In remarks on the House floor before the Congressional recess, Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) spoke about left-wing activists
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00:30Dr. Michael B. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025,
00:59The chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Schweikert, for 30 minutes.
01:12And forgive me, Mr. Speaker Pro Tem, as we get ourselves organized here.
01:18Our friends on the other side ended a little faster than we expected.
01:23Mr. Speaker, I'm going to do something a little dangerous.
01:26Have you ever heard the saying, you should never go to bed mad?
01:30I think there should be another rule.
01:32You probably shouldn't come behind these microphones cranky.
01:35But let's have at it.
01:38Mr. Speaker, I've been walking through numbers after numbers after numbers.
01:46And for many of us, for a decade now, I've come behind this microphone trying to walk
01:52through the scale of our borrowing, the scale of what's going on, the fact that most of
01:59it is driven by our demographics, giving a little bit of an excuse, saying that makes
02:04it so it's not Democrat or Republican, it's just math.
02:08And then at home, I'm blessed, I represent the Scottsdale, Phoenix area, I'm trying
02:14to figure out what's going on in our brothers and sisters on the left's head.
02:20So OK, I get it, they're cranky.
02:24And as a former senator that I sat next to from my state was sharing with me one of the
02:31great frustrations of Democrats in my area is, well, for 15 years, they raised money,
02:38they ran on marriage equality.
02:39Well, that's pretty much settled.
02:41They ran on the right to terminate pregnancies, well, now that's in my state constitution.
02:48So what do they run on now?
02:49Well, they run on apparently rage.
02:52So just, I want to get this out of my head before I start to walk through some of the math.
03:01You have a country that's borrowing about $6 billion a day, about $70,000 a second.
03:08In a decade, there's data saying 30 percent of our tax receipts will go just to pay interest.
03:18The wheels are coming off.
03:20And instead, the brain trust of some of these folks, OK, I accept that the tonal quality of
03:27some of the folks out of the White House isn't warm and cuddly.
03:31But do you go around neighborhoods, offices, and stick Nazi signs on their cars?
03:40So my wife drives a Tesla.
03:42We bought it a couple of years ago.
03:44You know, it's funny.
03:46At that time, she got teased a bit, oh, now you're driving an electric car.
03:50I thought you guys were, like, really conservative.
03:53Is this where your heads are at, sticking Nazi things on people's windshields?
04:00And there's no way they knew it was my wife's car.
04:02You know, she just has a little basis sticker, which is a charter school my kids go to.
04:09But this is really the quality of conversation, discourse, of communication that's going
04:17on with the left-wing activists in my community.
04:21It's not, hey, David, we're concerned about Medicaid.
04:24Here's ideas how you can deal with the debt and deficit so we have the resources.
04:30No, it's because it's this really highbrow intellectual discussion with our brothers
04:34and sisters on the other side.
04:36Stick Nazi things on people's cars.
04:41This is what you've come down to?
04:44This is what's going on?
04:46Come on, people.
04:49Look, I almost always start with this chart.
04:53You see what's in blue?
04:57It's defense and non-defense discretionary.
05:00We expect it to be 26, 25 percent of spending.
05:04Last year, for every dollar this country took in in tax collections, we spent $1.39.
05:12Not everything we vote on is 26 percent of the budget.
05:16Anyone see a math problem?
05:19So we're going to get behind the microphones and have honest discussions of how we're going
05:22to save the country.
05:23If it's about programs the left cares about, help us figure out how to pay for it.
05:28Look at that.
05:29When you actually look at some of the spending and debt, I think I have the chart.
05:36We actually did some of the math.
05:38So the crazy thing, one of my Democrat neighbors who makes a lot of money, he has a beautiful
05:43home.
05:44David, is it true that the president's even talking about keeping the old, going back
05:50to the 2017 tax rate for high-income earners?
05:54Well, apparently the president said something like that on Friday.
05:58Well, David, do you think that's fair?
06:00Now, this guy I know is a Democrat because he has Democrat signs even of my opponents
06:04in his front yard.
06:06We did the basic math.
06:08If you actually were saying, let's just go back to the tax rate for the top earners,
06:12back to the 2017, it's $32.7 billion over 10 years.
06:18OK, we can all divide that by 10, so let's call it $3 billion, $200 million a year.
06:27We borrow $6 billion a day.
