Helping Working Men and Women

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, as we get ourselves sort of organized, one of the hazards of being someone that almost can't speak without a chart with them, I wanted to do a couple of things in this time this evening. Some of it is the continuation of the debate that happened on the floor earlier today.

I will just try to add a little more meat, a little more detail on what some of us are seeing from the Joint Economic Committee and our economists there looking at the data, what is going on in our country; and also, the Ways and Means Committee and what we see and what we think we can do to truly help working men and women in this country, the working poor, and where the policy is going, and it is some of our angst as the legislation moved out of the House today on sort of a blank-check budget document.

Here is $1.9 trillion in immediate funding, ultimately costing about a trillion and half in the 10-year window because of interest and those things because it is not paid for.

And where does that money go? And is it designed to truly maximize helping our brothers and sisters around this country and their economic vitality, dealing with the shutdowns and the economic devastation that we have seen in so many of our communities?

But some of the other side is where we have seen around the country, even with the headwinds of the pandemic, where are we seeing the economy moving in the right direction? Where are we seeing communities that have, we used to use the term, green shoots. That is sort of overused anymore.

And there is also a substantial difference from what we see in some of the coastal economies to much of the rest of the Nation.

I am blessed to represent the Scottsdale, Phoenix, Carefree, Cave Creek, Fountain Hills area, so Phoenix and some of its suburbs. And we have some folks that have just been crushed, whether they be in the hospitality business and tourism-related businesses, some of the restaurants.

But yet, we have been shocked at also how healthy our economy has been because of the creativity of some of these very same people finding other ways to survive. And that is actually one of the secondary things we want to try to talk about this evening is, as the Democrats who run this place, they are in charge, will they actually be creative enough? Will they be forward-thinking enough to say, as we are looking at tax policy, where we are going to do stimulus policy, regulatory policy, are we building it for what the future of the economy looks like, for the future of opportunity, and will it be designed to actually help all Americans?

So some simple examples, and I am going to then use some of the display boards. We know there is already $1 trillion sitting in bank accounts at the Treasury right now that are supposed to be helping schools, States, others who are in need right now. And instead, today, we spent all day debating $1.9 trillion of new spending over the next year. Instead of saying, hey, there is $1 trillion sitting in these accounts. What can we do to help the Biden administration get it out the door, get it to those schools, to healthcare workers, to the places that are already designated?

That is part of the problem around this place is we engage sort of in the theatrics, but the really assisting and providing the resources for the management to actually get to where the need is, that is secondary because, in some ways, that doesn't give you the same television time opportunity.

So a couple of things I wanted to walk through is, if I come to you and tell you there is $1 trillion already sitting in accounts right now--it turns out, CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, just did some projections, and we want this better. But this is as if the additional $1.9 trillion of spending were not to happen; we would just stay where we are at with the dollars that are already appropriated, with the budget that is already sort of modeled out.

If you actually look here, 2020, miserable fall in the size of our economy. But our projections are functionally, by the end of the year, we expect growth to actually be substantially positive. We are looking at a year with just under 4 percent GDP growth. That is terrific. I would like to see it more, and we could see it more if we would actually target some of the resources, instead of doing what is often referred to around here as a peanut butter spread, where we are going to spend lots of money so we make sure we don't annoy any constituent groups; or particularly let's put money where, you know, we made these public employee unions happy. We made this group happy.

I think this needs to be less about making our politics happy and making this line go up even further. And that is actually what, if we would actually draft the legislation, I think you would see Republicans line up with Democrats and probably, not for $1.9 trillion because we know that is just almost absurd. But there are some real opportunities to make this GDP growth substantially, substantially better.

As we sort of walk through some of the ideas that I am trying to promote, and I am trying to find some of my friends on the other side, particularly the Joint Economic Committee Democrats and some of the Ways and Means Democrats, there is something very special going on right now and we need to seize this as an opportunity.

In a time that has been so difficult for so many small businesses in America, small entrepreneurs, microentrepreneurs, something has happened. Do you know this last year was the biggest year ever in this country for people starting new little businesses? Filing for new LLCs, just starting new businesses. And you can see it here in the chart.

That is a pretty big spike when you consider 2019 was one of the greatest economic expansion years in modern history. 2018, 2019 were remarkable years economically, and yet, 2020, in the middle of such difficulties, we are seeing people becoming entrepreneurial, taking risks.

If we are going to work on public policy, where we want to build a more egalitarian, a more robust economy next year, this year, future years, how about a conversation where we get the Democrats to actually talk to us as Republicans, instead of just run us over policy-wise. How do you provide access to capital to some of these microbusinesses, these businesses that are being started in people's back bedrooms?

