What Good Has Been Done in the Last Year

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I want to apologize right now, because I have had a lot of coffee, and I am just cranky today. I am just cranky. I also apologize for those who have to try to keep track. I will, on occasion, try to slow down. I torment them on occasion by talking too fast.

I started to do part of this a week ago and only wanted to do a little part, but we have a 10 o'clock shutdown rule, so I got up against the clock and had to stop. So, God forbid, they let me have the entire hour, which means I brought a whole bunch of boards.

A week ago, I pitched to some of our friends here a really mean, difficult, and absolutely honest question: Tell me something good that has been done in the last year of absolute control of Congress, of the White House, and of, functionally, the levers of our Government. Tell us something good that has been done policy-wise, legislative-wise, that has passed here for working men and women, for the future of my 6- year-old daughter, for people's retirement security, what has actually happened here.

Then I am going to walk through a whole bunch of things where the words, the virtue signaling, the discussion had great language, warm and fuzzy and caring, and it has actually been devastating to poor people, to the working poor.

I don't think they meant to, but the fact of the matter is, at some point, my brothers and sisters on the left have to have a brutally honest conversation with themselves of what their policies are doing.

We are going to start with, being from a border State, immigration. But it is not immigration. It is opening up the border. What has the Democrats' policy, what has this President's policy, on functionally ignoring the border, done to my community in Arizona and to the country.

First, let's also get our heads around the scale of the numbers when you start seeing that border encounters increased 278 percent, functionally, in a year, when you start seeing numbers over 1.7 million crossings, when you start seeing crossings that are in the millions.

But do you remember all the speechifying that was here a year ago? Do you remember how mean the last President was? We are going to be compassionate and loving.

Does anyone here understand the economic concept of first degree, second degree, third degree effects, what you have done to my communities in Phoenix, what you have done to the communities in this country? Let's show the actual math.

Now, I also have an economic premise, and we have done this presentation multiple times. They were written by liberal economists that talked about the two things you do to make the working poor poorer.

Number one was inflation. Well, congratulations. We are going to talk about that.

Number two was open borders, and it was a very simple concept. If you look at the profile of our brothers and sisters who we would categorize--and I hate these categories, but we do them for policy purposes--who are considered the working poor, they are often our brothers and sisters who did not graduate high school, who sell their labor. That is their income.

You open up the border and import millions of individuals who their economic contribution will be to sell their labor. One of these economic papers, written a decade ago, says you have just taken the working poor in the country and made them poor for another decade. One of them talks about that their income, at the end of the decade, will be at least 6 percent lower.

For all those folks that like to preach about compassion, where is the compassion for those who are just grinding it out, trying to survive here? Do you understand that, at some point, the math always wins?

Let's have a little fun here. Here is my premise, and I am going to try to do this on a number of these boards.

You open up the border. We are going to talk about how many of our brothers and sisters and families and the kids in my community and across this country are now dying of fentanyl.

I did a ride-along a month ago with one of my neighbors who happens to be a police sergeant in a portion of north central Phoenix. He is telling me that, a year ago--and I am not going to get these numbers exactly right. It was like $70 to $100 for that addict to get high, and now it might be $12.

Remember your basic economics classes. When a price crashes, what does that mean? The availability has skyrocketed.

We are also going to talk a little bit about--I have ZIP Codes in my community where the social workers, the charities, some of my churches are telling me homelessness has doubled in 1 year. Have you seen the crime numbers? We have to deal with reality.

Then, we probably should have an interesting conversation. What makes poor communities poorer? If you have made drugs available, if you have flooded the communities with homelessness, if now you have also increased crime--and do you see the death numbers of our brothers and sisters who are dying of drugs?

Are we willing to have a basic understanding--when you make a really crappy decision that we are not going to enforce the border because it is more compassionate, do you understand the cascade of misery that the left has brought to many of their own constituencies?

The fact of the matter is, a lot of these neighborhoods that are suffering this aren't the ones voting for me. But, dammit, I care because their misery should be all of ours, except it is not politically expedient around here because it basically proves the rhetoric: Let's defund the police. Let's defund ICE.

Great job, guys. Look what you did to your neighborhoods. Look what you did to our communities. Look at the misery. Look at the death you brought. And the math will always win.

