Democrats' Spending Bill

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, when we have someone special in our districts like that, sometimes with the chaos around here, it is hard finding time.

Mr. Speaker, one of the things I wanted to do this evening is to start to build on a theme that I have done in the past, and I hope to be able to do over the coming months. But it is a little difficult right now because, let's be honest, the House is spending money at a pace where it is really hard for the Joint Economic Committee and even my own staff to try to keep up.

We are going to talk about what is going on, a couple of things I really want us to start to put in the Record, talk about, and get our heads around.

I have an absolute fixation of a moral obligation to the working poor in this country and an understanding of what happened in 2018 and 2019 when the working poor, the value of their labor--and understand, for many of us who have graduate degrees and those things, who can work behind a computer, great. Our skill set is what we are selling.

For much of the workforce, if you didn't finish high school or you have moderate skill sets, your labor is your value. What is going on here right now is almost a type of economic violence to that labor value.

Yet, I am not sure my brothers and sisters on the other side even see it. So, let's first delve into a little bit of what is going on at the border. Do understand, one of the things we see in the math from 2018 and 2019, when the working poor got dramatically less poor, the first 2 years in modern times where income inequality shrank--not because rich people got less rich, but because poor people made money--the value of their labor increased because they weren't competing with armies of other unskilled labor.

Mr. Speaker, if we are going to be honest around here and say we care about the poor, that we care about the working poor, don't you see the economic violence we are allowing to happen at the border, making our folks have to compete with floods of moderate- to low-skilled immigrants? I know it is an uncomfortable conversation, but we need to see it in the totality of the people we claim we care about.

Then, the other day, I made a mistake on one of the hard-left-leaning cable television shows. They were trying to compare what we did in tax reform to the Democrats' $1.9 trillion spending bill and said: Well, they are both $1.9 trillion. But look here, this went to tax cuts, where this goes to spending. Isn't the spending so much more wonderful?

Once again, I need my brothers and sisters on the left to go back to school and spend a moment paying attention in their economics class. The elegance of the tax reform was that it made the value of workers' labor more valuable because the economy grew. We specifically made it so businesses would take part of that tax reform and put it into things that made their businesses more productive, making it so you can pay people more.

Remember, individuals' wages go up on two things, inflation and productivity. It is one of the reasons in 2018 and 2019 we had the fastest wage growth of workers, particularly the working poor in modern history.

So what is the Democrat solution to help these populations?

We are going to send them a check. And maybe part of that is good. There are people out there who are really suffering and hurting.

But what do we do next year?

The elegance of when you have someone's labor become more valuable is that value sets; and then the next year, it builds on it; and the next year, it builds on it; and after a little while, they are no longer in the working poor.

We are going to do a patch that is going to load another $1.9 trillion of debt. And over the decade, the amount of interest we are going to pay on that is not $1.9 trillion, but it is probably $1.6 trillion. That is one of the things we are going to talk about just real quickly here.

I cannot produce these boards fast enough to keep up with the Democrats' spending agenda right now. The CBO can't produce the data fast enough. The Joint Economic Committee can't produce the data fast enough to even get our heads around it.

So this slide here is from September. Understand, the numbers are much uglier today. It was a simple point in functioning 8 budget years. In September, we were saying each family would have $230,000 of Federal debt applied to their household, the amount of debt. So that is every household. That is not tax-paying households; that is every household. Today, my back-of-the-napkin math is about a quarter of a million dollars in 8 years for every family in America. We are spending that fast.

Being the father of a 5-year-old, I see the economic violence being done by the left here to her future, to the kids' futures. I am looking for the day I have to sit her down and apologize that she is not going to live as well as I have lived because of what we allowed to happen here today.

Let's have a quick education. Let's walk through real quick where the money goes. Social Security, about $1 trillion. Remember, this is based on last year's numbers. Today, these numbers have ballooned again. Defense, 724. Medicare, right now, I believe this year has now surpassed defense. So my last bit of math was Medicare was now starting to pass defense in total spending. Health, that is ObamaCare, that is all the other entitlements.

But if you actually look at the slide, Social Security, Medicare, the other health entitlements, income security, interest, veterans. It is the vast majority of spending. Yet you look at these tiny little slices, like, this little slice over here is foreign aid.

Yet how often do the politicians get behind these microphones and say, well, if we would cut foreign aid?

If this were a clock, I think foreign aid would cover about 14 minutes of spending in an entire day, in a 24-hour day.

If we don't get our heads around the fact that the Medicare, the health entitlements, the net interest are the things now which will drive our debt, I am terrified of what is coming. Because, understand, it is really hard to say, but our demographics, we are getting older very quickly as a society. If you look at the 30-year curve, we are a country that doesn't make it. We are so buried in debt.

And the economic violence the Democrats are committing tomorrow by adding another $1.9 trillion on top of the trillion that is already sitting in the bank and hasn't been expended, that we have done this last year, are we thinking about anything other than our next reelection?

