Floor Statements

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 21 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, May 23, 2024, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to walk us through a couple simple concepts that require really complex math, so wish me luck here.

Last week, and the week before that, I came here and tried to walk through a concept of how fragile we are because of our borrowing, the amount of insatiable borrowing we go through. I made a sarcastic comment that happens to have the benefit of being almost true that the bond market is the one that pretty much will run this country. I actually can prove part of my thesis.

Last week, because we made it a couple weeks without looking like a clown show, we got some decent inflation data. The movement in the U.S. debt market on our interest rates coming down, if you annualize that, do you realize it is more than every dime of foreign aid?

I need you to think about this for a moment, just those ticks. When a single basis point--remember, 1 percent of interest is one one- hundredth of a point of interest. One tick is about $800 million a year.

Whether this place likes it or not, when we tell the world we are not serious about leading the world, when we don't look serious that we are going to be the country that defends the reserve currency of the world, when we don't look like adults, we pay a price. Many of the folks here, you get your 5 minutes of theater, and then we add hundreds of billions of dollars of additional interest.

I am going to show you charts here where we are approaching $1.2 trillion in interest this year. I am going to try to walk through a concept that the spending, particularly what the Democrats did with the Inflation Reduction Act, where we are basically saying over the 10 years, we are pumping out a couple trillion dollars of subsidies to corporate America, and also the fact that because of our debt and these higher interest rates we are also pumping $1.2 trillion of interest payments out. That much cash flow is going out into the marketplace at the same time the Federal Reserve is over here trying to pull liquidity out of the market to slow down inflation.

For those of us that live in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, you have the right to be cranky because the day Joe Biden became President, from that day until today, if you are not making a little over 26 percent more in your paycheck, you are poorer today.

For all of us who are elected here, our area happens to be probably the second highest inflation in the continental United States right now. You meet people, and they have done fairly well in life. I have one of the more prosperous districts in America. I have one of the very best-educated districts in America. We are out there knocking on doors, and people want to share with

you that they are stressed out of their mind.

Part of it is they don't completely understand why they seem to be working harder, why their kids can't afford a place, why the price of education for their kids is just crushing them, why they seem to instinctively understand their kids are going to live poorer than they did, which is now fact. That isn't rhetorical. In every data point, if you are functionally under 40, 45 years old, you will be poorer than my generation and my parents' generation. It is the debt that has done this. It is inflation.

Once again, let's do a basic economics class. Inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. It is also a tax because who is the biggest debtor in the world? It is the United States. Congratulations. We did it. Yay. We are basically kicking off about a trillion dollars every 100, 115 days of borrowing. That interest is helping kick off inflation. Inflation is that tax.

The inflation we have had the last 3 years is the biggest tax in modern history because here is what happened: there is this massive amount of U.S. debt. We are now going to pay it back with inflated dollars, and your savings just became worth less. This country made a decision with the crazy spending that, screw them, and it set off inflation. We are going to reach in and grab the value of your savings, and we are going to transfer it to the debt, and we are going pay it back with inflated dollars.

Whether you know it or not, the reason you are poorer today is you got taxed. Thank you for your contribution to U.S. debt. Did you know you were even doing it?

The other thing is also the fragility concept. I have talked to dozens and dozens of Members here, and I get that blank stare because we don't often think this way. We are on different types of committees. I do Ways and Means and Financial Services, so maybe my whole world is trying to think about the math.

Today, the world has the highest level of debt since the Napoleonic Wars. You may not remember your history, but after that the world went into a massive depression for years.

Do you know which two countries are borrowing at extraordinary rates? The United States and China. Greece has a better credit rating than the United States. You can sell a 10-year bond in Greece cheaper than the United States. Go and read what the credit rating is. I think the United States is now number 14 in creditworthiness, and we are the reserve currency?

Does anyone care?

The hallways here are just full of people showing up at my door begging for more spending or begging us to set up rules to make sure that competition and new technology can't disrupt their business models.

If you are under 40, I am a baby boomer. I am sorry. I wish we had thought about the math. I wish we had been more honest with ourselves, but there are ways to deal with this. There are ways to make it work.

The other thing is we have been grinding through the Social Security Medicare actuary report. I am still not done with it, and my economist and the Joint Economic Committee, we are still not done with this because we are all so busy writing the response to President Biden's economic report.

I am going to walk through a few things here where we can't figure out why the actuaries would use the numbers they did because they are completely different than OMB and CBO's numbers. There are other things going on.

Let's actually start to walk through this. Some of these boards, you will have seen before. A lot of them you have never seen. I am trying to build a theme. The theme basically is this: This place needs to get serious and start acting like adults and understanding it is not our feelings anymore. It is not our theater or the troll that is going bang on us. If you are also the Russian troll that is going to be in my comments when this goes on YouTube, screw you, because the fact of the matter is I, we, this country, the world needs us to act like adults and provide a level of stability because when we don't, the price of our debt goes up. When you are clicking off borrowing $1 trillion every 100, 115 days, interest rates matter.

Remember, if we are going to borrow a couple trillion dollars this year--and actually right now our burden rate is 2.8, 2.6--and our refinancing is several trillion dollars because, as you have seen, Treasury has decided to stay very short on the curve. That means instead of saying we are going sell a 10-year bond because the market, it turns out, wasn't as excited about buying a bunch of 10-year U.S. bonds because they didn't trust us, we are now offering a 1-year note, a 2-year note. Remember, there are notes, there are bonds, and the definition is on duration.

We have made ourselves very fragile to the world, to the bond market. I used to come behind this microphone and joke that this country basically is an insurance company with an army. Now it is a really in debt insurance company with an army.

Let's walk through some of our realities. Yay.

The first thing I need to walk through is the deficit over the last 12 months is 1.8. If you actually do gross, it is closer to 3 in the last 12 months. Originally, when we built this board, we thought that is what we were going to borrow publicly. Our burden rate is actually substantially higher than we expected.

What is enraging about this is the economy is fairly decent. We just weren't prepared for higher interest rates and higher other expenses. The fact of the matter is, much of the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act, the most Orwellian named piece of legislation in modern history, its distortion effects in the economy and also the borrowing--when we are handing out cash grants, do you think that money is coming out of tax receipts? It is borrowed.

The point I wanted to make here is when you see this blue, that is what I get to vote on as a Member of Congress. The red, that is mandatory. It is about 74, 75 percent of all spending is on autopilot. Guess what? Every dime I vote on is on borrowed money, plus a sliver of your Medicare.

Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is on borrowed money.

Then we play this game around here. When you are clicking off, we are just shy of borrowing about $100,000 a second. We have debates here where we are debating on saving this tiny little bit, and the borrowing during the debate was greater than the savings because we are terrified to tell you the truth that the majority of borrowing, every dime of borrowing from this day for the next 30 years--and I am going to say this about a half a dozen times tonight--every dime of borrowing from today through the next 30 years is interest, Medicare, and then 9 years from now when the Social Security trust fund is gone we backfill the shortfall. Everything else is in balance.

All right. So let's continue to walk through this. To give you a sense, that blue area I was just showing you before on the chart that we get to vote on, okay, nondefense discretionary, that is everything you think of as government. That is the FBI, that is the Park Service, that is the State Department. This over here is Defense.

Mr. Speaker, if you come to me and say: David, I want you to cut spending, then I am all for burning a bunch of this down. A bunch of the things we do I have a really weird ethical question that Members of Congress need to think about.

Is it ethical for the Federal Government to borrow money and send it to an entity that has its own taxing authority? When many of those taxing authorities, if they actually had more skin in the game, might be a little more sensible and more disciplined in how they spend it.

Mr. Speaker, you realize that is one of the greatest scams here. We borrow it, we send it, we get love, and then the groups we send it to act like: Hey, we got free money from the Federal Government.

You are paying it back. Actually, Mr. Speaker, your kids, your grandkids, and your great-great-grandkids are going to pay it back because it is borrowed.

Everything else you see is interest, Social Security, and Medicare. Now, remember, Mr. Speaker, Social Security self-finances right now. Social Security is the payroll tax and the trust fund, and every month the trust fund

gets a little smaller. We do pay interest for the cash that the Federal Government and the Treasury have borrowed out of the trust fund. We give them their principal back, and then the Treasury gives them a little bit of interest.

However, that is continuing to shrink.

Then, Mr. Speaker, you look at everything else and you start to realize that we don't run this government anymore. The mandatory programs and the bond market do.

The other thing that also should really annoy anyone who actually pays attention to the actual math instead of theatrics, national debt increased in the first 7 months of this fiscal year. In 2023 at this point we had borrowed about one-half a trillion dollars.

Yea, good job.

Now we are at $1.45 trillion, the same time period this year. Yet, you have got to work through the problem with me.

Was 2023 economically that different from this year?

What happened?

What happened? Well, our interest rates went up so we are burning through tremendous amounts of more cash. In the last 12 months, I think we actually had 2 or 3 months where we had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing. Forgive me. I have had a stunning amount of coffee today, I haven't slept well, and I am just cranky.

Mr. Speaker, this chart is actually worse now. It is just the only one I have.

Some of these numbers I have trouble believing. We go back and double-check ourselves. We go back and double-check ourselves because the numbers read differently than the CBO report from 4 months ago or 5 months ago or the OMB report from 6 months ago.

That is because if the economy is supposed to be fairly decent, how can we be bleeding like this?

Think about this, Mr. Speaker. CBO and those who are saying: Hey, we are going to be borrowing about 4.5 percent, 4.7 percent of the economy is going to be in borrowed money. However, so far this fiscal year, our borrowing is closer to 9 percent, 9 percent, of the entire economy.

Why is that important?

Also looking at this chart, we are saying: Here are our tax receipts. We will get the Democrats, and we need to talk about this. They keep saying: Well, if we just tax rich people more.

I have come here multiple times and shown the analysis of higher taxes on those who earn $400,000 and up. We take the left's and this President's proposal, and we say: Let's tax maximize everything. Let's tax maximize their income taxes, their estate taxes, and their capital gains taxes, everything. Then you look at the data, and you get about 1.5 percent of GDP.

Okay, so we have used the Democrats' plan. We are going to tax our way to prosperity. You get about 1.5 of GDP. Great.

Mr. Speaker, do you remember I showed you the chart of nondefense discretionary?

You take 1 percent of that out of GDP, and it is about 40 percent of all nondefense discretionary you just wiped out. Now you have yourself 2.5 percent of GDP that we either tax or we cut.

Great job, guys.

Mr. Speaker, you are seeing a chart here where we are starting to talk about over the coming decade we are going to be at 31 percent of the economy is borrowed, but, hey, guys, everything we talk about we are going to get 1 percent of cuts and 1.5 percent of taxes?

We are borrowing close to 9 percent of GDP right now. The CBO baseline was up like 5.

Does anyone here do math?

Does anyone own a calculator?

Does anyone have a battery in the calculator?

Mr. Speaker, you can't cut yourself and you can't tax enough to make this work.

Yet, we are so vacuous intellectually around here. The ability to say that we are going to embrace the things that disrupt our cost drivers; we are going to actually adopt technology; we are going to adopt artificial intelligence to change the cost of government; we are going to adopt the things that crush the price of healthcare, not by making it more scarce and not by rationing it but by making it more moral.

We can do that. Except this place will run like hell every time you say: Do you know that we could actually have technology that would cure that disease?

Oh, no. That is our business model.

In a couple of weeks, we are going to do a major presentation from the Republican side of the Joint Economic Committee. The math is not done yet. We are trying to grind through the number one cost driver of this government. I am going to get some really, really interesting comments, and it is mathematically true.

It is obesity. We are starting to chase down some data that says that almost one-half of U.S. healthcare has a relationship to obesity. We are about to have our fifth year of prime-age males dying younger.

It is immoral. It is absolutely immoral what this place has become. The debt is immoral, and what we do in healthcare is immoral.

It is bad enough that we are destroying our kids. Mr. Speaker, I am 62, and my wife is 62. Maybe I shouldn't tell you that. I have an 8- year-old daughter we adopted, and I have a 23-month-old little boy we adopted, who is a miracle. Moreover, they are brother and sister.

Do they have the right to have the same life or even be more prosperous?

Because the American sort of societal contract says the next generation will be more prosperous, and right now that is mathematically impossible.

There is a way I can make it work, there is a way you can make it work, Mr. Speaker, and there is a way this place could make it work, but we are so busy knifing each other over petty crap because we are idiots. We are children here, because doing hard things is hard.

My father used to have a saying: If it is a complex problem, then it is a simple solution.

That is absolutely wrong. Complexity requires complexity. The reason for this portion of this tirade is that next year there will be about $380 billion a year in tax hikes. You, as an individual, your LLC, your subchapter S, your passthrough business, congratulations, your taxes are already going up next year. It is the law as it is already.

I will argue it is one of the greatest opportunities we have had in modern times because we are going to be forced to actually act like adults and do something.

Now, here is your battle, Mr. Speaker. Will we be smart, creative, and intellectually robust saying: Hey, let's use this as an opportunity to broaden the Tax Code, fix it in a way where we maximize prosperity and economic growth. Oh, by the way, because we don't want to add to the debt, can we do things over here to actually change some of the debt drivers?

We are going to legalize technology in healthcare. We are going to adopt technology to make government smaller but more efficient. We are going to crowdsource our data in a way where it is current, accurate, and more moral.

We have bills on all of this. This isn't just rhetoric. We have done bills on this stuff for years, and they have gotten much better.

Will the vision, particularly for those who have the responsibility of being on the Ways and Means Committee, will we actually step up and say: Is it going to be binary?

Hey, we are going to raise these people's taxes and lower these so it balances out. Hey, screw everyone.

Yea, we did something.

Are we going to use the stressor that is coming with the expiration of those portions of the 2017 tax reform to actually grow the society?

Mr. Speaker, you have to ask yourself that first, because I don't know if many of my Democrat colleagues agree with me that prosperity is moral.

Having a society where every day you have the chance to live a little bit better, is that moral?

Having a society we are not poisoning ourselves with what we eat, is that moral?

Having a healthcare system that is better, faster, and cheaper, is that moral?

All those things are in front of us because chart after chart after chart basically says that when we have had very high marginal tax rates, we get about 17, 18 percent of GDP. When we have had very low marginal tax rates, we get about 17, 18 percent of GDP.

When we have done lots of extra corporate taxes, we get 17 to 18 percent of GDP.

The fact of the matter is there are lots of brilliant economic papers and people have written their Ph.D. theses on this. You all have access to the internet. Maybe go read it. You are going to get about 17, 18 percent of GDP, and a bunch of the Democrat policies are: Well, let's raise these taxes, and we will get 24 percent of GDP.

Really?

Tell me a time in U.S. history on a sustained basis that has happened. It just hasn't.

Unless the Democrats' plan is to do a value-added tax, a VAT tax, which will crush the working middle class, you ain't getting that number. You have got to stop making crap up.

Yet, we know our spending because it is demographics. Remember our point before: interest, Medicare, and backfilling Social Security.

We got old as a society. I am going to show you a couple of charts here that are really rough, and they are absolutely factual.

The only reason I grabbed this chart, and we are going to go through some of these pretty quickly, it is just to show you over the past four quarters, $600 billion, $288 billion, $487 billion, $258 billion, we are borrowing in quarters where a few years ago that was the entire year.

Here is one of the punch lines: Social Security, $1.452 trillion. That is Social Security this year. However, Social Security is out of your payroll tax and then part of the trust fund. Interest now, there were a few of our brothers and sisters on that side who mocked me a few months ago when I said: I think we are going to close in on 1.1, $1.2 trillion in interest this year.

Oh, Schweikert, you have got to stop making crap up.

Treasury's own number, $1.144 trillion is the interest.

If you want this number to go down, then make us look like a stable government. Make us look like we are adults. Convince the bond markets we are actually going to take on our debt in a meaningful way instead of playing theatrics.

This is interesting. Right now, there is actually a little bit of squish here, so you have to understand. Mr. Speaker, our most recent Treasury update, defense now is number 3 and Medicare is number 4. We actually think that is going to flip again because last month it was flipped and reversed, but they are almost identical right now. The punch line here is interest now is the second biggest expense in the government. At our current borrowing rate, and if interest rates stay where they are at or go up just a little bit, in a couple of years, interest, interest, will be the number one spend in this government.

Congratulations.

Mr. Speaker, this is a hard chart to read. The point of this one is just interest fragility, what happens with small movements in interest rates on U.S. sovereign debt. The basic point is where we are interest rate-wise right now in 2033. Right now, we are working on the 2025 fiscal year budget; 7, 8 budget years from now, our model at today's interest rates we are at 3, $3.7 trillion baseline borrowing.

That is already our model. That is without a recession. That is without a war. That is without a pandemic. That is just where we are at.

I have some other articles talking about how fragile we have made ourselves. God forbid, this year or next year, we go into a true recession. Do you have any idea how fragile we have made this government, this country, with our ravenous borrowing?

What would happen if tax receipts started to roll over a bit on us because we went into a recession? Remember, tax receipts are up about 7 percent. Medicare spending is up around 10 percent this fiscal year. If that rolled over and wasn't 7 percent and was closer to 4 percent or 5 percent, do you want to talk about a bloodbath?

Raising interest rates could push the national debt toward 300 percent of GDP within 30 years. How many of you think the bond markets are going to let us get anywhere near 300 percent of GDP with our savings rates? If you are Japan, maybe you can do it. You would have remarkably high savings rates. They can almost finance their own debt. Actually, they do finance their own debt. Do you think the rest of the world is going to keep loaning us money, respecting the sovereignty of the reserve currency that is the dollar?

Why are we destroying ourselves? Why are we destroying your retirement? Why are we destroying your kids, my young kids? Yet, the hallways, once again, are full of people wanting more money.

Let's talk through a couple of things that are even more uncomfortable than talking about the debt. You all saw a week ago Friday the update on U.S. fertility rates. Yes, we are going to have an idiot Congressman talk about how many children we are having in society because it is important.

We sit there in our offices, and I am blessed to have some freaky smart staff, people much smarter than I ever could dream to be, a bunch of economists, and we are trying to figure out, over the next decade, two decades, how do we pay Social Security? How do we pay Medicare? How do we do these things?

The Democrats say that we will just raise more taxes, but then you show them the studies that that math doesn't work.

Are we just going to lie to our voters and survive the next election? Great job, guys, but we have a little problem. A week ago Friday, you saw the updated report on the 2023 fertility rates. I was wrong on my number. It is worse. It is worse than the speeches I came here and gave.

We are down to 1.62, meaning we are way below replacement rates now. The United States is dying, and one of the things I am frustrated with is the Census Bureau numbers basically say that when we start to get beyond--because, remember, the Census Bureau had us at 1.64, it turns out they were wrong. It is 1.62, and they were projecting as we go through the rest of this century, which is a long time.

Think about your kids. If you have a young child right now, they are going to live, hopefully, with the Lord's blessing, 100 years. We start to collapse populationwise, and we are going to walk you through a couple of why these are such a big deal.

Deaths are projected to exceed births. This chart said 2040. It is a little sooner. If you take last week's fertility number, in about 15 years, the United States will have more deaths than births.

There is no industrialized country that has succeeded in adopting policy that changed their fertility rates in the long run, so you have Hungary and these others that say, in your future life, have a fourth kid, and pay no income taxes in the future. We will buy you a house, and you get a little pop, and then, boom, after a few years, it moves right back to mean.

You have to deal with the reality. It turns out, all over the world, as the world has gotten more prosperous, we have a collapse in fertility, yet we built a social entitlement system. It is earned benefits. You earned your Medicare. You earned your Social Security. They were based on the concept that there would be this many workers because the reality is that today's FICA taxpayer's and payroll taxpayer's paycheck went into your Social Security check today, or your Medicare. It is just the way it has always been.

What happens when that next generation gets smaller? Are we also emotionally and mentally prepared for the number of schools that will be closing? It is starting to happen all over the country because U.S. fertility started to roll over in 1990. It has just now accelerated. We had a tiny little blip during the pandemic, and now it has gone back. The trend line continues to get uglier and uglier.

It is reality. Think about it. You live in a country where, in 15 years, we will have more deaths than births. Are we prepared for that? Are you ready, are we ready, is this body intellectually ready for saying you are going to adopt policies that are child friendly, this and that? There is no other country that has come up with an example where it actually raised the number of children. Are we ready to adopt policy to embrace technology?

This is where it gets really uncomfortable. How many robots are you ready to embrace? How much AI are you ready to embrace? When you call the IRS, instead of having a person, are

you ready to be talking to ChatGPT? Probably, in that case, you might prefer the chat.

We are going to have to adopt the embracement, or whatever the word would be, of technology in ways to keep the economy growing without more people, and this is happening all over the industrialized world.

How many times behind these microphones have you heard any Member of Congress come and say: I actually care about prosperity. I care about the next generation. I care about economic growth. I care about the future. We are going to adopt things where we are going to embrace technology so we can keep having prosperity.

What? The math is the math, and the math will always win.

One of the things I am also annoyed with is, reading through the Social Security actuarial report, they are making crap up. They have fertility numbers in here. They have us growing.

CBO actually has numbers growing, yet we talk about the Census Bureau, and the Census Bureau is down here. Could our government agencies--we spend a fortune with all these actuaries--maybe have a cocktail party, preferably no alcohol? Make it a coffee. We will do a coffee because that is what we need, a bunch of well-caffeinated actuaries in the same room from Social Security, from maybe OMB, CBO, a couple of these others, the Census Bureau, all in the same room. Can you give us a number because you are making it miserable around here trying to say what our future looks like because, so far, they keep being wrong.

It is a little geeky, but that is important, and that was my mocking them for the number of times I send them memos saying: Can you explain your number and why it is so different than each other?

I had some questions on this from last week, so I just brought the board back. You had the President stand right there, and he basically said that we are going to do this from Medicare, that we are going to raise this tax and this and that.

The red portion here is when you pay your payroll tax. That is the portion that goes to the Medicare trust fund. The rest, you functionally pay for. This comes out of the general fund, which we are borrowing part of it. Over here, that is actually your premiums, and a little bit of this is some other transfers. Then, we also have a little slice here, which is for dual eligibles, those who are seniors but maybe in Medicare and Medicaid, so we also get a little sliver from the State. Once again, the majority of spending in Medicare is not the trust fund.

I am elated that the current model on the trust fund extended for another few years. That is wonderful. We need to sort of study that, except if you read the actuary report, the reason it extended is really fragile. This dark blue there, that and interest are the primary drivers of U.S. debt.

Tell the truth. Maybe it will get you unelected, but how do you make public policy in a world where you are not allowed to tell the truth? That is what Members of Congress do.

``Rising Security and Medicare Shortfalls Drive Nearly Entire 2019- 2033 Deficit Rise.'' That is the fact. That is CBO's own quote.

Here is the board that I promise will be in the attack ad going at me in the next election, except it is CBO's own numbers, except it is 2 years out of date. There is a number right here that basically says Social Security and Medicare, $116 trillion deficit, and the rest of the budget, $3 trillion, is functionally in balance. Except the problem is, for anyone right now, if you care enough, go grab your phone. Go use a search engine and look up CBO's report from 6 weeks ago. The 30- year number is not $116 trillion. It is $143 trillion that is now our model.

That is what higher interest rates did, $143 trillion, 100 percent of that borrowing, Medicare and the interest financing on that, backfilling of Social Security and the interest financing on that. We can revolutionize this if we would finally be willing to legalize technology, the morality of moving and pushing cures.

Why does this place seem to like to finance people's misery instead of working with the FDA, working with biopharma, working with the people out there who are disrupting disease and misery? We seem to have a place around here that wants to build diabetic clinics instead of curing diabetes. What is wrong with the morality of this place?

Another thing we are trying to figure out in the Social Security actuary report is they play this game where, hey, when we get the out- years, things collapse. We will do that in a week or two because it is a little complex.

Another chart just trying to explain, once again, what is the part A trust fund, part B general fund. This here, part D, also is a combination of some of the fees you pay. That is your Medicare.

Back to the last couple of points I want to make here.

When I just told you we are about to have our fifth year of prime-age males dying younger, is it moral to stand here and say--remember, this chart functionally ends at 2020. It has actually gotten uglier.

