OUR ECONOMIC FUTURE

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Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 82 (Thursday, May 14, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 82 (Thursday, May 14, 2026)] [House] [Pages H3521-H3524] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] OUR ECONOMIC FUTURE (Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. Schweikert of Arizona was recognized for 30 minutes.) Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I am actually going to try something that we have done over and over. I apologize; I have had a lot of coffee. If I start talking like a machine gun, just start waving at me. I am going to try one more time to communicate to the thousands of televisions we are on around the campus. Hopefully, there are still staff, interns, and others who actually care about our economic future. Maybe there are a few Members. Maybe there are actually some really smart people out on C-SPAN, because I am often remarkably impressed when these floor speeches go up on YouTube or other things at some of the comments. I am also heartbroken about the thousands of Russian bots and other things that may crop up. Let's do some basic reality, and I am going to walk through some of these numbers. As of today, for the last 12 months, so more than just within the fiscal year, the last 12 months--so I pick up the tax cycle, and I pick up everything else--we are borrowing about $87,000 a second, every second of every day. Yet, I will go home and give a speech. I am leaving this place. I am running for Governor in Arizona. I will speak in front of people, watch their faces when I try to explain, here is what the math is, here is what is going on. My 3-year-old son that we have adopted--a miracle, absolute miracle-- this government needs 104 percent of his lifetime earnings just to pay Federal pensions, not the military, not the rest of the government; just to cover Social Security, Medicare, military retirement, just the pension benefits. {time} 1920 Madam Speaker, we need his entire lifetime earnings plus another 4 percent. Is that moral? Didn't we have one of our Founding Fathers say a generation should be responsible for its own debts? Yet, we will have borrowed about $7.5 billion, $7.7 billion today. Let's actually walk through some of the things that are actual math, a couple of the solutions. My tense frustration around here--and I accept a whole bunch of our Members are lawyers. Bless their precious hearts. Could they buy a calculator? Because it is beyond Republican versus Democrat. I think we have much better fiscal economic growth ideas, but it is demographics. In 1 year from now, we will have fewer people under 18 years of age than we had 20 years ago but double our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up. In 29 months, 29 months, over half the Federal spending will go to those 65 and up. Are we allowed to tell that truth? This is the report from the Treasury that was put out about 3 weeks ago. I know we all as Members of Congress grabbed it and read some of the projections in here, but some of the math in here made it very, very, very clear, except you had to work the graphs and play with the calculations and numbers because sometimes it is really uncomfortable telling these things when you actually had numbers, 30 years from now the United States having about 250 percent debt to GDP. When you actually took a look, if you do State and local debt right now, we are over 126 percent debt to GDP. When you actually start to look at other reports of the solvency issues in regard to Social Security, Medicare, is it moral that in about 6 years and 3 months the Social Security Trust Fund is empty? In 6 years and 3 months, if we follow the law as it is written today and don't fix things, those on Social Security will get a 24 percent cut. The math says in the following year we will double the poverty of seniors. We will basically double. We will double the number of baby boomers that live on the street. Madam Speaker, in a little over 6 years, the Medicare Trust Fund is empty and hospitals in your district and my district take a 12 percent cut. How many of them will remain open? It is the math. How many times, for anyone who is crazy enough to watch us, who has actually watched the people coming behind these microphones, have actually heard Members of Congress get up and say the greatest systemic threat to our society, to our culture, to this Nation is our debt and demographics? Why aren't we willing to have a conversation about it? Why aren't we willing to tell the truth? Yet, a couple of weeks ago we had a balanced budget bill, and, actually, I think it failed, but it is part of the scam we engage in. We all go out and vote for it and say, ``I voted for a balanced budget,'' but I am never going to tell you how we are going to get there because the actual path is really hard. I have come to the floor multiple times and done entire presentations on the MedPAC report. Those are functions of the models and auditors of Medicare. There is a thing called Medicare Part C, Medicare Advantage. I absolutely support it, but I want it to be the model that was originally designed by Senator Frist in 2005 that said we are going to build a model where it is capitated care. We are going to try to incentivize the insurance company to make its money by helping the population be healthier instead of constantly scoring people as sicker. This report basically says there is about a $1.5 trillion, $2 trillion over 10 years. We won't call it fraud because it is not. They are following the rules. We are the idiots that wrote the rules. Part of those rules were changed during Obama Care. If I came to you, Madam Speaker, and said I can find you $1 trillion, $1.5 trillion, $2 trillion, we have a piece of legislation to align that program with the incentives to keep people healthier. Our preliminary score was $1.84 trillion, and