Economics in America

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Michigan.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to actually try something, and these are always those moments where, if you don't like something that is fairly thick--we are going to do lots of demographics. If you don't enjoy that sort of stuff, don't watch this.

I am going to try to lay out a bit of an argument of the headwinds we are facing as a country and a society. I am also going to point out that we are still dramatically better off than all of the industrialized world, and we have done it better over the last couple of decades than the rest of the industrialized world. You have to understand what is coming.

There are a couple of examples where we can take a look and see what is happening in Japan. Is that a foreshadowing of some of our demographics?

Once again, it is a chip on my shoulder as I listen to my brothers and sisters from the left. I just need them to step up and admit that in the last 2 years Americans are poorer. They get up behind the microphone and attack Republicans for trying to grow the economy and for trying to provide opportunities. As a matter of fact, a couple minutes ago in the 1 minute speeches we had a Member of the left get up and talk about supply-side economics.

I am going, huh, where have you been the last couple of years of my life? You are now actually stealing our language.

If you are a working man or woman in this country, the purchasing power of your paycheck--you are poorer today than the day Joe Biden was elected. It is math. If you want to understand why so many Americans are cranky or dour or in some ways just very dark on what the future looks like, it is because every day they go into a grocery store or to work, this and that, and they realize they are poorer today than they were a couple of years ago.

Where is the empathy?

Also, where is the goal to grow where we can actually make up for the wages not keeping up anything close to what inflation is?

We are going to actually start to walk through--I have a lot of boards and I am going to do some of these very, very fast. If there is a staffer or someone out there watching--I try to explain to people that the room is substantially empty, and it is supposed to be. The House is done with its legislative work.

There are thousands of people on this campus and around Washington, D.C., and around the country who are working for Members of Congress who may have this idiot, me, on their television trying to talk to them about economics and how we make America prosperous again.

Let's do some of the positives. Something we don't tell each other enough. If you actually look at the economic conditions per capita, and you actually look at it from 1980 until today, you do realize the United States has done dramatically better than the rest of the industrialized world. If you actually sort of adjust all of the currencies to the same purchasing power, per capita income for the United States is around $70,000 per worker in this country. If you take a look at our competitors, you know, the next best one is all of Western Europe, they are around $46,000.

Do understand the brain trust around here that often says that we should be more like Western Europe?

Do they want us to give up that much of our economic prosperity?

We are better. We are more prosperous. We are actually more innovative, and we are losing it.

It is this prosperity that many of us are behind these mikes trying to defend. This is what we are trying to defend in our policy sets.

I have another way to try to explain this. The average income in the United States continues to be significantly higher than other countries. I think on this one I used Japan and Western Europe. Our per capita income--if you look over here--in 1990, we were about 24 percent per capita income higher than Western Europe. Today, we are about 30 percent. We still outgrew them.

I want you to take a look at Japan. This is one of the examples I am going to use here when you have that demographic headwind when you are running out of workers.

In 1980, we had about 17 percent to the plus side of healthier incomes than Japan in 1980. Today, it is 54 percent. Japan didn't actually shrink in their income, we grew so much more than Japan, and obviously, Western Europe. Let's pat ourselves on the back and then get back to work because we are going to lose this marginal prosperity with many of the policies I am seeing happening from this administration and from what the Democrats did to us over the last couple of years.

Now we have to walk through the headwinds of what is really going on in America.

A couple points of reference--and we went back and vetted the number--in about 18 years the United States will have more deaths than births. That is actually with current immigration models.

If you walk through this, you are not a dying society, but you are fading. There are ways you make that up. Country after country after country have tried to change their fertility rates. We are going to do geeky stuff here.

I think there is one country, I think it may be Hungary, that if you have a third child they give you a house. It barely adjusted the country's fertility rates. You need to accept this is across the industrialized world.

Prosperity actually is sort of the opposite of the Malthusians, opposite of the idiots that wrote things like ``The Population Bomb'' back in the late 1960s. They were wrong. The only thing Ehrlich got right was the spelling of his name on his book in 1968, but the left still worships him.