The U.S. is an outlier in disease and disability trends. We are sicker than the rest of the industrialized world. Is it that we are not spending enough on healthcare? Well, that is absurd because, let's be honest, we engage in agricultural policy and nutrition support policy where you can take your EBT card and go buy onion rings.

Is that moral? Why isn't there a fixation in this place when we have States where over half of the population statistically is obese? They are dying on us. We have a society that finances crap in our diets. Why would we do this to each other? Is that Republican or Democratic? I am just trying to make the arguments. It turns out, if you took it on, it is the single biggest thing you can do for U.S. debt, taking on the very things that are killing us.

I have done presentations before. They were a little geeky trying to explain that if we could make our society healthier, it is the single biggest thing I can do to reduce U.S. debt. You all remember your high school economics class, first-degree effects, second-degree effects, third-degree effects, knockoff effects. Do you remember all the weird language? You want more of our brothers and sisters to be able to marry and family formation and participate in society and be able to participate in the economy. Help us make our society healthier.

Mr. Speaker, I am trying to make the morality argument that the very thing that would be most effective for us to take on the U.S. debt is legalizing technology to crash the price of healthcare, putting technology into this government to make government smaller and more efficient. It requires thinking.

It also requires really annoying a whole bunch of the people in our hallways demanding more money from us. It would also be incredibly moral. It would actually give our kids a chance, in many ways, for the prosperity that we and previous generations had.

Let's think about it: We have done this to ourselves. There is a way out. It is not easy. It requires some complexity. Are these Republican or Democrat ideas? They are neither; they are just hard. They are just hard.

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

Mr. Speaker, we are going to do something this evening. Unless you want to sort of geek out a bit, I am not sure you want to hang out watching this, so maybe there is something good on Netflix.

I am going to walk through a couple of financial debt concepts I tried sharing last week just to help people sort of get their heads around something. Then we are going to actually just go through a couple of top lines on the Social Security actuary report. Now, I have to admit, I haven't finished it. We have only just gone through some of the very top line. It is going to take me a week or two to work out all the math. We want to make sure--because some of the headlines, I believe, were misleading on just, still, how difficult these numbers are.

Then we are going to go through sort of understanding the scale of the problem. Then we are going do a little bit of talking about optimism, and we are going to do some discussion about AI, artificial intelligence, in government, and some of the bills we have actually already introduced to disrupt the cost of this government.

We keep hearing sort of the nasty and horrible noise that the world is coming to an end. I am going to argue that if we get artificial intelligence right, we can make a difference in government.

So let's first walk through the first concept.

Mr. Speaker, how many of you remember a little while back--I think it was S&P or was it Moody's--it may have been Moody's, downgraded U.S. debt?

We have had two downgrades. Of the three largest rating agencies, we have been downgraded twice.

Now, I know every Member of Congress and all of our staff read every word of it, but if you actually read it, Mr. Speaker, there is an entire report about why they would downgrade U.S. debt. It was more of a downgrade of future horizons. One of the number one reasons on that downgrade was governance.

Now, the fact of the matter is the debt picture is off the charts. I am going to show one chart here where I think we have now had our fourth day in the last couple of weeks where we went over $100,000 per second of borrowing.

Mr. Speaker, do you screw with your bankers?

Because this is my passion, I try to convince my brothers and sisters here in Congress: You have to act like an adult. Have fights here. Actually know your math. Bend the cost of government, but don't do stupid things and then turn around.

That is because this week, understand, Mr. Speaker, this week, I believe, the Treasury is going to market for about $125 billion. Our interest rates are actually slightly down this week compared to last week, but the fact that those interest rates bounce up and down this much lets you know sort of how nervous the debt markets are.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, 2 weeks ago a lot of the fancy financial markets were writing stories about how U.S. debt is getting harder to sell. This week it looks like it is easier to sell.

That is fragility. I know that is a big word, but it is the only one I have for this. Don't play a game here. We will pay $1.2 trillion in interest this year. Interest for the United States in this fiscal year will be the second biggest expense in government. Social Security will be $1.450 trillion. Interest will be $1.2 trillion. Medicare is almost $1 trillion. Defense is $960 or $980 billion. Think of that, Mr. Speaker. Defense is now the fourth biggest expense in government. It is no longer the first or second.

Part of that concept is--this one is a little more for those folks who like to think of themselves as sort of monetary policy folks, think about what the Federal Reserve has been trying to do. They have been raising interest rates, they have been pulling liquidity, they have been holding back on buying bonds and doing just the opposite, letting their portfolio roll off. They are trying to pull liquidity out of society to squeeze inflation out.

However, this place has actually made it that much harder to do. It is craziness how much we spent in the Inflation Reduction Act, which is singularly the most Orwellian-named piece of legislation in modern history. You do realize, Mr. Speaker, in the Cloakroom a moment ago, I was trying to do this math off the top of my head. I think it is like $2.8 billion a day that we pay in interest. We pay that in interest. The U.S. Government pays that to bondholders every day.

So here is what you have, Mr. Speaker. We are borrowing about $8 to $8.5 billion a day. We are paying out $2.8 billion a day in interest.

The question is: Is government borrowing really good for productivity in this society?

Does government borrowing actually make us a wealthier society, a more prosperous society?

Now, some borrowing is historic. You are going to do that.

However, at the scale we are consuming, we are consuming much of the

world's liquidity, not just of the United States. The United States and China are the two big economies right now bingeing on debt. Europe actually has dialed back its debt.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, I did the presentation last week, and I think there were 13 countries that had better credit ratings than the United States.

Greece today has a better credit rating than the United States. Their 10-year bond is cheaper, lower in interest costs, than the U.S.

Much of that risk premium is governance. It is the belief saying: Oh, the United States is going to use its tools to bend inflation. The United States is going to do the things necessary to actually lower debt and borrowing.

Are we?

You see the conversations we have around here. Most of the time these microphones are full of people coming up with new programs and new ways to spend money.

So understand, Mr. Speaker, I had two concepts I just walked you through. They are a little highbrow. The first is you need to actually have a government that convinces the bond markets that we are serious, and we respect our creditors.

Let's be honest, Mr. Speaker, if you borrow a bunch of money, you don't go into your creditor and make a clown of yourself. We need to do the same.

The second half is understanding the economic mess we are making. It is more than just the borrowing. It is the fact you pulled capital out of the markets that would have gone to more productive uses, and at the same time we are paying interest. Now we are paying interest that in some ways is higher than people who said: Why would I take a risk premium and invest in something, a new plant, a new widget maker, those sorts things, when I can get 5 percent on a 2-year? I am going to do that.

The scale of our debt is creating economic distortion. It is just a concept we need to understand, that also in some ways Congress--and this always drives people crazy who believe it is Fed and liquidity, but in many ways, Congress, because of our borrowing, has actually created this liquidity cycle where we borrow and then we are pumping out interest. We borrow it, and then we give you almost a premium on the interest rate, and we are paying you out. It is a real problem.

In many ways, we have made the Federal Reserve's job even more difficult for squeezing inflation out. Almost no one has actually spent time on it. There are a couple of good academic articles if you want to geek out, Mr. Speaker.

All right. We have used this chart over and over and over because we are trying to help people understand.

Do you see the blue, Mr. Speaker?

The blue is what we get to vote on.

Mr. Speaker, you do understand every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed.

So interest, this number is wrong now. Interest, if you do gross interest, is 1.2. Publicly borrowed interest is probably--it may be somewhere near that, $890 or $900 billion.

This is interest.

This is Social Security.

This is Medicare.

This is Medicaid.

These are other mandatory programs.

These are earned benefits. You worked your 40 quarters; you get your maximum Social Security.

You worked so much, you get Medicare.

However, I need you also to be willing to hear some very difficult math of how Medicare is actually financed to understand its impact on the debt and deficit.

There are other benefits out there that are in the formula you get because we have a treaty obligation with some of our Native American population, where if you fall below a certain income, you get certain subsidies, those sorts of things. Those are also considered mandatory programs.

The point here is the vast majority of U.S. spending your Member of Congress never ever gets to vote on, and we need to change that. We need to start telling the truth that we are hemorrhaging cash. At these interest rates you have got to understand, Mr. Speaker, what we are doing to your retirement and your kids' futures.

So let's actually walk through. I will just do this board. You can actually go to my website and sign up. There is a little thing there you sign up for. Give us your phone number, we will send you a text message every single day called the daily debt. We have been doing this for several months now. You get a little text that says: Here is what we borrowed today. Here is what the gross borrowing is. We do the last 365 days. This year it is 366 days because of leap year. Over here we do the fiscal year.

When you look here at the total gross--now, remember, that is borrowing from the trust funds as well as publicly issued--we have now gone 4 days in the last couple of weeks where we went over $100,000 a second--a second. For anyone there that has a relative who doesn't believe the debt is a big deal, sign them up. Send us their phone number. We will send them a text message every day, and they can start to understand the scale of how much of this U.S. economy now is in debt.

Remember, think about that. If the U.S. economy is about $28 trillion, $29 trillion, and we are going to borrow this year--publicly borrow, not total borrowing--publicly borrow maybe $2.7 trillion, $2.8 trillion, you are functionally borrowing, what, 9 percent of the entire economy? That is remarkable.

I am hoping I am wrong. CBO thought we would only be at about 5.4 percent, but if you look at our current burn rate, the concept--and why that is important. Remember, I have come here and done the presentation of the left's version of let's tax people over 400,000. You do it, and then you say, okay, you max--there is this concept of tax maximization where I can tax your income to a certain point, but the next percent of tax on you, it rolls over. You will actually say: Screw it, I am not going to work as much.

It is basically a concept based off sort of the Laffer curve concept, but you can get the same thing in capital gains. How much of capital gains today is just inflation? It is not actually appreciation of your asset. It is inflation changes of your asset, estate taxes, your passthroughs, all those things.

The math came out to about 1.5 percent, 1.6 percent of GDP you could get by tax maximizing everything for those over $400,000. Play this math with me. If it is 1.5 percent of the economy and, so far this year, we are borrowing over 9 percent of the economy, does that give you an idea?

Those of us who want to cut spending, if you are not allowed to touch defense and if you are not allowed to touch any of that mandatory I just showed you, you have the nondefense discretionary spending--what was it? Let's call it $900 billion--can you get 1 percent of GDP, 1.5 percent? Yeah, you could cut all sorts of programs.

Remember the Bloomberg economist, a year ago, put out a report saying, if you took $100 billion out of nondefense discretionary, you actually lowered GDP about one-half of a percent, so everyone who says: We are going to cut and we are going to pretend the economy is going to grow at this rate, that is not how the math works. Now, in the long run, you have more capital stock, those things, but in the short run, you actually lowered GDP with these cuts. You have just got to deal with it. It is the reality of economics and math.

One of the things I wanted to go through is that very few people here have ever paid much attention to Medicare and how we finance it, and where does the money come from? You had the President behind that podium that made it sound like you are not allowed to talk about Social Security and we are going to actually raise these taxes for Medicare.

Okay. You have to understand. You see this red area there? Think of that as Medicare part A. That is the trust fund. That is, when you pay your payroll tax, a little slice of that goes to this right here. That is the trust fund that bounces up and down. One day it is 6 years away from running out. Now, it is 2035 because of some changes and good employment and the economy, but it is really sensitive.

This blue here, most folks don't understand. The majority here, the biggest single slice of the pie, of Medicare, comes right out of the general fund. When we talk about healthcare costs going up, they are already up over 10

percent this year. Tax receipts are up 7 percent, but Medicare costs are up 10 percent. That is a huge hit on the general fund.

Over here, you see this. That is actually premiums. Then here are some actual State transfers and those things, some of the dual eligibles and some of those things. You have a lot of folks who run around here somehow thinking Medicare is financed off of the FICA tax, the payroll tax, and it is not. It is about a third of the spending.

And why that is important is the actuary report that came out yesterday actually was okay on Medicare. We gained a few years. The reason, if you really dig into it, it is these minute changes and, I believe, unrealistically optimistic numbers that healthcare costs are going to stabilize--even though, this year, Medicare costs are up 10 percent, so I don't know how they justified those two numbers.

Guess what I am going to do the next week or two. We are going to read every line and try to figure out what they were saying in here. Welcome to my life.

But when you see this, see this part A here--now we are doing it in blue--that is actually part of your payroll tax. The part B and part D, those are substantially coming out of the general fund. It turns out Medicare, other than interest, is the biggest spend out of the general fund because Social Security, until the trust fund is gone, does not have a general fund aspect.

Social Security is self-financed right now. It is payroll tax and trust fund, but that is why so many of us are freaked out that--is it 8 years? 9 years? Is it now 2035, or 2034? We are going to get to that. I need you to understand they played a little game where they combined the disability trust fund number and the old age survivor fund number. The old age survivor was still at 2033, but then you roll in disability, actually--because so many people are able to work in the new economy--its number was better. They combined the two, and that is where you really got some of the added time on the trust fund. Yay.

All right. Now, let's go to the place that gets a lot of people really cranky. We are going to tell you the truth. You need to process this because you have had people in the political class, the media class, the fraud information class that comes through these things and tell you stories about Social Security and Medicare that just mathematically aren't true.

Let's get ready for the truth. This is based on an average couple-- not an individual--average couple. This number is updated. Look, the average couple in a lifetime--this is an average in America. I think we are actually basing this on a 2023 number--average couple will pay in $783,000 in their lifetime in Social Security taxes. It is amazing.

How many people will you hear: But they stole my money. No, actually, it turns out that the average couple gets every dime of that back. The benefits they will receive will be about 831,000, so a $70,000-some spiff. Okay. Crap rate of return.

You have got to understand. George Bush, what, 20-some years ago when they talked about taking just a tiny slice of your money and allowing you to control it and put it into other types of accounts, you would have had a stunning amount of money. The left beat the crap out of Republicans over that. They are trying to privatize. That wasn't the deal. We can look back now. You got lied to. You got played for fools.

But we got what we wanted. The average American actually gets every dime back of their Social Security, plus a little spiff. Horrible rate of return, but you get it all back. That isn't where the crisis is. What crushes the future Federal debt and deficit is the Medicare portion.

That same average couple in that lifetime will pay $214,000 into that Medicare part A trust fund. Remember, I already showed you the majority of Medicare doesn't actually come from the trust fund. It covers about 35 percent of spending. The rest comes in from your premiums, from the general fund, from some State transfers, other things.

That average couple is going to pay $214,000 in taxes into Medicare. They are going to get $635,000 in benefits. That difference there is the number one driver of U.S. debt. Political class, it is so dangerous to tell you the truth because it makes our core voters cranky.

It is not your fault. We as a society, we made a deal with all of us. These are earned benefits. We made a deal. You worked your 40 quarters for Social Security. You worked your time. You paid your taxes. You got to 65. That was the societal deal. But what this place didn't do is think about the cost of healthcare. We were so terrified to incentivize, to require, to encourage, to prod innovation, disruptions in cost. We committed a fraud here, and this fraud has gone on here for decades.

We tell you: ObamaCare, we are doing something on healthcare. ObamaCare was a finance bill. It is who had to pay taxes and who got subsidized. Our Republican bill, it was better. It fixed part of the actuarial curve problem, but it was still a finance bill. It is who had to pay and who got subsidized. Do you see the difference?

Medicare For All is a financing bill because we don't talk about what healthcare actually costs, and that is what we are going to end on, is I am going to give you some of the basic ideas of what we could do, the morality of disrupting the cost of healthcare. This is uncomfortable because I have done this at public meetings, and I get booed by my friends because a lot of people don't want to be told every dime of U.S. borrowing from today through the next 30 years--every dime--this is according to CBO and a bunch of the outside groups--every dime, interest, Medicare--and let's use the actuary, 2035--it is actually just the very beginning of 2035, and if there is one economic bump, it comes back down to 2033.

Instead of the 25 percent cut you were heading toward getting in Social Security, the fed gets paid out of the general fund, those three things are calculated to be 100 percent of the borrowing.

Here is the 2024 CBO long-term debt report that I know every Member of Congress here read, every line. When I started doing this presentation a few years ago, the long-term debt was $116 trillion. Remember, I just told you, it is interest and healthcare. And then, if we backfill Social Security, now it is $141 trillion.

As of March, when CBO did their long-term numbers, it is no longer $116 trillion. It is $141 trillion. And, if these interest rates stick around, which our economists say they are going to because we are still not at the historic norm--how many Members of Congress have gotten in front of you and told you the truth that 100 percent of borrowing from today through the next 30 years, the growth of it--the growth-- interest, healthcare, if we backfill Social Security in 10 years, and now it is $141 trillion?

There is a way to make this work. Are you willing to adopt technology? Some of it is incredibly simple stuff.

I am going to do a slight non sequitur here, but I have done it over time because it is so easy to understand. We calculate--and there are multiple studies saying this--16 percent of all of U.S. healthcare is people that get sick or have a stroke or a heart attack, these things, because they didn't stay on--someone like me, can you imagine, who drinks 7 or 8 cups of coffee a day? I have hypertension. As long as I take my calcium inhibitor, I am not likely to have a stroke. If you are diabetic, if you follow your regimen, you should be fine, but 16 percent of people in U.S. healthcare are people that don't take or don't follow their regimen. That is $600 billion this year in healthcare costs.

Do you care about U.S. debt? Think about something crazy. You could actually just get a pill bottle for 99 cents that the cap beeps at you: Hey, did you take your statin? Did you take your hypertension medicine? It would cost 99 cents. You would be amazed. I have had that piece of legislation for years around here.

I could no more get a hearing here because, well, that is creative. Maybe the outside world likes having sick people because they make money off of them. That is incredibly cynical for me to say. How many revolutionary pieces of legislation do you see coming through here that are simple, easy to understand, and make huge differences in the cost of healthcare?

No, David, a pill bottle cap that beeps at me that might save us $100 billion, we can't do that. Why the hell not? It is almost immoral.

Look, I have done this before trying to show you that, over the next couple decades, it is actually Medicare that starts to consume approaching 7 percent of the entire economy, just that. You start to add in Social Security, that is going 5.9 percent. You start to understand, when you are starting to look at numbers of 13 percent, 14 percent of the entire economy is just those two programs. You are probably not going to change Social Security. That is an earned benefit.

You could change the cost of healthcare by introducing technology disruptions, other business models, if this place was willing to be just somewhat creative, maybe read some of the journals out there. We are going to talk about some of those disruptions to our economy.

Should I make you actually understand that in 2034, the deficits--the reason I have this chart is, I am trying to help folks understand how far we missed.

If you and I go back a year ago, at that point we were saying, we will have about a $1.3 trillion borrowing. Then it went up. It might be 1.6.

How do we get expected deficits where we are missing numbers this much? Understanding the economic effects of what it actually does to economic growth when the smart people we keep turning to over in the administration, even our own CBO, are missing these numbers by 100 percent, when a year or two later the debt numbers double.

Does that let you understand something? If the economy is decent-- also what happened a week ago Friday, we went from running at a 2.8, 2.9 percent GDP to, oh, sorry, we were wrong. The first quarter was only 1.7.

There is something wrong in our data collection, and I don't know if it is the continued impacts of inflation making your life feel much heavier, much more stressed, but this stuff doesn't have to be terrifying. There are ways to attack it if you are willing to read, willing to be part of the action.

This chart has been around forever, and it just keeps getting uglier every time it gets updated. I am trying to help you understand current baseline debt with some of the policy changes and the higher interest rates. Remember, we are running substantially higher than this this year, but long-term baseline is going to start being just the borrowing. It will be 5, 6, 7 percent of the entire economy.

Long-run debt, if you go the 30-year window, debt starts to approach 32 percent of entire GDP. Do you think the bond markets are ever going to let us get anywhere near that? You tell me where on this line here we blow up.

It is not a crash. What it is is, you have got to turn on the printing presses. You start to inflate your way out. All your savings get devalued. Remember, I have done two or three presentations on this here. What is the biggest tax hike in modern history? You are living it. Understand, you are living it.

The last 3 years of the Biden administration because of the higher inflation, in my district, unless you right now make about 24 percent more today than you did the day the President took office, you are poorer if you live in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area.

If you are not making the 24 percent, you have the right to be cranky because that was a transfer of your wealth to the U.S. debt because we lowered the value of your purchasing power, but we now pay it back. We pay back the U.S. debt because the United States is the largest debtor in the world. We now pay it back with inflated dollars. It is a tax. Whether you understand it or not, inflation is a tax. Welcome to the biggest tax in modern history, and you just lived it.

Have you ever wondered why so many of our brothers and sisters on the left despise it when we talk about inflation? The answer: Because it worked for them.

It turns out when you have that inflation, the size of the debt as a percentage of GDP sort of flatlines a bit until the new higher interest rates come slamming into you, and that is where we are at now.

Let's do some optimistic stuff or semi-optimistic. I want us to think about how disruptive we can be if we actually read and if we think. I think my staff who made this one got a little carried away, but you do realize I think we just had the eighth OMB report that is saying the Pentagon is unauditable. They cannot audit it.

Do you really know your inventory? Do we know how many assets we have? It turns out we can't audit them. So why not do something crazy. How about this idea: We have multiple companies now that have designed artificial intelligence, AI audit crawlers that crawl through every asset list, every inventory list, every bookkeeping entry, everything. You could actually audit the Pentagon; you just have to use technology not a building full of people.

We have this as a piece of legislation. If it works, you could then unleash this type of technology on the fraudsters of Medicare, the durable medical equipment fraudsters, the billing fraudsters. How about all up and down government to find the waste and fraud?

The technology can do it. We and our army of auditors can't seem to do it. Can you believe I can't get a hearing on this? AI will audit the Pentagon. You would think this would be a no-brainer, but this place is terrified of the very technology that can save us.

Let's actually walk through a couple other ideas. How about if I came to you and said we could fast-track a drug, a vaccine--and for anyone that is actually watching and is curious, I want you right now to grab your favorite search engine on your phone and look up a fentanyl vaccine.

There is also one for cocaine, a cocaine vaccine. It turns out it is in trials right now where they figured out how to block the receptor. The cocaine one, because it is not a synthetic, the vaccine actually attaches to the protein. What is the morality in a society when you are approaching 100,000 of our brothers and sisters who die every year of synthetic opioid? What happens when law enforcement pulls over someone coming out of southern Arizona, and they have fentanyl tablets or powder shoved in their glove box and that law enforcement officer is exposed to it and has to slam Narcan into his system?

I am told in the Phoenix area we have one dead homeless person a day, almost always from fentanyl. Why isn't this moral? Why isn't the morality of this is if they are really heading toward this technology, let's fast-track it. Let's do an XPRIZE. Let's find some way to get it into our community and try it. Maybe it doesn't work.

There are all sorts of other ethical or moral applications. Does someone have to be in their right mind? Do they have to have sobered up to be able to make the decision to take something that keeps them from being able to have the receptors for the synthetic opioid. But let us embrace these things.

How many more people have to die? You think I am ever going to get a hearing on this? These are moral, but they are also great for the economy. How many people could come back into society, into the labor force, or actually mitigate their addiction? These are moral, and they are also great economics.

Let's actually walk through some of the other things going on that are wonderful, but we have to figure out here if we are going to do things to help finance it because it doesn't work right now.

Today, the very first patient here in D.C. began the process of having their sickle cell cured. Now, it is a rigorous process, but it is a cure for one of the most expensive diseases in this country. Once again, I argue and my team argues, the morality is in the cure, and it is also great economics. When you have a population that suffers a painful disease and there is a path to cure them now, because this has been FDA approved, and it is going into the first patient right now outside of the trials.

Let's actually walk through this. Right now there is a revolution happening in really smart labs all over America, where they are using AI to design the next generation of drugs. There is a great story from last week. I think it was WIRED magazine--if you want to geek out-- saying that AI produced a small molecule drug that no one had ever thought of, and at least on the computer simulator, it has amazing efficacy.

Why wouldn't we promote or why wouldn't we work with the FDA, that is saying we have the ability to do the datasets much faster, bring these things to market faster, cure people faster? Or is the 1930s, 1940s FDA model what we are still going to stand behind?

A cancer vaccine, particularly one--we have already had the conversation about the one for melanoma. This one is more brain cancer. It is actually going into trials. How do we help these things come to market faster? It is moral and it also saves boatloads of cash.

I showed you healthcare costs which are our primary driver. Do we do what the troglodytes around here say, well, we will just cut reimbursements, or you can stand in the waiting line longer? Or do we do this: cure people?