For every Member and staffer who may be on one of the televisions around this campus, if you are watching, I want you to have the experience I have had where you have to pick up the phone and talk to a mother who had their child die because they thought they were taking some party drug, and it turned out to have fentanyl in it.

That is the misery. And you are on that phone, and the tears are running down, and you are terrified.

I have a 6\1/2\-year-old, the greatest gift God has ever given me. I am terrified that this is the society that you get when you put the left in charge.

Did they mean this? The rhetoric doesn't say so, but, dammit, will they actually stop and take a look at the outcome of their decisions?

When you see a 133 percent increase, people in our communities are dying. They come behind these microphones and tell us how they are the ones that care. Fine. Maybe you should be on the next phone call with me when you are talking to that mother. You can explain to them that it was compassion to open up the border and make it so drug prices crash, so now fentanyl comes screaming into my community, and their child gets to die.

There are consequences to really bad policy. It may have been great rhetoric when you had a different President, but the misery has been foisted on our neighborhoods, our suburbs, our communities, and particularly the communities that the Democrats claim they care about.

If you look at what is going on, on the drug overdoses--by the way, I brought this because, believe it or not, for anyone watching, there are rules where I can't reach over here and write on this, so we did something sort of silly. We had to print it and put some tape on it.

There is your number for 2021, and that is only as of October. We don't have the final data. So, congratulations, Democrats. Over 100,000 of our brothers and sisters are dead, of our children, of our next generation. And there are still a couple more months to be added to that math.

I don't believe it is purposeful, but I believe there is an embarrassment of saying, oh, God, what have we done? The number of times around this place you make a policy decision, you campaign on it, it is in your brochures, you have given speeches, and then you find out it crashes and burns and creates more misery, that willingness to get up behind a microphone and say: I am wrong.

I have had a couple of those, where I thought I understood the math. I thought I understood the societal implications. I am waiting.

Now, we did hear a little bit of it. I was optimistic. The President got behind that microphone up ahead of me and said: Let's fund the police.

You could hear the grumbling of a number of our brothers and sisters on this side because they had campaigned on something very different for years.

Now, let's talk about other levels of crime, and this is not my area of specialty. I do Medicare finance. I do trade. I do taxes. I love working on the geeky stuff. Yes, it doesn't get you on television. You don't raise lots of money because you said something crazy, but it is important. It is what keeps the economy going. It is what keeps prosperity, and I believe economic growth is moral.

But we have been working on a side project on the Joint Economic Committee, and here is our outline. What makes people poor?

Well, you get people that say, oh, education, racism. You start looking at the data sets and truly grinding in, and then things we could do something about, and you start seeing things that pop off the data if you are willing to open your eyes and own a calculator.

Diabetes actually pops off as one of the top things when you see the concentrations of our brothers and sisters with diabetes.

When you actually see crime--and this is one that almost is never talked about here. Communities often that have the most economic misery, is it a chicken and the egg? It is a little hard to get ahead in life when people keep stealing stuff or killing your family members.

Maybe it is time. Reagan, back in the 1980 election, had something called the misery index. It was, functionally, inflation and unemployment. Maybe it is time we could do something much more effective and create the Biden and Democrat-controlled misery index. We could just lay out how many of our brothers and sisters are OD'ing, how many of our brothers and sisters are dying, how many of our brothers and sisters are victims of crime, how many of our brothers and sisters are sicker today, how many of our brothers and sisters now have mental health issues because they spent a couple of years locked up, how many of our kids are almost afraid to take their masks off now.

Think about the sort of psychodrama that this place has foisted on the citizens of this country. And the hits keep coming.

Look, I put this one here more just as a--and I know I am being a bit snarky, but I have to get it off my chest. The number of get-togethers I had a year ago, so during 2020, and fussing and screaming: Why aren't you doing more about COVID? If we had Democrats in charge, people would be healthier. We would solve the problem.

Do you remember President Biden's campaign promises? Do you remember the Democrat leadership's promises here? Put us in charge. We will take care of it.

So, a time where there are therapeutics, a time where there are vaccines, you did a great job, guys, a great job. Because do you see the math? A hell of a lot more of our brothers and sisters died in a time where we actually had the tools.