the calculation said it would actually help the population of seniors on Medicare Advantage, which is 55 percent of the population, be healthier because the insurance companies that manage the program would be incentivized to make you, help you, work with you to be healthier. I can't get a single other Member of Congress to sponsor the bill because it has the word ``Medicare'' in it, because, God forbid, we tell the truth around here. Let's actually do some more math. Here is another report that was out on the dispatch. It is a long format, leans conservative, leans real free market, but talking about even if we use current CBO math, my little boy who is 3 years old today, when he turns 33, the United States will have a couple hundred trillion dollars in debt when my little boy is 33 years old, and that was using the previous CBO numbers. The problem is the previous CBO numbers are now wrong. Since February until today--since February until today, you have about what they call 40 basis points of increase in interest rates. Okay, big deal. Forty basis points of interest if it sticks for the next 10 years, that is over $1.3 trillion in additional interest. Let's do this again. Social Security is our biggest spend in the Federal Government. Okay. It is an earned benefit. You earned it. We owe it. We are going to spend about $1.6 trillion this year. Anyone want to guess what the second biggest spend is? Interest. If you do [[Page H3522]] the interest that we owe to those who bought our bonds and the money we have also borrowed from the trust funds, we are going to pay over $1.2 trillion, $1.3 trillion this year just in interest. Okay. What is the third biggest expense? Medicare, about $1.1 trillion, and Medicare will double, double in spending over the next 7 years. So it goes to $2 trillion. Number four is actually Medicaid and Obama Care subsidies, ACA subsidies. Number five is actually defense. The thing that is actually in the U.S. Constitution is the number five in our spending stack. Let's actually have a little fun. We are going to take in about $5 trillion, $5.25 trillion in tax receipts. Okay. Let's say we made a deal. We are only going to spend what we get. Okay. So I just covered Social Security, 1.6. We are going to cover interest, about 1.2. We are going to cover Medicare, about 1.1. We are going to cover Medicaid and ACA subsidies, about 1. You basically right there have spent every dime of tax receipts. Your government is basically an insurance company with an army, and the army is on borrowed money. The rest of the government is on borrowed money. When we send money to the States, my State of Arizona, our appropriated budget is about $17.8 billion, $17.9 billion. Total spending is closer to $73 billion, $74 billion. What is that differential? Well, almost half the spending of my State of Arizona is actually revenue sharing, programs, matching things that we send from the Federal Government, except that money is borrowed. If you are a State government, are you prepared for when this place can't even afford to meet those obligations because everything we are doing is on borrowed money? It is important to think about. I have done entire presentations here talking about the concept of interest fragility, and no one cares until the moment you have a failed bond auction. Now our experts are actually saying that the age of lower interest rates probably isn't coming upon us. You do realize the 2-year instrument of United States debt has been hovering about 4 percent. You go, oh, why are you talking about math? The Federal funds rate is down here. {time} 1930 We always say, well, if the Fed would lower interest rates--once again, basic economics. The Federal funds rate is only on what they call the short end of the curve. It has very little effect on the 10 years and up. The 30-year bond went over 5 percent this week. It is the highest interest rate in 19 years. Does anyone talk about it? Remember, we borrow money. The world is borrowing money. The Chinese Government and other governments are bingeing on debt. The industrialized world has gotten old. We have much of our population that is moving out of its productive years and moving into its retirement benefit years. We have a society all over the industrialized world where population is flat or shrinking. Our Census Bureau, a couple of weeks ago, put out an abstract. If you actually read through their tables, they had the United States highly likely sometime in the next 5 years going negative--United States going negative on population growth. I showed that slide in a speech I gave last week at home, and I had this woman say: ``Yay.'' I said: ``Okay. You think there are too many people. Fine. How do you want me to finance Social Security and Medicare and all the other benefits?'' She just stared at me and said: ``Well, tax rich people.'' Now, this is a Republican meeting. I just happened to have in my binder a chart that showed her that we can take every dime from those rich people, and you pay for the government for about 8 months or 9 months. Then, I asked her: ``How would you like to finance things?'' All I got was this stare because, look, when you have a world where people get their news from this thing, when much of what people know is either doomscrolling or clickbait, I beg of you--this is important. This is the survival of our Republic. We have made it 250 years. Do my kids deserve to be in this country? Does this deserve to be another American century? It can be. I have done presentation after presentation after presentation on how we can crash the price of healthcare; how we can adopt technology to do things better, faster, and cheaper; and how we can stabilize debt. Remember, all the rage around here about 2 months ago was that we are going to pass a motion to borrow only 3 percent of GDP. Love it. Madam Speaker, at this moment, we are pushing--I think 3.4 percent or 3.5 percent of GDP is just interest from