We have about a half a dozen AI bills just for healthcare. The concept of bringing technology faster, using AI to find fraudsters, using AI for the back office, for example, you are a doctor's office or medical clinic using AI to say--it is called AI clean claims.

Instead of going through the rigmarole--boom--you just match up the insurance companies or the Medicare or the rules, and if they match-- boom--it is paid. You just cut the staff. Yes, it does remove some people, but it also removes a hell of a lot of cost.

I talked to you about using AI to audit the Pentagon. The fact of the matter is, this is the MedPAC report from 3 weeks ago--and I know every Member of Congress read it, but there is one thing in here, when you go through it, that explodes at you and that basically says--it is falling apart because we have been using it so much--at the end of this decade, Medicare will be about 23 percent of every corporate tax dollar and personal tax dollar we collect. That is from 13 percent to 23 percent, and that is coming in just a few more years.

There is this term called a ``black swan.'' That is when something sneaks up on you, blows you up, and you weren't expecting it.

This is called a ``white swan.'' You know it is coming for you and you choose to do nothing about it.

I know I come behind this microphone every week, and I am almost mentally exhausted. Is anyone listening? There are solutions. Our problem is the clock is ticking. The on-ramp to bring those solutions to market, to actually have an effect on our debt and borrowing and economic growth, I think we only have 3, 4, 5 more years, but you have got to deal with the real numbers.

When this place borrows $8.5 billion a day and we will lose our minds over things that mathematically are rounding errors, when we have done things in this body that have made the bond markets nervous, when a single basis point--so 1 percent of interest has 100 basis points--a single basis point just this year cost us about $800 million.

I have watched us--sorry. I am not supposed to curse on the floor. I have watched us have debates where we say absolutely insane things and you can almost watch parts of the market saying: Nope. I think U.S. debt just got riskier because these people aren't serious about economic growth and stability.

Mr. Speaker, there are ways to make this work. Is anyone listening?

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Austin Scott).

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to explain something. I have come behind this mike a number of times, and I have had a little trouble. Apparently, I am not communicating well, so I am going to try a

slightly different way. Let's back up a bit.

I think I was behind this mike 2 weeks ago and then the week before that and probably the week before that. One of my comments was that I can't figure out how the United States can have a 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, at one point, GDP growth and still be borrowing at the rate we are borrowing.

Remember, a week or so ago, we had 3 days during that week when we went over a $100,000 a second borrowing. We see tax receipts up 7-plus percent, yet we are still burning through cash at an incredible rate and having to borrow.

It turns out, last Friday, we got the punch line. We were wrong. The Atlanta Fed and others had their math wrong. We got an update. We were all thinking that the GDP the Atlanta Fed had been estimating the first quarter of this calendar year--not fiscal year, calendar year--was sitting at about 2.7 percent. They came in and said no, they were wrong. It looks like we are at about 1.6 percent.

That is a big deal, and it helps explain why we were having such difficulty getting the math to line up. Why is this a big deal? The other concept I have been trying to sell and trying to sink into our skulls here is the bankers, the people who buy U.S. sovereign debt, when you have to borrow $2 trillion, $3 trillion a year, and refinance several trillion a year--don't make the bond markets upset with you.

As of today, the 2-year note went over 5.05 percent. We are not there yet, but we are almost to last year's highs. It is the highest this calendar year, but we are back to really expensive debt. I have some data here that says we are still not back to the historical average of where U.S. debt should be.

If I came to you right now and said one of the reasons Members of Congress need to act like adults, besides our obligation to govern, is: Do you really want to make your bankers nervous?

Think about this. We were playing around with some math the other day. It is hard math to do because you have to figure out how much comes to market in U.S. sovereigns that have to be refinanced, how much are virgin issues, saying this is our excess spending this year. We were playing with numbers. Remember, 1 point of interest has 100 basis points in it, so 1 basis point, 1/100th of percent of interest in a 365-day calendar year, would be about maybe $800 million.

Think of some of the things we fight over here and the words we sometimes say on this floor. You can actually watch bond markets go: These people aren't serious about ever paying us back.

The second concept here is that as we walk through this, remember, we fixate on the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve does the short end of interest rates, the 2 years. That is where they have influence. When you start to look at 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years, the debt market is saying: Do we get paid back? What will U.S. inflation be? What is governance going to be? Are they going to play some games with how they pay? Are they going to raise taxes dramatically? So, we are going to be fixing this instrument, and then U.S. taxes go up here, and our actual rate of return crashes.

For my brothers and sisters here on the left and the right, be careful when you want to engage in the nihilism, the burn the place down. You think it is sort of fun. One of these days, the bond market is going to look at us, and this happened in the 1990s--we have already had a couple of bond auctions in the last 12 months that were undersubscribed the way we thought they would be. You are actually now seeing articles saying American bonds are getting harder to sell. I think that was from The Wall Street Journal this last week. You have to understand that you are playing games with fire.

Interest this year, if today's interest rates hold, we are approaching $1.2 trillion this fiscal year. That means Social Security is $1.45 trillion; interest is $1.2 trillion; Medicare is underneath that; and defense is number four.

One of the punch lines I wanted to bring. Just so you can see it is-- we threw together a little chart. Remember, these are just 12 countries, and then the United States. We are number 13 on there. The markets price U.S. debt higher, meaning they consider it more risky. Risk comes in many forms when you start to look at debt markets, from what is the inflation, what is the likelihood to be paid back, are there going to be other risk profiles, what is happening to the country demographically.

When you start to realize the United States right now pays higher interest rates on a 10-year bond than Greece, higher than the United Kingdom, Canada, the Republic of Korea, Greece, Spain, France, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland. They are down here at the bottom. Understand, you take these industrialized countries, we are functionally number 14 on the price.

King dollar, the currency that is used all over the world for exchanges--most transactions in the world, we represent about 46 to 48 percent of all transactions. We dominate that as a reserve currency.

Yet, because of how our inflation runs, because of how our governance has been running, because of our demographics, because of what we are talking about in taxes and plans to grow the economy and the stunning amount of debt we are borrowing, we have 13 countries in the industrialized world that have cheaper 10-year bonds than we do.

I am trying to find some way to help this body sort of understand that now you have the responsibility--you are going to come and argue and say I am going to cut this spending. Great. God bless you. Do it, but if you are going to come behind these mikes and say you are going to burn the place down, you may make markets here and around the world just nervous enough that with a few ticks, you just cost billions and billions.

Remember, we are borrowing about $8.5 billion a day. Think of some of the debates we have here. We are knifing each other for fractions of that because we are not willing to tell the truth. The hardest truth I say over and over--and maybe I am an idiot for doing it--from today through the next 30 years--remember, I used to come here with a chart that said 30-year debt from now is $116 trillion. Then I brought one that was $130 trillion. Then CBO, about 2 to 3 weeks ago, said, no, Schweikert, you are wrong. It is going to be $141 trillion 30 years from now. A hundred percent of that is borrowing--interest, healthcare, almost all Medicare.

Then, 8, 9 years from now, when the Social Security trust fund has been emptied out and seniors are about to take a 25 percent cut and we are about to double senior poverty, do we make a political decision to reach into the general fund and make up that difference?

Those three things are 100 percent of that increase in debt over the next 30 years. The rest of the budget is pretty much flat.

That is hard for us to process because we don't want to tell each other the truth. The earned benefits--Medicare, Social Security--and then our obligation to pay the interest on the money we have borrowed is the primary driver of our debt, but we are going to do a clown show here and say we don't tax rich people enough. Then, I show up with the reports that basically when you go over the numbers--and I have done entire floor speeches just on this report--when you did every bit of taxes on the $400,000 and up, you maximize their capital gains tax, maximize their income tax, maximize their estate tax, maximize everything, and then you adjust for its effect on the economy, you get about 1.5, 1.6 percent of GDP.

The last 366 days--remember, it is a leap year--we have borrowed over 9 percent of GDP. The running average I think for this fiscal year-- remember, fiscal year is different than a calendar year--I think we are in the mid-4s, 4 percent of GDP.

The entire tax scheme--well, except for unrealized capital gains, which is a bizarre idea that the Democrats have, which is hey, you have a house, so you own a piece of real estate. You're over 400, we want a tax gain you haven't recognized yet, although most of that gain is probably inflation. Work with me here. The Democrats' tax scheme of taxing the rich, if you do tax maximization, the concept of I maximize your income tax before the number rolls over.

We maximized your estate tax before you start getting rid of assets or are done building them, or we've maximized your capital gains before you say, we are never selling this.

You get about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP when you do the economic effects. The last 366 days we were borrowing about 9 percent.

For those of us who want to cut things, if you start to look at the chart, remember, the blue is what we get to vote on.

Everything in the red is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest. Well, now interest is much higher. There are other mandatory programs. We only get to vote on about 25, 26 percent of the budget.

If you split out defense, out of that $7 trillion spending of your U.S. Government, we get to vote on about $965 billion. So less than one-seventh is nondefense discretionary, and that is where all the cuts--now, I can cut it dramatically. We could get rid of all of it. You get rid of all $965 billion in nondefense discretionary, so there is no Park Service, no FBI, none of this. It is all gone. We are heading towards borrowing about $2.8 trillion. You don't get anywhere close to balancing the budget, and that is getting rid of almost everything you think of as government.

There seems to be this unwillingness to understand the scale of the borrowing. We may come back to that chart.

Once again, I also need to help folks sort of understand the voracious appetite we are bringing to market on debt.

There was a bizarre article I was looking at just before coming to the floor, some economist who I have never heard of trying to argue-- must have been some leftwing radical--saying, don't worry, debt is fine. The Treasury numbers aren't that bad.

Of course, he sort of missed the numbers. I have noticed it was one of those classic articles with lots of feelings explained but no actual math in it.

This may be a little hard to see. You see this spike here? That is the peak of the spending during the pandemic.

Here is we are today. Don't know if you can see it on this chart because these little bars are really small, but our borrowing is higher than during the peak of the pandemic.

If someone out there has a more brilliant way to try to explain, we are making ourselves fragile to interest rate exposure to the markets.

The bond market very soon will run this government. Think about that.

I think it is Carville which had a--I think it was in his book. He commented that in his next life, he wants to come back as the U.S. bond market. This actually happened in the nineties when the bond market was a little cranky about something. He makes the point that the next day, he had Speaker Gingrich and President Clinton working it out and making the bond markets calm.

Today's debt to GDP is dramatically higher than it was back then. Does anyone actually think at all about what would happen if we had a failed bond market, a bond auction in the United States?

Now, I actually believe Treasury is doing a fairly competent job of trying to smooth it out. They are trying to give lots of visibility. We are going to be borrowing--except how many of you watch what happened yesterday? They put out their refunding notice saying, hey, it turns out, well, this quarter we are going to have to borrow about $41 billion more than we expected.

The next moment, you have a 2-year bond, excuse me, a 2-year note. There is a different definition when it is 2 years shorter, paper shorter.

It was a 2-year note that went over 5 percent, and it has remained there today. This stuff gets expensive when you are borrowing trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions.

I am trying to help our brothers and sisters understand. Those of you who think that we are going to go back to normal, the last 10 years weren't normal.

There are already books out on what an interesting experiment the previous decade was with artificially low interest rates, except now we spent the last 3 years with inflation sort of paying for it.

Here was the last, functionally, 10 years with 2.2 as an average on U.S. sovereign. Here is where we are right now, and this is low.

We did this, oh, I think 6 weeks ago. We had 3.3. I think it is substantially higher right now. If you go back from 1975 to 2001, the average on U.S. sovereign debt was 7\1/2\ percent. Even when we strip out the early 1980s, the Volcker years when they were trying to crush inflation, you get a number that actually is still in the mid to high sixes.

What happens if we go back to that? If that is normal, if that is nominal, how many of your businesses, how many of your lives, how much of this U.S. debt will we have to refinance?

This year, a little under $10 trillion will come to market. That is the stuff we have to refinance. Remember, part of that refinancing is when you stay very short on what they call the curve, which is a fancy way of saying we are going to borrow some 30 days, and 1 years, and 2 years, and 5 years, and 10 years. The short stuff here you have to refinance over and over and over. When interest rates are this high on U.S. sovereign debt, and you have $10 trillion coming to market, maybe 2 or 3 of that is new debt, the rest is refinanced.

What would happen if you had a spike back to normal? Remember, we are already modeling right now approaching $1.2 trillion in interest this fiscal year, becoming the second biggest expense in U.S. Government.

I have this chart. I didn't have time. I was going to cross it out again. I do need to explain one thing because I want to be technically accurate.

You will actually see U.S. debt referred to as ``publicly held total debt.'' Publicly held is what goes to auction. That is what you are often worried about because that has the interest rate fragility. That goes out and people bid on it. It might be your pension plan. It might be your savings. It might be some nice family on the other side of the world that walks into their neighborhood bank and says: We want something safe that we can get some interest on, and they pull that money and come out and buy a U.S. bond.

Then over here is the big number. That is where my 1.2 number is. Treasury, I think a month ago, came out and said their number then was $1.1436 trillion. With the higher interest rates--I am just doing a back of the envelope calculation--it is higher than that.

That is total borrowing. That is when they reach over and borrow the cash out of Social Security. They reach in and borrow the cash out of Medicare Part A. They borrow the cash out of the transportation fund, the railroad retirement fund, all these trust funds out there, except they have to pay interest on that, and eventually, they have to pay it back.

We are actually looking at some weird numbers right now because remember, every month Social Security has to take all the tax receipts and reach in and grab a little bit of the trust fund money because the tax receipts--because we have the growth--as we have gotten older, the growth of those in their earned benefit years and the number of workers.

Even though employment and labor force participation are excellent right now, we still have to reach into the Social Security trust fund. It gives you a sense of how tough U.S. demographics are.

I have come behind the mike multiple times and pointed out that in 15 years the United States is probably going to have more deaths than births. We didn't make a chart on it. We should have.

How many of you also saw last Friday the estimate for last year's fertility rates? There was some jerk out there that was going at me because I was using a number of 1.63.

Turns out he is right. I was wrong. The number was 1.62. It was even worse. The United States now has lower births, fertility rates, than much of western Europe.

Why is that important? If you have sort of pay-as-you-go systems where today's workers are contributing into pools that help pay for today's retirees, and the number of workers is going to be shrinking in the coming decades, besides the dislocation that is going to be happening, your local elementary school may wake up and, all of a sudden, start to have fewer kindergartners coming in and fewer second graders and fourth graders and so on. We are already seeing that in some of the school districts in Arizona, and we are a growth State.

The point I am trying to nail down is: our bond rates are higher than 13 other industrialized countries. Should that tell you what the bond markets think about us? This is actually a more

recent phenomenon, seeing this differential with this many. What does that tell you about what the world thinks about our controlling inflation, about our governance, our demographics, our tax policy?

When you saw last week the IMF--when the IMF is putting in their international report on debt and taking a swipe at the United States saying, two things that were fascinating: they are worried about us and our scale of borrowing, and the fact that the United States and China are the two big economies sopping up much of the world credit.

We are actually crushing much of the developing world because we are consuming all the money that would be helping them build up their economies. There is some ugly stuff in here.

For all my Democrat colleagues who run around and talk about the morality of helping the developing world, it turns out our voracious appetite to spend and spend and spend and spend and spend and not tell the truth, and interest and healthcare are our primary drivers.

What are you willing to do to help us change the price of healthcare, not the financing of it? ObamaCare was a financing bill. Medicare for all is a financing bill. They don't actually change the cost by using technology to make people healthier and crash the price of healthcare. Even when the IMF is going at us, maybe we should think about that it is sort of embarrassing.

When you actually have people that--I have never met him. I know he is controversial. I don't think he is any Republican. Larry Fink, in his shareholder newsletter, is actually putting out information saying, he is worried about U.S. borrowing and the scale of it. When you all saw Jamie Dimon in his comments, he is worried about it.

Don't listen to me. Maybe some of the people that have armies of economists that work for them, maybe they are worth actually giving some mind to instead of some idiot on social media who is making crap up.

You have to understand. If you have someone also do this: David, we are just going to grow ourselves out of the debt.

Okay. I showed you a chart a moment ago that last Friday, they recalculated--put out the official calculation. It may get updated one or two more times, but the first quarter fell down to 1.6.

Here is how you have to understand this. Here is, functionally, our borrowing. This is publicly held debt. This is the GDP growth from 2023.

Until this growth is actually beyond the borrowing, because you go out and borrow a trillion dollars, we have got to pay interest on a trillion dollars. If the GDP, the size of our economy, grows a trillion dollars, we only get 17, 18 percent of that in tax receipts. Are you with me? When someone says we are going to borrow a trillion dollars but we will grow the economy a trillion, the math doesn't work that way.

I have shown you these charts before. When we have had very high marginal tax rates, we get about 18 percent of GDP. When we have had very low marginal tax rates, we get about 18 percent of GDP in taxes to the U.S. Government. There is a whole formula why that works that way.

You need the growth. You desperately have to have the growth. I can't make the math work without really good growth, but it doesn't come anywhere close, doesn't come anywhere mathematically close to closing the gap of our borrowing.

You have got to understand how dystopian this future looks. This chart is already getting a little out of date, but we see deficits reaching 14 percent of GDP in 30 years. We seem to be racing pretty hard to get there. You see this gap? This is the history of tax receipts. When we have had high marginal tax rates or low marginal tax rates. They have the model actually going up to 17.9 near the end of the next 30 years, but we also have our spending at 31.9.

What is the chance we get anywhere near the end of this without this economy collapsing, without the people we need to borrow money from saying they are not loaning to the United States Government anymore? What happens when we have to make the decision that we are just going to inflate the debt, we are going to wipe out your savings; we are going to set off inflation, we are going to have to lower your COLA, so we make everyone poorer in America, but we are going to use that as the hidden tax? Understand, actually the biggest tax in modern history has been the last 3 years of inflation.

I am going to say this multiple times before I finish this presentation. My district, the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, if you don't make, I think it is, 23.6 percent more than, I believe, the day President Biden took office, you are poorer today. Do you think that could explain why some people are cranky?

Let's walk through this. I was trying to explain this a moment ago. The last 366 days, we are borrowing slightly over 9 percent of GDP. If you go from the fiscal year, October 1, we are already borrowing over 4.2 percent of the economy.

This is what I was just trying to share. If you go back to January of 2017--remember, we didn't do tax reform until December of 2017--to January of 2021, right before the pandemic, if you were a production and nonsupervisory employee, your income went up 9.8 percent. Today, since January 2021, when Biden took office, you are 2.7 percent poorer. If you want to understand why people feel stress, much of our society is poorer today because of that hidden tax called inflation.

One more time: Remember, when we tell you we are going to cut our way to prosperity or we are going to tax our way to prosperity, that is just stupid. That is not how the math works.

You see this chart next to me? We only get to vote on that blue portion, and half that blue portion is defense. How much of that do you want cut? This is what you are playing with, and that is why we need to create a revolution of technology to change the cost of the services we provide.

Now, let's talk a little bit about hope, something I don't do enough of because there is so much crappy news around here. There are some really, really helpful things in technology. I have stacks of these things because I sit on an airplane 10 hours a week when I go back and forth from D.C. back home to Arizona.

There are some amazing things happening. About 3 weeks ago, a month ago, we had the first new drug that was developed completely by artificial intelligence. We now have some papers coming out of a cervical cancer screening that is done with AI that has remarkable accuracy, an AI for skin cancer detection where it is doing remarkably high-quality detection, and a stethoscope that uses AI in the background to identify whether there is going to be heart failure. That is remarkable.

There are these amazing things happening. We now know how to cure sickle cell anemia, which is the first genetic-altering drug. Now that we know how to do it, you are going to see all sorts of other things.

If you are a geek watching this, look up ``inverse vaccine'' and read about the hope of the things that it might do.

There are also other crazy things outside of healthcare. Here is one where a robot goes out and fixes potholes and dramatically cuts the cost of road maintenance.

Here is actually one that is fascinating. They actually came up with this crazy idea of how to get hydrogen to businesses. We have been talking about how we want to have hydrogen as one of our additional energy sources. Hydrogen is fairly efficiently made with natural gas and electrolysis. Instead of building a big electrolysis center, their model is you already have a gas line to your business, so we will just build a piece of equipment right there where you convert it right there and burn the hydrogen in your facility.

There are brilliant disruptions coming that will grow this economy, that will actually help us make government smaller.

We have a piece of legislation, and I don't know if I will ever get a hearing on it around here, but we should. The GAO just announced about a month and a half ago, two months ago, for the eighth year in a row, the Pentagon is unauditable. They can't audit it. They have no idea what the inventories are, all of the things we should know in an audit.

Why do we tolerate that? Why isn't this body losing its mind over something like that, just from a national security standpoint? Maybe they need more. Maybe they need less. Maybe we have too much of something. We don't know. When you walk around the campus here, there are all sorts of people in uniforms and all sorts of people from defense contractors saying we need more of this. How do we know? We can't audit you.

Turns out that a couple of the biggest and couple of smallest audit companies, CPA companies, compliance companies, have come up with Audit AI, artificial intelligence that crawls through the books, crawls through the inventories, and crawls through the asset lists. You can use AI to audit the Pentagon. If that works, you could use AI to look for fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs. How about durable equipment fraud that you read about so often? You could use AI for that.

Right now, there has been an experiment--and I haven't gotten the final report of how well it works--but if you call the IRS during this tax season, there is a very good chance the individual you are talking with is a ChatGPT, a chat computer. My understanding is that the satisfaction was higher talking to the AI because it stayed on the phone with you longer and would work through helping you fill out your form. Those are ways to use technology to make this government smaller.

I have already done whole presentations on the morality of this government using its resources to cure diseases because it turns out it is really good economics. It is moral. The knockoff effects, what they called second degree, third degree, fourth degree--there are a whole series of things you calculate.

How about family formation or less people dying. Remember, we are about to have the fifth year in a row where a prime age male's life expectancy is shorter, but this body will knife each other when we are just trying to add technology to telehealth because it will force someone out there to change their business model and maybe also find a better, faster, cheaper way to do it because they have to compete against technology.

I will argue disruption and adopting the technology is the only path I can mathematically come up with to crash this debt or stabilize it. We just need to stabilize it, so the debt doesn't grow faster than the economy. To do that, you are going to disrupt bureaucracies, you are going to disrupt incumbent business models, and that is the way America is supposed to work.

There is a reason you didn't go to Blockbuster Video last weekend. The technology has changed. You don't stand in line for your little silver disc anymore. You go home and hit a button and you have how many streaming services? If Blockbuster video had hired enough lobbyists, this place probably would have slowed down the internet for them. That is mean, but I am trying to get people to think.

We have got to get ourselves to push. We have got to be willing to disrupt, because I will argue we are Americans, and we are supposed to do things better every day. The cures, changing the way government works, making our economy constantly evolve, becoming better, faster, cheaper, and more affordable.

It basically comes down to a single line: Prosperity is moral. If you looked at the inflation data, the new GDP data that came out on Friday, we are on the cusp of going back to something horrible from almost 40 years ago called stagflation. That is immoral. This body can make that not happen, and we can make this a prosperous future. I believe we only have 3 to 5 years to embrace the disruption, but if we don't do it, we have engaged in a really immoral act here.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 56 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, we have one-half hour. We have a number of different things to make it through. As we know, our running sarcasm is that we all work in a math-free zone where we use feelings to make public policy and then we wonder what the hell is going on when we actually have to deal with the honesty of the math. So let's have a little bit of fun with the honesty of the math.

A couple of days ago was tax day.

Mr. Speaker, did you know when you paid your taxes that 39 cents out of every dollar you sent in was just interest, 39 cents of every dollar you sent in, Mr. Speaker, as an individual taxpayer?

Now, that is the billionaire and that is down to the working stiff who actually had income tax, you paid 39 cents of your tax dollars just to interest.

The point, once again, that we are going to go through is understanding how fragile we have made part of the American economy because of the scale of the debt. Remember, Mr. Speaker, every 110, 115 days we are clicking off another trillion dollars of borrowing. So yay for that.

We also hit another benchmark. Yesterday, we had $100,000 a second we were borrowing. Congratulations, once again. It is the third time--the third time outside COVID--when we have clicked through $100,000 a second.