06:33If that's $3.2 billion, you've functionally bought yourself 12 and a half, 13 hours worth
06:41of borrowing for the entire year.
06:44And there's the mental breakdown, is the left runs around and says, raise taxes, OK?
06:51We're going to borrow 7.3 percent of GDP, is my latest number.
06:56Some of the other economists are around 7.2 percent of GDP.
07:00Either way, every tax, you go to the Manhattan Institute, read the articles, and it's from
07:05Democrat literature that if you take every tax they have that they've scored, raise
07:10tax on capital gains, raise tax on income, raise tax on businesses, raise tax here.
07:15And I'm sorry for talking so fast.
07:18I believe it or not, would you leave?
07:19I live on coffee and I need to apparently deal with my issue, 12-step group for coffee.
07:27But the point I'm going to, read the article.
07:32All those taxes, when you do the economic judgment, is about 1.5 percent of GDP.
07:40But this place lies, excuse me.
07:43We make up math because it's really hard to tell people the truth.
07:48Almost every cut we talk about, as Republicans, it's about 1 percent or so of GDP.
07:54And I'm enraged right now because I'm hearing down the hallway, the Senate, they're talking
07:59about doing their reconciliation budget and setting a floor saying, we're not going to
08:05allow a Senate to pass a budget, you know, cuts of less than $3 billion.
08:12Huh?
08:13You know, I'm upset that ours is so anemic at like $1.5 trillion.
08:20But if they do $3 billion, it's not even a half, it's functioning a half a day of borrowing.
08:26This is, yay, go team.
08:29Look, at some point the math is the reality.
08:33Why is it so hard to tell the truth?
08:37And one of the other points I sort of want to make, and I stole this graphic from another
08:43group, thank you.
08:45Baseline, baseline, baseline law, not baseline policy.
08:50The law, and I'll explain that later.
08:52Over the next 10 years, we're going to spend $86 trillion.
09:01We're talking about, at best, on the House budget resolution, cutting $2 trillion over
09:06those 10 years.
09:07That's 2.3 percent.
09:10Oh, God, dear heaven, you're butchering government.
09:142.3 percent.
09:18You're telling me that if we didn't grind through government, look at our programs, look
09:24at all the reports that GAO and others give us of the waste and fraud and just programs
09:29that haven't been authorized in decades.
09:32You couldn't find 2.3 percent, but it's easier to go stick this sort of crap on my wife's windshield
09:38than it is to do the intellectual work of saying, hey, we think we have more elegant ideas
09:43on how to reform spending in government and modernize it and make it better, faster, cheaper
09:48for the American people.
09:49No, we'd rather burn things down.
09:52Are we all proud of ourselves?
09:57The fact of the matter is $86 trillion spending over the next 10 years, and at best, our budget
10:05reconciliation is 2.3 percent of that spending.
10:10And this is the one I get complaints from everyone, so please understand, I'm trying to offend
10:15everyone with facts and math.
10:17If you do all this, because we have a number of senators over there, don't cut any spending.
10:23And they're Republicans.
10:26When you hear someone say, we should do baseline policy, not the law, what they're basically
10:31saying is they don't want to have to deal with telling the truth of the math.
10:35So let's take a look here.
10:37We finished this fiscal year $37 trillion, $200 billion in debt as a country.
10:43Baseline, we add $22 trillion of additional borrowing over the next 10 years.
10:52If we were to do the tax extensions, which we really need to protect the middle class
10:58and others by not raising their taxes.
11:02But if we were to do it without any offsets, and then you add in the interest, that's
11:06about another $6.8 trillion of borrowing.
11:10And then if we were to take care of the president's request, that's another $8 trillion, functionally
11:14saying we will borrow more in this 10-year period than we did in the previous 240 years.
11:23240 years of borrowing on the day we were elected, and we're going to double it.
11:30Are we proud of ourselves?
11:35This is how we're going to save the republic?
11:36Is we're going to continue to just bury it in debt because it's hard to tell people the
11:41truth about the math?
11:51A caveat on this board.
11:55We don't have a subscription to Moody's Analytics.
11:58It's expensive.
12:00Congressional Research Service doesn't have an—but we found four or five articles talking
12:06about Moody's saying their model says in 2035—so nine budget years from now, 10 years
12:14from now, 30 percent of all U.S. tax receipts.
12:23So you pay a dollar in taxes, 30 cents of it, just paid interest.
