back to where our expectation was of 1.8, 1.7 GDP growth.

You have got to understand that when the debt grows dramatically faster than the growth of your economy, that ratio of debt to the size of the economy starts to spread and it makes buying U.S. debt riskier, meaning we have to pay a premium. The United States is now number 14 on the credit stack, meaning there are 13 countries that have better credit. When they go sell a 10-year bond, their bonds are sold cheaper than ours. Greece today has a better credit stack than the United States. Part of that is governance. Part of it is all the other things that go into how the Moody's and the S&P's and those do.

Understand, until we can also demonstrate to the bond markets--you ask: Why is he talking about the bond markets? I think we borrowed like $57 billion last week.

There is some good news. Our estimate that we would borrow $2.8 trillion this fiscal year may be down to $2.5 trillion. That is still almost double what we were predicting a year ago or a year-and-a-half ago.

Now, when you see the size of the economy starting to flatten out, is anyone other than myself getting nervous?

Let's dive into this. I would suggest to anyone who wants to geek out with me, there is an app. Go grab your phone. The Atlanta Fed has something called GDPNow. Others have Nowcast. They all model it differently. One looks at expected; one looks at actual data.

This is from the Atlanta Fed. I want you to notice something. The Atlanta Fed was way up here at 4 percent. You had the White House and you had the Democrats saying: Keynesian economics works. You can buy prosperity by borrowing stunning amounts of money.

Boom. That number is falling off the cliff. It turns out, at a certain point, the sugar high of spending--this is just

because I care about this, even if no one wants to hear it.

There is sort of this allocation theory. This is one of the splits between Republicans and Democrats. Every once in a while, you will hear Democrats say: Well, they believe in supply side. Understand what that means. If you give someone a tax break, the benefits of that go to where it gets the highest yield, the most productivity.

If you engage in the arrogance of saying: We are really smart. We are going to choose businesses which we are going to invest in, so we are going to invest in this solar technology even though 3 weeks later there is another breakthrough that doesn't get financed. The arrogance--oh, by the way, because we hand out checks, these people become friends with us politically. They even show up at the White House for nice cocktail parties and fundraisers.

This is what the Democrats did. They had the arrogance of deciding who would get the money on their Inflation Reduction Act, the most Orwellian-named bill in modern history, to things like the CHIPS and Science Act. It was sort of a designation of where the cash goes.

If you wake up the next day and there is a technology breakthrough, with that allocation theory--if you had done some of those same dollars in tax reform, the money goes to where it maximizes productivity, wage growth, and it becomes part of the base of the economy where it is the new cornerstone of the next generation of economic growth. This one buys you lots of political power. This one actually buys you the morality of prosperity.

You are starting to see it. Mark my word, watch the data coming in on GDP and the size of the economy. I am not terrified yet. I am not that worried yet, but the fact of the matter is, when you start to see numbers predicting--we went from 4 to almost 1.8 in a matter of weeks. Something's wrong out there.

What happens to that debt and deficit when we roll over economically? What would happen if we hit even a short-term recession?

This is one of the other great frauds around here. In my time here, I have never seen revisions in the economic data like we have been seeing these last several months, revisions where you get this great headline and everybody applauds: Keynesian economics managed the economy. Industrial planning, it works, you see here.

Then they don't mention that 6 weeks later those numbers are being revised way down because you have got your political pop already.

Some of the revisions of the fourth-quarter wage and salaries, we had to revise down again another $73 billion. Some of this is from sampling errors, actually some there were complications. This isn't a conspiracy. It just turns out the economy is different today than it was before the pandemic, a number of people work at home, this and that, the way we sample. We have to modernize our data.

It turns out, this may explain why tax receipts aren't where the size of the economy should be. At the same time, we are trying to figure out the growth of the debt and deficits when we keep being told how great the economy is. Now that it starts to roll over on us, we start to understand.

Just a couple of other geeky things. Over the past four quarters, the total public debt has grown by more than twice the growth of GDP. This is a weird slide. Let me explain.

Do not get it in your head that you can borrow at the rate of the growth of your economy. It doesn't work that way. If the economy grew $1, you only get about 17 to 18 cents in tax receipts. This is historic. When we have had high marginal tax rates or low marginal tax rates, the United States gets about 17 to 18 percent of the economy. The secret is to grow the economy, grow the economy, grow the economy.

What happens when you know you are only going to get about 17 to 18 percent of that GDP growth in tax receipts when the debt grows twice as fast as size of the economy?