The reason I break it down to a second is: How many people can visualize $1 trillion?

It is hard to visualize 12 zeros, so let's actually walk through this. As we are clicking off $100,000 a second, that basically means gross borrowing. It looks like it is going to be, if we stay close to this, $3.151 trillion, $3 trillion 151 billion.

Now, why is that a big deal?

That was yesterday. Today, it fell way down. We are 99,000 something per second.

We were expecting to see the number actually really bounce down because what happened in the last couple of days? It was tax collection time.

We are trying to figure out what is going on because these are right off the Treasury's website we get every afternoon. You can sign up on our website for our office and get something we call the daily debt. We will text it to you. We break it down both in gross--gross is all borrowing because remember, we borrow from the Social Security trust fund and we borrow from the transportation trust fund. We borrow from all of those. We do pay interest, and we have got to pay it back.

Then there is what they call net borrowing. That is where we go to public bonds. Many of you saw yesterday we had a bond auction that wasn't great at the interest rates we paid, and even if you do the public borrowing, Mr. Speaker, we are crossing over $2.8 trillion this year.

So let's process this for one moment because I feel as if I can't find a way to get this through people's heads. GDP, now, I believe it was yesterday, which is the Atlanta Fed, they have a neat little app you can sign up for, they will send you updates and give you market predictions on interest rates and these things, but they also give you an estimator of what they think the gross national product is for this quarter. They had a number of 2.9 percent come out yesterday.

That is remarkable. The American people should be given a ginormous hug for how hard they are out there working.

Yet, how much of that 2.9 percent GDP growth that was on the Atlanta Fed website is because we are spending at this remarkable rate?

Just as the left used to attack us when we did tax reform, which actually has the elegance of being proper allocation, they have been spending money at a crazy rate--remember, $100,000 a second--and here are some of the other parts of the punch line. I hope I am not throwing too much out. Tax receipts so far this fiscal year are up 7 percent.

Okay, that is wonderful. But we are still borrowing close to $3 trillion this year. Nonetheless, tax receipts are up 7 percent, and we are still having to borrow like that, and Medicare is up 10 percent so far this year.

Does anyone see a problem?

Part of the point we have got to walk through is how much is on autopilot, and we, as policymakers, are terrified to go home and tell the truth, or--let's be honest, let's be honest--we haven't told a lot of our voters the truth for so long, how do you get in front of them and say: It is not foreign aid, it is not waste and fraud, we can't tax our way out of this?

So I have shown this chart a number of times.

So, Mr. Speaker, if you look at a chart like this, do you see the blue area?

That is all we get to vote on. We function and only get to vote on about 26, 25 percent of all spending, and part of that, one-half of that, is basically defense. So if you don't want us to cut defense and you want us to maintain that, Mr. Speaker, then you do realize that the nondefense appropriations in this place is 12 percent, 13 percent of our spending. That is all we vote on. Everything else is on autopilot.

On my chart here, I have $890 billion as interest, but we already know the interest number now looks like it is going to be 1.1. It could actually be, if interest rates stay where they have been this week, $1.2 trillion.

One more time, let's do this.

Medicare will be $1 trillion 450 billion; interest will be $1.1, $1.2 trillion; Medicare will be 839; and defense will be right there.

Now, remember, Mr. Speaker, we were just calculating that Medicare spending has already moved up almost 10 percent this year. We have Medicare coming in as number three and defense coming in as number four.

It is a lot different than the folklore out there in society.

Part of the point we keep trying to make here is we have made this society, this government, and the world actually in some ways incredibly fragile because as interest rates move up it is starting to consume everything around us.

So, I have not done this chart in years, but we have updated it. Understand, Mr. Speaker, it is a little hard to see. We will put it up on one of our websites, but we are right here at 2024. We were supposed to only be borrowing about $1.5 trillion this year. It looks like we may double that.

This chart is only a few months old, and it is already out of date, but understand it is an interest rate scenario chart. Right now, CBO has us at 3\1/2\ percent. Well, we are already over that. At 3\1/2\ percent in functionally 9 budget years, we are borrowing almost close to $4 trillion a year. I would say that is actually 8 budget years.

If we go up one full point, then we are well over $4 trillion. If we go up to the 5.5, which is historically closer to what we were before the fake years of the previous decade, at suppressed interest rates, if you do the 35 years before that, Mr. Speaker, even if you take out the Volcker years, 5\1/2\ was closer to what norm was, and then you are starting to approach in 9 budget years almost $5 trillion in a single year interest.

There is our problem.

We have listened to speeches already today of people telling us that this is a human right and that is a human right. Okay, fine.

Do you want to think like an economist, Mr. Speaker, or someone who believes in fairy tales?

We actually make public policy here by our feelings and not by facts because the facts are uncomfortable, and they don't sound that great on campaign stumps.

I actually originally intended to come here, Mr. Speaker, and just do some basic economics charts and then do some optimism of solutions.

Nonetheless, let's run through these charts, and then we will actually talk about the reality that there is hope. There is a way to deal with this. It just would require thinking, but we are so busy having the drama of: Are we going to remove another Speaker?

Are we going to knife each other over some foreign aid?

Understand, Mr. Speaker, I know some people passionately care about Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. Add up the total amount of money, remove the money that functionally comes back to the United States, and you are talking about 3 or 4 days of borrowing. People have no sense of the scale.

So, Mr. Speaker, you look at a chart like this, and here is part of your classic problem. Remove COVID, that is COVID right there, and just look at the basic chart. All we are trying to say is that historically, next year a bunch of TCJA, which was the tax reform, expires. Your tax rates will go up next year. If you have an LLC, a pass-through, a Subchapter S, employee owned, then your taxes go up next year, and that is already based in this number. We still functionally get a little less than 18 percent of the size of the economy in taxes.

Nonetheless, the blue line going up, that you have got to understand, Mr. Speaker--and I know it is a 30-year chart and nobody wants to think about a 30-year chart--but this is the crisis: tax receipts stay stable as a percentage of the economy.

So I have already brought charts here before that show: hey, here are times when we have had remarkably high marginal tax rates, here are times when we have had really low tax rates, and you get this percentage of the economy that always sort of falls in between, about 17 to 19. It is always right there in that bandwidth.

So the secret is: have a bigger economy.

Understand, Mr. Speaker, over the next couple of decades the Congressional Budget Office has a number where we are saying, hey, 2054--that is a long time from now. What is that? It is 28 budget years from now. Mr. Speaker, 31.9 percent of the economy is in spending, but tax receipts are still projected to be about 17.9, 18 percent. So the tax receipts stay level, but our spending--what is the primary driver of spending?

This is the thing we share, at least I share, that gets you unelected, but it happens to be true. From today through the next 30 years, 100 percent of growth of borrowing--and most of the growth is spending--is demographics. We got old.

The fact of the matter is that when I was a kid, $5 to $6 was spent for those under the age of 18 and for every $1 a senior. Today that is reversed. Today we spend about $5 for a senior for every dollar we spend for those under the age of 18.

It is demographics. There are different population dynamics. Then the healthcare costs, because if Medicare is going up just 10 percent so far this fiscal year, then you have to see what the numbers look like over the next decade--particularly baby boomers--as what is it, close to some 70 million of us age.

So if we had a revolution in changing the cost of healthcare, which we have written about and actually have designed ways to do it, but you couldn't get a hearing around here because there are too many lobbyists running up and down the hallways saying: That will affect our business models or that will affect the bureaucracy.

The bureaucracy has its own lobbyists here.

Math will win, but this place will still curl up in a fetal position of fantasy.

One more time, it keeps ticking away from us.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, 1 year ago we were estimating and saying: oh, yeah, this 2024 budget we will only borrow about 1.3, then it was 1.5, then maybe 1.6. We are looking at numbers now of what the public borrows, that means selling bonds, it is 2.8, the total borrowing now is approaching--and this is from the Treasury. This isn't from my joint economic economists or Schweikert's brain. This is from the Treasury's own numbers. They are at now $1,1436 trillion in interest this fiscal year, and this was put together before the most recent pop in interest rates.

So I have said this--and this seems to upset some folks--Congress has made a governing decision, and it is not a governing decision of whether we want to go through the chaos of removing another Speaker or the chaos of letting the Democrats have more power around here. It is the chaos that we have made the decision that the bond markets are in charge of your country.

If we have a failed bond auction, Mr. Speaker, do you understand the cascade of hell that happens in this country and around the world?

So it is our moral, fiscal sanity and economic obligation to demonstrate to those who are willing to buy our country's debt that we are adults, that we understand what is going on, we understand our demographics, and we understand our earned entitlements that we have got to pay.

How are we going to pay them when functionally the taxes you just paid, 39 cents out of every dollar you paid, went just to cover the interest, and it will be worse next year?

We live in a country where we have made the decision to put the bond market in charge of our country because

we are too much of a wimp to tell the truth. For those who are going to say: Well, Schweikert, if you would just vote against this or that, and we don't understand those are rounding errors.

The scale, this is not today. It is as we move over the next couple of years. The scale of borrowing is structural. It is what we are demographically. Heaven forbid, in 8 years, 9 years when the Social Security trust fund is exhausted--to my Democrats who get cranky and say we can't use the word ``exhausted,'' that is what the Social Security actuary report, if we actually read the math, actually says. They use the word ``exhausted'' because it is gone.

At that moment, we get a 25 percent cut in our Social Security check, and we double senior poverty in America. Yesterday, we had a Social Security Subcommittee hearing in the Ways and Means, and one of the members--I think Jodey Arrington gets credit for this--asked a simple question: For Democrats, how many would support policy changes and raising taxes? Nope. They only want raising taxes.

Over here, the Republicans said: We have to do everything. At least the Republicans on the committee and the Republican witnesses told the truth. The Democrats are so locked in that there is this fantasy, and I have shown the charts over and over. The caps can all be raised. If no benefits are given, the caps are raised, so Social Security is functionally turned into everything that FDR swore it would never be. It is functionally a wealth transfer system. It only covers half, at best, of the shortfall.

When you hear people say: Well, we have a solution. We are going to fix it through tax hikes. You do understand that what the fraud is, to be able to close the gap, you have to tax unrealized capital gains all up and down the economy.

We are still trying to figure out what Democrats mean when they say that because we are walking through the details in their proposals, and we are having trouble making the math work.

You have a house. You have a building. You have a retirement account. You have investments. Do they get to come in and take 12.4 percent of everything you gained that year, because that is the only way you start to cover these scales of shortfall. The first year, 2033, first year Social Security is empty, the shortfall is $616 billion.

Every dime of Defense is in the $800 billion range. Do you understand the scale of what is coming at us? Look, I have already done these charts before over and over saying: Hey, here we are right now. We are actually a little higher. This is interest rates. We are probably at 3.6 now. We are going to go higher with the recent bond auctions.

Here is what we were during the 2001 to 2022, sort of the suppressed years of the Federal Reserve, suppressing interest rates. However, when we go back to 1975 to 2001, understand what the average interest rate was on U.S. sovereign debt. It was 3.5 percent.

I just showed a chart a moment ago that said we are almost at Armageddon if we go to 5.5. So don't think it is some sort of crazy, dystopian fantasy, oh, you are never going to get that high. Our math, we are not even going up to what the historical average was. However, we want to live in a fantasy world.

This is another chart trying to show where interest rates are and where they are going.

I wanted to do this one again because I had someone that was looking at the video on YouTube from last week's floor speech, and I used this chart, and we had a misunderstanding, so I want to walk through it again.

This line here is Social Security. This line is Medicare's spending as a percentage of GDP. Understand, one of the key differences in Medicare is there is a trust fund, but it only covers maybe 30, 40 percent. It is the hospital portion. The rest comes out of the general fund.

Social Security, even when the trust fund is exhausted, 75 percent, and then it falls to 70, and a little bit less of that comes from your taxes.

Right now, for every dollar you pay in, they basically take that, and they put it out the door, and then they reach over and cash in a little bit of the special trust bonds, T bills, Treasury bills they have, to pay out, and that is what is exhausting the trust fund.

When you see this, this is not borrowing, but spending, according to GDP. What is fascinating is, sometime in the next decade, you actually have Medicare taking more of the total economy than Social Security.

However, the thing that I was surprised no one noticed, if Medicare, functioning in the 30-year window, gets as high as 6.9 percent of the entire economy, and then Social Security is another 5.9 percent of the economy, that is just the two earned retirement programs.

Start to think about that. If that is consuming that much of the entire economy, how do you pay for the rest of government? How do you pay for military? How do you pay for anything else? You start to understand how, very quickly, the government spending starts getting around 31, 32 percent of the entire economy. That is actually calculated on last year's interest rates.

Think what those numbers will be over the next few months when we update them on what happens if the interest rate environment goes back to normal.

Social Security Subcommittee yesterday, the Democrat solution for Social Security was: Well, we just need to tax people more.

The problem is, of the crisis that we are on the cusp of, two-thirds is healthcare, one-third is Social Security, and the Social Security trust fund still has another 8 years or 9 years.

When we did tax reform, a dirty little secret that the Democrats never want you to hear: The top income, so the top 20 percent of income earners, do you know they actually, today, pay a higher percentage of Federal income taxes than before tax reform?

The U.S. tax code actually got more progressive. Now, a lot of that was because the bottom quartiles, we almost removed from paying income taxes. Now, they still pay payroll taxes. They pay into their Social Security. They pay into their Medicare. They pay into their unemployment. However, from the income tax standpoint, if you take a look, the bottom quartiles functionally pay nothing. The top 20 percent today pay 70, 71 percent of all taxes.

I will do more of this in a future speech. I want to go through these fairly quickly because I want to end on something that is a little more optimistic than some of these more dystopian numbers.

Social Security faces a $39 trillion shortfall over the next 30 years, $36 trillion if subtracting the trust fund. Therefore, functionally what we are saying here is this is income. Payroll taxes and benefits, the red. You see the little green part here? That is actually up to the moment; the trust fund is exhausted. That is the interest we get from the general fund. The general fund borrows the money; we pay a little interest back.

See the purple here? That is how much is going out the door.

See this up here? That is the interest covering if the general fund covers the shortfall. These numbers are so stunningly ginormous. A word my 8-year-old likes to use, ginormous.

When you think about this, if Social Security itself has a structural $36, $39 trillion shortfall, what happens when I come to you and explain Medicare, $80, $90 trillion shortfall? Actually, I think it is closer to 90-something now. That is, when you add in the interest, 100 percent of all the debt from today through the next 30 years.

I just meant to show this to try to make the point again. It is sometimes like talking to a Golden Retriever. They are adorable, but at the end of the day, they are still adorable and didn't really understand a word you said.

Some of my Democrat colleagues, when you walk through saying here is your proposals of raising the cap on all taxpayers and what the outlays are expected on Social Security, that it doesn't actually close the gap. One more time. This chart does it by percentage of GDP, but let's conceptually one more time process this.

The trust fund is almost gone. You basically say: Everyone now pays 12.4 percent. You pay 12.4, and that is your Social Security tax. You give no benefits, no additional benefits for the folks over the cap. You covered, to be generous, 50 percent of the shortfall, and you basically have chewed up all the potential taxes that you needed to

shore up Medicare, and there becomes the math problem. To be honest, you will almost never see someone from the left saying: Well, to save Medicare and Social Security and a couple of these other programs they care about, here is the scale.

You even saw the President stand behind that microphone here at the State of the Union, and you noticed he only talked about the Medicare taxes, and that didn't solve the problem. It just shored up part of the trust fund for a little bit. Still, the vast majority of spending comes out of the general fund.

Look, we have come here repeatedly and said: There are solutions. We actually, several months ago, wrote an entire chapter in the economic position of the Republicans on the Joint Economic Committee, and I thought I was going to get absolute hell for it because I stood on one of the third rails of politics. I had five economists work on a paper. It was a whole chapter in here, chapter 3, and we talked about what would happen in society if we took on obesity.

It turns out the single greatest thing you could do to lower the debt of the United States, produce growth, family formation, all those things, originally, we were coming up with 5 trillion, 7 trillion. We are right now doing the math updating that chapter.

It turns out--I am not committing to it because we still have weeks of math to do--it could be $9 trillion over the decade. The single greatest thing we can do to save this country and start to stabilize our debt is actually moral. Let's give our brothers and sisters the opportunity to be healthier. There is a way to do it, Mr. Speaker.

Maybe I should stop coming and doing the dystopian anger about people not wanting to deal with the realities of the math, and I will try to spend a little more time talking about the fact there are solutions.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 44 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, April 18, 2024, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Virginia (Mrs. Kiggans).

Supporting U.S.-Israel Relations

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Obernolte), my friend.

Honoring the Life of Roberta Darlene McCarthy

Mr. Speaker, I am going to try doing something this evening. This is going to be difficult because I am going to try to explain something that has been annoying me and has me concerned that what I am learning is actually really dangerous to our society. Then we are going to walk through some of the latest budget numbers.

If you don't have a life and you are someone that watches C-SPAN, you have had to deal with me coming up here once a week and functionally doing economic lectures. I don't mean to sound like a jerk. I am just trying to make it so there is an understanding of the actual fiscal situation we are facing as a country.

A couple weeks ago, I did one, and boom. I didn't believe there were this many people that don't have a life and watch YouTube, but there were about 960,000 views. I have been blessed. This has happened multiple times over the last couple of years.

Then I made a mistake. I actually looked at some of the comments. This started a couple years ago, and you are going: Well, that is not true. Well, that has to be a robot. Well, that is a bot. Well, why is that one written in horrible English?

So we actually started a little project in our office a couple months ago trying to understand what foreign infiltration is doing in our ability to communicate in our society. How many bad actors are basically filling up our phones with crap, with things that are completely not true?

It turned out we found academic article after academic article; Microsoft doing huge data analytics. There are all sorts of things that are out there that show, in many ways, we are at war. We don't actually understand it, but we have a war going on, and it is a war for hearts and minds. There are bad actors all around this world.

The number of data points we have here is showing, particularly China, Russia, and Iran, and they are getting weaponized at a level I don't think any of us are intellectually ready for. AI is here, the plain language is here, and they are moving off of just your Facebook page or your social media accounts. It is now moving into fake text messages, all sorts of other ways where they are going to try to pollute and take down the West.

We are not the only ones. We have map after map of what China just did to Taiwan. Now, Taiwan actually has built a policy on how to help combat it. When they get attacked on social media with fake stuff, they have teams that turn around and say: Okay, here is what they said. Here are the documents. Look it up yourself.

I don't think we are ready for this. How do you and I and our brothers and sisters on the left and anyone that actually cares about this country have honest debates, honest discussions about, in my case, my fear of the crushing debt--we are going to walk through that--but other policy things where you actually lay out facts, lay out the information of what is going on, and 1\1/2\ minutes later, there is a bot that basically is putting out absolute crap?

How do you hold a society together when you can't even agree on the baseline facts to build the debate from when article after article-- some of these are huge. These are the executive summaries. Some of the ones we have gone through are hundreds of pages of tracking entire troll farms. There is one document here saying that China may be spending multiple billions of dollars in influence operations here in this country to basically distort reality.

The point I am going to right now--this seems like a weird place to go for a guy that wants to talk about the numbers and what is happening in our government--I am incredibly frustrated because I do not know how we have an honest debate when we have a disinformation wave coming at us from governments, let alone the private troll farms that do it just for clickbait to make money.

However, how do you have an honest debate when our brothers and sisters or constituents at home or activists see things that are absolutely not true?

We are going to have to find some way for us to have a commonality of these are the facts, or, as I hate to say, how do I make the public absolutely cynical?

Don't believe me. Don't believe half the crap on your phone. Look it up yourself. Find things you trust and confirm it. We have article after article here documenting the troll farms, documenting the new bot farms, documenting the use of new AI. This one is actually sort of scary because it is going to be industrialized.

If you think things are screwy right now, wait a couple more months when we are in the middle of the election season. This government here has already decided they are--look what Russia has done to Ukraine. Look what the

Palestinians and their teammates in Iran and, oddly enough coming through China, are doing to Israel.

We are going to have to grow up and deal with the reality that as much of the information that is smashing into this country isn't real, and we are going to have to become much more discerning on it.

Look, that is my caveat because we have such incredibly difficult things to deal with and there is hope, but it is hard. I have said a dozen times behind this microphone, a family saying, for every hard, difficult problem, there is a simple solution. That is absolutely wrong.

It turns out complexity often requires complexity, but we have hope if we just get off our heinies and actually start to deal with the reality.

Let's walk through some of the reality of United States math right now. We made this chart today. It is accurate, but it is also missing a couple things.

The point I will make here is--you see this blue area? That is what a Member of Congress gets to vote on. That is Defense and what we call nondefense discretionary, such as the Park Service, the FBI, the State Department. You see all that red? None of that gets a vote from a Member of Congress.

The vast majority of our spending is on autopilot, and this interest number here is actually the net number, not the gross number, because there is another $300 billion or so that is actually borrowed from the trust funds that we still have to pay back. We still have to pay interest. We sort of hide that where other European countries actually have to tell the truth about their total borrowing.

How do we as Members of Congress go home and explain every dime you as a Member of Congress vote on is borrowed?

If you use my projections on the borrowing for this year, $800 billion of Medicare is borrowed, and the economy is actually okay. How can we be at the current GDP--and I didn't check GDP now on the Atlanta Fed before I walked in here, but I think it was like 2.4, 2.5, which is actually a fairly decent GDP growth considering where interest rates are and those things.

Yet, a couple days ago, we were breaking in--forgive me. I am going to do this slightly out of order to make a point--nope. I don't even have it. Somehow the board come.

In the last week, we have had two times where we went over $100,000 a second in borrowing. Every second, we were borrowing over $100,000. It came down a little bit today. Today, I think we are back to $98,000 a second, and that is over a 12-month period. That is 365 days of borrowing, averaging it out, dividing it down so you know what it is per second.

If I had come to this body a couple years ago and said, ``We are going to be borrowing $100,000 a second,'' you would have thought I was out of my mind, but we are doing it. $100,000 a second is our borrowing, and there is my anger. We will have honorable debates here on this and that, but we are often debating over a couple minutes' worth of borrowing because we are unwilling to talk about the driver of debt. It is interest and healthcare.

There is not a lot we can do about interest because here is how bad the interest numbers continue to be for us. I did this board a month ago and I was saying my math is gross interest, which will be $1.67 trillion and I got some crap for it: ``How can you say that?''

Well, you will be happy to know that yesterday the Treasury announced that I was wrong. Interest will be $1.1436 trillion. I underestimated it, and if you saw what interest rates did this week with the higher inflation data, the number is going to go higher.

Let's understand the hierarchy right now. Social Security is going to spend $1.450 trillion, but that is off tax receipts and the trust fund.

Now, the trust fund is going to be gone in 8, 9 years, but right now it is self-contained. Interest is the second biggest spend in this government. The third is Medicare. Defense is now number four. Now because I know every Member of Congress sits around and doesn't have a life and reads--this is the MedPAC report from last week. Yes, I am an idiot. I read it.

There is one thing in here and I wanted to make the point because I am trying to get my head around this. In 2022, way back then, Medicare was 13 percent of functionally income tax, corporate tax receipts.

In 5 more budget years, Medicare spending will be 22 percent of all income tax, all corporate taxes. That is a remarkable movement.

We had a data point a couple days ago saying Medicare spending is up 10 percent this year, but we are not allowed to talk about that. It is an earned benefit. You worked in America--it is just like Social Security. You worked your 40 quarters, you earned it, but that doesn't mean we have to lie to each other.

Just as I am angry about the foreigners polluting our information set, we do something similar. We avoid telling the truth because the math is uncomfortable, and we are talking trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars here. Maybe the debate on this floor shouldn't be rounding errors, it should be taking on the actual drivers of our debt.

Now, back to the point. Even here I am actually having to adjust, so now we actually believe what we call net interest. Let me explain the difference between gross and net. Net interest is where we have to sell bonds. We have to get your pension system, your personal wealth, a nice family in Japan buying U.S. debt.

Gross is where we sell the bonds over here and then over here we are borrowing from the trust funds, even though we have a little technical problem. The transportation trust fund, the Medicare Part A trust fund, the Social Security trust fund, all are gone this decade. Well, in the next 9 years, they are all gone.