the Federal Government. You tell me what spending you want to cut, and then you tell me what bonds we are going to pay off. There is a math experiment that is very simple. Remember how we passed a balanced budget amendment a couple of weeks ago, but no one was willing to tell you how to get there. If, next year, we wanted to balance the budget, I can do it. You have to cut half of Federal spending. If you do the feedback effects in the economy, you would have to cut one-half of Federal spending. I need you to think about what I am saying here, so let's do this. This is as we built the budget. Do you see this blue area, nondefense discretionary, defense? That is the only thing a Member of Congress gets to vote on, unless it is a reconciliation budget, and then we have been wasting those because we have been unwilling to tell the truth and do the cuts that are required, to start to tell the bond market that we are serious to bring down interest rates. Once again, the way you bring down interest rates: convince the bond markets that we are incredibly creditworthy, that we are doing the things that are not inflating the economy by pumping all sorts of borrowed spending into the economy, and, therefore, raising interest rates by raising inflation. The rest of the red is on autopilot. The problem is that if you want to look at the pie, every dime of defense is borrowed. Every dime in nondefense discretionary is borrowed, and a big chunk of--choose whatever you want--is borrowed. How long can we keep doing this? Seriously, how long can we keep doing this? I chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am No. 4 on the Ways and Means Committee. I chair the Oversight Subcommittee. I have been doing all the waste and fraud investigations I can, whether it be hospice care, particularly in L.A. County--it is trying to expose the things going on in New York, the organ procurement fraud, all the work we have done on trying to fix the misalignment in Medicare Advantage. Yet, the armies of lobbyists up and down these hallways--many of them are wonderful people--the armies of people from our home districts who come into our office who tell us how much they want us to cut spending--no, they don't ask us to cut spending, do they? I will do a presentation to my own people from Arizona and say: ``Here is what we are up against.'' They will say: ``That is very interesting. Now, will you listen to my request for more spending?'' The other one that is even more perverse is that we get businesses that come into our office and try to explain how they want us to regulate their competition. I thought we were the free market party. I thought we were the party that believed prosperity was moral, that the way you help our brothers and sisters be less poor is an economy that works, that allocates its resources where you maximize prosperity. Are we doing that right now? The math basically says that when you do the adjustments for inflation--now, a lot of this is the inflation from 4 years or 5 years ago. The people in my State are still poorer today than they were 5 years ago. Wage growth hasn't even gotten close to catching up. Where is the fixation on the people who we claim that we care about and love? We are conservatives. We are supposed to love people. We are supposed to believe in freedom. We are supposed to believe in prosperity, but we are so busy selling shiny objects so we can get on cable news or be a YouTube celebrity or a Twitter celebrity tonight, we make crap up. We do salacious things. We throw out things where we have never told the truth about the underlying math, or we know that the math doesn't work. [[Page H3523]] My Joint Economic Committee did our report, the Republican side, and we did something really hard. We spent months working on this. We talked about a unified theory: Here is how we bring prosperity back. Here is how we bring wage growth back. Here is how we start to stabilize the U.S. debt. Yet, you have to be willing to tell the truth. Yet, the troll army: ``Well, they talked about talent-based immigration.'' I also talked about ending H-1B visas because of the misallocation in wage suppression and going to a model that would actually increase wages, but you have to be willing to read the report. Yes, it is hundreds of pages, and there are fancy formulas in there that, unless you had advanced calculus, you are not going to get the math, but we do the explanation under it. The rest of the reading is actually pretty easy. The reason we wrote this is that we are trying to make the point that we can do this. There is a mathematical policy way that we can bring back prosperity. We can bring back actual affordability, your retirement. My kids have a chance. Other than six of us and half of those reading it to try to find a way to attack us, and the other half because they don't have a life, please, someone out there read the Joint Economic Report from the Republicans. We worked hard on this. The math, in some ways, is brilliant. The policies work, but there are things in there that are controversial. You are going to have to talk about automation, accepting technology, bringing the benefits of possible automation, labor substitution to grow the economy, two things to raise up wages. It is possible, but we have to tell the truth, and we have a real situation in our country. I know this chart is a little hard to read, but I have a simple point I am trying to make. If you go back to 2019, all the way to April, where we are at right now, and you basically take a look at all nonfarm growth, it is actually up only about 4 percent. What is way up here that has had a 24 percent growth? What has had the 17 percent growth? Those are, functionally, employment from welfare programs. This is like, I think, in Medicaid, visiting family members, getting signed up, and getting paid for it. This is essentially welfare services in healthcare. The problem with healthcare is--what is it?