Prosperity actually leads to delayed marriages and less fertility. We are going to talk about that, but we are also going to touch on some other things that we could affect by policy. I am going to step out on a limb and talk about some things that a politician gets himself in trouble for, but it is math, and it is the truth.

We have got a real problem with young males. It is blowing off the pages in the statistics. Let's go see how uncomfortable we can make each other, but it is math and the math always wins.

Mr. Speaker, I hope--I am trying not to curse--but I don't give a darn if it hurts your feelings. We have got to embrace and deal with the facts. So let's do some facts.

Mr. Speaker, the percentage of people 65 and over, relative to the number of people we have 25 to 64--so 25 to 64 is what we mean when we say prime working age populations, those are actually our productive populations.

I actually believe in today's world--I intend never to retire because I am also crazy. I am 61 and I have a 9-month-old child, and, yes, my wife is exactly my age. I am pathologically optimistic. People like me are never retiring.

The reality of it is that what we see in our society is the prime working age population is shrinking and the over 65 population is exploding. We call them baby boomers. It is like Congress completely forgot there were baby boomers. You look at this chart, we are here in the inflection years where the growth of our population that is 65 and older is just growing incredibly.

Understand that in a couple of decades, if you use my ratio of prime- age workers compared to my population of 65 and older, we get as high as 46 percent. That means 46 percent will be 65 and older compared to prime age.

Grow your economy when almost half of your population is 65 and older compared to your working population. Yes, that number skews out under 18 for a couple other reasons, and some of that is because of fertility and some other things trying to calculate it.

That type of ratio you need to think through. How do you design economic incentives for productivity?

What are you willing to automate?

Are you going to run around and be terrified of chat AIs and other things that may add a huge productivity spike, or allow an individual worker to be much more productive?

This place has to stop being terrified of technology because without it we are going to be buried.

Here is another slide, basically in some ways saying the same thing. By 2042--how many years is that? It is 19 years--population growth will be driven entirely by net immigration. It is basically saying that in about 18 years--remember, we are going to have more deaths than births--any population change we will have at the time will be from immigration.

Are we ever going to update our immigration codes saying that we want immigration that maximizes vitality for the country?

You are going to go fixate more on a talent-based immigration system than a--I don't have a more polite way to say this. When you have an open border like Arizona--and come down to the border some time with me--you have migration of poverty. These are wonderful people. I am sure they are God's children.

The fact of the matter is we have got to figure out a way to pay for Medicare and Social Security. We need highly productive populations to have the multiplier effect on the economy. The math will win.

I know this chart is a little hard to read. The only adult population group expected to decrease past 2045 will be my prime working age. Our working productive population from economic terms is shrinking. We get about a decade out and we begin to shrink.

This is a little easier to understand. The prime working age population is the only age group expected to decline in the long run. You start to see this--and I am going to show you some slides of what this means to economic growth.

Part of the argument I am making here is we are fighting over the debt ceiling and what the budget looks like and what the long-term projections are. Remember, I have been to this floor, heaven knows, how many times over the last few years saying between today and 30 years from now that 100 percent of the borrowing--we are expecting to have about $128 trillion of borrowing in those 30 years.

Mr. Speaker, 100 percent of that borrowing is the shortfall of Medicare. Remember, three-quarters of Medicare comes from the general fund and the Medicare part A trust fund is going to be empty in about 6 years. The other 25 percent of that $128 trillion of borrowing will be if we backfill Social Security.

You all saw--because I know this place ran out and got a copy of the Medicare/Social Security actuary report that came out 3 weeks ago, it basically said we lost another year. It is not 10 years; it is now like 9 years and the Social Security trust fund is gone. At that moment, if we do not fix Social Security, we double senior poverty.

What did the President do on that podium when we had the state of the Union?

He basically made talking about fixing Social Security toxic because it was a better campaign issue than a moral one.

A little bit more fun with math. An increasingly large share of births are happening to women 30 and over.

Why would I show this slide?

Basically when we are doing fertility curves and when your population--you have older parents--they have fewer children. I am one of these.