What happened? My argument is rhetoric sure does sound a lot better than actually explaining competence.

Now, let's talk about--in my 8 minutes I had last week, it was basically trying to have a conversation of what the Democrats have done making the environment worse. And you go, huh?

The fact of the matter--and I will show you the slide here in a moment. As soon as the Biden administration took over--but it even goes back to 2018 when the Democrats won the House.

They basically set off a campaign or jihad, whatever colloquialism you want to use, and it wasn't, hey, we are just going to cancel pipelines. What was it? In 2020, President Biden, in a debate with Bernie Sanders, said there will be no more permitting. No more permitting of pipelines. No more permitting of wells. It was an absolute promise.

Well, to his credit, he kept his promise. But did anyone stop for a moment to think about what they were going to do?

So, functionally, what is ESG? I can give you the quote, or we can just do something really simple. It is when you basically add such a risk premium to investing in any type of hydrocarbons.

So, you are a pension system, you are our pension systems, you are the California teachers, you are a mutual fund, you are an index fund, and you are going to now have to, with all the threats and things coming through the administration--this isn't votes. This isn't a proclamation from the President. This is the infrastructure of our society and our financial markets basically raising a risk premium for investing in natural gas, for investing in the infrastructure of hydrocarbons. Well, what happens?

What happens when you do that? Because remember, it wasn't the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Go back to last September and October when natural gas prices shot off the charts, and there were people here coming--people on the left--you know, attacking hydrocarbon and natural gas companies. But the fact of the matter is, we were talking about how miserable this winter was going to be, what was happening to your fuel prices.

And look, I have never actually seen heating oil. I am from the desert. I have lived in the desert my entire life. I have seen pictures of it. And then you see people saying it is two, three, four times more expensive for these people to heat their homes, and then you also realize the ZIP Codes they live in and who they vote for. They voted for it.

But the reality of it is, there is a punch line here. When Democrat policy drove up the price of natural gas so high that power generation all across North America converted back to coal, you realize the United States burnt 23 percent more coal last year.

I mean, did anyone just do the basic math? Okay. You are going to engage in policies that make natural gas dramatically more expensive. The next least expensive fuel, all of a sudden, became coal. Congratulations.

Now, during President Trump's time, the use of coal--and this was a guy who claimed to be a coal supporter--went down dramatically because natural gas crashed in price. Remember, the last 15 years, the movement we had to become dramatically less carbon-centric, you know, greenhouse gas formula, heading towards--for those who cared about the math on the Paris accords, was almost exclusively, exclusively the use of natural gas because, remember, we took off so much baseload nuclear, we took off more baseload nuclear in the United States in the previous 15 years than we actually did produce new photovoltaic and wind. So if someone says, oh, it is because of all the clean energy generation. No, it is actually because of natural gas displacing coal. I mean, the math is the math.

This one we need to share. Anyone notice if you were here--and this is even for the poor staff here, please don't move your eyes or anything because someone will take a shot at you for it--a couple weeks ago, before the State of the Union, we came to the floor here, we had to wear masks. Then we all hear about polling being done by the White House and the Democrat leadership, and all of a sudden, we find out, hey, turns out the public is over it, even Democrat-based voters are pretty much over the enforcement of mask mandates, and did you notice pretty much a little bit after the Impact Research poll that the Democrats did, 48 hours later after the poll was published, guess what happened? I don't have to wear a mask on the floor anymore.

Policy by virtue signaling instead of a calculator, it is theater. Welcome to how this Congress has been run. It happened. It happened. Look, I am not the only one to point this out. Even a number of leftist publications said: Isn't it just amazing, as soon as the Democrats got a poll that it no longer was popular even with their base, all the masks come off?

Even the people, even the experience of a couple of the Democrat matriarchs that fussed at me not to get into an elevator with them because I wasn't wearing a mask in the hallway, which I was very respectful, I didn't, 48 hours later didn't care that I was in the elevator with them without a mask because the polling said it was okay. I am happy to know we now make public health policy on the Democrat side with polling. But it is real. It happened.

So let's actually have a little bit more fun here. The absurdity of Democrat policy. Guess when statutorily--the Democrats passed this about 3 weeks ago, they set a date. They set a date when the pandemic will be over. Not based on science, not based even on their polling. They set a date. Congratulations, it is September 30, 2025.

