Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I have to make a plane, so I won't be here for the whole 30 minutes. It will be probably more like 15 minutes.

Before addressing the issues I wanted to talk about today, I want to one more time talk a little bit about vitamin D, because earlier today I talked to Dr. Amiez Dror from Israel about a study that he conducted.

The study is absolutely amazing. In Israel about 45 percent of the population is vitamin D deficient, and that is really deficient. By deficient, they mean less than 20 nanograms per milliliter. About 75 percent of the Israeli population has vitamin D less than 30 milligrams per nanoliter.

In any event, it wasn't a huge study, but he looked to see how people who had adequate levels of vitamin D performed once they came into the medical system compared to people who were under that 20 nanograms. He found people who were vitamin D deficient, which is almost half the Israeli population, were 14 times more likely to have severe or critical COVID than the people who were above 20 nanograms per milliliter.

As far as people who died, 25 percent of the people who were hospitalized and were vitamin D deficient died compared to only 2.3 percent of those who had adequate vitamin D.

Think about that. You are 11 times more likely to die, Madam Speaker, if you are vitamin D deficient.

When he looked at adequate prelevel hospitalization for vitamin D, it was a better predictor of how you would turn out than having COPD, having diabetes, or having congestive heart failure. Unbelievable what a great predictor it was.

Nevertheless, continued our kind of asleep public health establishment has still not talked about this like they could have. We recently went over 1 million deaths in the United States attributed to COVID, but we can't talk about the fact that--and he is not the only doctor who feels that way--you could have cut that number in half or maybe well time more than half, if out of the chute well before we had such things as vaccines, we knew about vitamin D being good for people back in April or May of 2020.

If they had spent some of these advertising dollars they spent on other things en masse or whatever, they could have, I believe, saved half the lives. I right now personally know nine people who have died of COVID, and I can't help but think how many of these people or which of those people would have survived if they had publicized the importance of taking vitamin D.

Now, of course, I also asked the doctor how much vitamin D you should take. He felt for people in good shape it would be 2,000 to 3,000 international units.

If you are overweight, because the fat cells absorb the vitamin D, you should take more, maybe 4,000 or more international units.

He points out that even if you are in the sun, one of the things that creates so many people in Israel to be vitamin D deficient is--as the United States--so many people take sunscreen. It is important to protect yourself from skin cancer, but you have to remember, if you are one of these people who put sunscreen all over yourself, even in a sunny climate, you are not going to get adequate vitamin D levels.

He is a very important doctor. He has a Ph.D. in genetics. He is also a medical doctor. He also has degrees in molecular biology. So you are talking about a real sharp guy here.

If we had an on-the-ball press corps paying attention today, they should give him a call in Israel. He loves to talk to people about this, and you could get something that is very important in your local newspapers.

If anybody connected to the public health establishment is hearing this speech, they should give my office a call. We will give them the contact information.

It would have been better if this sort of stuff were out there 2 years ago, but the COVID infection rate goes up and down. We are on a downswing right now, though we are not as low as we were last July.

Vitamin D helps prevent other diseases as well. I realize a lot of the medical establishment in the United States does not like to focus on things in which people don't make a lot of money. But for people who want to save lives, there is still time to get the story of vitamin D out there. I certainly think every major and minor newspaper in the United States should be covering it.

He happened to mention that he got something in the New York Post, but it should be in more than just the New York Post.

Right now, we have our President, who I watched a little bit yesterday, focusing on Transgender Day, saying how important it is we talk about transgenders to first and second graders. I can't believe that is where we are as a country. That is what President Biden felt was important to talk about.

I am going to talk about some other issues, some suggestions that President Biden might want to adapt to something he could talk about a little bit more.

I continue to believe the border is the biggest crisis America faces today. In February, we let about 72,000 people, including got-aways, into the country. ICE also releases people into the interior.

Right now, the administration does not release those numbers, so we will say 70,000 on the low side. That was this past February. Two years ago, well under 20,000 were being let in, in February. We are in a situation right now where about four times as many people per month are coming into the country.

I will point out, we are not always getting the best. The last time I was down there, I walked down a path that the people coming here illegally walked down. It was littered with photo IDs being thrown away from Chile, Brazil, Colombia, wherever.

But we are about to have the situation become much, much worse. We are about to get rid of what we refer to as title 42. That means that people who are coming here will no longer be held up because of the COVID threat.

There is a concern that the number of people coming here will be about 18,000 a day being let in, or 500,000 a month.

I think we have the biggest crisis in this country, allowing 70,000 people who are unvetted come into this country. We are about to go from 70,000 to half a million a month, and our President is focusing on: Are we doing enough to educate second graders about transgenders?