12:34Think about that—30 percent in 10 years.
12:39This year, it's 18 percent.
12:44Dear heaven, there's a model out there that actually shows that if interest rates were
12:50to go up 1 percent in that nine budget years, it's like 45 percent of all U.S. tax receipts
12:58go just to interest.
13:01We're playing a very dangerous game here.
13:04But at least we can stick things on Teslas and protest and be angry because, God forbid,
13:09we talk about actual math.
13:17In seven and a half, eight years from now, Social Security Trust Fund is empty.
13:21The law says you cut benefits.
13:26That's a 21 percent cut.
13:27We double senior poverty in America.
13:30How many people do you think coming behind these microphones, willing to have a conversation
13:34on how we're going to save it?
13:36First year, my math—actually, the Joint Economic Economist math—first year—so if the trust
13:44fund has gone in 2033 and 2034, it's over $600 billion just to make up that shortfall.
13:53That makes what we're talking about here in the budget resolutions tiny.
13:57Those are only like $200 billion a year.
13:59We're talking $600 billion a year, and it grows just to cover the Social Security Trust
14:04fund being gone.
14:07That's seven and a half, eight years from now.
14:09But are we going to talk about that?
14:11No, because they're going to run television ads beating the crap out of us because we tried
14:16to figure out a way to save it.
14:18The perversity of this place.
14:21They don't give a damn about someone's future, their poverty.
14:25It's about winning the next election and raising money on it.
14:29And we've got to tell the truth also, what's going on in our country.
14:37You all saw the updates from the Census Bureau basically saying, after next year, if you zero
14:48out immigration, our number of prime-age workers starts to fall.
14:54As a matter of fact, there's a data set — now, we always — we've been using eight years
14:58from now, because that was the official Census Bureau number.
15:02There's a couple demographers out there that wrote articles a week ago saying we may have
15:06already hit more deaths than births in America.
15:12I need you to process what that means.
15:15You have a system where Social Security, the financing of Medicare, the financing of so
15:22many of our pensions relies on a growth of the working population, particularly those prime-age
15:27workers.
15:29If we're now entering a time of a shortage of young people, 2027, not that long from now,
15:40we actually go negative of prime-age workers.
15:47Maybe our committee should maybe invite in a demographer and talk about saying, is this
15:53Republican or Democrat?
15:55Starting in 1990, we started to roll over and the number of children we had.
15:59Now we're paying the price for it.
16:01Now make these long-run programs, which are pay-as-you-go math, make them work.
16:10This should be scaring the hell out of this place.
16:13Oh, no, David, we can't tell our voters that.
16:17It's harder to raise money when you tell them the truth of how hard the future is.
16:25It is fixable.
16:28I've done presentation after presentation of adoption of technology, redesigning some
16:33of the programs where you don't cut anything, but you do really hard stuff.
16:38And the problem is our hallways are crowded with people here.
16:41It's all about the money.
16:43And Congress is really about one thing, money.
16:47And the inefficiencies, the design failures for these bureaucracies, for the business models
16:54that make their living off government, that's their profit.
16:57They actually like the inefficiencies.
16:59We came and showed some charts I think a week or two ago, just our calculations that there
17:04could be 25 billion a year in duplicative MRI, X-rays, ultrasound scans in Medicare.
17:13Does a duplicative scan, when it's not necessary, make someone healthier?
17:17Or you could actually do something crazy, take the scan, attach it to one of these things,
17:22your little supercomputer in your pocket, and carry it around with you.
17:26And there it is.
17:28Did that cut anyone's service?
17:30But 25 billion this year, times 10, it's a quarter trillion dollars with one little reform.
17:40But the perversity of this place, when I do that piece of legislation, I'll get a tax
17:44taxing, you're trying to cut benefits.
17:47No, I'm trying to save the programs.
17:54But I guess it would cause the difficulty of math and having to design and put something
18:00on paper and getting some of the economists to work through it.
18:04But that's our job.
18:05We are the board of directors of the biggest economy in the world, the biggest entity in
18:13the world.
18:14We're going to spend over seven trillion this year.
18:16Of course, we're only going to take in two trillion in taxes, meaning we may borrow
18:21about 2.1, 2.3 trillion this year to keep the wheels on.
18:30The scale of this should be scaring the hell out of people.
18:34And look, the demographic curve.