--about 67 percent, maybe even more, of healthcare dollars come from the Federal Government. In my State of Arizona, last year, we produced only 24,000 new jobs. {time} 1940 Every single one of those new jobs was in healthcare and welfare services. Private-sector jobs actually fell. Last month in Arizona, we lost about 10,800 jobs. Private-sector jobs shrank. We are now either 47th or 45th from the bottom or to the bottom in affordability in Arizona. Of my three wage categories, two of the wage categories went down. They lost--not even inflation adjusted, the raw number--they lost salary structure. Why do we care? Look, you try to explain the basic math on these things. Do we care and love our brothers and sisters? We are tracking this, and I am trying to get better data. This chart is a little hard to read, but those little tops you see with the orange and the yellow? Those are delinquencies. Those are delinquencies that are starting to grow economically in our society, people who are having trouble making their mortgage payment, people who are having trouble making their car payment. I don't think this even has student loans in it. The fact of the matter is, we did some really good things in the tax policy last year, but we haven't done all the other things that are required from us to get the economy roaring to open up markets. Look, when it is illegal in the United States to modernize a port--we have the least efficient ports in the industrialized world. I know that is uncomfortable because I just made a union mad by saying that, but the fact of the matter is we care about pricing. We care about supply chains. We care about inflation. We care about affordability, but then we are going to basically do the very things that stop the efficiencies in our economy. Maybe we could legalize the very technologies, the very things in our world that would make the world more prosperous. Are we too busy pandering to the last group of lobbyists that came into our office? Look, a local example, just because I care about this: I used to be the Maricopa County treasurer. Maricopa County is the most populous county in the United States. All right. I was the tax collector. I was the investment officer. I was the bank. So I had a really good staff. We did lots of great things. If I walk in tomorrow and say, all right, let's get rid of the income tax in my State, that is great. I love it. It is about 31 percent of the budget that is appropriated. Okay. Tell me what you want to cut. Tell me where we are going to move, because understand, if you wanted to make that up and say we are just going to cut it on the income tax and move it to the property tax, you just doubled grandma's property taxes. Is that your plan? Is that what we are actually going to do? Now, we have actually offered ideas to lower the cost of government where we think we can cut that rate down by a third, 40 percent, but you systematically have to have a plan to do things. It is the same thing here. We talk a big game, but you notice we avoid telling the truth about the details of what it takes. And I think the public, the voters we represent, the voters we claim we care about, have gotten to the point where they are tired of the fraud. If you are going to give us an idea, tell us how you get there. Tell us the math. I have used the sarcastic comments behind this microphone a dozen times. I work in a math-free zone. If you are going to make a proposal, maybe we should try something new, Madam Speaker. If we are going to make a proposal, demonstrate how you are going to get there. Demonstrate how the math actually works. There are ways to make it happen. Nothing is easy, but it is doable. Lay out a plan. Look, we have been doing presentations around Arizona on how we could crash the price of our Medicaid system. It will take a couple years, but through technology, helping our brothers and sisters be healthier, we think we can remove hundreds of millions of dollars in spending. We can end fraud in much of our government programs tomorrow by simple adoption of data systems. So think about this: One of the great perversities--and actually part of it is in this MedPAC book. If you look at it, we pay fraudsters, and then the current government model is we hire auditors, and then we hire lawyers. How often do we ever get any money back? How often do people actually end up in jail? May I propose a suggestion? Stop letting the damn money go out the door in the first place. The pay and chase model is from a different century, a different decade. We have the technology today, whether you want to call it AI, algorithmic, the fact of the matter is someone is requesting benefits. Their data doesn't match. These hospices that were popping up all over L.A. County, the first time we start to look at their data, we knew they were a fraud. The fact of the matter is we have the technology today; we can stop the waste and fraud in government. Maybe the public would start to believe in us again if they knew their money wasn't going to fraudsters. We can do that particularly at my State level where we had, what, $2.8 billion in sober living home fraud that could have been caught, I have been told, by a $1,500 simple accounting AI package. It would have seen it immediately, and it would have saved $2.8 billion. Is that Republican or Democrat? Now, I know it upsets the people that are the auditors, the people that make their living, but this needs to be about the taxpayers and about the American people. We have ways to fix these things. Why don't we have the intellectual gravitas or whatever fancy word we want to use around this place to actually try and do it instead of continuing to do the trite? Madam Speaker, I appreciate you tolerating me, and I did mention I have had a lot of caffeine already today. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. [[Page H3524]] ____________________

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