I would hope the press corps would drill him on these questions again and again: Who is going to pay for these people? How is it fair for the people who are trying to come into this country appropriately? What are you going to do about people who are coming here who perhaps are breaking the law?

I haven't touched on the fact that while we are focusing right now on people coming into the country, we are now having a fraction as many people being deported as we were before. That is another problem that we have to address.

In any event, I hope the press zeros in, when they have a chance to talk to President Biden, on what he is going to do since his own administration is estimating 18,000 people a day are going to come here.

Other things he is doing to encourage people to come here: We know, in the Build Back Better bill he was promoting, he was trying to get people who come here illegally to get free college. We know, as a practical matter, when you come here, if you are sick, we take you to the hospital. You will get free healthcare. I think probably virtually every State in the country--certainly, in Wisconsin--if you are ill and show up at the emergency room, they will treat you. So, you are getting free healthcare, perhaps free college.

It is just a disaster. It is the end of America. They talk right now about this happening the second half of May. America has to look out. Like I said, we are heading toward the point where we could have as many as half a million people a month coming here--the end of America.

The other crisis that we should be looking at--not quite as important as the border but close--is the amount of inflation.

We had President Biden show us his new budget. In that new budget, we are talking about a 12 percent increase in nondiscretionary spending. It is not rocket science as to where this inflation is coming from. When you spend money excessively, and the Federal Reserve has to print money, you are going to get inflation.

I had naively hoped, at the beginning of the year, after the huge, excessive spending the last 2 years, that Republicans and Democrats would get together and hold discretionary spending to even. Of course, mandatory spending is going to go up anyway as the population ages-- more money spent on Medicare, more money spent on Social Security. But, no, I didn't get my wish of zero percent increase.

A 12 percent increase in nondefense discretionary, what does that mean? It means we are going to continue to have the Fed print more and more money.

We have a graph here to look at. It shows the year-over-year increase in M2, one measure of the amount of money in the system, which directly leads to inflation.

Looking at the 1970s--and I was alive in the 1970s--there might have been a 7 percent increase, year over year, in the size of the monetary supply. Look where we are right now. We are just short of a 40 percent increase.

Look at where we are now compared to the 1970s and how difficult it was to get that inflation out of the system in the late 1970s and particularly the early 1980s. It really did take a real economic downturn to make the dollar have any value again. That is what it took in the 1980s, if you remember that downturn, that recession. Can you imagine how difficult it is going to be to give the dollar adequate value again?

Not only that, as I look in that budget, it is a divisive budget. One more time, we have program after program aimed at certain groups, not all Americans across the board, as our forefathers would want.

When I go back home, I talk to a restauranteur. He has a little restaurant. He has his chin up. He doesn't want to be publicized. He felt, during the COVID stuff, he was denied a $30,000 grant because of his race. He is a White guy.

This is the type of thing that page after page after page of this proposed budget throws out. Again, we have to focus on some people rather than other people, which is one of the reasons why I do feel, in addition to his incompetence at the border, in addition to his incompetence with regard to inflation, in addition to the fact that I think he has done a bad job on COVID, as illustrated by the fact that he has been there well over a year and still they haven't adequately publicized vitamin D--President Trump should have been doing that as well, quite frankly.

Despite all of these other problems, he for sure has become a divisive President, trying to lower the opinion of the police by saying that they are racist.

In any event, these are the things that we should be focusing on right now.

I must leave in a second due to a flight, but I will make one more comment on Ukraine. It is my belief, talking to other Congressmen in this Chamber, as well as talking to people in the Biden administration, that they are not adequately preparing for the end of the Ukraine war. The longer the war goes on, the more people die, the more both the Ukrainian and Russian economies are shattered. If you look at all the bombs going off in Ukraine, you can imagine how long it is going to take to rebuild that country.

Therefore, it should be obvious that, like any war, eventually, an armistice is going to be signed, and an agreement is going to be met. I don't think enough exercise, enough time, is being put into bringing both sides to the table and working toward an agreement. As soon as an agreement is reached, it will benefit both of these countries as well as the rest of the world.

I strongly encourage the Biden administration to see what they can do. I appreciate what France has done, and I appreciate what Israel has done, trying to broker a deal.

There was a time when the United States was the world leader--I still like to think we are the world leader--in which we would get involved in brokering a deal, certainly brokering a deal before this whole war gets so out of line that it begins to affect the rest of the world as easily as it could if it would become a world war.

Like I said, every day that goes by, the more people die, the more equipment that is destroyed, it increases the chance that things will get out of line. So, I beg the Biden administration to exert a little bit of leadership toward trying to get this war to end.

We all wish the Ukrainians are doing well, but ultimately, an agreement will have to be signed.

I am all for helping Ukrainians. I have certainly voted for billions of dollars which will be used by that country. But I am sure the people there will be happy when the war is over.

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

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