Two years ago, when we were actually working together on this, we had a collective understanding we were worried that emergency rooms, hospitals were going to be just packed, we wouldn't have enough ventilators, we were racing for vaccines. We didn't have antivirals. But there was, I thought, a collective societal that we declare a pandemic.

Do you remember 15 days to slow the spread? We will all stay home for 15 days, slow the spread. And here we are a couple years later. We have antivirals; we have vaccines; we have therapeutics; we understand the virus; and the policy set is to make September 30, 2025.

Now, we should actually let whoever is watching know the joke. It is about the money. This place is always about the money. There are lots and lots and lots of special spending line items that come with the declaration of a pandemic, and this pretty much locks in saying, hey, you know, this person may hate vaccine passports or hate masks or this and that, but wink wink, nod nod we have made sure the declaration of the pandemic is until 2025 so we can keep getting the largesse of the SPIFs on the cash. If that is what it is, tell the truth. Say, look, you know, we buy our elections by handouts through our policies here. Okay. But tell the truth.

I have a personal fixation on diabetes, and I have done speeches, presentation after presentation on this, and I want to walk through why. Look, we will come back to this two or three times.

This slide, the numbers are much higher now because this slide is from a year ago because the CBO, Congressional Budget Office, hasn't given us an update. But 29 years from now, we are scheduled to have $112 trillion of borrowing, and that is in today's dollars, so adjusted for inflation. Functionally, 75 percent of that spending is Medicare. 31 percent of all Medicare spending is diabetes. 33 percent of all healthcare spending in the United States is diabetic related. I represent, I believe, the second highest percentage of population, one of my Tribal communities that I represent--I love them dearly--they are number two in, we think the world, in the percentage of their members who have diabetes, and their sister Tribe is number one.

Come to my community sometime. I will take you out in the community, introduce you to some of the families I have known my whole life, and grandma has her foot cut off.

So the President did something a lot of people cheered for: Hey, insulin is outrageously expensive, we are going to subsidize it. Okay. Fine. Fine.

Does anyone on the Democrat side actually read any of the healthcare, the pharmaceutical, the science journals? The facility is almost up and running where it is a co-op. If they actually cared about crashing the price of insulin, someone would have paid attention that it is already here. This stuff is about to roll out.

A number of the pharmacies and hospitals got together and said: Screw this, we are going to use a market. We are going to go around, and we are going to make it ourselves, and we are going to do direct sales. They are talking about no more than $30 per vial, $55 per box. It is not requiring government subsidies, regulations, because you know how efficiently that works: We will subsidize it, but the cost of the bureaucracy to do it will be a nightmare.

But does anyone pay attention? I was here about 3 weeks ago talking about if the left really wants to be compassionate--and I can get my brothers and sisters on the right to be loving and compassionate--we know how to cure type 1, at least that is what the science journals are saying. We have figured out how to take a stem cell and direct it to become--I always mispronounce it--an islet cell to produce insulin. There is now even a new version where the taking of that cell and adjusting it with CRISPR so the body doesn't see it as foreign so you can actually have a constant line.

Wouldn't it be miraculous if you actually had some thinking people here that said: Screw this, instead of patching up people's misery, we are going to subsidize insulin so you can live in misery, just cheaper?

And back to my previous comments that we have been working on a model about what creates income inequality, what creates poverty? We are actually seeing health and crime and these things. Hold it. We know diabetes is actually for our brothers, the urban poor, my Tribal poor, rural poor, is truly everywhere. If you cared, wouldn't you throw everything you have at this concept of, okay, we know how to cure type 1?

The articles, if you read through them--and some of it is thick--is, yeah, the same concept, you could take someone with type 2 and get their body to produce insulin again, but you would actually have to have them engage in much healthier life practices. Would we be willing to have the really brutal conversation here of we are going to change how the farm bill works, we are going to change how nutrition support works, and those who would actually like to see a future where their diabetes type 2 is cured, would they be willing to work with their community to eat different? Would we be willing to work on that? Would we be willing to deliver, have Lyft deliver food boxes to the home and say we are loving, caring about your future and your health, and we don't want you to be like the grandma who is a friend of mine who has had her foot cut off? And if you will do this, the societal trade will be, we will do the stem cell to islet cell to get your body back to producing insulin.