You hear the discussions of what happens when you are at 100 percent of debt to GDP. Understand, the way the Europeans do their calculations, it is all debt. The United States, if you do our gross debt, the borrowing from our trust funds, which we have to pay interest on and we have to pay it back, we are over 120 percent of debt to GDP. In one calculation, we are at 140 percent of debt to GDP.

If you do just borrowing from the public, which subjects you to the bond market being in charge of your government, we are just shy of 100 percent of debt to GDP. This number tells you it is moving away from us fast.

A bit of trivia. Mr. Perry, you want to play?

You can just yell from there. I know it is a break of decorum, but we will have some fun.

If I came to you and said: What is the second biggest spend in government, what is it? The second biggest spend this fiscal year?

Mr. Perry said the military. He is a general. Of course he is going to say that.

Turns out it is interest.

Remember, it is unfair to use Social Security, because Social Security operates on its own trust fund. It has its own tax stream and trust fund. As we saw in the Social Security actuary report, in about 9 or 10 years, the trust fund is empty and everyone gets a 21 percent cut, depending on if the economy is good or maybe larger.

Now, they have interest at $1.144 trillion this fiscal year. My math is a little higher. I come in just around $1.2 trillion.

Defense and Medicare are moving back and forth between who gets to be number three and who gets to be number four.

My friend from Texas, tell me you like this number. Isn't this terrifying?

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

Correct. You and I don't get to vote on it.

You pay your obligations.

Medicare spending, when I checked about 6 weeks ago, was already up 10 percent in spending this fiscal year.

Part of that is demographics.

Yes.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Texas is my buddy. In some ways he is much more elegant with language. He has the misfortune of being a lawyer.

I show up at townhalls and things like that and they say it is defense spending. Then they don't believe you when you say, no, defense is either third or fourth. Actually, defense spending is what is in the Constitution.

We have to deal with the reality. This coming fiscal year, I calculate Social Security will be at $1.480 trillion. The shortfall, just this fiscal year, is about $340 billion in the Social Security tax that comes in and the spending is out the door. That is why you see them every month having to cash in their special Social Security Treasury bills. Let's just call it that.

Now, they get paid interest. Believe it or not, about 6 percent of the Social

Security budget is actually interest paid by the general fund. In some ways, over here we are borrowing money to pay back the interest on the borrowed money. You have got to see this weird washing machine that is going on.

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

No.

Now, it is a little more complicated than that because Social Security is on the FICA side. Interest is general fund. Defense is general fund. Medicare is a little tricky, because it is about--I have a chart here I wasn't going to use. Most people think Medicare is off the FICA tax. Only about a third of it is. That is the Medicare part A. That is the hospital portion. The other part comes out of some fees, and then the majority of it is right out of the general fund.

You said this, and I actually stole it from you months ago, Mr. Roy. Every dime we as Members of Congress vote on is borrowed money.

Every dime we vote on is borrowed money, and if you actually sort of work it out on the annual, all defense is borrowed, all nondefense discretionary is borrowed, and about one-third of Medicare is on borrowed money.

Most people can't get their heads around the fact that everything we vote on is borrowed money, and over here, it is on autopilot.

I have been trying to make the moral argument of what is doable. I believe we could crash the price of healthcare. I believe we could dramatically shrink government.

We had a hearing on artificial intelligence over in the Senate with the Joint Economic Committee. We had a couple of experts saying: You realize you could get rid of all these employees and do all this stuff with crowdsourcing and this and that. You could revolutionize the size and cost of this government tomorrow if we would legalize the technology and use it.

You have to deal with the army of lobbyists and the army of people from bureaucracies who will knife us for just actually saying that.

The running joke in our office, and this is one of our tests for the interns--you are going to be tested on this later: What is your government? In one sentence, describe it. It is an insurance company with an army.

It really is the vast majority of the money.

Now, it is earned benefits. You earned it. We just don't have the money for it. I am going to light myself on fire. I am going to go out of order.

The gentleman may want to leave before I do this chart because this chart really upsets people.

It is more complicated, and I have to do about a half-hour presentation to talk about it because it is more than just the disability payments that are part of Social Security and SSI.

That is coming out of part of the FICA tax, but it is the labor force participation. When you create incentives in society not to be part of society, then you lose all sorts of things.

Let's do this slightly out of order. I was going to do this slide to talk about the scale of what you and I have to deal with.

What happens in society when you functionally finance people being sick?

Let's be brutal. We should do some fairly revolutionary things in the farm bill because we give people money to buy onion rings. I would say that is immoral when obesity is almost one-half of healthcare costs.

I have a slide that shows the Milken Institute study from a couple of years ago. It is 40 percent of all healthcare spending in the country. We are dying.