18:37When we start to think right now in 2024, we've got 2.9 people working for every person receiving
18:45their benefits.
18:49A decade from now, that's starting to fall to 2.7, 2.6.
18:52And then it really starts to crash.
18:54And when we start to look at the 30-year window, we're down to about 2.4.
18:59Now, that may not mean much to you.
19:01But trying to make these numbers work, it can be done.
19:11It's just hard.
19:14And so you're going to hear people come behind these microphones, give these beautiful speeches
19:18of how they want to save the republic, how we care about the future, how we care about
19:22our kids, how we care about your retirement.
19:24And then we'll do nothing that's actually hard.
19:31It's just immoral.
19:35It's just absolutely immoral.
19:36And then I try over and over just to bring – when I'm doing these, I'm trying to do
19:42a better job of bringing examples of where we can save.
19:52Okay.
19:54I'm going to admit Doge and those – I'm fascinated with the data mining and those
19:59things.
20:00I know the quality of the gentil – gentleness or gentility of the communications.
20:06Yeah, they have a hard, rough edge.
20:10And the fact of the matter is a lot of the craziness actually wasn't coming from them.
20:14It was coming from people in the bureaucracy trying to throw out stuff to make it more difficult
20:19and make – and just really anger people.
20:21And then the government unions, you know, have to try to light things on fire.
20:25So okay, disharmony.
20:27We have five major databases in the federal government.
20:32Is it Republican or Democrat to just build a world where those databases would talk to
20:38each other?
20:40If there's potential of $100 billion a year in misallocations and fraud and these things.
20:47And you could fix it by just having the databases talk to each other and know this is a fraudster.
20:53This person isn't with us anymore.
20:55They've gone on to their reward, but somehow they're over here asking for an SBA loan.
21:00Is that Republican or Democrat?
21:02It's just technology.
21:05Yet you have protesters out there saying, you can't make the databases allow them to talk
21:09to each other.
21:11Have we lost our minds?
21:16And I want to do this just as an example because this one just burns me.
21:21Between Christmas and New Year's I went up and spent three or four days up in the Navajo
21:25nation.
21:26I took my little nine-year-old daughter.
21:28Yes, I have a nine-year-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old.
21:31That's the definition of pathologically optimistic when you're 63 and have a two-and-a-half-year-old.
21:38It's both funny and true.
21:41Guess what?
21:43We've spent $42.5 billion for broadband equity.
21:48Remember, we always like to add that word equity, except no one has gotten broadband.
21:56So the tribal president of the Navajo nation and a number of the communities called chapter
22:01houses basically said, hey, screw this.
22:04I'm not willing to wait another 20 years.
22:06You know what?
22:07They did something just crazy.
22:09Instead of being patient and waiting for us to spend billions of more dollars and run
22:13a piece of wire, they went out and stuck a satellite dish, and 48 hours later for several
22:18hundred dollars, they had broadband for the whole neighborhood, for the whole what we
22:23call chapter house.
22:26Is that Republican or Democrat?
22:28It's just the adoption of technology, except the lobbyists who run around here wanting billions
22:33of subsidies for something they're never going to connect.
22:38Get really upset every time I do this board.
22:46Do we care?
22:48Does this place care enough to do the hard things, to actually do the math, the creativity?
22:57Last week I came here with the MedPAC report.
22:59It's like this.
23:00I have no idea how many members have actually bothered to read it.
23:03But in there, there's a whole section.
23:05And yes, I understand there's some anomalies, but they're rounding errors compared to this.
23:11I think it had saying $84 billion was spent last year in the differential between Medicare
23:17Part D and Medicare Part A. So that's Medicare fee-for-service, Medicare Advantage.
23:22And it was supposed to be at 95 percent, if anyone wants to go back and do their history
23:26in 2005 when they started Medicare Advantage.
23:29Well, if you do that basic math, that's $104 billion a year.
23:37Okay.
23:38How about if Republicans and Democrats got together and say, we're going to fix this.
23:41We're going to get the capitation program to actually work the way it's supposed to.
23:46We're going to have the providers of services actually make money because they help our brothers
23:50and sisters who are in their retirement years earning their health care benefits, helping
23:54them be healthier.
23:55They get rewarded by having their population be healthier, not by running around scoring
23:59them as sicker.
24:01Yay!
24:02Everyone wins.
24:03What would happen if that's several hundred billion dollars over a decade?