And, oh, by the way, diabetes is the single biggest contributor to U.S. sovereign debt. So for those who are fiscal hawks, great. For those who actually give a darn about people, wonderful.

And, instead, our solution coming from our President standing right there is: I am going to subsidize insulin. I am not going to cure the misery; I am just going to make it cheaper. Where's the vision here?

So now let's actually go back to the previous, the two things you do most to make the working poor poor. Okay. We talked about opening the border, making them compete with others with similar skill sets. My numbers are already out of date because it keeps getting worse. You also crush them by making everything they buy--because if you are poor, if you are that working middle class, if you are just hardworking middle class, the amount of your income that goes to food, the amount of your income that goes to rent, the amount of your income that goes to driving is substantially more than the vast majority of the people in this body.

The income we are paid, we are in the top quartile. And then we also have some of the richest people you can imagine that are here, and it is always funny hearing them talk about--when they are worth millions and millions and millions of dollars, but to the family that is struggling out there, this has been a really crappy year.

I will point it out, and I am going to do it a couple times. Guess which community had the highest inflation rate in the United States? Mine. I had 10.9 percent in my neighborhoods. You want to talk about kicking people in the head? That is year over year. This is what unified Democrat government has brought you. You are poorer today than the day Joe Biden took office.

And then the hallmark here used to be, well, the gap between the rich and poor, income inequality. Well, guess what? That gap, particularly in 2018, 2019, was the greatest shrinkage in modern economic times. 2018, 2019, the fastest movement of the poor getting less poor, the fastest movement of food insecurity shrinking. Congratulations, Democrats, you have done a great job.

It turns out income inequality really started to expand last year. Inflation crushing people. Except if you own lots of assets. If you are one of the rich people here, and you have multiple houses, you have lots of stocks and bonds, you have other things, you got richer or at least your assets went up in value.

Does anyone else see the cruelty going on here, or does it just not fit because you have a pasty White guy here giving the speech?

But the math is the math. I mean, at some point the math will always win.

And my brothers and sisters in the Phoenix area--now, Phoenix is a big community. Remember, Maricopa County is the fourth most populous--I still think we are catching up with Harris County, but fourth most populous county in the country. It is functionally almost seven congressional districts.

And my brothers and sisters in the Phoenix area had a 10.9 percent inflation year over year. Go talk to those families and explain to them how, hasn't this been a great year for you? Aren't you happy you voted for this?

And then you start to look at some of the other data. And I have got to give the left credit. They have done one thing that I didn't think could happen. I am seeing some polling coming out of my community where, not by a little bit, but by almost double digits, Hispanic voters are now going to vote for Republicans. And then you see this and you start to understand why.

Look what has happened, particularly to the African American and Latino voters--or the population, what has happened to their rents? 28 percent increases. They may have thought Democrats were their protectors, but Democrats have basically been their tormentors because the policies have been so badly designed.

And when they were voting for these, we stood here and explained, do you understand what you are about to set off? And the arrogance--well, in a weird way, thank you. It looks like now the Hispanic vote may actually be Republican. Is it because we are so wonderful, or their policies have been so brutal to those communities?

So let's have the hits keep going. The United States--you have heard this over and over and lots of other people have come here and talked about this, but it is worth saying again.

What happens when a nation has the ability to be secure in its energy? What happens to a nation when you are Germany; when you are basically beholden to someone else's hydrocarbons?

And there is one here, and I am going to do this a little bit out of order because I find it absolutely fascinating. We should do this one two or three times. Now we understand that a decade, a decade and a half ago, the protests in Germany, and now we find out much of the activism here, the researchers, the reporters, the journalists that actually do investigative, hey, this stuff may have been financed by countries that sell hydrocarbons. I can't imagine who that would be.

But we now know the stories in Germany--you have seen the stories of the suitcases of cash going to their green movement to shut down their base load nuclear, and Germany today is dramatically dirtier in greenhouse gases than they were 10, 15 years ago because they are living on Russian hydrocarbons and coal.

And I think out of the 20-plus nuclear facilities, I think they have one facility and they are scrambling to find out can they put them back into service. It turns out, same concept here.

