The State of the Economy

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do the impossible. We are going to do like 20 boards in 30 minutes. Just please wave at me if I start rambling at hyper rates of speed.

One of the reasons for today's presentation, it is somewhat of a follow-up from a couple of weeks ago, but also somewhat of just this frustration of statements from our brothers and sisters on the left, from the President, even the comments this week of: Okay, Republicans, where is your plan?

Have you seen the numbers of bills that we have offered to take on inflation, to promote economic growth, to promote fairness? None of them can get a hearing around here.

My point comes to something very, very simple. We intend to judge the left over what you have accomplished the last 15 months, and we will make it to 2 years.

Are the poor better off, the working poor better off, the middle class better off? Is the environment better off? Is the world safer and healthier?

Then, we expect you to turn around and judge us when we had the majority and the White House. Take a look at 2017, '18, '19, and we will bookend the pandemic, and judge us. I believe you will see the policies we brought to this floor, to this country, made the poor less poor, the working poor substantially less poor, the middle class much more prosperous, and it didn't have the cruelty that Democrat policy has executed the last 15 months.

Look, I am not being hyperbolic. It is a crappy environment out there.

It is just exhausting having to do this every couple of months because of the willingness just not to tell the truth here by my brothers and sisters on the left.

Once again, tax reform was done at the very end of 2017. Speaker after speaker, the Speaker herself, came to the floor and told us how this was a giveaway to the rich, that it was going to crash revenues, that we are heading to recession. None of that was true.

We ended up having a couple of years there before the pandemic--and I am going to show you, if we hadn't had it, how miserable the pandemic economics would have been.

The fact of the matter is, when we passed tax reform, corporate tax receipts--we don't call them revenues; we call them receipts if you are on the Ways and Means Committee--went up 75 percent, far beyond CBO's early projections.

The fact of the matter is individual income taxes were up 27\1/2\ percent, and 80 percent of that was paid by the top 10 percent.

Bit of trivia, Mr. Speaker pro tem, and to my Democrat colleagues. Our tax reform was more progressive, meaning the top tier of income earners were paying a higher percentage, a larger percentage, of the Federal income tax burden than the previous tax system.

Stop lying about what we did because what we did was pretty darn amazing. When you think about just the economic effects, income inequality shrank, food insecurity shrank, and we did it without inflation.

Look, I accept there is a huge divide here. Democrats don't particularly like Republican policies. We obviously don't like theirs. Fine.

Do you care about poor people? Do you care about the middle class? Then step up and just steal our ideas. We will be happy to let you take them if it is good for America. But the crap that has been moved here in the last 15 months has just been cruel.

Let's go back and, one more time, take a look at the actual math. If you take a look at the middle income, what was happening in that mean of our country--and this is adjusted to, I believe, 2019, so it is all consistent.

You take a look at that growth, the opportunity, and you take a look at what happened when we did tax reform, just the incredible growth of income. This is real purchasing power. This is adjusted for inflation.

The fact of the matter is, take a look at these miserable years here during the Obama administration, where we basically just flatlined, and we stayed there.

The 2008 recession was brutal. Why did it take years and years and years and years and years just to get back to mean?

The fact of the matter is regulatory policy, tax policy, and trade policy make a difference, and you have to basically embrace something. Maybe this is where some of the left and right divide is.

As a conservative, I believe growth is moral. I believe my daughter and the next generation of Americans deserve to live better tomorrow and the next year and the next decade better than they did yesterday. Instead, the policies of this administration and this Congress have made America poorer.

Once again, you take a look at what was being said here. That blue is what all the pretax reform trend line was. This is where we were going. We were all excited that we might get slightly over 2 percent GDP growth.

Understand, when we talk about gross domestic product growth, it is a big deal because it builds on itself. It is like a staircase. When you get another 1 percent here, 1 percent may not seem like a lot to you, but it becomes the new basis for the next year and the next year. When you start to look at that over a decade, it starts being remarkable amounts of wealth that is distributed throughout society.

The red is what we accomplished by fixing the regulatory and tax system around here.