I have two kids, and I am in my early sixties with my wife. We are an outlier. We have other health issues and other things. It is actually becoming much more common that as we wait for prosperity, it is so hard to start a family; it is so hard to find a spouse; and it is so hard in the economics, particularly with what has happened in the last 2 years where, Mr. Speaker, if you are that working person and you want to get married but you are poorer today.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, family formation is a derivative of a couple of things. It is who graduates school and your ability to find stable employment to have economic growth. Most people will not enter into family formation until you start to have that level of stability, Mr. Speaker.

In the last couple years with policies here we are willing to give out stunning amounts of money to green energy, to this, to that, and to whatever favored groups to subsidize really rich people to go buy battery walls, and we functionally subsidize people not to actually participate in the labor force.

This is where it gets uncomfortable, but the math is the math is the math. If we don't start to think about it, we are avoiding a really uncomfortable subject.

Men, male participation, has fallen 19 percent.

Now, I know this is like over the last 70 years, but something is going on in our society. We had brought in an expert a couple years ago, and the conversation was fascinating. It was a professor from one of the Ivy Leagues.

She was saying: Look, we don't know if some of it is drugs, though we expect that. We don't know if some of it is video games.

There were questions of how many young men, particularly, are put on hyperactive drugs during their adolescent years and other things. We just don't know. However, we do know that we have a crisis of young males coming back into society, and we need them. We need their participation for more than just their tax revenues from their labor.

A healthy society is one that has the vitality where everyone is sort of loved and participates in the economy and has opportunity. With that comes sort of the American Dream of family formation and other things.

The number has gotten ugly. A total of 13 percent of prime age males are not working.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, I just walked you through some of the prime age male calculations of what that demographic was. Thirteen percent of the males in that group are not participating in the economy.

If you want an economic pop, Mr. Speaker, then I can fix things in the Tax Code. I can do some incredible things here with the Ways and Means Committee and the Members here who actually care about economics to incentivize investments. However, I also have a moral issue of I have a huge portion of my society that has dropped out.

We need to understand why, and we need to bring them back if not for economic reasons, then just for basic humanity.

We have been trying to dive into this to understand, okay, here is functionally we are getting right up against the pandemic, but the new baseline of male labor force participation is dramatically below where we were before, and it just continues to steadily decline. This is a problem.

I can't make much of the math work in the out years, so I get Members here who say: David, give me a plan to balance in 10 years.

Mr. Speaker, do understand: I can balance. We could build a plan. We could all come together and balance in 10 years. Of course, the next day we would be out of balance.

In 9 budget years--and I have said this, and this seems to be the single thing I say that upsets more people around here than anything, so let's do it slow.

In 9 budget years, according to CBO's report from 6 weeks ago, we can get rid of every dime of the military; we can get rid of every dime of the rest of what we call discretionary; and that is the FBI, the military, the Park Service, the State Department, the White House, and the Supreme Court.

Everything we think is discretionary is all gone.

In 9 budget years, it is all gone. There is no discretionary. We still have to borrow a couple of hundred billion dollars to have enough cash flow to cover Medicare and enough cash flow to cover veterans' benefits, and we haven't actually calculated in the fact that the actuaries from Social Security and Medicare just removed a year of actuarial life.

So it may be much worse because our math before was the very next year so that in 10 budget years it is not a couple of hundred billion dollars we have to borrow, it may be several hundred billion dollars we have to borrow if we were to backfill Social Security.

These are demographics.

Is that Republican or Democrat?

It is a bit of both.

The fact of the matter is the primary driver of our debt is demographics. We got old as a society, and this place needs to be maniacally fixated on growth, on efficiency, and on adopting the technologies that make healthcare less expensive but more accessible.

If we don't do this, then this math gets really ugly really fast. We are not talking about something 20 years from now.

Mr. Speaker, how many of us expect to still be us in 9 years?

That is what we are talking about.

So this is actually one of the things that is going on, and the number is actually worse. This is just the only chart that we have that we vetted.

The number of males and females who are entering sort of our university world pretty much enter it about the same, except graduation rates: only about 40 percent of males are graduating. I think the number now is in the high thirties. It rolled over again over the last couple of years.

Females, God bless them. We are seeing about 60 percent of those are graduating. It is wonderful.

However, this number between there is actually a really uncomfortable conversation. It is called functional family formation gap.