I would love for our brothers and sisters on the left to help us actually do an investigation of who has been financing these shut down the pipelines, shut down much of the--particularly natural gas, which I have a great fondness for natural gas because of its miracle on reducing greenhouse gases.

But it looks like much of that part of the green movement may have been financed by countries that could care less about the world's global warming. But it was more about market constraints so they could sell more of their product.

And once again, we had become energy independent. We had become an exporter. The Biden administration takes over, and all of a sudden, the extortion games begin. The threat games begin. You start to find out you are going to be invested by the Securities and Exchange Commission because you may not have disclosed your global warming impact on your investments.

And then you wonder why it was actually months ago that natural gas prices went through the ceiling. I was going to say exploded, but that is a really bad pun. It is in the charts. It wasn't an invasion of Ukraine. It was the election of Democrats really, really screwing up policy.

And now, we don't actually have a complete answer on this. I am hoping it is purely for technical reasons because a couple of weeks ago I did a couple of charts here showing how much base load nuclear is coming offline. And the fact of the matter is when that comes offline, even with adoption of all the clean energy, all the photovoltaic, all the wind, we actually are upside down. We will have to actually use more hydrocarbons.

And then you hear the story this week that the Feds have rescinded license for a Florida facility that is under construction, which I understand there are stunning amounts of capital already sitting there. I hope this is temporary.

But you would think this would be the type of thing we would be struggling, saying we really want non-carbon emitting base load power in this country. Except for the fact of the matter is--and it is reality--photovoltaic, wind, they write a lot of checks to the Democrats.

It is a dark thing I say, but the fact of the matter is, I can walk you through policy after policy after policy here where it seems to be chasing--I mean, look at H.R. 1 and the other things that this place has passed which had ultimately nothing to do with access to voting. It had to do with building a model that elects Democrats.

I mean, financing Democratic campaigns with six to one money; industrializing ballot harvesting because they have the networks to do that? I mean, it is just--

But, once again, we virtue signal. We say pretty words, and then just hope that the public never finds out what is actually underlying in the real piece of legislation.

And back to what I said before, congratulations Democrats. You burned 23 percent more coal last year.

Yes, I am from Arizona. We are one of the photovoltaic--I mean, it is a Holy Grail where we are. Power actually almost goes to zero for two, three, four hours in the afternoon because we produce so much. But let's get the policies right.

We need storage. There are some breakthroughs in storage now. I have a fascination with the rust iron battery. It doesn't work in a car because it is really big, really heavy, but it works in a utility scale.

But will the left take responsibility that they say one thing and the proof, they burnt 23 percent more coal last year. They made greenhouse gases worse. Pretty rhetoric isn't good math.

And the movement of natural gas--so the folks that say we have got to stop pipelines; have you seen what the pipelines actually look like in the United States? They are everywhere.

So the brain trust here raises lots of money; does lots of campaigns. We are going to cancel something like Keystone so they can put the oil on railcars, or maybe shove it out to the West Coast of Canada so it can be shipped to Asia? Because heaven knows, when they crack it, refine it, they do it in a really clean, well-regulated, EPA-controlled facilities, right?

It had nothing to do with what was good for the environment. It had to do with what was good for raising money.

And now the brain trust gets to deal with the mess they have created policywise. So now we get to see great stories that we are out visiting Venezuela. We are out visiting other countries that functionally are either--I accept the humiliation. Let's take the humiliation.

But if my brothers and sisters over here are truly committed to their green agenda, aren't they just horrified that the decision and policies that they have set up have actually made the environment worse, and now we are actually going to go to countries that actually do it in a filthy fashion.

Huge global warming impacts in the way they pull their hydrocarbon, and that is actually who we are reaching out to to ask for their help.

Of course, I think the real reality, the reason they do is because they have an idea what is about to hit them this election cycle because they have made working men and women's lives, the hard working men and women's lives in this country more miserable, and they are pedaling as fast as they can to find a way to back off the damage they have done.

So let's also see the efficiencies. Remember, we are going to have an administration with no drama. We are going to bring professionalism back.

Well, great. Passport backlog now at 2 million. VA claim backlog over a quarter million. IRS returns backed up over 24 million. SSA hearings, taking functionally almost a year.