Then, we have this other issue that we are not having children. This last year, fertility rates in the United States collapsed to 1.62, meaning France has more children than we do.

You tell me how we finance things like Social Security, Medicare, and these things, which are pay-as-you-go. Today's taxpayers are sort of paying the benefits of today's retirees, which is the way it was designed because we always expect population stability.

In 15 years, this country has more deaths than births. We are having the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger. A child born today, particularly a male child born today, is estimated to have a shorter life expectancy than you and I.

There is something incredibly immoral happening, and I would say it is our own policies. We have incentivized leaving the workforce. We have financed unhealthy living. We do a number of things where we have indemnified being alive, healthy, and part of society.

It is immoral what we have done under policy, and most of the policies have been brought to us by that side. We make the sin of continuing it.

Here is the punch line. This punch line is really uncomfortable, and you may want to run away from me because I am an idiot willing to tell the truth.

The average family is going to get back Social Security money and about a $72,000 spiff for the average couple, which is a crack rate of return. Most people don't realize that your Social Security payment is actually progressive. If you were at the lower end, you get a decent rate of return. If you are at the higher end, you actually get a substantially negative rate of return.

For every dollar you paid when you paid your FICA taxes for Medicare, we now calculate you get $5 to $6 back. This right here and the financing costs to that is the primary driver of U.S. debt.

I have been booed. I have had someone throw something at me. I have had a woman stand on her chair and scream at me that she wants every dime. It is fine. It is an earned benefit. You earned it.

My argument is that we need to think more like revolutionaries. Legalize the technology. Do the financing of the cures, the very things where we could crash the price of healthcare and have a healthier and more moral society, maybe with family formation, maybe where young working men aren't dying younger, maybe where obesity isn't killing off substantial portions of society.

It is moral, and I need us to think much more because complex problems, the terrible things, often require complex solutions, and I don't know if this place is capable of thinking of complexities.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Yes, but we have a plan. We have a plan.

This is probably going to be the first time you have ever heard this, Chip. I don't think you are cynical enough. That is actually very funny for those of us who know Chip.

We have actually created a motto in our office: Money, power, vanity, but most of the time, it is about the money.

I would argue that Congress has become substantially a protection racket. We protect incumbent bureaucracies and incumbent business models. When someone comes to us and says: Hey, I have this thing you can blow into and, boom, it will tell you that you have the flu, and it can bounce off your medical records and order your antivirals that Lyft can drop off in 2 hours. That technology exists. We will find a way to make that illegal. We will make it so you can't be reimbursed. It will be illegal for an algorithm to write a prescription--those sorts of things.

There is a revolution of technology around us where we can make our lives so much easier. You and your family can have more time, and we can crash the debt and deficit, and young people don't have to live poorer than their parents because that is what the math says.

This will be the first generation coming up right now that will be economically more disadvantaged than their parents. That is immoral, and we can stop it, but we have to think disruptively.

Maybe I am a little bit of a utopian on some of this stuff. The Democrats, all their taxes, you get about 1.5 percent of GDP when you do economic effects. I have offered some pretty brutal amendments here, which are never going to pass, on cutting spending and nondefense discretionary. If you let me have everything, I can get 1 percent of nondefense discretionary, 2\1/2\ percent.

The runway rate this year, I think it is going to go down near the ending of the last quarter of this year, but we are burning 8, 9 percent of GDP in borrowing.

Here is my problem: If you are borrowing about 8 percent of GDP and everyone's proposal, because this is our campaign talking points, is down here, we have to revolutionize policy.

There is our problem because there will be an army of people in the hallways here really cranky at us because we are forcing them to compete, have a vibrant economy, and bring technology, disruption, and productivity to market.

It means they have to change their business models. The bureaucracies have to actually be, in many ways, replaced with technology.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

And government.

No, no, no. Don't use a word like that. Just morally. Morally.

Yes.

Of course. How much of that is on borrowed money right now?

Oddly enough, I get this crazy thing where I will get business models that are built on today's way of healthcare reimbursement, which need sick people to exist. They will come in and say: Okay, I am wearing two hats. For my business, I need to stop you, Schweikert.

It is like the fights we had here on telehealth and digital medicine, those things. They fought like crazy to stop that, and then, in the next sentence as they are walking out the door, they are saying: But we want it for our family. We want the technology. We want the time. We want to be healthier. We want this.

That is actually why I am hoping at some point the morality of what people would want for themselves and their families, they will see actually it is good business, moral, and really important for the future survival of this Republic.