Of the many who have succeeded--they have their bachelor's degree, they have their master's degree, they went through the university process, and they graduated--what is the population of prospective spouses?

Something is going on in our society where we are trying to understand why are there so few family formations.

Some of the demographers who responded to our question said: You have a problem. You have lots of success in females making it through college systems and university systems, and we have some universities where females are graduating at twice the rate as males.

That differential, how much of this population is comfortable marrying someone who also did not graduate?

That is a tough thing. We don't talk about things like that here, but it is such a sizeable number now that we are actually seeing it in our economic data.

So let's see, what else can we produce that actually makes us uncomfortable?

This is basically the same thing we just talked about actually broken up by genders. This chart ends in 2020. It has actually gotten worse in the last couple of years. This is not a new trend. This has been going on, and we have been tracking this for about the last 15 years.

We actually have been also trying to understand what happens because of some of these societal factors, the fact of the economics of the government has pumped in lots of money and done all these things. People are poorer because they set off inflation with much of the economic policies and what the Fed did but also the Inflation Reduction Act and all these other things where we just dumped money back into society and won't take responsibility for setting off inflation--to my brothers and sisters on the left--but with those economic headwinds, we are actually seeing other data of the delays in marriage formation or household formation.

With that, we are recalculating how many children we expect to have in America.

Understand, Mr. Speaker, half the States in the United States today have more deaths than births. Half the States today have more deaths than births, and the country in total in 18 years will have more deaths than births.

By 2042, deaths are projected to exceed births in CBO's population growth model, and this one is already out of date. So even the CBO has been putting this out.

Now, the reason I keep showing these demographic slides is do you all remember your high school economics class, Mr. Speaker?

Stable populations or growing populations have the ability to have economic expansion.

It is what we call--I don't want to geek out too much. It is hard to have that domestic gross product expanding and expanding unless we have populations to take the jobs or we are willing to do tax and regulatory code changes like a number of the countries that we compete against. I am going to show you some of those slides in a moment, Mr. Speaker, where they said: We can't get labor. We are going to incentivize robots. We are going to incentivize automation.

We are going to get people who say: What about the jobs?

We don't have people. We have school districts all over America where the incoming kindergartners' and first graders' population is falling. The schools are going to have fewer kids. They are going to be closing schools.

Then they look at me like: That makes me upset.

We have been talking about the falling fertility rates for one- quarter of a century.

Here is the punch line. We have worked really hard on this math. The Joint Economic Committee, some of the economists, and some of the others spent weeks because this is sort of one of those things we don't really find in the literature: If I have a 1 percent decrease in my labor population and in my labor growth, then I lose 0.6 percent of GDP growth. If we had 2 percent, then you lose a point, 1.2. If you had a 5 percent decrease--and that is what some of these charts are talking about--in our labor force populations in the out years then we are losing 3 percent of our GDP growth.

Why is this important?

How many of us just saw that the Congressional Budget Office just said: Hey, we expect that in the next year or maybe the next couple of years the United States is only going to grow 1, 1.2 percent.

We are already seeing it in the math.

Yet how many idiots--excuse me--how many of us have gotten up behind these microphones and tried to explain that we have got to fix tax policy, we have got to fix regulatory policy, we have got to fix trade policy, and we have got to fix immigration policy?

We are not sure how to fix demographics.

This one is really uncomfortable because almost no one understands it.

Back to mandatory spending, an oldie but a goodie.

Why is this so important?

This slide here is maybe 3 years old. It gets dramatically worse through the end of this decade.

However, once again, our government is an insurance company with an army.

This is from the 2022 budget cycle. Seventy-one percent of all of our spending is what we call mandatory. Some of that is earned. Mr. Speaker, you earned your Social Security, you earned your Medicare, and you earned your veterans' benefits.

Some things you get because you fell below a certain economic income, Mr. Speaker. You get Medicaid or you are part of a certain tribal population and the United States has a treaty obligation to meet. There are things out there. However, the vast majority of this is what we would call earned benefits.

So when we hear someone here say: Oh, it is mandatory spending. We are not being disrespectful. You earned these. Is part of the societal contract.