Tell me something--so back to my opening question, give me something, anything, one thing that unified leftist control of this government has done to make people's lives better; to make the future of this country better? It has been like a misery factory.

And then, the next board, I want to point out, and it is just one of dozens of examples, but it is for people out there who may be paying attention to understand what is said over there has nothing to do with what they actually do.

So remember the build back better, you had the Speaker and the President and their spokespeople, well, if we spend all this money, if we engage in this policy, it will be good for inflation.

Mr. Speaker, can you tell me my time?

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, so, tucked into--now here is the great irony. So we found this, tucked into their thousands and thousands of pages of build back better, because, remember, on one hand, they are telling you, hey, we are going to make things more efficient. We are going to actually help reduce inflation. Oh, except for the way that if you actually find out it is a bunch of pandering to the unions, and they made it so you can't automate ports. Huh?

So you are giving us speeches about how the supply chains are the real responsibility for inflation, and build back better is supposed to help inflation, except for you have done the very things that will make it so just the opposite happens. You have made it so I can't automate ports legally anymore.

So all this money, your largesse, you are going to throw out will go to green stuff at ports, but you can't make it more efficient.

You lied to the American people. And how many of my brothers and sisters on the left even knew these sorts of little land mines were tucked into. I mean, they had the unionization of all the government employees in my State if they want the largesse money for family and medical leave; yet they had to do it through a collective bargaining agreement.

The legislation was pandering to those who financed their campaigns, and it would make people's lives more miserable.

I mean, think of that. Inside their build back better was you can't automate ports. You can't make this stuff up.

And then you start to realize, why do we have so many unfilled jobs? Something went horribly off the rails here.

When we functionally--and I need to update this chart because apparently the number is actually even worse.

But we have--I have a fixation on demographic issues. I have done lots of presentations here on the floor, because demographics are actually the primary driver of our U.S. sovereign debt, and Democrat policies continue to make the policy sets around that worse.

So we have 1.5 million more of other brothers and sisters who have said, I quit, I am out of here, I am taking early retirement, I leave, than we expected. Instead of encouraging our brothers and sisters to stay in the economy because we have got to step up productivity because if we don't step up productivity, we can't start to knock down inflation.

Remember, what is inflation? It is too many dollars chasing too few goods.

There is a couple of ways you attack inflation. You can squeeze down the money supply, and you saw that happen with interest rates starting to go up. Or you could also do what Reagan did in 1981. People forget this. Paul Volcker is jacking up interest rates and jacking up interest rates.

Congress, a Democrat Congress at that time, also did a tax cut, a tax reform to try to make business more productive so they would make more stuff. Remember, too many dollars chasing too few goods and services; make more goods and services.

Then, when you are driving people out of the workforce, how do you make more goods and services? Get the policy sets right.

You say you care about inflation, you care about it crushing working men and women, and then you do the very things that continue to make it worse in a society.

When we get through this period of misery, we still have the thing that wipes us out as a society, leads us to decades of misery. The current calculation basically says, in 29 years, my new math says we get to be about 210 percent of debt-to-GDP. That is publicly held debt.

Remember, last year, we were borrowing functionally $47,000 a second. I know most of this place just cares about surviving the next election. I mean, look at the legislation that keeps being offered. But is there at all a moral responsibility here to understand this destroys your kids, this destroys your grandkids, this destroys the future generations? We will be handing the next couple of generations a much poorer--they will live poorer--country than we inherited.

This is $112 trillion of publicly borrowed money adjusted for inflation. This isn't my math; this is CBO's math from a year ago. This is before the crazy spending of last year.

Mr. Speaker, when I came to the mike, I shared with you I was a bit cranky, and I had had a lot of coffee. I don't believe Democrats are evil. Misguided, yes, but I believe many of them are my friends. They have good hearts. But you have to stop the policies that hurt people. You have to stop hurting people, and you have to stop making the Nation poorer.

There are a number of us whose ideas, that aren't even traditionally Republican, we could embrace. I mean, curing diabetes is one of them. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is neither. It is just moral.

Maybe, once in a while, let a Republican have an amendment or an open debate because there is a path. There is a path where we can make our future better, but you have to stop the bloodletting.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to go back and have some decaf.

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