How do you actually provide them a cleaner path through the regulatory bodies, the licensing, the permitting?

Are we willing to be creative enough that, if you are poor and you happen to be willing to start a microbusiness and you live in public housing, you are actually allowed to run that business in the public housing, instead of being threatened with losing your lease?

If you actually care about people, this is the time we say there is something going on in our society and our economy; is this one of the great disruptions a lot of the economists have been talking about, that when we have gone through this upheaval of this last year, what the future is going to look like?

And does Congress actually provide assistance in a way that makes this economic change happen in a positive way? Or do we do what we are seeing in today's budget document, which was functionally, $1.9 trillion, and most of it just going to fund either legacy economics, States and municipalities, where the numbers were stunningly out of whack? Or are we functionally funding the last decade's economy and not moving to the future economy?

Now, I can try to explain this. If you will take a look at the bottom chart here--I put two charts on one board--you will actually see spending per government job lost. And the only point I am trying to make with this board is there is about $350 billion set aside in the Democrats' budget reconciliation bill.

There have been about 350,000 jobs lost in the government sector. But let's first just do it by States. If that money were used for States, that is $1 million a job. If it is all of them, it is still $350,000 a job.

This is actually how--if you actually say, here is the problem, here is the math of how much money is in that bill, you start to realize something is not lining up. And I desperately hope we can actually have an intellectually honest conversation saying, you want to help States and municipalities? We know from the Census Bureau--and it was as of the end of the third quarter because that is the last number we had-- State revenues were up. State and local revenues were up over 17 percent last year, which is remarkable to think about, because it is unlike everything we have been told.

Yes, there are municipalities around this country where their revenues have been crushed. They are also the very municipalities that have been most aggressive in their shutdowns. Maybe those are places we need to look at and figure out how we help them.

But the math is the math, and State and local revenues are up, if you take the entire country, they are up rather dramatically.

The top part is part of the argument of targeting. If you are going to have impact in the country while spending lots of money, do you spend it in a way where you actually put the money in places that-- let's be honest--don't need it? Or do you put the money to those who are truly hurting?

And we can actually tell, because we can see it just in the aggregate. This is actually about commercial bank deposits, and this is telling us big businesses that got access to capital, wealthier people that actually got certain types of stimulus; stunning, stunning, stunning rise of cash sitting in banks right now.

Did the Democrats actually intend to hand these same people that much more money?

So part of what we are arguing for is, please, could we actually take a step back and understand the data? It is not slowing things down. It is actually not sticking money into the very pockets that actually don't need it.

The brutal political part is the folks that actually have these huge deposits, they are also the ones that often finance those campaigns.

So let's actually walk through--and this one is a little tougher, and I probably will do more on the floor on it in the future because I want to go into some depth--$15 minimum wage. Okay. I am one of those who genuinely, desperately wants to find ways to help the working poor.

Understand what was accomplished in 2018 and 2019. There seems to be this fear of actually acknowledging that there was an economic miracle going on. It was the fastest rise of wealth and income for the working poor in modern history. It was the first, not one, but 2 years in modern economic history where income inequality in this country actually shrank.

If you say you end up with a society that becomes dangerously fractured as income inequality splits and splits and splits apart, there should have been joy in this body in 2018 and 2019 when that very income inequality shrank.

The left can make whatever reason, excuse, but they need to at least acknowledge it happened. The working poor's wages went up dramatically.

Nutrition, if you care about hunger, it was the first time in modern years where, what do they call it, food fragility, food stress, actually shrank. These are good things. Maybe we need to take a step back and say what did we do for 2018? What did we do, as a body, for 2019 that created such prosperity, where revenues--so tax receipts is the proper way to call it, ways and means, tax receipts actually went up?

If you actually did inflation-adjusted dollars, I think we had the number two and number three best years in U.S. history post-tax reform.

We need to have an honest dialogue, and I know this is really difficult for the left. There are things for us on the right that are really difficult. But the fact of the matter is; whether things have changed in regulation; whether it is the things that changed in our tax code, whether it was the adoption of technology, there were lots of things moving in those couple of years there. But the fact of the matter is, U.S. society got much healthier, and not at cost to the Treasury.

If the truth here is that we care about where we are going economically, that we care about the economic stress, that we care about the working poor, a $1.9 trillion spending stimulus while ignoring the fact that we had a couple of years where we actually had success in shrinking income inequality, maybe we need to understand what we did there and do more of it.