How about thinking about my 5-year-old daughter and what her economic future is. How about everyone else's economic future.

I am going to try to do a couple of these quickly. We were trying to use CBO's numbers. The problem is, they haven't updated them yet on how fast we are spending. But what is so important here in functionally 8 budget years--now, this slide looks a little different than your typical debt slide because we calculate it on debt that is sold to the public, not internal debt.

Remember, when you look at U.S. sovereign debts, there are, sort of, two pies. There is stuff where we reach into the Social Security fund, grab that money, and borrow it, and put IOUs in it.

The other debt that is economically dangerous--because when interest rates move, it causes a problem--we are going to talk about that real quickly. This is debt sold to the public. It might be China; it might be Japan; it might be your grandma's pension. In about 8 years, debt held by the public will double from where we were last year. Understand how fast.

Now, a lot of this, believe it or not, even though some of the crazy spending we are doing right now is the demographics, demographics aren't Republican and Democrat. It is just math that we don't like to talk about. But the fact of the matter is that we have made promises, and the money that we collected for those promises, we have already spent and we are going to have to borrow.

So understand the fragility--I love that word, fragility--we have given ourselves. Interest rates in January were under 1 percent. They were actually at .91. Today, when the market closed, I think it was, 1.54, something in that nature. Most of us go, big deal, this still is historically really, really, really cheap. Except, think about it. Just that little movement in the last 2 months is about $600 billion over the next 10 years. Just that little movement, $600 billion of interest.

What are we buying with that interest?

Nothing.

And there are a lot of economists out there who think, because we are spending at such a fast rate, we are going to start to chase our tail. Part of that may be because the economy actually is getting healthier. One of the great intense ironies is we are about to spend $1.9 trillion, pretend it is a stimulus--even though a bunch of that money doesn't get spent for a year, 2 years, a little bit, 3 years from now-- claim it is a stimulus, pile it on as debt that is going to cost $2.6 trillion with financing costs added to it. Only a sliver of it is actually economic stimulus. And because we are going to the markets to finance every dime of it, we are helping drive up our own interest rates. Meaning, we are going to chase our tail economically.

Do you understand?

Remember the pie chart from before, that interest right now. We expect, within about a decade, interest may be the second most expensive thing in our budget. You will be seeing Social Security, Medicare, and then interest right up there, and that is going to consume everything. There functionally will be no more money left.

I know I am getting a little thick, but to try to drive this home, the changes in debt that happen from where the CBO was projecting back in January to some of the numbers we are seeing right now.

So just for the fun of it--I know this is hard to read. We just did a calculation and said, hey--the CBO basically said, hey, interest rates are going to go up a quarter percent. Think of it as 25 basis points. But if we went up 100 basis points in interest, over the 10 years of financing that, we are basically looking at--what is that--another $3.5 trillion of financing costs.

So, yes, you get to say we are spending that $1.9 trillion today, but do you understand the total cost of that?

So it is not just the cost of the legislation. It is the cascade effect that you are creating to the economy; where that family who wants to buy their first home, you just raised their mortgage interest rates.

But on a national basis, this year we will finance probably about $10 trillion. My quick estimate is about $7 trillion on just our bonds that are rolling off, that we have to refinance because we have no cash to pay for them. So they get reset at the new interest rates.

Then we have our typical spending. So there goes another trillion dollars, plus the trillion we authorized back in December and last year, and now another couple trillion dollars. So another four on top of that seven, and you start to look at over $10 trillion of new issue or refinancing coming to market of U.S. sovereign debt.

What did we just do to our interest rates, the world interest rates, the value of money?

And this comes back to my earlier point. We talk about what is happening in income inequality, the working poor. Those of us who have stocks or have a house or have assets, when you do this type of monetization of debt, when it requires the Federal Reserve to keep pumping in--today, we have 20 percent more cash floating around in our economy than we had a year ago.

People who are wealthy own things. They make a lot of money because their assets get more and more valuable.

The working poor who don't own a house, they don't own stocks, they don't have a bond, they don't have a pension. What they have, they get crushed. That is what we are doing to the working poor here.

Please, someone, buy an economic book for my Democrat brothers and sisters to understand. There is going to be a lot of singing and happy in a couple months when they get the check. And next year, when they realize they are being crushed, who will step up and actually take blame, saying, we could have done things that would have grown the economy, grown your future income, made so the working poor actually had a future?

Instead, we are going to flood the market with competing labor. We are going to devalue any asset you have, and we are going to make it so you can never afford to get out of the quartile where you are trapped. And this is what leftist policies do to poor people.

So, look, this is a theme. We are going to build on it and we are going to bring in more and more data and facts and see if we can turn around some of the heads here to say it is not enough to talk that we care. It is when you actually can stand up and say Republican policies in 2018 and 2019, before the virus, we actually made a difference. We are the party that actually closed income inequality. We are the party that actually made the working poor less poor.

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