Mr. Speaker, do you see this wedge over here, the defense, nondefense, and discretionary?

That is what we all think of government. In 9 budget years, every dime of this and part of the mandatory live on borrowed money.

Now, Mr. Speaker, walk in my door and say: David, I demand you balance in 10.

I can balance in 10.

How much of the mandatory do you want us to cut, because we can wipe out everything else?

Also, are we prepared to live in a country without a defense?

That is a violation of the U.S. Constitution, but a lot of these folks don't seem to give a damn--excuse me--care about what the U.S. Constitution says anymore as long as it doesn't inconvenience them.

Here is the one I get the most nasty emails about: What is the primary driver between today and 30 years from now?

It is not the primary driver; it is 100 percent.

One hundred percent of the U.S. sovereign borrowing between today and 30 years from now, 75 percent of it is basically Medicare, 25 percent will be if we backfill Social Security in now, what, 8 or 9 years because the trust fund is all empty, but what we allocate to the rest of the budget actually has cash in the bank.

It is demographics. That is why we just spent the last half hour going over what is happening demographically to our country. Getting old is not Republican or Democrat. How we react to it may be.

Just one more time, to understand, 30 years--and this slide is already out of date. On hard dollars, without the financing costs, if we backfill it, Social Security is $21 trillion short.

Medicare, the part that comes out of the general fund, 75 percent of all Medicare spending comes out of the general fund. Then there is what we call the Medicare trust fund, which the President talked about taxing, but his new taxes only produce like $660 billion over 10 years, which is just a fraction of the spend, believe it or not, and that trust fund is functionally gone. The Medicare shortfall is $48 trillion.

The financing cost of those two is $47 trillion. Add it up. The newest number, when we add it up, is closer to $128 trillion.

Is anyone getting the punch line here?

We can fix Social Security. Of course, it would have been really helpful if the President wouldn't have made it toxic. If he had gone behind that microphone and said: ``I need our brothers and sisters on the right and left to do the moral thing. We care about our seniors. We are not going to allow, at the end of this decade, a doubling of senior poverty. We are going to work together.'' Instead, he made it toxic. For Medicare, we need a revolution in the cost of healthcare.

Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. If the Lord has mercy on us, I won't use all of that time.

Federal spending, this is one I have never used on the floor. It has been several years ago that I remember reading--I think it might have been in The Economist magazine. It was talking about, in the 1970s, for every dollar spent on seniors, we spent $5 on young people, and that, today, for every $5 we spend on seniors, we only spend $1 on young people. It is completely reversed.

This is basically what we are trying to say: Today, for folks 65 and older--and this is a 2015 number because it is the newest number I could find in the literature--we will spend $35,000 a year on seniors and $5,000 on young people. Just understand that is what happens when your demographic curve changes.

We have updated this, and we have vetted it. This is conservative. We were careful on this number. In 1960, we had 5.1 workers for every 1 person on Social Security. In 2035, where we are heading, we believe the math to be 2.3, and that number is assuming a stabilization of labor force participation.

We have some other articles that say this falls down to only 2 people, so you and your partner or you and your spouse will have 1 person in retirement. However, we are going to use 2.3, but understand those differentials. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system.

When you get the folks who say ``the lockbox,'' for years, we had more workers than retirees consuming, and the trust fund built up. No one stole your money. The cash came in, and they would loan it to Treasury. Treasury would give them special Treasury bills, just like you might take your own retirement account and say, ``I have some cash. I am going to buy a Treasury bond.'' That is functionally what Social Security did.

For the last couple of years, they have been cashing in those Treasury bonds. That cashing goes faster and faster as the baby boomers are moving in. That is what gets used up--now, what is it?--in about 8, 9 years.

At that moment, Social Security lives on its cash flow, so it will be the cash flow from these workers. Whatever FICA taxes they pay in, that is what will go out the door.

That is why, right now, the best math is we expect a 23 percent cut in that first year that the Social Security trust fund is expired. Then, the next year gets bigger and the next year it gets bigger.

It breaks my heart because I think this is a moral obligation to fix this, except, once again, the left is going to use it as a political item for an election instead of a moral item of we are all going to come together to fix it.