It is math. Is it acceptable that this has become a math-free zone? And these numbers, when I was starting to show these a couple months ago and the inbound silliness we would get, ``stop making up numbers.'' Yeah, you are right. I missed them. I wasn't dark enough.

CBO will be updating all these numbers because it turns out interest has gotten more expensive. Today's interest rate, we are back up to the highs, almost to the highs of last November. They haven't been going down, they are going the other direction.

You all saw the head of Chase Bank, Jamie Dimon, in part of his report to shareholders this last week, saying his economists believe there is a very good chance that interest rates are going higher.

Look, I will put these down and I will try not to hit anyone with them.

Please look at this chart. Please look at this. You see this line over here? This is 1975 to 2001, the average on U.S. sovereign debt was 7\1/2\ percent. The average for all those years was 7\1/2\ percent. That was actually the average considering--now, I accept that has some of the 1980s, Paul Volcker, but that was the average.

Then we go to 2001 to 2022, absolutely suppressed interest rates. We lived in a fantasy world. It was down to 2.2. Okay. That is your juxtaposition. What is the real interest rate? What is the real cost of money here? We are only right now at 3.3. Our economists and the Joint Economic Committee, Republican side, and even myself, we are trying to figure out where it is going. We don't think it is going down.

We need to somehow understand the reality. If you are borrowing $100,000 a second, do you think there is lots of liquidity out there to see your interest rates come falling? What would happen to the United States debt when you functionally have a total of 34.7; actually in May we go to 35, in September we will be over 36, because we are clicking off about a trillion dollars of borrowing about every 110, 115 days right now.

We need to think about that. What happens if the interest rates go anywhere back to the historic norm? Are we allowed to tell our constituents the truth? It breaks my heart because there is a path, but you have to be willing to be disruptive, almost revolutionary. You have to be willing to be moral in saying, if these are the cost drivers, the actual cost drivers, not the theatrics--I always love it when I go and read some of the comments like ``if you just got rid of your salaries,'' fine. Maybe we are overpaid--trust me. For our work product, we are--but it is 2.6 seconds a day of all borrowing. Foreign

aid is about 5 days of borrowing. There is the fantasy. And then there is the other side, the Democrats. ``Well, tax rich people.'' Okay. Fine. Have at it. I have done the economic studies multiple times here on the floor showing that you take your own plans, $400,000 and up and maximize every tax. Maximize estate tax, capital gains tax, income taxes, just do it all. Maximize it to the revenue producing maximum and then do the economic adjustment, you get 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. That is the studies, 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. We are borrowing over 9.6 right now.

If someone out there is brilliant and you have an easier way to explain this, please send it to me because I feel like I am just treading water here while people look at me and go, ``Oh, Schweikert, you did another speech on the floor. That was interesting. I didn't watch, though.''

You start to understand that when you do the comparisons of where we are heading--this is one--when you start to see numbers saying in 9 budget years you are going to have $60, $62 trillion of borrowing--that is what we are trying to compare.

We are slicing the difference between our projection and the CBO baseline, but the punch line here, the President's budget in 9 budget years has us at $70 trillion and the CBO has us at $62 trillion. That is 9 budget years from now.

Am I the only idiot here that is terrified? This is moral? But we are going to engage in theatrics that is not even a days' worth of borrowing, maybe minutes' worth of borrowing because that is what we are willing to debate over because we are terrified to stand in front of our audiences and say, unless we revolutionize the cost of healthcare, I can't make the numbers work.

So what are you willing to do?

And that is with all the leftists taxes. You start to also look-- because the other day, I was taking inbound from one of my Democrat friends--well, you had the tax cut. Have you seen your own numbers on even just the Inflation Reduction Act? Seriously, where you are right down here, oh, that is only going to cost $20 billion and the next year will be $14 billion, and the actual now number projections where some of the years it is over $120 billion outlays. That is cash money, subsidies to corporate America, they basically bought the love of multinational corporations. God bless them.

It is more than the entire 10-year cost of tax reform, which actually spread out wealth, but they can't admit that.

I am breaking one of my own rules because I keep coming here and saying maybe we should spend less time litigating the past and deal with the reality of our demographics and the math right now. Let's take a look at some of the things that we are up against.

Why is the public so cranky? Seriously, I try to have this conversation with folks at home. I am blessed. I represent the Phoenix- Scottsdale area. If you have to represent a district, I represent one of the most beautiful spots, particularly in the winter months. I represent a fairly prosperous district. I represent a really well- educated district, a really entrepreneurial district.

A lot of my folks appear, on the surface, to be doing fairly well in life, but they are stressed out of their minds because, in my district, we have had the highest inflation in the continental United States. If you do not make 23.6 percent more money today than you did the day President Biden took office, you are poorer.

No matter what economic data the clown show--excuse me, body of Congress--wants to talk about over and over: Oh, jobs are this. Unemployment is this.

This is what matters. When you actually look at the data of those who are nonsupervisory or supervisory, today they are poorer, even when you put back in wage growth. Our brothers and sisters in America are poorer today.

In my district, it is worse. I have a prosperous district. Do you want to understand why people are struggling, angry, and frustrated? Maybe an honest conversation that we made them poorer.

Here is a bit of an intellectual tease: What is the biggest tax hike in modern history? Come on, what is the biggest tax hike in modern history? Let's work through this. If I came to you right now and said the thousand dollars, the hundred dollars, the dollar you have saved up, and over the next 3 to 3\1/2\ years we are going to basically take away almost a quarter of its value, we made you poorer, right? That is called inflation.

Where did that value go, though? It went to the debtors. Who is the biggest debtor in the world? The United States.

We functionally transferred your wealth through inflation and devalued the debt. The problem is now we hit the interest rate cycle, so we were devaluing the debt by inflation. The financing of our debt explodes, as well as the fact--and this is one that is a little trickier to talk about. Social Security, Medicare, these other things have kickers for inflation in there. You get a short-term benefit. You saw a little spike about a year, year-and-a-half ago when debt to GDP, even though the debt was higher--the GDP had sort of grown, but it is because of the differential because of inflation.

Now, all that benefit is gone. Now, it is getting really ugly because the financing of the debt--I just showed you--if you do the gross number, is on its way to $1.2 trillion just this year. Interest now is the second biggest expense in our government.

In a little while, you have to understand--back to my fixation that we need to find some way to add technology, disruption, cures to disrupt the cost of healthcare because guess what, Mr. Speaker? In a few years, Medicare even passes Social Security in total spending.

The hierarchy used to always be Social Security is number one, defense is number two, Medicare is number three, and interest was actually way down here. Now, interest is number two, but Social Security is number one.

In just a few years, healthcare costs will be the number one expense in this country--just Medicare. This isn't adding in the Indian Health Service, the VA, Medicaid.

Now, look, much of it is demographics. This is where maybe there is a problem that we are so busy attacking the left, and the left is so busy attacking us. The fact of the matter is, people getting older, moving into their earned benefits, is that Republican or Democrat? It is demographics.

We know it is going to happen. We have known there were 67 million baby boomers for how long? Sixty-five years. We did brilliant planning for it, didn't we? Understanding charts like this, it is coming, it is in front of us, and we will do everything we can to ignore it.

This chart is a little hard to read, but I am trying to make a point. This uses some of the math from our colleagues on the left. As we get near the 8-year window, 10-year window, we get back closer to 18 percent--this is just structural, 18 percent of GDP coming in as taxes. Yet, the debt continues to grow even with that because interest keeps growing as well as the other expenses, particularly driven by, once again, healthcare costs.

Unless we are willing to tell the truth, how do you take on the problem?

This one is a little more for my Republican brothers and sisters. In 2023, how many times have you heard one of us get up and say ``growth''? Growth is incredibly important, and you can spike growth by cleaning up the immigration system and moving to a talent base, not importing massive poverty. You can do other things, such as getting regulations--adapt to using technology as much of your regulator instead of armies full of bureaucrats and file cabinets.

There are dozens of things you can do policywise to create growth, but if you had someone who said, ``We will just grow ourselves out of borrowing $100,000 a second,'' they are not good at math.

Here is the basic simple rule: GDP, the size of the economy, in 2023 grew a trillion and a half dollars. However, you do understand, for that growth, you only get 17, 18, maybe even 19 percent of that in tax receipts. The growth is wonderful, but it is not dollar for dollar. I will get people who say, okay, you guys borrowed $2.5 trillion, but the economy grew $1.5 trillion. Yes, it did grow $1.5 trillion, but I only get 17, 18, 19 percent of that in tax receipts. Do you understand the scale of growth we would have to have for the tax receipts to come close to the borrowing? That

would require elementary school math, wouldn't it? Sorry.

Back to the baseline. Our brothers and sisters are struggling. If you are in markets like I am, where housing costs have gone up dramatically, parts of your food budget have gone up dramatically, we have Americans who are struggling. I showed the inflation numbers, and into that headwind, we have to find a way to stabilize the borrowing to that growth of the economy. At the same time, we have to find a way to get beyond the liars out there that are trying to pollute the debate because they want to see this country fail.

If we don't step up and do our job, start telling people the truth, realize there is a path to stabilize our debt to GDP--and this could be a stunning century for America, but my fear is when I look at the debt spiral that is coming, if interest rates continue to go where they are going, you have maybe 3 years, 5 years. At that point then most of what this government does is we have handed over the power of this government to the bond market because the bond market will be in charge of us. The bond market will decide what our priorities are. They will control the price of our debt. They will control our resources.

Make a decision: Are you willing to act like adults, digest facts, vet, double-check your facts, and then demand Members of Congress start thinking like--it is impolite to curse behind the mike--start thinking in a way where they are willing to do difficult things that are accurate on their calculator and not their feelings? You can't make public policy with feelings and have it actually work out on your calculator. As the old family saying for the Schweikert household goes, the math will eventually win.

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

Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do three things tonight.

One, I am going to spend a few minutes sort of talking about folklore. I have tried this a couple of times. It hasn't worked, but hope springs eternal. I will sort of walk through some of the comments you get and try to explain where reality is, and maybe they are bots or maybe they are made up.

The second thing, we are going to walk through the borrowing numbers off of the Treasury's website so they are up to date on what is actually happening. I need to do it over and over because I am trying to get this place to understand how fast the numbers are moving away from us.

Number three, we are going to do some thought experiments. I am going to show some ideas in technology that actually could fairly substantially change the borrowing and debt curve.

First off, last week, I appreciate that Forbes put up on YouTube last week's floor speech. I think now 640,000 people have viewed it, which is wonderful. However, you then read some of the comments, and you accept some of the comments are from Russian troll farms, Chinese troll farms, or Iranian troll farms, or they are bots. It is just lunacy. Every once in a while, you get the person who says: Why aren't there any people in the Chamber?

They are not supposed to be here. The work of the day is done. Now, we do our floor speeches. Some evenings, they are still in committee until late at night. It is right now--what?--7:30 here in Washington.

If they are hanging out here, they should be in their offices reading, but one of the reasons I do these presentations, is that we are probably on a thousand televisions around this campus right now. Maybe there are some staffers who all of a sudden are willing to listen to math. Remember our running joke that this is a math-free zone.

Second thing, I am going to do this because I am tired of people who don't think. Stop being trite. The scale of the debt problem is real, and whether you are on the left or the right, you have to understand the solutions. We move our mouths about saying we are going to raise taxes on rich people, and you get about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP, but you are borrowing them at 9.6.

Those of us who want to cut things have to be honest. I can find you 1\1/2\, 2 percent of cuts, but if you are borrowing 9.6 percent of GDP, which we are this year, you are not really moving the needle.

One of the comments, just to understand how absurd and how stupid-- excuse me. That is not fair. I take that back. I apologize.

Please take this seriously. When you have the person who says--and maybe it was a bot, and you see in the comments 20, 30 times--if you just got rid of congressional salaries. We are probably overpaid for our work product.

In an entire year, every U.S. Senator, every Member of the House, if you get rid of their salaries, it would cover 16 minutes of borrowing in an entire year. In a day, it would cover 2.6 seconds of borrowing. This is what we call fun rhetoric, and it is stupid math.

When you have someone willing to say things like that, it once again shows you are not willing to understand the scale that is moving against this country.

Remember, over and over, it is debt that has crushed republics, so let's actually go through some of the other math. Then, there are a number of things we are going to go through here, just trying to understand how absurd what is going on is.

I grabbed The Economist magazine, a wonderful magazine. It is a little liberal, a little European-centric, but you see their cover. Their cover is trying to make the point that we have actually a remarkably healthy economy, considering all the stupid that has gone on. Yet, what does it mean to you when magazines like this have covers saying: The amazing American economy is still growing.

At the same time, last week I was here and told you we were borrowing over $95,000 a second. Now, it is no longer $95,000. It is, I think, $98,300 a second. If we try a little harder, maybe we will get over $100,000 a second.

If you go over the last 365 days, as of today, we are borrowing over $98,000 a second, and almost every dime of that growth in borrowing is interest and different types of healthcare. Yet, when you look at these, I keep trying to explain over and over every dime.

This is a more updated version. Here is what we call discretionary. You see there in the blue or purple or whatever that color is, about half of that is Defense. About half of that is everything you think of as government. It is the FBI. It is the Park Service. It is everything else other than mandatory earned benefits.

Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed. All Defense is borrowed. All discretionary is borrowed.

Also, we are heading toward a time where we may actually see--and this is off. If we actually get close to $2.8 trillion and all discretionary is about--start thinking that. When you start having another $800 billion of Medicare, things of that nature, borrowed, shouldn't that actually start to create a little sense of stress, of panic?

Are we going to continue to play the game around here where the left lies, saying we are going to raise taxes, and then we do stupid things like, well, if we got rid of foreign aid, yes, it would take care of a whole week or so of borrowing.

What I am asking for is to think with a calculator. We have to change policies in a big-time way to save this country, and it is going to be complex. It is going to be hard. You are going to have to read and understand, but there is hope.

I can show you over and over. I have come to this floor and said: If you do these things, you can crash the price of healthcare. If you adopt these technologies, you can crash the price of this government.

Yet, these hallways around here are full of people who are not here to help us cut spending. They are here to actually help themselves. They want money. They want it either to defend their bureaucracies or to defend their business models, and they use Congress as a barrier to entry.

Let's walk through some more of this.

One of my other frustrations is how you plan. Last May, when we were supposed to be building the 2024 budget, a year ago May--and we are going to vote on the rest of it this week, which shows just how dysfunctional we have been, but we have been too busy trying to get rid of a Speaker.

Think of this. In that time, we were fighting over $16 billion. We are borrowing about $9 billion a day. We have gone how many months, and we never got around to actually working on the real problems because of the theatrics around here.

The Congressional Budget Office last year said that we may only borrow $1.744 billion. I like to use gross numbers instead of publicly borrowed, and over here when you borrow from the trust funds, because you have to pay them back--and we do pay interest to the trust funds-- when you borrow out of Social Security, borrow out of Medicare part A trust fund, when you borrow out of Transportation--and we do borrow that money right out--it goes to Treasury, goes out the door, and then we give them Treasury note IOUs with interest.

Then OMB, Office of Management and Budget, last June, said that we are only going to borrow $1.988 trillion in the 2024 fiscal year, and that bottom number is just what we have already borrowed to date, which, if you work it out per month, you are looking at the number of $2.8 trillion, $2.9 trillion.

How do we keep missing the number by a trillion dollars? Is that part of the scam? Is it part of the game to say that we are going to give our number prediction--and that is what all the talking heads on television, radio, and the newspapers and the really diligent press around here fixate on because it is in their little book and they are not paying attention. That first board I showed you, you could go onto the Treasury's website and do the math yourself and see where we are actually at.

Part of one of the drivers is nothing you get to vote on here. It is the continuation of rising interest rates, so I have had to adjust this. Understand, today's 10 years, I think, was at 4.3, so this is the blend interest rate, which means--let me see if I can make this make sense.

You have a country with about $34\1/2\ trillion of borrowing, but it is really closer to $27 trillion, $28 trillion is sold to the public. The rest of that is borrowed internally. What is sold to the public has a couple of factors on it. It is duration. They sold a 6-month. They sold a 1-year. They sold a 5-year. They sold a 10-year. They sold a 30- year. These are bonds. These are notes. These are paper. It is just different names for the different durations. Some were sold years ago when interest rates were basically close to zero.

This year, in the 2024 year, with the new issuances of bonds because of our current borrowing and then the refinancing of old, there is about $10 trillion that gets subject to the new interest rates. As bonds are rolling off, and then you saw when we had that stressed bond auction--what was it?--last November where the market makers had to buy 24 percent of it, and a couple of weeks later, Treasury rolls out and says maybe we are just going to start selling shorter on the curve because at least that way we know we have the demand, but, yes, we are going to pay higher premiums on it.

Every couple of weeks, we get the calculation of what our interest load is, and it keeps ticking up on us. I am going to show a couple of boards here. If you look, interest on outstanding debt, the nonnegotiable is the debt internally. Publicly held is right now about 3.259 and may continue to tick up as they go shorter on the curve.

I know this is geeky. If you don't like math, please go watch something else. We are selling more and more of our debt short because there is demand there, but that interest, we are paying a premium. Then, you want to know why the debt and borrowing keeps going up.

It is about how we are financing. What that ends up creating is this situation here where my predictions--and I will take responsibility if I am wrong because, understand, my darkness is about $800 billion to almost a trillion dollars over what our Congressional Budget Office says, what Office of Management and Budget said. So far, I have been right. I also look at it every single day, where they put a number and then several months go by.

We are right now on track for coming in over $2.8 trillion in borrowing. Remember, I just showed you an economic magazine saying: Isn't it amazing how healthy the U.S. economy is? How do you borrow close to $3 trillion--that is a gross number that is both publicly borrowed and internal borrowing--how do you borrow close to $3 trillion when the economy is good?

I need you to think about this because tax collections are not that far off from the historical average. When we have had very high marginal rates, when we have had very low marginal rates, they are always there at about 17.5 percent, 18.5 percent, sometimes it is as high as 19 percent of the economy, it comes in as taxes.

Does this let you know there is something structural out there? It is the dirty little secret that we all know, but we are afraid to say because it gets us unelected. We tell the truth about where the drivers are.

Mr. Speaker, 100 percent of U.S. borrowing from today through the next 30 years will be interest, healthcare, and Social Security. In 8 or 9 years, when the Social Security trust fund is emptied out, we have to decide whether we will let the immorality of doubling senior poverty in America with seniors taking a 25 percent cut go on, or do we backfill it with general fund revenues? If we do that, those three things will be 100 percent of the borrowing for the next 30 years. Everything else is modeled to be pretty flat. As a matter of fact, the general fund, as related to discretionary, actually is going to be slightly positive over the 30 years.

We got old. It is demographics. We are not supposed to say that around here because we might hurt someone's feelings. I brought the charts here a couple weeks ago with the update in fertility rates. In 15 years, this country has had more deaths than births.

What are we doing to plan for that? What are we doing to plan for the reality that we are heading toward a time where we are going to have 2.3, 2.4 workers for every person in retirement on Social Security?

We know it is coming. It is not a black swan. It is what they nicknamed a white swan. It means you see it and you still don't do anything about it because we are too busy knifing each other with rhetoric that doesn't make mathematical sense because it is good politics.

And now we have done the updates again and our latest update this year is no longer fitting just interest in this year. I want to say this in a way where I get it fairly accurate. Our latest model says interest in the 2024 fiscal year will be $1.076 trillion.

When I came here a couple months ago and said: We could be heading for $1 trillion--I got mocked, even from some of my colleagues saying: Schweikert, you have got to stop making things up.

Well, it turns out I am right.

Mr. Speaker, why don't we take it seriously? We sit here and fight and fight over--it is real money we fight over, but in the same day, we will spend all day fighting over a few million here, which is important, and I am fine. I am willing to cut these things. However, we are picking pennies up off the ground as the avalanche is crushing us. That same day we fought over those millions; we borrowed $9 billion that day when we were fighting over millions. I understand that millions has a lot of zeroes. A trillion has 12 zeroes, so you can understand the scale.

I put up this slide just because this is our prediction slide, but also to make another point. Here is how spending will work this year, just so people understand the hierarchy.

Social Security, we expect $1.450 trillion to go out the door. This is an earned benefit. You worked in America; you paid your FICA tax. If you worked your 40 quarters, you maxed out, but you earned this.

The next biggest spend in your government isn't coming from a running tax and trust fund; it is borrowing, in both net and gross. The difference there, once again, is net is just the interest we pay out the door to people who bought our bonds. Gross is also because we owe interest to Social Security and Medicare and all the other trust funds. Both are coming in as the second biggest expense to the U.S. Government.

Number three, Medicare.

Number four is now defense.

If you and I walked down the street and said to someone: Hey, what is the number one spend in the U.S. Government? What is the number two? Would they say interest is the number two expense of this government? If you think interest rates are about to crash down to where they were in the last decade, remember the last decade was a fantasy.

If you take a look, if you remove sort of the previous decade with the value of money manipulation in interest rates, if we remove that and look at the 35-year average, we are not even high enough to be in the 35-year average yet. The fantasy has to come to an end here. This is reality. This is one of my continuing frustrations.

CBO, we try to work with them. They do their best. They have to operate with the GDP growth they expected, that is where Treasury tells them what receipts are coming in. We call tax revenue receipts. That is the proper term.

But over and over, we keep missing the numbers. And when you start missing your numbers by a trillion dollars, it makes the job a little trickier when the people you rely on, the data you rely on--because we missed how high interest rates--remember, last October everyone was saying that the Fed is going to start cutting, and inflation in the last 2 months really hasn't gone down.

This isn't a non sequitur. We suffer inflation because we spent too much money. Even the leftwing academic studies from last year, which wanted to blame the supply chain, had that as part of it. Some of them said as much as half was supply chain. Some said it was only about 40 percent, but supply chains are fixed.

We are a couple years later, how are we still running hot again? We are paying the price for spending money in ways that did not actually spike productivity. When you subsidize things, do you get the most efficient, the cheapest, the best way to produce them? It doesn't work that way.

You need to make it so there is a level of competition that the best, fastest product and the reinvestment in your capital--it is the difference between supply side and sort of the Keynesian investments, and now you have seen both.

You saw the productivity gains with the tax reform and now you have seen what happened with inflation reduction where you got inflation. Now, the last 2 months, it hasn't been going down the way it is supposed to. So expect these interest rates I just showed you to continue.

If you live in my neighborhood, if you live in the Scottsdale-Phoenix

area, it is a wonderful area. It is absolutely incredibly beautiful this time of year. From January 2021 until 2 months ago, if you are not making 23.6 percent more, you are poorer today than you were in January 2021. You want to know why people are cranky?

Try and understand how many of our brothers and sisters around the country, particularly in the working class, are poorer today. In my area, if you are not making 23.6 percent more than that January 2021 date, you are poorer today.

Look, if you want to go down the rabbit hole, part of the idea of stabilizing debt--when someone says: We are going to go pay it all off. Really? Let's see, the debt basically equals the entire size of this economy, just the debt. You are going to go pay it off?

From an economic standpoint, right now, be joyful if we could just stabilize it. That means the growth of the debt can only grow as fast as we are being productive as a society, as the growth of this economy.

Right now you have a problem in 2023 at that time--this is publicly- held debt; this isn't my gross debt--we borrowed $2.6 trillion from the public and the estimate is the economy grew about $1.5 trillion. But it is that delta that kills you. Until you squeeze those two back together, so if you only, only grow debt at the pace you grow the economy, that is stability. Then maybe you can get some more discipline, adoption of technologies, and better ways to do things, and you start to separate those so you can start to pay down that principal because the interest doesn't buy you anything.

I am not going to make you have to deal with some of these. How do I say this nicely? Here is where I hurt people's feelings.

Remember a moment ago how I was trying to explain that the primary driver is the U.S. sovereign debt? I need to update this board because the 30-year number was $116 trillion of borrowing and that is from a year or two ago. Our best math right now is close to $130 trillion of borrowing over the next 30 years.

If you are still a decade from retirement and you think you are going to live another 20 years, you have got to understand the dystopian level of what we are going to have to do to the U.S. dollar, to your savings, to those things. You don't think this is going to crush your retirement?