The fact of the matter is, if you care about the middle class, if you care about the working poor, if you care about this society, if you care about our future, embrace the truth. Embrace that it worked. If you want, say you could have done it better. But the fact of the matter is, what we accomplished worked.

This is taking a little bit to geekdom, and I am sorry about that, but how horrendous the Democrats' forecasts were on accuracy, and how, when Republicans took over the majority, we functionally nailed it.

As a matter of fact, for 2018, we substantially underestimated the amount of growth we were going to accomplish with our regulatory and tax reform.

I know this may not seem important, but it is because, once again, in this place, we play this game: ``Well, CBO says this.'' But for some reason, when the Democrats are in charge of this place, CBO gives these projections, and we never get there. When Republicans are in charge, CBO gives us projections, and we touch them or exceed them.

Then, we turn around and see the President and Democrat leadership talk about it as if it was some dystopian time. It is just this bizarre place, being judged by what we actually accomplished just as we intend to judge you and what you have done to this country.

This one is actually important because we are going through this right now. There is an argument that inputs in inflation is basically it is too many dollars--simplistic--too many dollars chasing too few goods and services.

You can do what the Federal Reserve is doing right now, which is basically squeeze dollars, squeeze liquidity out of our society. It will drive us into a recession, and it will raise misery, and people will lose their jobs. But that is what is being required to get out the excess liquidity that the Democrats here--not a single Republican voted for it--did to this country.

There is a reason Larry Summers begged you not to do it. You know, big-time Republican Larry Summers, right? He begged you not to do it. You did it anyway, and you set it off. You basically took a flaming log and threw it on the kindling. Then you run around and say, ``Well, it was Russia.'' I am going to show you over and over here that it was going on before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I am going to show you that your policies, for years, are what set off energy prices. But one of the inputs, if you want to tamp down inflation, that we as Members of Congress can do is incentivize society. You incentivize industry to make more stuff.

Some of the ways you do that is you get more of our brothers and sisters to participate in the economy. The fact of the matter is that was also one of the miracles that we accomplished with tax reform, the number of folks that came from the sidelines and came back into work because it became profitable for their lives, because there were opportunities.

Once again, is growth moral? Because what we accomplished was pretty remarkable.

I know it may be hard to try to get your head around some of these charts, but the fact of the matter is the spike we saw of people coming back out of retirement and going back into the labor force and young people, I guess, dropping their video games and going into the labor force, it didn't set off inflation. In many ways, what it did was help set off productivity so we had those amazing wealth effects there, particularly in 2018, 2019, the first quarter of 2020 before the pandemic.

Look where we are at today. Today, we are now seeing articles that labor force participation--our numbers of brothers and sister who are going to choose not to participate in the economy, who are going to take early retirement, not come back into labor--continues to leave us flatlined, leaving our country with the solution the left is going to give us for inflation is to let the Federal Reserve drive us into a recession. That is all you are giving us right now.

This chart is absolutely fascinating for folks. Remember how Democrats believed they made people's lives so much better by functionally handing out cash?

Did you know that our brothers and sister had a hell of a lot more cash in their bank accounts before COVID? The amount of economic growth that was happening over here--they weren't spending it as fast as they got it. It was actually starting to go into their future retirement, their retirement security, the money for their kids' education.

The fact of the matter is the chart is the chart. These are the increases in household income, household checking deposits for the lowest 20 percent of quartiles. I despise that term. The fact of the matter is these are our brothers and sisters who are considered to be at the bottom 20 percent of the income quartiles. You see this dramatic change in how much money they had in their checking accounts? Over here you can see--here is the blip where we sent out COVID money, and here is where they are today. It is gone. As a matter of fact, it is now lower than it was pre-COVID.

This is the Democrats' great success in the Keynesian stimulus model of handing out cash. Our brothers and sisters have less cash in the bank than they did before. When we were doing it through economic growth and not handouts, our brothers and sisters out there--if you care about the poor and the working poor, you made them poorer.

If I get one more Democrat here who comes behind the microphone, and says: Well, energy prices are because of the invasion. Come on. We all know that isn't true.