I was surprised by the numbers on this board. I have used it for years now. For anyone who says, ``Just give me the money I put in,'' the United States Government should grab that and run. However, once again, it is not Social Security.

With Social Security, you get back every dime you put in, plus a little SPIF. You would have made so much more, have been so much more prosperous, if the left and these other groups hadn't stopped, 20-plus years ago, the discussion of allowing younger workers to take a tiny sliver of that FICA tax and put it into the markets as a private account. We wouldn't be facing much of this crisis today, but the control freaks didn't want you to have any of your own money in the economy.

This slide is now a couple of years old. Social Security for a couple, you will pay about $625,000 in a lifetime, your 40 quarters as you qualify, but you are going to get back about $698,000. That is about a $72,000 SPIF.

It is Medicare that is my mathematical problem. In Medicare, that couple will put in about $161,000 because the Medicare-only FICA tax you are paying is the Medicare part A trust fund. We just talked about that. Depending on the mix, it can be up to about a 40 percent Medicare spend because it is really sort of the hospital portion. However, the vast majority of Medicare spend comes out of the general fund. You, as a couple, are going to put about $161,000 of your lifetime taxes into Medicare. You are going to get out $522,000.

This is based on math from a couple of years ago. We are told this is substantially different today because if all of you have looked at medical inflation numbers, medical inflation has been running about double mean U.S. inflation, so there is a whole bunch of ugly recalculations that are going to be happening around this place as we try to figure out what we have done to ourselves in this inflation fight.

Spending on mandatory programs is expected to increase as a larger share of the population is in retirement age. Duh. We still thought we would make a nice slide out of it, though.

Right now, functionally, a little over 5 percent of the entire economy is Social Security. The entire economy goes out; 5 percent of it is in Social Security. In a couple of decades, that goes to 6.4. So, Social Security, okay, it is fixable.

Now, this is Medicare, not Medicaid, not Indian Health Services, not veterans, just Medicare itself. Today, the spend on that is about 5.7 percent of the entire economy. In the next couple of decades, it goes well over 8 percent.

When we get into the large numbers, we actually often use percentages of the entire economy. If anyone is paying attention here, when we were talking about those earlier slides that if we can maximize growth-- because if we are doing percentages of the size of the economy, and you don't want to be putting out 8-plus percent just in senior healthcare in the economy, grow the economy, so this number goes down.

Change the price of healthcare by adopting technology, curing things. The number of times I have come to this floor and talked about what we could do, the number one cost in society today is what? It is diabetes. Thirty-three percent of all healthcare spending is diabetes. Thirty-one percent of all Medicare is diabetes.

If I came to you and said: What is the single thing you could do to maximize an impact on the budget, the debt, the borrowing, and also be one of the most moral things you could do in society, if you cared about income inequality for my Tribal populations, it is not income. My Tribal populations, I represent the second highest per capita population in the world with diabetes. However, urban poor, rural poor, it turns out if you cared about income inequality, it is health. The economics, the math, is really complex because there is so much noise in the numbers or, as we say, noise in the data.

Many of my brothers and sisters on the left come in and say it is racism, that it is education. Well, it turns out, the data may say it is actually health.

As a moral society, why wouldn't we say: Okay, there are things we can do. We know we could actually, tomorrow, revolutionize the farm bill to say we are going to take on obesity in our society because we are killing ourselves. We are not going to hand you an EBT card that you can go get onion rings with.

Yes, there are lobbyists everywhere who are now upset that I am not selling their onion rings. Welcome to the world. Every time you tell the truth about this math, you have an army of lobbyists in the hallway who are mad at you because you may have taken away dollars from who they are representing. I care so much more about the survival and prosperity of this country.

How about the next thing? Have you seen the over-the-skin--as a matter of fact, I saw the article that a future Apple Watch is going to have a blood glucose meter in it. What would happen if our prediabetic population could watch what is happening to their body without pricking themselves, if they could see it right there on their phone? Would that change society if you could stabilize the prediabetic population? Remember, diabetes is 33 percent of all healthcare spending.