How about me? I accept I am an old dad, but I have a 20-month-old and I have an 8-year-old, do they deserve to have prosperity? Understand, my little boy, when he is 23 years old, I believe is the number, every U.S. tax has to be double what it is today just to cover projected spending, and that is baseline spending. That is no war, no recession, no pandemic, just baseline.

If any of you plan to be around here in 20-some years, are you prepared to have your taxes doubled? That is the math. I know this is a math-free zone, but I am pitching to your self-interest. Do you care?

It doesn't have to be that way. There are solutions. The hard part of this board is trying to explain to people that 100 percent of the borrowing that is coming over the next 30 years is Medicare and Social Security--if we backfill Social Security when the trust fund is gone in 8, 9 years--and interest. The rest of the budget actually has a slightly positive balance, meaning it comes in under its growth curve, underneath the projected receipts.

Now, we are going to first talk about understanding one of the key problems in our society. Then we are going to see if we can be creative in understanding the problem and be disruptive.

What could we do to have a healthier, more prosperous society? First, you have got to understand some of the things that are wrong here. The U.S. is an outlier in disease and disability trends. For some reason, we are dramatically sicker than much of the rest of the industrialized world. It is just math. We have the data.

You are all smart; at least if you are punishing yourself enough to watch an idiot like me talk, you have got to be either interested or not have a life, but understand that there is something wrong in the U.S. We are sicker than much of the rest of the world. The fact of the matter is healthcare costs are the primary driver of U.S. debt.

So what are the good things? What can we do to disrupt that?

There are a couple of amazing articles from a couple years ago. For my Democrat colleagues, who tell me how important taking on income inequality is, they are really interesting abstract studies that sort of say: Is it education? Yeah, that is a big play.

It turns out health was actually above everything else in the disparity of creating income inequality: urban poor, Tribal poor in a place like Arizona, and rural poor.

When diabetes is 33 percent of all of our healthcare spend in America, why doesn't this place go nuts in trying to fix diabetes? Instead what we did was something that is absolutely absurd.

In the Inflation Reduction Act, they took $16 billion and gave it to Big Pharma who they complain was gouging the price of insulin. At the same time, 75 miles from here, there is a co-op making three brands of generic insulin cheaper than the subsidized price.

Why wouldn't we take a fraction, a fraction, a fraction of that money and put it into saying we want competition, we want everyone battling to give us the best product and the best prices? I am going to show a weird little technology just as a part of the thought experiment.

However, instead, we subsidized. Excuse me, they subsidized the very Big Pharma that they complained about was gouging people, and then they crushed the competition that was trying to come in cheaper because now they can't compete against the subsidized price. This is the absurdity of this place.

We need more of this. Finally, you start to see the curve because of some of the breakthroughs in synthetic biology. We are going to talk a little bit about AI. Artificial intelligence is about to have a revolution in bringing cures to market dramatically faster, dramatically faster. We have actually now had the first couple of AI drugs designed to make it through the FDA.

As you know, 6 weeks ago we had the first genetic drug cure sickle cell anemia. Excuse me. Yeah, no, sickle cell. What we learned from that technology, there is more coming. How do we make it possible that it doesn't take $100 million or $1 billion to bring one of these drugs to market when we now have the ability to crunch data in ways that we were never able to do before, to understand efficacy and safety and effectiveness?

We could do it by policies. Is that Republican or Democrat or is that just sort of joining into this century?

This is a wonderful chart, trying to just point out the capital markets are starting to spend money in places to cure people. I will argue, one of the most moral things we could do and one of the most powerful things we could do for U.S. sovereign debt, make Americans much less sick.

Now, this is where I will get some really nasty comments. I have brought the charts and the reports and the academic studies. If diabetes is 33 percent of all spending, half of human diseases--so there are 3,000-plus human conditions--half of them are related to obesity.

Do we think about things we could do in farm policy, in nutrition policy, in helping our brothers and sisters live better, healthier, more prosperous? An ability to join into the labor force, maybe family formation, crushing income inequality.

Is that Republican or Democrat?

Yes, it will really, really annoy a whole bunch of incumbent business models that need sick people, but even they have souls. We are on the cusp of miracles. Why aren't we doing this?

Poor health reduces labor force participation. This is an absurd chart except for the fact, this is from Goldman Sachs, and they were just doing this thought experiment.

These semaglutides, I think there is a generic one that is going to be here in May. There are a couple great articles if you want to use your favorite search engine about some small molecule versions that will cost dramatically less to make, and they are coming. There is going to be competition, the prices are coming down. These are these GLP-1s.

They were just doing the thought experiment of what would happen if all of a sudden we started to get healthier as a society.

Okay, is that Republican or Democrat?

It would be the most powerful thing we could do for U.S. sovereign debt.

Are we ready to step up and take on the armies of lobbyists here who are upset with us every time we come up with--do you remember when we were trying to do telehealth? Before the pandemic, telehealth was one of the most lobbied-against technologies in Washington, D.C. Then the pandemic hit, and it turns out people had figured out how to work their phones.

Believe in the American people. Stop treating them like children, but also stop coddling those who make money off of our illnesses.

Let's actually take a look. This was fascinating. Once again, I want to thank Joint Economic Republican staff for being willing to go down the rabbit hole, talk to the Goldman Sachs economists, and try to understand how they got these numbers.

The basic pitch here is they were trying to figure out if there was a wider use and accessibility for the semaglutides, the GLP-1s. These are the hormone molecules your gut produces to tell you that you are full. It helped reduce diabetes and helped reduce obesity in America.

It actually had a substantial effect on growing the economy. It actually increased GDP. It is at least worth thinking about. This is the thought experiment portion of this program. Think about it.

If I came to you tomorrow--actually today, let's just do it right now--and said I need something from you we could roll out, and in the next 6 months we could have a major effect on reducing U.S. spending.

Okay, I have all sorts of things I could cut. I know my brothers and sisters on the left, they would want to raise taxes on people, but I need a policy that could have a major effect.

We have multiple academic studies that make it clear that about 16 percent of U.S. healthcare spending is people actually not adhering to their drugs. Someone like me, can you believe I have high blood pressure? As long as I take my calcium inhibitor, I don't stroke out. It is a pill that costs--in many ways, it is pennies. It has been off patent for decades and decades and decades. I just have to do my drug adherence.

Sixteen percent of U.S. healthcare spending is people not adhering to their pharmaceutical policy or whatever the right way to say that.

You do realize 16 percent of U.S. healthcare spending is close to $600 billion? What if you cut a third of that? What if I came to you and said, hey, we can get $200 billion in savings and make our brothers and sisters healthier and maybe keep a few of them from dying?

It turns out there are crazy, simple, little things, like the pill bottle cap that just beeps at you if you don't open it in the morning. It is like 99 cents. How many of us have a phone that the pharmacy, the doctor's office, however you want to do it, could beep at you in the morning, hey, remember, it is that time, you should really do this.

It is not the way this place thinks. This place thinks about subsidies and giveaways. Remember, ObamaCare, the ACA was a finance bill. It was who had to pay and who got subsidized, and then how much Federal money also went into subsidizing. It was a financing package. The Republican alternative was a financing package. Medicare for All is a financing bill.

How about the revolution of thought? Why don't we change what we pay by making our brothers and sisters healthier or maybe curing some things?

This is one of the simplest thought experiments I can give you. If U.S. healthcare, 16 percent of it is people not engaging in adherence, why not take that on?

Is that Republican or Democrat or is that just the adoption of technology? Is it just trying to be creative?

Look, there are other quirky things. This is more my personal fascination. I actually am blessed to have a couple staffers who are doing experiments with some of the different wearables that actually can use the data to help them stay healthier, to find out about their bodies. The beauty of this is, you get data off you for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and it starts to tell you things. Oh, when I ate that, my body didn't like it. When I slept this way, my body did like it.

These have crashed in price. There are even some health insurance companies now that are working with you, asking if you will do a wearable.

Look, a couple years ago, I came here, I had met a material science professor who had come up with this thing. We always joked; we called it the flu kazoo. It was something you blew into. It was a breath biopsy. It could almost tell you within a couple moments if you had a certain type, category of virus. It could bang off your health records, and then it could order you antivirals.

Would that help us? Would that make us healthier? Would that cut down the cycle time so you don't wait in the waiting room?

Yes. Except the problem is, in most places that technology would be illegal because it would be the algorithm writing a prescription. Every time I say this, I will get someone who says: David, we are going to try to run ads against you because we make money writing prescriptions.

I am just trying to make America healthier, and I am trying to find a way to take down the debt so we don't crush ourselves.

The adoption of technology, if it is as accurate--and, statistically, a model like that is more accurate than you and I can be as humans--why don't we promote it? Why don't we allow people the freedom to take care of themselves by using technology?

All right, now here is a crazy one. I am going to do this one just because it amused me. Remember how a couple minutes ago I was complaining about Democrats and the way they approached insulin because it was a great campaign issue, but it was technologically vacuous?

Here is one: How about if you had taken a couple dollars or just actually helped this? It turns out, they have succeeded at doing a DNA tweak to some cattle, and the cattle will produce insulin at a fraction, fraction, fraction of the price, and you could actually do different tweaks for different types of insulin.

I am just starting to read the academic article, but it exists. These are quirky solutions.

When you have debates around here, it becomes a debate of give away money or give away more money. It is not embrace something that disrupts and makes people healthier and actually at the same time doesn't blow up the U.S. debt and deficit. You can be moral and also have a fiscal brain around here. It just requires some literacy.

Maybe along with being a math-free zone, we don't read things. I subscribe to a lot of crazy journals, so I come up with this stuff.

I guess my reason for the thought experiment, Mr. Speaker, we are in real trouble. There is hope, but the hope only works if this body finds some way to think differently. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I actually am about to try to make everyone mad. I actually believe data is a private property right. It belongs to you as an American citizen. The problem with our design here, it is really well-meaning, but it doesn't get at the structural problem.

Let's say you have an entity over here that divests. What makes them not then take the data, sell it to a data broker, and it gets washed and ends up still in the bad actors' hands?

You have to understand, there is even articles out this week of even our

own three-letter agencies buying their data now from data brokers instead of doing the tracking.

We need to think dramatically more globally. Your data is a private property right. That will be the only way we end up protecting ourselves from bad actors and sometimes even our own selves.

Madam Speaker, we are going to do something really daring tonight, and we will see if it actually works. We are going to use some boards, some math, that I haven't even seen the final numbers on. We were

working on them over the weekend in regard to President Biden's State of the Union and then with them dropping their budget. We are trying to make the math work, which seems to be the routine here.

I have a lot of boards. The theme is really simple on a couple of conceptual levels.

The President basically said: Hey, the Medicare trust fund, we are going to do something about it. Great. Seven years or so from now, the Medicare trust fund is empty. We often refer to it as part A. There are actually a couple of slivers of it. It is about a third. It is just the hospital portion. The rest comes out of the general fund.

Did you notice how the President stood right there and basically said you are not allowed to talk about Social Security, not allowed to talk

about reforming it, and not allowed to talk about the fact

that in 8 or 9 years, it is gone?

The amount of that dwarfs dramatically the scale of the shortfall of Medicare. Understand, you have the transportation trust fund that is going empty, and you have Medicare part A. Then, the big kahuna is Social Security. Those all happen within the next 9 years.

The intense frustration of the President's speech is that it was a campaign speech. In talking to the voters out there, I would ask: Are you for sale? You were promised lots of things with your own money. Here is the reality. We are going to borrow the money, or we are going to raise the taxes. I am going to show you the tax calculations are a complete fraud. We are going to buy your votes with your own money, and then we are going to borrow a boatload of spending that is going to crush your retirement and crush your kids and grandkids.

Go America.

Once again, we are back to sort of setting records. If you subscribe to my Daily Debt Monitor, we send out a text message every single day with what is going on. It is not our opinion. It is right off the Treasury's website. We just grab it, and we give you two numbers so you actually understand it.

Remember, we play some games at the end of the fiscal year and the timing effect where, like they did last year, they rolled back the money from the Supreme Court ruling in regard to student loans, but they rolled it back in to push down the total number because they had done it up the previous fiscal year. There are all sorts of games.

We also give you one which is just a running clock. It is the 365- day--this year, 366-day--clock, and it just runs. You get to see both of them.

Right now, if you tell the truth and use the gross number--we pay interest to the trust funds. We are the only industrialized country in the world that lies on this, where we borrow our own money, pay interest, and then pretend that is off the books.

If you look at OECD, they actually have the United States closer to 144 percent of debt to GDP because they don't allow accounting games like we do internally.

We are borrowing over $95,000 per second. If you actually look at the run rate right now, the last 365 days, or 366 if you throw in the leap year, we have borrowed over $3 trillion--I am trying to find a nice way to emphasize that word, $3 trillion--in the running last year.

I think I have it in one of my charts here, but if I don't, I will just say it right now: When the President published their budget, did anyone pay attention to how the game is working?

We are starting to understand the game.

So several months ago when the preliminary budget numbers were put out by the White House, we were going to borrow $1.5 trillion, 1.6, wink, wink, nod, nod. The number came out what was it yesterday or--no, excuse me--earlier today. It says: It looks like we are closer to 2.1, 2.2. However, if you then look at the rest of their math, it is going up higher than that. It looks like actually, if you actually do the gross, it really is going over the $2 trillion 800 billion.

Do we do this to lie to the bond markets or each other?

Or is it just so the idiot class in Washington basically quotes the old number?

Be that as it may, does anyone understand, Madam Speaker, that when you see movements of numbers that are functionally 1 trillion, the burn rate right now is we are borrowing $1 trillion about every 125 days.

Does that get anyone's attention?

So we are going to walk through a number of these slides, and then when we get down to the end here, we are going to actually do some slides trying to take a look at the President's budget they dropped just a few hours ago and our base math.

So I am going to run through many of these really quickly because there were a number of things said during the President's State of the Union Address that were bizarre. They are urban folk legends. Nonetheless, as we have seen in this town, if you say a lie enough times it starts to become baseline political discussion.

What happened after the TCJA?

That is the tax reform that happened in December 2017.

There are two reasons for doing this. I want to show that the vast majority of where the tax cuts were for the working middle class and that the U.S. tax code got more progressive. The wealthy, the top- tiers--actually the top couple of tiers--in the United States of income today pay a higher percentage of the Federal income tax than they did before 2017.

I probably should say this now, so I don't forget it: I believe there is a scam.

So often when we go home, we have people who meet you at your grocery store. You are at Walmart, Costco, whatever, when someone comes up to you, Madam Speaker, and they have the latest conspiracy theory or the number of times our cell phones are just filled with them.

Madam Speaker, I will give you one that is not a conspiracy theory. It is math. If you take the President's speech and say: We are going to tax rich people-- Remember, Madam Speaker, I have come to this floor multiple times and shown you what happens when you do tax maximization of those over $400,000 and you can't even get anything close. You get about 1.5 percent of GDP. This year, we are basically borrowing, what, 9.6 percent of the GDP.

Does anyone do some basic math and see the difference?

We have a problem. Be that as it may, it is great political rhetoric both on the right and the left because we are a populist country now: tax the rich people.

Great. It doesn't get you anywhere near where you need to be.

So when we get near the end of this decade, the Social Security trust fund is empty and the transportation trust fund is empty, the President got his way, and we have tax maximized just to cover the shortfall in the Medicare trust fund. Madam Speaker, where do you get the money?

I will lay a marker down today, by the end of this decade this country will have a VAT tax, a value added tax, just like the rest of the industrialized world, just like Europe and just like everyone else. At that moment, the working middle class--that hardworking middle class--will be poorer. That is the scam that is going on because that is where the money is.

So, Madam Speaker, you have this dancing here.

It works politically. Think about this: as the wealthier and better educated have moved more to the Democratic Party and working people have moved to the Republican Party, depending on who is in power at the end of this decade, be prepared.

If we don't make some of these policy changes that change the cost of healthcare, then there is no mathematical way we make it out of this decade without kicking the working class in the head. That is what is going on.

So let's walk through some of this.

So over here, Madam Speaker, you have got to understand one of the key things that happened when we did tax reform is we functionally took one-half of the society, one-half of the working people in this country, the poor working people, understand, but half of them pay almost no income taxes. Okay?

Now, you get over here to that top 1 percent, and, yes, they had a huge tax cut. They went from 26.8 to 25.6. However, we also removed a whole bunch of other deductions. We are going to talk about that. So it is always amusing

here when you have our brothers and sisters from high tax States saying: we want SALT because it goes mostly to really rich people, and they write us checks.

So we are going to blaze through these because we have a lot to do tonight.

I did this last week. I want to make the point that this number is now wrong. Now our estimate is we are going to have interest this year--interest this fiscal year--of $1.1 trillion. Madam Speaker, $1.1 trillion dollars of interest in the 2024 fiscal year means Social Security is the number one spend at $1 trillion 450 billion, interest will be number two, Medicare will be number three, and defense is now number four.

We all heard that in the President's speech, right?

I keep trying to make the point over and over and over that it is not just those of us who think it is more ethical to do gross interest, if you even do net interest--net interest--now that means you pretend you didn't pay any interest to the Social Security trust fund, Medicare trust fund, transportation trust fund, railroad retirement trust fund, and all the others. You just say you borrowed the money, and you didn't pay anything--we are just going to keep that off the books--just the interest we pay out to those people who bought U.S. debt, bonds, T- bills, notes, that is still the second highest spend.

Nonetheless, that would be inconvenient to go out and tell the truth, wouldn't it?

So I am laying myself on the line. I believe if you look at the trendline--even from the Budget Office at the White House, they have kept revising the number, revising the number, and revising the number--there is a very good chance total gross debt, borrowing, borrowing, this year, $2.8 trillion, it could actually kiss up to 3.

Now, why is this such a big deal?

Think about it, Madam Speaker.

Why is this such a big deal?

Didn't we just have a gentleman standing behind that microphone telling us how great the economy was, how great all the spending was, and how much it had moved the economy?

Okay. GDP is actually reasonable. It is actually pretty good right now.

How is it possible we are running a $2.8, $3 trillion deficit in a time when the economy is supposedly doing well?

Madam Speaker, do you understand that these are deficits that would have been in the middle of the pandemic?

The wheels have come off, and this place isn't willing to actually deal with the reality.

When we can't even do a deficit commission, when we sit here and fight for months over things that would be rounding errors, then we are borrowing like $9 billion a day, and we are going to shut the place down for months over $16 billion?

Does anyone see a math problem?

We basically burnt this place down for a couple of days of interest, borrowing.

So let's actually walk through what is about to happen to each of you. We will use 2026 because that is the year you are going to pay your taxes.

Next year, a number of the provisions of the tax reform from December 2017, expire.

So let's walk through. Let's say you are a middle American. You are basically working. Right now, you have a 24 percent tax rate. Congratulations. You go up to 28. If you are one of those top earners, then you now have functionally a 37 percent tax rate, you are going to 39.6. All the marginal tax rates go up, and that happens next year.

So the moment this election is over, and the negotiations begin on this it will matter who is in the Senate Finance Committee and who is in the House Ways and Means Committee because the math takes off.

So let's actually go a little bit further. The expiring 2025 tax provisions, standard deduction, if you are single, Madam Speaker, you get a $14,600 deduction, that goes away next year, and that standard deduction goes to $8,300.

Does anyone see a problem?

Married, you get a $29,200 deduction today. A year from now, that is gone. You go to $16,600.

I am sure glad the President spent a bunch of time talking about how we were going to protect the middle class and make the economy continue to grow.

So here is just a baseline. The baseline number, and this is already the law, you are a single individual, you make $60,000, you will pay $1,794 more, $1,794 at the end of next year. That is the law. It is already baseline.

So, Madam Speaker, understand the crazy amount of spending that was talked about behind that microphone last week. They are already relying on your taxes going up.

So let's walk through a couple of other things so people understand. In 2025 tax provisions for pass-throughs expire.

Do any of you have an LLC? A family business? A side hustle?

Do you have a little LLC, you make some income, you do some consulting. Maybe you are a fancy Sub-Chapter S Corporation. Maybe you are a partnership. Maybe you are one of those employee-owned type businesses. You understand, Madam Speaker, current status, you can deduct equal to 20 percent. I was trying to find a way to make it equal, so you have the same fairness for Sub-Chapter C Corporations. That is gone. Your taxes are going up a whole bunch if you are an LLC or a pass-through.

Employer credit for paid leave goes away next year. It just goes away. Right now, credit up to 25 percent for up to 12 weeks, you get a 25 percent credit. That was one of the incentives that was built into the 2017 tax reform. It expires. It goes away.

I am sure glad this place is stepping up and understanding the expiring provisions and the kick in the head that it will be to the working class because we are making the numbers work, right?

All right. Another expiring 2025 provision is the State and local tax deduction. Now those of you from high tax States, you are giddy. The deduction right now is capped at $10,000, and it goes back. It goes back to as high as you want.

The great irony here is when you have the Bernie Sanderses of the world who basically say: This is a tax cut, a tax deduction for the ultrawealthy. Years ago, I came back and did the charts on this, and it was somewhere in the 80 percent, almost 90-plus percent went to really the top 1 or 2 percent income earners.

Watch how many of our friends on the left, our Democratic colleagues, fight like crazy for this even though it is a complete violation of every principle they claim, except it happens to be their constituents and their contributors.

Let's have a little more darkness here. There is the expiring 2025 tax provision, the child tax credit and credit for other dependents. Right now you get a couple thousand dollars, and it phases out when you get to around that $400,000. Next year, it is no longer $2,000. It goes to one, and it starts to phase out at $110,000, not $400,000.

This is already the law. This is what is coming.

I was delusional. I thought the President would actually talk about: hey, these are the things I am willing to support in the tax reform and its extensions.

Current status: You get $500 per dependent. That is gone.

Expiring in 2025 tax provisions, some more stuff that is expiring. The current status, 100 percent of first-year bonus deduction through 2022. This is what we did a couple weeks--well, 2 months ago now. It is still sitting in the Senate where we were just trying to fix some of the bonus depreciation because it turns out--all right, I am going to backtrack on myself, but this is important.

When you hear some of us come behind the microphone and talk about being able to deduct research and development, Madam Speaker, you realize that is not a deduction, that is a depreciation. It is a timing effect. You get to take it over 5 or 7 years that you spent all this money developing a new technology or you can take it today. However, you still take it as a deduction.

The difference is if you do it over 5 years, then you have to finance your cost, and in today's environment, that financing has gotten much more expensive.

It is just like expensing when you buy a new piece of equipment so you are more productive and so you can pay your workers more, so you can actually grow the economy and grow your business.

When depreciating that piece of equipment, do you do it in one day or in 7 years?

It is still the same depreciation. The difference is if you do it over 7 years, you have to finance the piece of equipment. If you do it in the first year, you can take it now, and the reinvestment cycle gets dramatically faster. That is why you are seeing productivity shoot up.

Is that an expense to the Government; I mean, for our tax collections? It is a timing effect. If you do it in the 10-year window it hits, but if you use a perpetual horizon, it is the same thing. The economics say you actually get more growth.

Please understand, one of the great advocates for doing the expensing was I think this ultraconservative President--what was his name--oh, yes, Barack Obama. Part of this was his idea.

Just understand, the expensing is gone.

Now we need to talk about--I am so glad the President basically said we are not going to touch Social Security; we are not going to talk about it. In the budget they just dropped, they did actually put out money for the Medicare Trust Fund, but there is nothing there for Social Security.

Why am I the only idiot that keeps coming behind these microphones saying in 8 or 9 years we double senior poverty? It is immoral, but is it just immoral for me? I don't understand why our brothers and sisters don't walk around here and understand we already have lots of data about the number of baby boomers who are ending up homeless right now because they weren't prepared--because they were renters--for what was happening to their rent costs. There is a spike in homeless baby boomers.

In 8, 9 years, the Social Security trust fund, you get a 25 percent cut. If you are an average working couple in America, that is a $17,400 cut. You double senior poverty.

I did multiple presentations here, but I did a big one 3 weeks ago--I had almost at least 200-plus thousand views on YouTube, so someone cared enough to watch it, and many of the comments were insane--that basically showed the Democrats' proposal to just raise the cap doesn't get you anywhere close to covering the shortfall.