How many times have there been votes in this House and every single Democrat voted no to construction of new refineries, no construction to even provide permits for new refineries, no new drilling? We have vote after vote after vote and this has been going on for decades.

You have all heard this discussion of when the Biden administration took over and they functionally took their regulatory apparatus, and said, you give a loan, you are a pension system, and you invest in hydrocarbons. We need you now to file new disclosures on what you did for the environment and greenhouse. What are your risk levels?

You functionally basically created this chilling effect for what we call the capital stack, the access to capital to extract and refine hydrocarbons. It sounds a little geeky. Let's make this simple.

It is not because of the cancellation of the pipelines; it is a little bit. It is not because of the lack of leases; it is a little bit. It is substantially because in 2020 you had the collapse of the useful hydrocarbons because everyone is staying home. If you remember, we went to negative oil prices. Lots and lots of fields and lots of delivery systems shut down. A year later, we desperately need those back into production.

The Democrats have taken over everything and now they make it damn hard to get any money. They make it damn hard to put that field back into production. What did you think was going to happen?

I am going to show you in a couple of charts--it is a couple charts away--the pricing that we are paying today for heating and cooling our homes, for filling up our vehicle, was coming before the invasion. What Russia is doing to Ukraine just brought it forward by a few months, but you could already see it in the futures market.

Don't you remember last fall we were having discussions here on the floor about how people were going to heat their homes this winter? Once again, you are going to have the President and Democrats say, well, it is Putin's inflation. It is just not true. It is Democrat policy.

The fact of the matter is--think about this--when we functionally hit 2019 and going into the first part of 2020, we were energy independent. We functionally had accomplished the miracle that we had not seen for 30, 40, 50 years. Imagine if we had that today? It shows you how much damage the left has been able to accomplish in 15 months.

There is a great irony here. One of the pledges of the Democrats when they were running in the last election and the Biden campaign, and even the people that ran against me--we are going to clean the environment. We actually care. We are going to deal with greenhouse gases. Their lack of understanding of basic economics--they do all these things, they screw up the capital stack, they screw up the ability to extract natural gas, natural gas goes way up in price, and power plants all across the country have to convert back to coal.

Congratulations, guys. Last year, America burned 23 percent more coal because you raised the price of the dramatically cleaner natural gas so much they had to convert back to coal. So when the environmental party--at least the party that claims to be. But if you look at the math, the Republicans' ability to get natural gas to the market cheaply and efficiently is what got us so darn close to those Paris accord numbers, just organically, because we believed in economics.

The control freaks here that thought they controlled the energy markets--sorry, guys, you made it much worse. You made it much worse. The math is the math. This is math coming from the Democrat administration admitting they made it much worse.

Once again, if you take a look at the futures market--and this is long before the invasion--when you see these spikes, this is almost a year ago, it was already coming because the constraint on supplies was already built into the policy of Democrat control of this government.

The misery today--even though there is going to be this desperate attempt to say it is Putin's inflation and Putin's gas prices--it is just not true. Some of us were on this floor last October saying that we were already seeing this in the futures market. The only thing the invasion did is just brought it forward by a few months.

You wonder why you have inflation. Let's see. Left policies blew up the energy market. Left policies financed massive amounts of liquidity and the incentive to functionally stay home and not be part of a productive society. Great Democrat policies again.

Take a look at the misery index--which actually I should do a calculation. I should go back and try to figure out--in this misery index we would probably just do inflation and how many people are living on the street and how many kids are dying of fentanyl overdose because the border is open. That may be one of our coming projects.

The fact of the matter is, the CPI calculation--and this is just from the last couple of weeks--is now well over 14 percent, and we are seeing food, energy, shelter coming close to 20 percent. These are the core components. This is year over year. This isn't the little transitory--do you remember how we were promised over and over by the administration and my Democrat colleagues that it was transitory? This is year over year. This is your version of transitory?

If you want to make Americans poorer, what are some of the cruelest things you can do? Let's go back to our working poor. What are the two things you do to crush the working poor? Inflation and open up the border. You flood the population with individuals with similar skill sets and then you make the core things you need: food, rent and fuel-- if you are rich, which we know the Democratic Party now has become substantially an elite party. If you take a look at your money, it is rich coastal people that write the checks. It is what it is.