24:08That's not a cut.
24:11It's actually lining up incentives.
24:14Instead, it's just easier to run around and scream stories, they're going to cut things.
24:23Let's pay people, so I have hospitals and other groups paying people to fly out here, tell
24:28stories, and they have no idea what they're talking about.
24:32Because we make crap up, once again, because everything's about the money.
24:38And the last board and the one that always seems to upset people because they don't want
24:42to know the truth.
24:44Congressional Budget Office, and this one's a year out of date.
24:46The numbers are actually apparently worse, but we haven't had the update yet.
24:50Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next 30 years, our country borrows
24:57124 trillion dollars.
25:01Now I've got to tell you, this number, when we get our updates, is going to be much worse.
25:06But if you look at their data, they actually have discretionary, the part we vote on, growing
25:12slower than tax receipts.
25:14So that has a 9 trillion dollar positive over the 30 years.
25:18But Medicare is 87.2 trillion in the hole.
25:23Social Security is 36.8 trillion in the hole over those 30 years.
25:29Turns out, even the next decade, almost, almost 100 percent of the U.S. sovereign debt growth
25:39is interest and Medicare.
25:45Nothing we can do about interest.
25:48We can do some things to incentivize going out on the curve so we're not as fragile to
25:52communicate to the bond markets, because the bond markets are basically about to run this
25:56country.
25:57Because if you have to sell six billion dollars a day, 60, 70 thousand dollars every second,
26:03maybe you need to pay attention to your bankers who you're having to sell your debt to.
26:09But to communicate to those debt markets, we're serious, we're looking at ways to
26:15use technology, better models, when obesity is the single biggest expense in our society.
26:20Yeah, we're not supposed to say that.
26:22Shh!
26:23Mr. Speaker, please don't tell anyone.
26:27Last year, the Joint Economic Economist calculated $9.1 trillion of additional health care spending.
26:34Is it moral?
26:35With what we do in food policy, nutrition support, how we deliver health care, maybe the concept
26:42of helping our brothers and sisters live healthier when 31 percent of Medicare spending is diabetes.
26:49Thirty-three percent of all health care overall is just diabetes.
26:56Is that Republican or Democrat?
26:57It's just trying to get your policy alignment to the fact we're buried in debt.
27:03We're getting older as a society.
27:04I think in a decade, twenty-three percent of our population is 65 and up.
27:09We now know that we're having this remarkable shortage of young people.
27:14We're already potentially on the cusp of having more deaths than births in our country.
27:21In a couple of weeks, we're trying to roll out a STEM-based, talent-based immigration bill
27:26because for the economy to grow and stabilize, we don't have a choice.
27:34And people just, oh, David, you're not allowed to talk about immigration.
27:37People won't understand it.
27:39Well, they understand the economic survival of you still getting your benefits when you're
27:42a senior.
27:46We can make this work.
27:48But, Mr. Speaker, we're now starting to run into articles that are talking about we're
27:56putting the extraordinary privilege.
28:00And what are the two extraordinary privileges America has?
28:04Our currency?
28:06The world borrows in our currency, meaning the fact of the matter is when we sell debt, there's
28:12a demand to hold U.S. dollar denominated.
28:15And then the second thing is people want to live here.
28:20They want to invest here.
28:21They want to be educated here.
28:23They want to be an entrepreneur here.
28:27And now we're running into multiple articles saying some of the things we're doing, particularly
28:31our debt stack, we're putting our extraordinary privilege as a country at risk.
28:37Doesn't have to be this way, Mr. Speaker.
28:39But a couple of the smart people, a couple of our economists say you've got three or four
28:45more years.
28:47And at that point, the debt gets so hard to manage.
28:53And just what the Federal Reserve said last week, taking us from a 2.1 GDP down to a 1.7,
29:03just that movement is almost $200 billion a year in tax collections.
29:09Just that GDP reduction the Federal Reserve calculated for the next three years, now take
29:14that out to 10, that's more money, that's more money than everything in our budget reconciliation.
29:24The lack of understanding of the inner dynamics of our debt, the interest, these dollars terrifies
29:36me because there is a path.
29:38There is a path for this to work, Mr. Speaker.
29:41But we're living on a razor's edge because we're not doing the hard work.
29:45With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back.
29:49The gentleman yields back his time.
29:52Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3rd, 2025.