Here, I will do this backwards. The first year, the very first year-- so my math, this is in 2033, but they want me to use 2034 because that is the vetted number. The first year, the shortfall is $616 billion. We know this is coming. It is really crappy to talk about this when you are out there campaigning because, God knows, we don't want to tell our voters the actual truth of how hard and how difficult what is coming at us is, but it is math. It is real. If you raise the cap on $400,000 and up, you only cover about a quarter of this. You have still doubled senior poverty.

That is the morality of this place.

Look, it is not Republican or Democrat. It is demographics. We got old. We only have a fraction of the workers. We have got an update-- what was it--a week ago Friday. U.S. fertility rates have collapsed again, so we are down to like 1.63. Basically that math means in 15 years the United States has more deaths than births.

All these things are fixable.

I am just exhausted. I keep coming behind these microphones to see if anyone cares. Is it too hard to tell the truth? I even have some of the--what is a nice way to say the Republican industrial establishment fighting like crazy to stop the debt and deficit commission because they are terrified that one of the special interests that finances their group might actually have to step it up.

Does anyone actually care about the country?

This is the type of crap that takes down a republic. It is not my feelings. It is not Republican math. It is not Democrat math. It is demographics. It is what we are.

Here is the chart I get the most complaints about, and it happens to be maybe the one--and it is already out of date because we no longer think this number is $116 trillion deficit in 30 years; we now think it is closer to 130. So it gives you an idea. This chart is now 3 years out of date.

Madam Speaker, 100 percent of the borrowing from today through the next 30 years--100 percent of the borrowing from today through the next 30 years is interest, healthcare costs, and Medicare. Then if the decision is to backfill Social Security, that is what you get.

It always goes silent. You always get, David, no one wants to see that board. I have actually had a Member come up to me angrily in the elevator once telling me that I have got to stop doing that. I had to actually face a question at one of my townhalls about that chart.

These are the facts.

Once again, a couple weeks ago because I am an idiot I came here and showed the chart that says Social Security, you and your spouse, you and your partner, you get back every dime plus about a $70,000 spiff. Now, that is a crap rate of return. You would have done so much better if you had been allowed to take a little sliver and put it in the markets, but that ship sailed 20 years ago.

Medicare, for every dime you put in, you are functionally now close to getting $5 back. That is the primary driver. We are not supposed to talk about that, but that is the primary driver. Think about what happened--and this is my point I have made for years here. We talk about healthcare as a financing issue; not as a reducing the cost of delivering healthcare.

ObamaCare, ACA, it was a financing bill. It was who had to pay, who got subsidized. The Republican alternative was a financing bill. It was who got subsidized, who had to pay. Medicare for All is a financing bill.

None of these are about what we pay. I will argue there is an incredible morality out there that could be bipartisan taking on obesity, taking on diabetes being 33 percent of all healthcare spending in this country. What would happen if we could actually make a huge dent in that? It would be the most powerful thing you could do for U.S. sovereign debt, income inequality, family formation, and just the morality of society. But instead, we don't talk about fixing health, we talk about how we are going to raise taxes to finance more of it.

Is this place completely void of the ability to think?

Let's get into a couple of these charts that I have only had a little glimpse at because we were building these off the President's budget that was delivered today. Look, you have all seen the press coverage; oh, the President proposes, the Congress disposes. But that is not the point. What is in there is they give you the latest baselines. They are supposed to be honest about the baselines. I started with showing the chart and then actually showing that 7 months ago, we are actually now six, $700 billion more in borrowing, and every time they update it, it keeps going up.

Comparing debt held by the public projections in CBO's baseline estimate to 2025 budget resolution, you know, from the budget resolution and the 2025 President's budget, we have got a math problem. We are basically missing each other's numbers. If you do it over a decade, understand the baseline looks like at the end of the decade we are going to be well over $48 trillion.

That makes sense. If we are clicking off a trillion dollars about every 125 days, you really think the credit markets are going to keep loaning us money at favorable interest rates when we are staring down $50 trillion at the end of this decade? Remember, we are supposed to be working on the 2025 budget.

Comparing revenue projections in the CBO baseline estimates for the 2025 resolution and the 2025 President's budget. And then you take that, and you stretch it out over 10 years, so take it out to 2034. The President's FY budget projects $70 trillion in deficit spending through 2034.

Look, that is just stunning because, believe it or not, that is like $7 trillion higher than the Congressional Budget Office. We are just now starting to break in. All I can tell you is they have a number on there that is just stunning. We are trying to figure out: Where did it come from? How is that possible?

That is $7 trillion higher. That is what it is.

Look, we keep going over and over and over, and we are going to do another presentation in a couple weeks where we will actually try to make this much more understandable. But the point I am going at--and when I get through these, I will try to close on this, Madam Speaker-- the President promised us lots and lots of new taxes.

No one has begun to do the estimations of what it does to the economy, yet there was almost no discussion of what we are going to do to make healthcare actually more affordable. We are going to play the con job of we are just going to raise taxes from one group, put it over in the other group, and we are going to pretend that you can shore it up by taxing rich people.

Okay. Fine. I am not bleeding for rich people. What I am bleeding for is the fact that once you use their wealth to shore up the Medicare trust fund, how do you plan to take care of Social Security, which is three-quarters of the problem, so three times bigger? You were willing to talk about the one quarter. I guess that is called good politics. I am sure they polled it all before they got there.

You start looking about the total cumulative receipts--and, remember, we don't actually have tax collections, we call them receipts. That is actually the proper term in the tax world. You know, we actually have a mismatching problem where the President's budget basically keeps saying somehow they are going to have $7 trillion more in tax receipts than the CBO baseline.

We are going to dig into this and try to understand where it comes from because it is not only CBO, it is also the fiscal budget, and somehow there is this magic money that appears over the rest of this decade.

All right. Two more of these, and it always helps if you put it right-side up.

Total difference in receipts. We start to understand they expect substantially higher income taxes. Okay. Everybody needs to get ready. Corporate taxes are also higher. Payroll taxes, now that is the one that has stayed fairly flat in the way of these new projections, and that is what actually finances our Social Security. That is actually what finances--up until recently--our Medicare Part A. The numbers just don't line up.

I am not even going to make you suffer through this.

Madam Speaker, back to the point at hand. In 9 years, maybe 8 years, we double senior poverty. The President said he wants to raise taxes rather dramatically on people with $100 million, because apparently if you have $100 million, you are a billionaire.

Okay. That may be enough money to shore up part of the Medicare trust fund, but once again, the vast majority of Medicare spending is general fund spending. That is actually the single biggest driver--that and now interest--of our debt and deficits.

Did you all see the stunts last year and now again this year of, ``Well, you are not allowed to talk about Social Security''? So, they are willing to double senior poverty.

My simple projection is that this Congress has decided to put the bond market in charge of this government because the first moment the bond market doesn't want our borrowing--remember, $95,000 a second is what we are borrowing. That is about $9 billion a day that we are borrowing. Understand, we have actually had a couple of months so far this year when we had to borrow money to pay the interest.

Madam Speaker, I am going to yield back because I am bewildered. I am not sure anyone cares anymore, but these numbers are going to wipe us out, and making up crap to win the next election is immoral.

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

Madam Speaker, we are actually going to try three things tonight, and I apologize to anyone who doesn't like math or complexity. Originally, I promised I was going to do something simpler tonight, and let's just say it didn't work out.

The three things we are going to try doing this evening: One, I want to spend a few minutes talking about folklore. The things we get as Members of Congress--this is both for the folks on the left and the right--the comments we get, things people believe, and I want to walk through a little bit of that. I want to do sort of an update status on what is happening financially. Then I am going to broach a subject that is really uncomfortable, and that is going to be talking about the future. I am going to talk about fertility rates and what that means to being able to finance Social Security and other things.

For anyone who does not like math, please just go watch something on Netflix right now.

A couple weeks ago, I did a whole presentation on the work we have done on what it takes financially to save Social Security. One of the things I have been genuinely angry about--and I

have been angry about it for years--is the left uses Social Security as a weapon, and our folks are terrified to talk about it because every time we talk about trying to save it, we get attacked. Then my brothers and sisters on the left will say: Just raise the cap.

We have shown the math. We had two Ph.D. economists spend months working out the math, and raising the caps doesn't get you anywhere close to stabilizing it.

There is the immortality of this place being willing to double senior poverty in 9 years. You do understand, even if you raise the caps--I showed the math--that you are still having about a $400 billion shortfall in the first year. If you did all the taxes, you might cut that down to a $250 billion or $300 billion shortfall.

Today's math says the average couple in 2034 will take a $17,400 cut. We will double senior poverty.

Is that a Republican or Democrat perversity? I will just argue it is a moral one.

Why can't we actually work on the math? When I chaired the Subcommittee on Social Security, every time I tried to do a roomful of actuaries and those things, my brothers and sisters on the left found more joy in the politics, because it is a powerful issue.

It is absolutely immoral what we are doing. There is this concept of a black swan. That is something that sneaks up on you and blows you up. There is this concept of a white swan. You see it coming, and you don't do anything.

We have the actuary reports in front of us. I know this is a math- free zone, so one of first things I want to walk through is the concept of--when I did the speech a couple weeks ago, it had a couple hundred thousand views on YouTube. God bless. Yea. Then you read through the comments. Those of us in Congress know that about half our comments are bots. A lot of them are Russian bots, which is hysterical. When you read through some of them, they say: They stole my Social Security money.

Okay. Let's do math and sort of walk through this because this is really important to understand. The Social Security trust fund built up, built up, built up, particularly with the baby boomers, because there was a population bubble that actually built up those tax receipts. It had $3 trillion or $4 trillion in it. Now that has rolled over.

No one stole the money. What happened was, you don't just let the cash sit there. The cash was actually loaned to the Treasury, and the Treasury gives a T bill, a type of Treasury bond, just like if you walked into your bank and said: I want a U.S. T bill.

Same thing. Twice a year, the Treasury pays interest.

The problem right now, when you hear many of us get behind these microphones and talk about the Social Security trust fund getting emptied, is the amount of tax receipts that come in. Your FICA tax every month doesn't cover all the checks that are going out. Every month, they have to take a little bit of one of their T bills, Treasury bills, and hand it to the Treasury and say: We need some cash. We need some cash. Give us some cash so we can make this month's Social Security payments.

Every time they do that, they use up a little bit of that savings account. It is that savings account, the trust fund, that is emptied in 2033 or 2034.

The Social Security trust fund, just like the transportation trust fund, just like the airline trust fund, all the trust funds that are borrowed from, they are paid interest.

I am going to get this wrong. Treasury pays interest twice a year to the Social Security trust fund. I think last month may have been $30 billion, $40 billion. The mean interest rate is right about market.

For everyone who says: They stole my money.

It is there. The average couple will get about a $70,000, $72,000 spiff. The money they pay into Social Security over their lifetime, the average will get about $70,000, $72,000.

Now, understand, that is a crap rate of return. If 20 years ago, when it was being discussed, you had been able to take a little sliver of that money and put it in the market, you would have had a ginormous--I love that word--a larger rate of return.

The politics of that became toxic. There were lots of campaigns saying: You are trying to privatize.

Okay. That world is gone. It is Medicare that actually has the huge problem of for every dollar you put in, you get almost $5 back. Social Security, you get pretty much the money you put in. Crappy rate of return, but you get that back. That is the first folklore I wanted to go over.

Number two, you saw in the comments: Why aren't there people there?

If this room was full as I am giving this presentation, we have got a problem. When you are sitting in this room--this is for voting. This is for debating. This is not necessarily where you do your work. You do your work in your meetings, in your subcommittees and your primary committees. When you see the room empty, this is how it is supposed to be.

Now, when you have an idiot like me behind one of these mikes, you are probably on a thousand televisions. A lot of these presentations I do, I am as much here to talk to staff and try to educate them on what is going on in the math. That is actually one of the things you look for.

Another one, I have this neighbor--a wonderful guy--loves screwing with me. About every 6 weeks, he sends me this text message with this article that is completely fake. He says: David, why do you get 100 percent of your pension? You got it on the first day. Why do you run again?

None of that is true. That is all made up. For, I think, 25, 30 years, the pension system we have is pretty much identical to the forest ranger.

The only reason I say those things is I believe, when you see those sort of comments and posts and other things, it is an attempt to distract, an attempt to avoid dealing with what is really going on around us.

One of the points I wanted to go to tonight is what is happening. The economy is actually fairly decent right now. GDP growth is fairly decent. However, I want to make a point, because we did the math just before coming to the floor. We are what, 5 months into the fiscal year? We have added $1.243 trillion in that 5 months.

My current math is of right now about every 123 to 125 days, at the current borrowing per day, we are adding another trillion dollars. This is in a time when the economy is pretty good. Since October 1, right now we are borrowing about $7.9 billion every day. You have got to understand what that ultimately means to us, because it has actually been accelerating. I think on Friday we set our all-time record. I think we were up to borrowing $95,000 a second.

Almost 100 percent of that growth is interest--you are going to see this over and over in the charts--interest and healthcare costs. It is Medicare. It is things that we are not allowed to talk about. They are on autopilot. If it continues, my math says we are heading toward about a $2.6, $2.7 trillion borrow this year, in a year where the economy is doing fairly well. If today's math held up, you do realize you are broaching $3 trillion.

Now, I am hoping we are going to have really good April tax receipts. That means right now, if you take where we are at and average it, from the first day of this fiscal year, for the 5 months, right now our math is $2.9 trillion for this year borrowed. That is substantially higher than CBO predicted 6 weeks ago, and that is right off the Treasury's website.

Let's actually walk through reality and try to understand. My personal theory is we have lots of crazy conversations around here because we are desperate to avoid telling the public, or even ourselves, the truth. Every single dollar you and I, as Members of Congress, vote on is borrowed. Every single dollar we vote on is borrowed. The way we are going this year, every single dollar we vote on is borrowed plus maybe a trillion dollars of Medicare will be borrowed. We don't get to vote on that. That is on autopilot.

My point is trying to understand how much--now, this number is no longer about 73 percent; we think it is actually approaching 75 percent--will be on mandatory because of the growth of interest.

We made this board a couple days ago, and then it popped, so it wasn't $93,000, it was almost $95,000 a second, but I didn't want to waste the ink and print a new one.

Why do the second? Because it is understandable. Let's be brutally honest. How many of us can see 12 zeros in our head? One of my great sins in trying to communicate my stress about this, my fear is I am up here saying: It is a trillion dollars. No one knows what the hell a trillion dollars is. It is 12 zeros. Every second, we borrow substantially more than the average wage of Americans. Maybe that hits home.

Let's actually walk through what is going on, and then my sarcasm here is going to be my anger at myself, my brothers and sisters here, particularly on the left, but also on the right. We have been debating and fighting over things that don't even qualify as a day's borrowing. We bring this place to its knees. We remove a Speaker, we do this and that, and then you realize the amount of dollars being fought over only equal a couple days' worth of borrowing. Darn it, it got us on television. I got to raise some money on the internet. It is that type of false prophet that I will argue is our demise, because if I can get you to fixate on the shiny objects, you are never going to be willing to absorb the truth on how ugly these numbers are.

This is where we are heading toward right now for 2024. Social Security will be our number one spend. The baseline looks like it is ticking up. We are seeing something interesting where the number of retirees asking for benefits is actually ticking a little faster than we expected; $1.450 trillion, the number one spend, Social Security.

Interest, both gross and potentially net, but gross interest now is our second biggest spend. I just had to redo the math because our math right now looks like, for 2024, we are going to cross $1.1 trillion of just interest this year.

I know for many people who are forced because you are employed to sit here and listen to an idiot like me talk, you have heard this before, but it doesn't seem to sink in.

Is pay $1.1 trillion Republican or Democrat? It is math.

Yet, we are not allowed to actually talk about it because the hallways in this place are full of people coming to our doors wanting more spending, and when you point this out to them, they will often say: Well, take it from someone else. I want my money.

It is not your money. It is the taxpayers' money.

On Medicare--and Medicare is rising rapidly--healthcare costs, and then defense, for all of my brothers and sisters on the left who always say: Cut defense, cut defense.

Okay, it is sort of stupid, but it is the number four expense. It is not number one.

How often would you and I go home to our constituents and say: What is the biggest spend in government?

Oh, it is defense.

No. Defense is now number four.

Moreover, at the trendline, in the next few years, healthcare will actually be number one; interest will be number two; and Social Security, believe it or not, will be number three or right tied to it. It is a very tight number there.

Let's actually walk through the '24 spend because I want to be able to get our heads around this. Social Security was a fascinating number, and we have been trying to also average in the new appropriations bills. Remember, Madam Speaker, we are just now finishing up our 2024, so we are only 5 months late. It is the net interest because the United States does something no other industrialized country does. We play a game with how we describe our borrowing: Oh, that is borrowing from the public. This is borrowing from the trust funds.

If anyone is listening right now and you question this, go on the OECD. Google right now, or your favorite search engine: What is the debt to GDP of the United States according to OECD?

You are going to get a number that is like 144 percent because they don't let the scam artists say: Well, you borrowed it from yourself, but you still have to pay it back, and you are going to have to actually borrow money while you pay it back while you are paying interest for it.

It is a con. We should never allow discussions in this place and not use the terms ``gross borrowing'' because, what, is it magic money? We don't have to pay it back? It is just money we didn't have to go float publicly traded bonds for, but we still have to pay it back.

The reason I built this chart is I wanted you to see a line right here. Even the net interest, so the publicly borrowed money, the interest we will pay on that is still the second biggest spend in this government. I will say it, and it will probably just land on deaf ears.

Let's actually walk through something that is really uncomfortable, and it is going to tie in. One of my fixations is: How do you stabilize borrowing so that borrowing equals what our economic growth is?

Madam Speaker, I am going to show you some charts here later. This is for the people who actually care about economics.

Here is the growth of the country, and here is the debt of the country. If you could ever bring the GDP growth and the debt in line, then you have created stability. Nonetheless, we have some crazy headwinds. There are also some crazy opportunities happening to us. There are good things happening out there. Will Congress be the barrier or the adoption of them? Right now, we are the problem because we are scared of our own shadows.

Madam Speaker, if I came to you right now and said: Let's come up with a way to stabilize Social Security, and let's stabilize Medicare. It is moral. It is our moral obligation. We made a social contract in this society.

Okay, we have a problem, and it is all something almost no one here ever talks about: We are not having children. United States' fertility rates have collapsed.

This number is wrong. Our latest number for last year is not 1.64; it is 1.63. France has a higher fertility rate than the United States. Even when you adjust for the immigration population, they still have a dramatically higher fertility rate. Most of Western Europe looks like us, and we are worse than a whole bunch of the world.

Madam Speaker, how do you and I set public policy so 25 years from now--remember, Social Security is substantially a pay-as-you-go system. Today's workers are functionally paying for today's retirees. The trust fund was the shock absorber. The trust fund is disappearing, but my future generation of workers is going to be smaller.

Madam Speaker, you are already seeing this in school districts all over America. The number of students they have is shrinking.

Are we willing to have the really interesting discussion of, okay, are there things we could do economically to promote family formation so there are more children?

There are things we could do to help, but almost every country that has tried has not been able to change fertility rates. I think in Hungary I saw something like the third child, they buy you a house. The fourth child, you get some sort of prize. It has barely ticked up their fertility rates. It is a really difficult question happening all over the industrialized world.

If you can't really change it, Madam Speaker, do you actually build public policy to deal with it? Do you accept the fact that we are going to have a lot more automation? That means capital investment. Are we going to have to find ways to safely adopt artificial intelligence into society so that the labor force is maximized in its value, what they earn, and productivity? Those are policies we need to work on.

You have seen the intellectual capital of the conversations we have on the floor here, Madam Speaker. How many of them are actually ready to actually have the reality of: Hey, we need to set policies.

Is it Republican or Democratic? It is demographics. It is life.

I am going to bounce to the next two boards because there is a punch line here we need to absorb.

This is a little uncomfortable, but this was deaths that are projected to exceed births. The new math, in 15 years, you have to understand what a big deal this is, Madam Speaker. I came behind this microphone a couple of years ago, and I got some real crap that was sent to my office. I think at that time I was saying: Hey, in 21 or 22 years, we are going to have more deaths than births in this country. Then it became 18 years. Then it became 17 years. The new math is 15

years. In 15 years, the United States will have more deaths than births.

The blip you see here is the pandemic, but if you actually look at the line, Madam Speaker, you can sort of understand. Here is our crossing. Somewhere a little before 2040, which is 15 years, we have more deaths than births.

Now, try to stabilize long-term benefits. There are ways to do it. This Congress right now is mathematically incapable of owning a calculator, but there are ways to do it. We can't even put together a debt and deficit commission to have an honest conversation about what is happening in our society demographically, borrowing-wise or interest-rate-wise, because maybe it will affect the next election.

Does anybody actually care about their own pensions let alone their kids' and their grandkids'?

We lied. There is not magic money out there. This inflation cycle proved to those who believed in modern monetary policy, ta-da, you have 36 months of high inflation. That is the ultimate proof that the magic money theory didn't work.

Here is the punch line: Social Security actuaries is the green line. They actually had fertility rates going up. These were our baselines. The baselines also already have continued to show that they are wrong.

Madam Speaker, be prepared over the next year to see dramatically different numbers coming at us on what our future looks like when financing this society because our next generation is going to be smaller.

It is just math. There are ways to make it work. There are ways to make this a society of prosperity. It just requires intellectual capital, and that is something I am not sure we are ready to do.

Let's do a quick run-through. This was just the first 3 months, and I brought these boards back because I saw some things over the weekend where people were just making up the numbers. It is not that hard. You can go right to the Treasury's website. You have to own a calculator. Spend an hour laying it out. You know how to work Excel.

The national debt increased in the first 3 months. This was important. This is the 2024 number: $834 billion. If this is the first 3 months, and it is $834 billion, now I can hope maybe there will be magic tax receipts, but multiply that times four, and you will see what we are projecting.

The part of the punch line is interest continues to grow. I am going to show you why some of this is, but in the first 3 months, we spent $288 billion in interest, and that number will keep getting bigger and bigger because this year--and there is a debate on how much because the Treasury announced they are going to be financing rolling some of the debt shorter on the curve.

Let's say we had a year where we are going to borrow $2.8 trillion new issuances, but you still have about $7.9 trillion that comes due. It is bonds that have been sold in the past. When they come due, particularly if they are bonds sold 3, 4, or 5 years ago with very low interest rates, what happens? They are now sold at the newer, higher interest rate, and that is the modeling problem.

Madam Speaker, do you remember one of the first boards I showed you, that we expect interest this year to be $1.1 trillion? A lot of that is because the amount of debt is coming due. It is coming due, and we stayed very short on the curve instead of what I begged for a few years ago saying: Please, go long in the curve. Go long because that way at least you locked it in.

Understand, because Congress doesn't want to be in charge because you have a White House here that makes crap up--and I can prove that on a bunch of the numbers that they published last year--the bond market now runs this country.

Madam Speaker, hear my words. The first time the bond market gets cranky, the first time we have an undersubscribed auction, watch how fast this place comes in and we capitulate. It doesn't have to happen, but because we have abdicated our jobs, we have basically made a decision--and this happened actually not that long ago.

Go ask some people who were involved in the Clinton administration. Go ask Newt Gingrich. Some of the people were around when the bond market hiccupped. The debt situation then was dramatically better than today. This Congress stood at attention and did what they needed to do to make the bond market happy. That is because if you have a failed bond auction, Madam Speaker, then you will see society have a really bad day.

Let's walk a little more through some of these.

The total interest costs continue to rise very quickly. I am just trying to make a point here. The first 4 months, if this was 2021, we spent $159 billion in interest. This year, our first 4 months, was $357 billion.

Remember my point I was trying to make, Madam Speaker, interest and healthcare costs--we are going to knife each other here over discretionary.

Understand, Madam Speaker, I have some things I would do in discretionary. I am going to talk about it, and I promise you there will be a television ad attacking me, but it is honest.

Nonetheless, we don't control this. The thing we can do is if we convince the bond markets we are taking the debt seriously, then maybe the interest rates to buy our debt will get more efficient and get lower.

Be that as it may, the only way the bond market gives us that spiff is because we do our work, and we have proven over and over we are incapable of doing our work.