That working class, particularly the poor working class, are just getting their heads kicked in. The only solution we get from the left is, well, let's send them more checks, even though that worked brilliantly a year ago.

If you start to look at fuel, 58.8, gasoline up 43 percent. Then you start taking a look at changes in food and shelter. In my community, I represent a population that has had the highest inflation now for almost a year and a half. The calculation that just came out last week, my community just suffered 11 percent year-over-year inflation. Last January, the year-over-year inflation was 10.9. My community has gotten poorer, substantially poorer, because of Democrat policies.

Now you start to think about that middle class, how much of their income actually goes to buy fuel or, in this case, buy food? You get the con job here saying, well, the core CPI says this. Okay.

When you adjust core CPI, the consumer price index, and you start to think about individuals of--if I am in the working middle class, that hardworking middle class, or even some of the lower quartiles, the amount of your income that goes to food, fuel and shelter, you start to realize across the country that it is not 8.1 or whatever that number is that was the national average, it is over 10.

It is folks with assets, like a bunch of the Members here. They own houses, they own a second house, they own a vacation home. They are invested in real estate equities. They own some REITs holdings. They are doing fine. All those adjust with inflation.

But for our brothers and sisters who are just trying to survive, we are kicking their heads in. It is policy that came from the floor of this House that did it.

You start to think about the share of income now having to be spent just on shelter, when our lowest quartiles, or quintiles, however you prefer to say it, is now over 24\1/2\ percent for our lowest quintile to basically just pay for their rent. These are nationwide numbers. This isn't my Phoenix-Scottsdale number where it is actually substantially higher.

Congratulations to my community, Democrats brought you 11 percent inflation. Yay. After redistricting--I am blessed, I have an amazing community, but my community voted for Joe Biden by a couple of points, but they didn't vote for this.

If you want to make someone that is retired, if you want to make a working person poorer, do this. This is misery. The unwillingness--this is an uncomfortable analogy, but I think it works.

Does anyone have a friend that they tried to help through being an alcoholic and you took them to their 12-step meeting?

What is the first step? They admit they have a problem. My brothers and sisters on the left here won't admit they have a problem because they won't admit they did this.

Let's start going over some of the brilliant policy ideas--and I only use this one as a simple example because it is easy to digest. In the Democrats' Build Back Better, they have been speechifying to us that supply chains are setting off inflation, we need more production, we need this.

Then they slip language into their own legislation that says--but you can't automate the ports because we are beholden to the unions. Think about that. The Build Back Better has a provision in there, slipped in there, hidden in there, that you can't automate the very things that technology disruptions can help make us more productive, so that we can actually start to drive inflation down and get the wealth cycle back to our brothers and sisters here in this country. They are more beholden to their union constituency than the working men and women of this country.

Then here is the very last slide.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask for my time?

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It shows you how fast you can talk if you have been just sucking down coffee all day, Mr. Speaker.

I should throw this out: I have had the pleasure of sitting there when I have someone on the other side, and I know it is sometimes like fingernails on a chalkboard, and you are a good guy to tolerate because I am frustrated. I am frustrated that this body is not living up to what we are capable of. There are lots of reasons and lots of excuses. But, please, to anyone here, no more going behind the microphone and saying: but it is all paid for.

The math up to this point of just what has been passed--this isn't what has been proposed, what is proposed is off the chart--just what has been passed, the left has functionally increased the deficit by $2\1/2\ trillion dollars.

That is actually using the much more favorable CBO scoring. So no more pretending and saying everything is paid for. It is not.

All I'm trying to do here is a simple point: judge us as conservatives and Republicans by what we did policywise in 2017, `18, and `19 and the good it was for the country. It was good for everyone across the board. And then take a look at particularly the last 15 months.

I beg of my Democratic colleagues: reach back, figure out what we did that worked, steal the ideas and call them your own. But the country deserves so much better than what they are getting from this body today.

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