You have to keep trying. My argument is that there is a path.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate you tolerating us, but there is a path where you can make this math work. The problem is it is going to be hard. There are going to be people who are upset because you are making them rethink how they do their business. You are going to make bureaucrats either rebuild their bureaucratic model or actually go find a job in the private sector, but we don't have a choice.

Be prepared. There is a way to save us. One of our economists has played some math games, and the theory is depending on where interest rates are at, because functionally the bond market is getting close to running this country, depending on where interest rates are, you may have 3, 5 years, could be longer, where a movement in the bond market starts to consume all your variability.

At that point, it is almost too late to do major policy. At that point, you are doing policy to pacify those whom you are trying to sell your debt to.

This election you just saw, you have the prosperity of your family and the tax code, but you have an opportunity to use that stressor.

Mr. Roy, this is actually where my punch line at the end was going to be: Are we nimble enough to use the stressor of the expiring tax provisions to get us to think about things we could do to change the cost of government because it is like the debt ceiling around here and other things? Without those and without a stressor on this place, this place will not do anything that is hard.

Let's think creatively. Let's do quality math. Let's be hopeful, but let's demand that the public understand the scale of the problem and that there is hope. It just is that hope isn't perpetual. We may only have a few more years, and then the revolution is too late to be able to make the difference.

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

My own family doesn't watch.

Mr. Speaker, I say to my friend from Texas, your intro was actually brilliant because we are going to try to do something this evening that is going to make a whole bunch of people really cranky.

Mr. Speaker, let's see if I can frame this in a way that I don't sound too much like a jerk. Week after week after week after week, I have come to the floor here and walked people through saying, the blue here, that portion we get to vote on and that every dime a Member of Congress votes on is on borrowed money.

This is all borrowed, plus actually a portion of your Medicare, if you look at the math, is actually borrowed. Gross interest is going to be $1.2 trillion, making interest the second biggest expense in this government.

One of the arguments I deal with over and over is trying to find moral, effective ways that we can save ourselves; that you could actually impact this remarkable amount of debt where we are hovering around borrowing about $100,000 a second.

Every second of every day, we are just a little below that. Then the really uncomfortable is when you walk through the data, it is interest and healthcare. I am not a doctor; I am good at math.

The dear Lord gave me one thing, I am good at math, but I thought I would try something new and exciting. How about if I brought, A, my friend who just happens to be benefited with a medical school education. That is why we will call him Dr. Harris and talk about if healthcare is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt, why not engage in the morality of a society that is healthier, that could be more vibrant?

I have come here, and we have talked about diabetes being 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare, being 30 percent of Medicare spending, the cascade of conditions that come from obesity in America and the morality of loving our brothers and sisters and having a healthier society.

My economists right now, we are working on our reply to the President's budget. We are vetting all the math, and we are highlighting things. We are still about 2 more weeks from our publication. We estimate that obesity will result in anywhere between $8.2 and $9.1 trillion in excess medical expenditures over the next decade.

Maybe the most powerful thing you and I could do for U.S. sovereign debt and burying your retirement and our children and our great- grandchildren and our great-great-grandchildren in piles of debt would be to actually work on policies to make us a healthier society.

You get the benefits of the morality and really good math. I just happen to have a medical doctor who is a Member of Congress who is on the Appropriations Committee who has an expertise that I don't have and can talk about things that I can't say, but understand, we mean this from a portion of optimism.

There is a path here, but we have to do something that is brutally uncomfortable for us: We have to tell the truth.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Harris).

Is that a fair set up?

Yet, I promise you, tomorrow, we will have things on our phone attacking us for telling the truth.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to argue our willingness to come here and tell the truth--I love people. I want them to flourish.

Doctor, we are about to have our fifth year of prime-age males where their life expectancy is shorter. You were actually walking me through some of the math earlier.

Does anyone care?

The concentration I see of the lack of family formation, productivity, the ability to participate in society, the healthcare costs--what would happen if we had a society where we were not afraid to talk about the stigma?

We are saying there are policies. I have the stacks of charts and these things, but there are policies we can engage in to make a difference.

This is on topic and uncomfortable, but one of the things I come here and talk about over and over--let's just use this chart down here. Medicare is singularly the primary driver of our debt. It is healthcare costs. It is an earned benefit. You paid your 40 quarters for Social Security, but the average couple

will have paid in $227,000 in FICA taxes, the portion that goes toward Medicare, but they get back $725,000. That differential right there is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt.

Do you do what some of the folks around here want to do, my Democratic colleagues, where they want to basically say Medicare for All? We are going to ration it. It is going to be government everything. The doctors you have are going to be government employees, that sort of model. Or should we actually take on something much more moral, much more creative, and much more, I would argue, doable?