This was my calculation as of a week and a half ago, and now it has gone up again, but we were basically trying to say--my frustration was, last September, we were projecting interest is only going to be $709 billion. Then, when we got a little beyond that from October to January, we borrowed 357, and then you started to annualize that, and that is how you are getting closer. Now that is actually going up from that.

I am just trying to make a point. CBO, OMB, a lot of the people around us, they are good people. Their projections--something has gone horribly wrong in our math and our modeling. We keep being really off the mark. These are dangerous.

If you are on the left and you care about social welfare policy and the ability to afford that, if you are on the right and your fixation is economic prosperity and opportunity, we are going to crush both sides. It is right in front of us, and we do almost nothing to tell the truth about it.

I brought some boards about interest rates. I don't know if anyone really cares, but when you start to understand that the differences out there--marketable and unmarketable--unmarketable are payments to trust funds and other things; marketable is you have a bond and you can sell it tomorrow--you have those interest rates and outstanding debt. Also, remember, much of this debt had been sold down here in the trough, around 1\1/2\ or so was the mean yield. Now it is coming in at well over 3. You say: What? Just understand that difference is you just doubled your interest costs.

Let's go into something that is uncomfortable. One of the first boards I showed, I showed that every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed.

I haven't vetted this. It was actually, I think, in an article in ``The New York Times,'' so God knows if that is accurate. The budget bills that will be coming to us in the next couple weeks will have around 7,000-plus earmarks in them. Now, the earmarks are only a tiny, tiny fraction of the spending, okay? Accept what it is.

A really uncomfortable question: Is it actually moral--is it good economics to borrow money, because that is what we are doing-- everything we are going to vote on here is we are borrowing money, and many of these are things I like. However, is it appropriate to borrow money here and send it to entities that actually have their own taxing authority?

It gets better. It turns out we spent a little time looking at municipal bond debt earlier today. Do you know cities, States, counties, particularly the highest rated ones, those with AAAs, and you have to do the tax adjustment because muni bonds have certain tax benefits, many of them actually have lower interest rates than the United States sovereign debt, so a well-run

city with a really good credit rating actually gets to float bonds at lower interest rates than we do.

That should tell you something. Is it rational, moral, that we borrow money and send it to entities that have both their own taxing and borrowing authority, and many of those entities actually can borrow money at equal to or better than what we are paying over here?

Of nondefense discretionary, about 40 percent of the money in that nondefense discretionary is money that we are sending to entities that have their own taxing and borrowing authority.

Now, we would all probably get unelected the next day because people would lose their mind saying: We thought that was free money. It is free money, except we are borrowing it and paying interest on it.

Those are the types of things, are we capable of having an honest discussion about it? Of course not, but we could try.

All right. A couple more here, and then I am going to go back to the office and have more coffee.

There is often an argument, you can borrow money, but you need in the long run to keep it close to the growth of your economy. How often do you hear people talk about the debt to GDP and the fact that the United States now is functionally at 100 percent of public and borrowed and, if you do total gross, you are well over 140 percent of debt to GDP?

Let's use that entity, and then we adjust for inflation, because remember a dollar the day President Biden came into office and a dollar today, that dollar today is worth 22, maybe 23 percent less, so you have to do all these inflation calculators.

However, this is actually--what is the fancy word--``ceteris paribus,'' ``all things being equal.'' I am trying to point out the increase in national debt. This is the increase in GDP over 2023. If this growth here in this debt were right about this green line, you would actually have been stable.

In a weird way, when you have a politician stand in front of you and say: We are going to pay it off. Really? Did I mention every dime we vote on is now borrowed, plus close to a trillion dollars of things we don't even get to vote on, mandatory spending, things like Medicare, is borrowed?

It would be nirvana if we could just work our heinies off and get stability, bring down the growth of this debt so it would match our growth rates. The benefit of that is, for the left, if they want to spend more money, great. Growing the economy more creates more capacity; more tax receipts, more borrowing capacity.

For those of us who want to cut, we actually know the number we are working towards. That is how we would do it if we had put on our economist hat.

Same concept, just a little bit differently done. Increase in national debt outpaced growth in the economy by more than $1 trillion over the past year, and that is what that bond market is going to be looking at. It is that debt to GDP and when does it hit stress; when does a spike in interest rates; when does a recession; when does a pandemic; when does a war make it so in all likelihood you will be paid back your interest and your principal?

Understand, when the United States actually has--and, dear God, please don't ever let it happen--that moment of stress, that failed auction, we put the entire world into a depression. The entire world, let alone your pension, let alone my kids' future, depends on us getting our act together here.

The last chart--and this one is a little difficult because there are some anomalies in the numbers, but we didn't have time to fix it. On occasion, we will go all the way back to 2000. Now, remember, 2000 had an unusual tax collection year because, the year or two before that, there were massive capital gains because of the dot-com bubble, so the number is always distorted.

Anyway, for that year, we collected 20 percent of GDP in taxes. The long-run average has been about 17.8.

Let's actually go to 2023. That year, we collected 16.5 percent of GDP in taxes. We still had some of the legacy of COVID and some other things.

However, the other part of this chart, I am trying to show you the hierarchy of spending--Social Security, Medicare, defense, others--and you start to see this spending up here, when you start seeing that green, well, the green is nothing but interest.

Our problem is, even with the projections, which I hope are right, that long run over the next 8 years or so, we start getting up close to 18 percent of the economy in tax receipts. Great.

The gap still continues to widen, and most of that widening is our projection of the benefits we have promised our brothers and sisters who get older--or the 67 million of us who are baby boomers--our healthcare benefits, the interest we owe, and then back to the point earlier.

What do these numbers look like in 2033, 2034, when the Social Security trust fund is empty? Will the policy be we are going to raise taxes? Okay. Except I have already done the presentation multiple times on the floor where I have brought in the economic data from both liberal groups and other groups that showed even tax maximization. This is the punch line.

Please understand. The tax maximization, when you do the economic effect, you get about a point and a half of GDP. So you take people worth $400,000 and tax maximize everything for them--tax maximize their income tax, their capital gains tax, their estate tax, you just do it all--you get about a point and a half of GDP. Great.

And then, over here, for those of us who want to cut things, you take everything that has been discussed in discretionary--the debate we have had in this place the last several months--and it is a fraction of a fraction of a percent. It is not even a rounding error. You would have to change programs, change spending, adopt technology, make people healthier.

Understand, the single biggest thing you can do to bring down borrowing over the next decade, take on things like diabetes, which is 33 percent of all healthcare spending. It would be moral. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just the right thing to do.

How many brilliant discussions have you seen behind these microphones of saying we are actually looking for real solutions? No, we are too busy knifing each other.

I can find about a point and a half--a point of GDP to cut. Okay. I have got a point and a half over here, let's say it is a point and a half over here on this end. This year, so far, we are borrowing 9.6 percent of the entire economy, 9.6 of all GDP, and all the solutions are a fraction of that.

Yet, the left is going to come behind the microphone and say: We don't tax rich people enough. The right is going to come in saying: It is foreign aid and spending. Well, foreign aid equals around 7, 8 days, maybe 9 days of borrowing, every dime of it.

Why can't we just tell the truth?

Madam Speaker, every dime of borrowing from today through the next 30 years is demographics, and maybe telling the truth gets me unelected, but, dammit, it is worth telling the truth. It is demographics. It is interest on what has been borrowed and what is to be borrowed. It is healthcare, particularly Medicare, and if, 8, 9 years from now, when the Social Security trust fund is emptied--remember, the math is the very first year of the shortfall is $616 billion.

How do we backfill that? If you try to backfill through taxes, fine. You have to accept the economic effects of how much you just slowed down the economy and how you slowed down other tax receipts.

Do you do it through borrowing? Well, then it explodes, and that is how you see some projections that, 30 years from now, U.S. sovereign debt will be $130 trillion. Between now and then, how many people around the world and how many people in this country are going to be willing to buy our debt?

Do our work, take it seriously, put together the debt and deficit commission. Demonstrate to the people who want to save and buy U.S. debt that we are taking paying them back seriously. Take it seriously that my--I have very young kids. They deserve a future. Also make it so that people who want to enjoy their retirement understand the stability, retirement security. We all say it, and almost none of us are willing to actually do the work for it.

Madam Speaker, I am going to go have some more coffee, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, last week, I promised we were getting close to actually finishing our math in regard to what was the true story of what was happening with Social Security. A couple of our Ph.D. economists have spent months, and we have put it together.

However, I first want to talk a little bit about the politics of telling the truth around this place. Then I want to talk about the reality that the Democrats, our brothers and sisters on the left, either willfully or through ignorance, their solution just doesn't get you there, and the immorality.

Let's first walk through something. How many of you have heard over and over from me behind this microphone that, in 2033, 2034, a 25 percent cut, because the Social Security trust fund is emptied? I had a debate the other day with a Democratic Member here who is running for another office, and she was saying Social Security doesn't contribute at all to the debt and deficit.

She is absolutely right. That is not what we are discussing. What we are discussing is, in 8 or 9 years, we are going to double senior poverty, the average couple in America. In 2033--I am going to use 2034 because at least that is more of a consensus number for the exhaustion of the trust fund. That average couple in America will take a $17,400 cut. Articles that we have been collecting on the number of baby boomers who are ending up homeless--they are ending up on the street. We are looking at numbers that would explode that type of dystopian vision. Yet, if you get behind this microphone and tell the truth about the math, right now, some troll in a basement is writing something saying: Schweikert mentioned Social Security. Let's attack.

It is the same thing with Medicare. This society is absolutely immoral. We have this obligation to modernize, to save, to protect. If you step up to try to do it, you will be attacked. There is a reason we call it the third rail.

Well, screw them. We are going to tell the truth here. Part of the morality here is: How do you save something? How do you modernize it? How do you protect seniors?

Everyone runs away from the discussion, runs away from the actuarial reports, because the moment you start to tell the truth, you are a target. Now, most of it is not true. I had someone in my office a couple of hours ago bring me something saying: Look, this person is writing editorials in your district saying you voted against Social Security.

I am going, okay, let's see. I actually used to chair the subcommittee over Social Security, trying to work out the math and those things to save it. I don't remember ever having a vote in this place to change it.

We looked it up. There hasn't been, but this is the way politics works anymore. Make crap up. Then you wonder why it is toxic. It is so much easier around here to pretend, somehow pretend magic is going to fall out of the sky and everything is going to be fine.

Let's actually walk through a couple of things here. One of the things, just because this bothers me, my sarcasm that this is a math- free zone, I listened to a number of people, both Republicans and Democrats, get behind these microphones today, and they have no understanding of the scale of the problem.

Therefore, let's actually do a little bit of very simple math off the top of our heads so you understand some of the scale. Yesterday, interest rates popped up a bit. They came down a bit today, but I think, at one point yesterday, they were up 14 basis points. I just

need this to be an example. The math is not going to be perfect. One percent on $34.2 trillion would be $342 billion of interest, right?

And a basis point is 1/100, so 1 basis point would be $3.4 billion, right?

Just agree with me.

So the 14 basis points movement in interest rates yesterday on 10- year sovereigns, if that had stuck throughout this year, that is $48 billion.

Understand we are here knifing ourselves over fractions and fractions of a day's interest. We borrow about $7.5 billion a day. We borrow $85,000 a second, but here is the scam: We will knife each other back and forth over math--these are real numbers. This is important, but we are doing everything we can to avoid explaining the scale when a single day's interest rate movement is almost $50 billion.

Then you hear Members come behind the microphone, it was $6 billion. Well, that was less than a day's worth of borrowing interest. I don't mean the total borrowing.

I know I have been exacerbated, but I am frustrated because there is this unwillingness to understand the scale of the problem.

Let's actually start to walk through the charts and try to get this. I have a mistake on this chart and I owe everyone an apology. Our math right now is, we are heading towards borrowing between about $2.7 to over $3 trillion this year.

Remember, it was only several months ago, CBO and OMB and all those were saying, it is only going to be like a $1.6 trillion borrow. Something is horribly wrong. We have doubled it, but we have doubled it at a time when the economy is actually doing fairly well.

Understand what these higher interest rates mean. Understand what the growth in healthcare costs mean.

Right now this was our projection. We are going to borrow $1.45 trillion. That is our Social Security. That is coming out of the trust fund and out of the taxes you are paying every single day.

The next line item is where we had a mistake. We were saying gross interest was going to go over $1 trillion, making interest the second most expensive thing in this government. We also came back and showed that net interest was still the second most expensive.

The difference between net and gross is gross is the interest we pay back to trust funds for borrowing the money. Net is only publicly held. The rest of the world doesn't make that distinction. It is just one of the things we do in the United States. That is why if you ever see something from OECD, they have the United States at like 144 percent of debt-to-GDP. It is because they put back in the borrowing from trust funds.

It turns out Treasury a few hours ago did one of their monthly updates, and I have to apologize to everyone that gross interest for the year wasn't $1.003 trillion. I got it wrong. It turns out it is going to be $1.67 trillion, and we think this number is off because we had been looking at the Treasury receipts, the growth of spending, growth of healthcare, growth of interest. My math now is just interest. Just interest this year will be $1.100 trillion. No one knows what 12 zeros are.

When I speak about a trillion dollars with my brothers and sisters, Members of Congress, our staff, they just sort of stare at you. What you need to understand is, this is a disaster. It is an absolute disaster. Trillion, thousand, billion, but yet we are going to sit here and knife each other for months and months and months over a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of this because we don't want to actually deal with the actual structural crisis.

We got old. The fact of the matter is, it is uncomfortable to talk about, but unless we do some things revolutionary on the cost of healthcare and dramatically change government, it doesn't work.

Basic math: Every dime of defense is now borrowed. Every dime of discretionary now is borrowed and if you start to look at this math, it is about $1.4 trillion of Medicare, the stuff we don't even get to vote on.

Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is now borrowed. We are clicking off another trillion dollars of borrowing every 140 days. And if you think you are going to fix that by a rounding error on this little piece of discretionary or this little piece here, it is a game of avoidance.

I have had Members here who will, when I start to talk about a deficit commission where we are going to have to do a major redesign, they say, oh, David, I can't vote for that. I will, however, fight like hell to save a few hundred million here and there. That is real money.

We are borrowing $85,000 a second, $7.4 billion a day, but it is great theater for our voters. It is horrible math, but great theater.

So understand, even the Treasury statement now confirms my math. We are borrowing over a trillion dollars in interest. That is just the interest borrowing. And total borrowing looks like it may be coming in closer to $2.7 to $3 trillion this year.

Let's do a quick walk through before we get to the stuff where I soak myself in kerosene and light myself on fire.

What happened between the 2022 fiscal year and 2023 fiscal year? Well, first off, if we actually take a look, Social Security spending-- but it comes out of the trust fund, comes out of tax receipts--was up 11.1 percent in a single year.

Between fiscal year 2022 and 2023, if you take a look at the spending on Medicare, not Medicaid, not Indian Health Services, not veterans, just Medicare, spending was up 12.3; interest was up 38.7 percent.

Anyone see a trend here?

We are trying to track these same sort of numbers for this fiscal year. Maybe no one really cares. I know these numbers are really big. It is easier to scream and yell and worry about a shiny object or some latest conspiracy theory. You don't need a conspiracy theory. Just look at the math.

Let's actually have an honest conversation of how much trouble Social Security is in and why it is absolutely moral that we keep our promises. We actually tell the truth about how we are going to modernize it, here is how we are going to save it, here is what we have to do to fix it. The reality of it is it has to be done with our Democratic colleagues.

They have got to stop using it as a tool to win elections. And what is fascinating in the polling, I think FreedomWorks did some polling recently, saying if you are under 45, under 50, you understand this math.

If you are over, you don't. You are almost pretending it doesn't exist. What happens to you? Think about yourselves. What happens to you if it is 8 years, 9 years from now and you get a nice letter from Social Security saying we are cutting your check by 25 percent?

I am going to show a chart here, but remember my words: The average will be a $17,400 cut in 2033 or 2034, depending on if you use CBO's number or Social Security's actuaries.

One of our structural problems is, in 1960, we had 5.1 workers. In 2035, we were saying 2.3. We have been told this number is wrong. It is actually less, but we are trying to vet that number.

Remember, Social Security was designed as a pay-as-you-go system. If you pay attention to some of these presentations--I have come here a dozen times and shown the average couple gets every dime back they put into Social Security plus about 72,000 SPIF.

It is a horrible rate of return, but you do get your money back plus a little bit of a SPIF, but it is a horrible rate of return. I want all of you to remember as we talk about this potential misery that 20 years ago, when Republicans got up and said, if we could just take a little sliver and do some other things with it, when we got to the 2030s, we would have a system that is actually more robust and people would have a much higher rate of return. It turns out they told the truth.

When those activists told you, oh, they are trying to steal your money, this and that, try to remember this. They lied to you, and we now have 20 years of data to prove it.

However, the big lie around here continues because it is great politics. Scare the crap out of people, and then make sure they don't actually read an actuary report because that might require math, and this is a math-free zone.

Let's actually walk through this. We are going to use 2034 because that is the one date we absolutely can vet, even though CBO says 2033. They both agree on a 25, 25.2 percent cut in benefits. In 2034, our best math is that very first year, single year number, $616 billion shortfall. That just means the trust fund is emptied, and without the trust fund to back up, the payroll tax that is coming in and the offset to beneficiaries, if there is more beneficiary checks, oh, oh, we have got a $616 billion shortfall. That is where you get your 25 percent cut.

You start to understand, for lower-income workers who are receiving Social Security, as a couple, that is a $10,600 cut. For the average, it is that $17,400 I was talking about. For high-income couples, it is over $23,000. Remember, there is actually a formula within Social Security where lower-income workers with their 40 quarters get a little bit more than higher-income workers. It is part of the formula.

Here is the math. It is conservative math. We worked like hell--well, the Joint Economic economists worked like hell on this. My job was just to torment them. In 2034, if you do the Democrats' and the President's solution of saying, hey, just take people over $400,000 and make them pay the 12.4 percent. Okay. Right now I think this year it is 168 something is subject to Social Security tax, and you have this, like, doughnut hole in this plan. For everyone else in today's world, you hit that 168, if you are above that, you are not paying the Social Security tax anymore.

On this math, understand this, this is sort of the Democrats', the President's plan, we are just going to tax people who make $400,000 and up, make them pay the 12.4 percent, but we are not going to give them any benefits for it.

Okay, fine. It doesn't get you close. This is your new revenue. Our best model is you might get about $259 billion of income into Social Security doing it that way, but you slow down the economy. That would be general tax revenues.

Over here is your still-remaining shortfall. You still have, what is that, $417 billion shortfall in that single year. You have already done the Democrat plan, and you still have a $417 billion shortfall. The next time you see an AARP attack ad on someone because they were willing to try to talk about saving Social Security, I hope they tell you the truth and say, our plan, we have supported raising this tax, but it looks like it doesn't even cover half. As a matter of fact, it only covers like 30, 40 percent of the shortfall.

Let's actually go to the next level. I did this chart to just basically reemphasize what is going on in the math. The shortfall, tax receipts, tax receipts with the higher tax, tax receipts without it because it also actually has an effect on the general fund. The general fund, tax receipts go down.

Now let's go to the other proposal. Let's not do people $400,000 and up. Let's do everyone $250,000 and up. Remember, this is 8, 9 years from now, okay? Remember, we should be working--it is not like we are doing anything useful here--on the 2025 fiscal year budget. Now we are talking about the 2033, 2034 fiscal budgets.

Well, if you take everyone that makes $250,000 and up, and you subject them to the 12.4 percent, okay, fine, you get, our best model, about $380 billion of taxes, leaving $237 billion short, and you have slowed down tax receipts by $88 billion, so you are going to have a $325 billion shortfall.

Okay. Well, that is not good enough. Let's just get rid of the caps all together. If you were making 168 today, it doesn't matter there is no 168, everyone pays the 12.4 percent. You still have pretty much the exact same shortfall because that gap doesn't produce that much tax receipts between no cap and the $250,000 cap.

Still, the model is almost identical. You slow down tax receipts by $88 billion. The shortfall is $234 billion, so you are basically back to, what, $324 billion? No, $322 billion.

The reason I do this is not to end my political career, but to tell the truth. Is it moral to be basically--it is right in front of us. It is coming. We know it is coming. There are actuary reports from Social Security, from CBO, from private groups, those around us, then there is the political ones who just lie to you because they want you to send them a contribution or they want Democrats to win the next election, which I believe those groups are absolutely immoral. I believe what the Democrats have been doing is absolutely immoral, but damn it, they care about winning the next election a hell of a lot more than they care about doubling senior poverty or the number of baby boomers who are expected to be homeless in a decade.

Somehow when they say, oh, we will just take care of the shortfall, we will just get rid of the cap on rich people, it doesn't get you where you have got to go. Is there any leadership around here other than me as an idiot getting behind this microphone and telling people the truth?

I have done presentations on also what is happening on Medicare. Guess what? It is multiples of the problem of this one. The difference here is we have a specific trust fund, so we can see the date it expires.

I beg of you, if you are a voter out there, don't let some politician squirm out of, well, if we just tax rich people more, we would have plenty of money. That is not true. Look, I don't have all the answers, but I bet you I can make this work. It would be painful, but I bet you I can find a way to not let the collapse happen. Demand the morality that this government is going to keep its promises.

This chart here is now 2 years old. The top line here is not $116 trillion of debt. Now it is assumed to be closer to $130 trillion of debt over the next 30 years. Every dime of debt between today and 30 years--and I don't know if the mics are picking the sound up, but my 19 month old is in the back in the screaming. Yes, I have a 19 month old. That is a different discussion. Does that child deserve to have the same life the rest of us have had?

Here is the math. 100 percent of the borrowing, it is coming. Interest. The shortfall of Medicare, because remember the vast majority of Medicare spending comes straight out of the general fund, and the Medicare trust fund is scheduled to be empty in, what, 7 years, okay? Part A trust fund is really primarily just hospital coverage.

This is if we actually say we are not going to fix the Social Security trust fund, we are just going to borrow the money, we are just going to borrow the money. If you update what that means, it is about $130 trillion of borrowing. The crazy thing is the CBO math is actually the rest of government, military, discretionary, which military is discretionary, but all nondefense discretionary actually over the 30 years when adjusted for inflation actually falls. That little portion actually has like a $3 trillion positive. The rest of it is about $130 trillion negative.

Who is going to tell you that? It is all over. I mean, if anyone actually reads the reports, it is there. That is uncomfortable.

We will spend maybe this next year doing really important stuff with failed legislation, failed votes. Every single day, we are going to click off another $7 billion, $7\1/2\ billion of borrowing. We will give some beautiful speeches about how we are fighting to save this little tiny bit of money, but we are not going to tell you it is little tiny.

I have seen fights on the floor that in the time the fight on the floor took, the interest clock on U.S. borrowing used up more money than the debate was fighting to save.

In Washington, D.C., it is always about the money. Group after group is wandering the hallways this time of year, all with wonderful things for us to spend more money on. Many of the things are things you really like. They get outraged at you when you start to pull out these charts and say, can we talk about what is going on?

Once again--I will do this as my closing--every dime of defense is borrowed, every dime of discretionary is borrowed, and now $1.4 trillion of mandatory, things we don't even get to vote on, is now borrowed.

We are going to give these beautiful speeches about trying to save $16 billion, which is a lot of money, except it is like 2\1/4\ days of borrowing.

We fought over that sort of amount for 7 months, and in that time, we clicked off well over another trillion dollars of borrowing because we fight over the shiny little objects instead of the willingness to actually have an honest conversation about the structural crisis because this is politically

easy. You get a nice little spot on Twitter or Facebook or on social media, maybe even a hit on cable television, but it is a lie.

How do you save this place when it won't even put batteries in its calculator?

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 23 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, February 7, 2024, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, this is sort of elementary school economics. A dozen things have been said here that are absolutely wrong.

Mr. Speaker, if you look at the 2017 tax reform, where did we get the greatest economic boost with the least amount of cost?

It was actually the R&D and the expensing. We actually have models that make it perfectly clear the expensing actually was the one portion of the tax reform that actually paid for itself. That is because in a higher interest rate world--and I believe higher interest rates came from Democrat spending, but that is a different discussion--the fact of the matter is that if you do research and development then you have to finance it. This is where you get the economic growth that actually knocks down inflation and makes our society more prosperous. It is a good bill.