There is a reality here. If you want the working poor to have a better life, we can raise their wages to $15 an hour. But you also have to accept there is--I think one of these charts says it is like 3.2 million American workers in that working poor category who are going to become much poorer because they will lose their employment.

We will spend some more time on a couple of these boards in the near future to try to understand: Do you do what happened in 2018 and 2019, where what we saw is wages, almost everywhere in the country, were substantially above the minimum wage because of the scarcity of labor? Labor became valuable.

There is also another controversial subject we are going to have to have an honest discussion on: immigration issues in regard to the importation of low-skilled labor. It was somewhat restricted in that time. Competition for labor shrank; therefore, the value of that labor went up.

There is a combination of a robust economy, a tax code that is working, earned income tax credit, and things of that nature being expanded, and also not flooding the market with others with similar skill sets.

A couple of others we want to just sort of walk through. This one is sort of difficult to get our heads around, but it is the math: total monthly spending effects of first and second stimulus payments by household income. What you find is, when you get up into the higher income, almost none of the money was really getting spent. It functionally went to make people's bank accounts more robust. When you went down, you saw more of the money actually getting spent.

All we are trying to argue here is, if you are going to do direct stimulus to individuals, great, but make sure it is not going into populations that aren't going to spend it because you don't get any multiplier in the economy. Lots of good data exist on this, and you saw it in a previous chart when you saw how much is just sitting in bank accounts right now.

Back to trying to make a point. This indicates income by households. I want to make sure I say this the right way. If you take a look at what I often refer to as sort of the miracle of 2018 and 2019, you started seeing populations that were in the lower percentiles. All of a sudden, their curve was much steeper than those who had typically benefited.

There are series of data like this that we will show you, if you care about the working poor, that mimic what the Republicans accomplished in the tax reform and in the regulatory reform. If you are on the left, put it under a different name. But the fact of the matter is, the data is the data. There were some really wonderful things happening for the poor and the working poor in this country.

Instead of going through the next couple of boards, I will save those for when we do a concentrated conversation.

Madam Speaker, in sort of building a closing here, it has been a crappy month for a lot of us here in Congress. We have gone through some things I really thought I would never see.

But I always thought, even outside, when many of us are standing in front of microphones and being a bit hyperbolic, thinking that the only way voters will actually hear our words is when we tell stories because math is too difficult, there have always been those moments in the back--or the joy of being in the Ways and Means Committee where we share a common back room, unlike so many other committees where you go off separately.

In this time of COVID, we don't have those conversations right now. We don't hear each other's arguments and, hopefully, build policy that is good for the country.

What we saw on the floor earlier today, I think, is somewhat shameful, a $1.9 trillion budget box, which is designed basically to be able to run through the process, get through the Senate with 51 votes, so they don't have to negotiate with any Republicans.

But what was also sort of heartbreaking is so many of the things that were said just weren't true. They weren't mathematically true. They weren't policy true. They weren't historically true.

The Speaker got up and said, I think, 83 percent of the benefits of tax reform went to the top 1 percent. That just isn't true. We have lots of papers and other things that say it isn't. I am sure the smart people around her know it is not true. But around here, if you say something enough times, it becomes part of, sort of, congressional folklore.

To be correct, it is 25 percent of the benefits went to the top 1 percent, but they pay just a stunning percentage of Federal income tax.

How do we ever build policy, particularly for economic growth, for opportunity for everyone, and build a much more, shall we say, fair and egalitarian society when in the debates we have, so much of the discussion is make-believe? The math isn't true. Yet, if we say it enough times, you will hear it resaid over and over. I will argue that is where a lot of the crisis is around here.

My family joke that Daddy works in a place that is a math-free zone was meant to be funny. It wasn't supposed to be true. The problem is, it is true.

How do you make public policy in times of difficulty, when you want to have an economic future that is good for everyone, but when so much of the debate has so little to do with the truth?

I double my commitment. Leading the Joint Economic Committee, our economists, our team, I know we have all committed to working with our Democrat colleagues on finding the things that look like they work and do more of it.

I desperately hope we can find some Democrats who are less bathing in partisan rage, or whatever the proper term would be, and are willing to look at the math that would be good for all of us, good for the country, good for someone like myself who has a 5-year-old. I want her future to be amazing.

I truly believe our society is at the moment of an economic disruption that, if we can get policy right, the next couple of years can be pretty darn amazing. The next decade could be just awesome. But right now, our regulatory policy and our reimbursement policies aren't there.

How do we get the conversation to move back to things that will make this future amazing instead of just burying my 5-year-old daughter in more debt?

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

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