Let's look at the government policies we engage in where we subsidize people's misery. Could we turn some of the very programs we have to make them more moral and help make our society healthier?

Doctor, I know that has been one of your fixations. You have been in front of committees over and over, talking about things we could do, everything from agricultural legislation, nutrition legislation--the things I do in Ways and Means, trying to finance access to therapies to make people healthier.

And sicker.

Doctor, the morality argument I really want us to make is the way we have designed these programs, as they were originally designed decades and decades and decades ago, we now understand, we are financing people's misery instead of financing the opportunity to be healthier, to be part of society, to actually live longer.

It is uncomfortable, but we have to have a moment of honesty. I don't understand the left's fixation on basically using borrowed money to finance misery.

Yes. On the economic side, we call it knock-off effects, second-degree, third-degree effects. In some ways, they are not even that. They are just the principal effects.

Yes.

And?

Yes. Would this explain my ice cream problem?

Doctor, look, my personal philosophy, I am probably a little bit more libertarian here. Have what you want, but understand, A, should government finance things that make our population less healthy, and, as a matter of fact, make much of the population very sick? The reality of it is when the majority of healthcare partially is financed in some fashion through government, we have an interest. In some ways, it sickens me, but that is the reality we have to sort of mechanically deal with.

The statistics, the data, are just crashing on us since the pandemic, the curve of our brothers and sisters who are getting sicker and sicker. Now, I am dealing with some of the data we are looking at of those moving into their retirement benefits being also much sicker and trying to figure out how we finance that. We are financing it with partially borrowed money.

It is honestly a good economics and moral argument. Maybe we should change the way we do nutrition assistance in America. Maybe we should change even down to some of the agricultural policy of adding more variety. I have given presentations on the concentration of certain crops and the whole way commodity pricing works, and the black swan theory of that level of concentration, God forbid something ever happened to one of the crops, but

it all ties together. It is a unified theory. If I care about healthcare spending--and, understand, ObamaCare was a financing bill. It was about who got subsidized and who had to pay. Our Republican alternative was a financing bill.

We are right now doing the hardest thing in Congress. We are actually talking about what we pay for. Could we actually reduce healthcare spending by having a healthier country, a healthier population? That would actually be much more egalitarian with prosperity.

It is fascinating when I am home in Arizona, the number of folks I walk up to who will almost pull me aside and say: I can't believe you were willing to talk about that. You told the truth.

It is almost like they weren't ready to have those of us from the political class do something that is uncomfortable.

The math is the math. If you take a look at mortality statistics, is it moral to have a society, particularly working, prime-age males--I mean, you were actually quoting some of the statistics in our previous conversation. They are dying younger and younger.

What we have done to younger people in the country, what we are doing to seniors, we can fix this. We just have to be willing to do some difficult policy here--it is not difficult policy.

There are some experiments out there--and you and I have not talked about this before, so we are winging it--where it was the food box and saying that we are going to deliver to our brothers and sisters who need nutrition support a box. There was a problem. Sometimes, the fruits and those things were thrown away, so they experimented with other ways to deliver it.

It was in a microwave pouch, and it turned out that it was working. They were making people healthier, and then that pilot program disappeared.

We are talking billions and billions of dollars, which means there will be armies of lobbyists in the hallway here tomorrow really cranky about what we talked about.

Can we make the argument that we should do the right thing? Is this Republican or Democrat? It should be just the right thing.

I am more optimistic than you.

We are already crushing the next generation, the next three generations. My wife is my age, and I have an 8-year-old and a 23-month-old.

Mathematically, my 23-month-old, when he is 20 years old, U.S. taxes will have to be double what they are today to maintain baseline services.

This is what we are doing to our society. We are coming behind these microphones, and we have done the economic presentations. We can do the Democrats' tax scheme. You get about 1.5 percent of GDP if you were able to tax maximize everything.

For those of us who want to cut things, we get about a point of discretionary nondefense. That is $300 billion there if we could cut that much, so 2.5 percent.

This fiscal year so far, we were expecting to borrow about 5, 5.5 percent of GDP. We are closer to 9. Does anyone see a math problem there?

If this is the political rhetoric, that they want to raise taxes and we want to cut, and you only get this much, maybe we need to promote policies that disrupt the cost of government and the cost of healthcare.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a series of presentations here on using technology, using AI, those things, to make government much smaller. We can do things like this. There are paths.

Mr. Speaker pro tempore, are we up against time?

Mr. Speaker, I thank Dr. Harris for joining me, and I yield back.