How about these GLP-1s? I have an article from the University of Southern California, which I am still upset they are moving to the Big Ten instead of the Pac-12, but that is a whole different discussion. The article basically says just the use of GLP-1s in the Medicare population, not Medicaid, would be a trillion bucks, a trillion-dollar impact to the positive. We need to study that. Is that Republican or Democrat, or is it just giving a darn?

I came here a couple of weeks ago about the company that has this incredible stem cell that they have tagged with CRISPR so the body doesn't reject it, so you don't have to have antirejection drugs. It is in phase one that actually gets a body producing islet cells again, meaning your body produces insulin again. That may be at the end of the decade, but because of the way they are doing it, you can do it in a biofoundry fashion, which means you could have a production line. It doesn't have to be designed to you.

Why wouldn't we, as we are doing the budget discussion and all these other things, set a decade vision saying we are going to stabilize prediabetic populations, that we are going to help our brothers and sisters get healthy again? Dear heavens, if it works, at the end of the decade, we could actually have people who rep parts of their body system to start producing insulin again. It would be worth trillions and trillions of dollars of less borrowing.

That is a vision, and this place is incapable, almost incapable, of processing vision, but the reality is upon us.

Annual spend for Medicare and Medicaid, this number is already not enough. By the end of the decade, it is functionally a trillion dollars more annually, and the majority of that money will be borrowed.

In a weird way, I wanted to close on this. We are still the shiny object in the industrialized world. We are still better off than people we compete with. We need to embrace that but not lay on our laurels. We need to stop the stupid types of conversations we have here on the floor where we talk about the shiny object instead of the things that take us down as a republic, which is debt, which is actually our economics.

Understand, this is what is called a dependency ratio, and it is not a derogatory term. It is an economic term of: Here is what I have in the labor market in a country, and here is how many people I have not in the labor market. It is not complex math.

We hear the conversations about China, China, China. China is a problem, but China is on the verge of a collapse demographically. I am one of those who believes much of what we see China doing is they are running around the world trying to build annuities because with their one-child policy and all the other things they did, they are collapsing demographically. They start to roll over in the next couple of years, where, boom, their working population is collapsing.

Is that why you go out and buy ports and farmland, because you are trying to turn the world into an annuity so you have cash flow? It is worth thinking about.

Here is Japan. Japan is already way down here, and they actually sort of flatlined, but Japan has done incredibly creative things, incentives for seniors. If you are healthy and you want to, we are going to make it advantageous if you want to stay in the labor force. Adoption of technology--they have incredibly high savings rates. They are able to finance much of their own debt. We don't. We have a society where the majority of our population is living paycheck to paycheck, substantially because of inflation.

We fall, but we don't fall nearly as hard. Our demographic curve is ugly, but it is so much less ugly than Western Europe, Japan, and China. The reason we did these three countries, these are the number one, number two, and number three size economies in the world.

If we get the most basic tax, regulatory, immigration, adoption of technology policies right here, this can be a hell of a great decade. It can be a hell of a great century. This could once again be another American century.

I will argue it will be the decisions made in this timeframe, in this year and next year, because we are at the inflection.

You see it demographically in the chart. We are at the time of inflection. Do we actually step up and use an IQ around here, or do we still sound like it is the 1990s politically?

For everyone who is terrified of a chat AI, grow up. It could actually be one of the next generations of economic growth, if do you it right. Embrace it, learn it, get it right, and run with it.

The new stem cell therapies; the fact we might cure diabetes, the fact that there are things we can do. Understand it, learn it, run with it.

Fix this stupid immigration system. Close up our borders. Stop importing poverty. Bring in talent. There are just simple things.

The Tax Code. Get it so it incentivizes risk taking and investment to grow. You don't need a Ph.D. in this stuff. You may be required to be literate. Maybe that is a problem.

Our running joke here is I work in a place that is a math-free zone. That was meant to be funny, but it is sort of sarcastic and cruel.

I believe really, really good things can happen. We have to get the policies right. My rage that I feel is I don't believe this place has even come close to actually having those pro-growth, those sort of growth is moral, what are we going to do-type conversations, and then to turn it into policy.

I am exhausted. I just don't know how to drag this place over the line so they actually think.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source