Our National Debt, Our Spending, and Our Deficit
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to focus more on discretionary, just so people understand. The vast majority of our spending is on autopilot, but a lot of us have no understanding of how much the wheels have come off just this year, and this is so important to start the process.
I am going to start with a board, and please understand, if this were May 2022--you remember how long ago that was? Like a year. We expected the U.S. deficit for this year to be $980 billion. Okay.
So where are we at today? One year later, we are functionally pushing $1.18 trillion. We functionally have doubled the borrowing this year.
What happened? Healthcare costs went up dramatically. Interest is up dramatically. Tax receipts are down.
What happens if some of the protections we have for the next couple of years are off? Remember, that $1.8 trillion that we are projected to borrow in this fiscal year, we weren't supposed to hit that for almost 8 more years.
The wheels are coming off, and if you are on the left and you care about this program or that program, understand, there is no money. You should help us go at every dollar here.
So we get into this game of saying, oh, but that is discretionary, discretionary is fairly flat. It really is just not true. It is a lot flatter than Medicare, Social Security, all of those. But those are earned benefits that are about our aging population.
We need to walk through a sense of reality, and you are going to get the punch line here in a moment.
This is just sort of the breakdown for this year's borrowing, this year's spending and discretionary and what the 2018 baseline is. You will notice the growth in spending.
Here is the punch line. We were only supposed to have borrowing of about $1.8 trillion this year.
Let me rephrase that. We were supposed to have spending equal to only about $1.8 trillion for both defense and nondefense. Do you remember the borrowing number? It is about $1.8 trillion.
Every dime of defense and what you think of as government is living on borrowed money this year. You got to understand, when you get the folks saying, well, let's just cut this program or that program. You got to cut every dime of defense and what you think of as government, whether that be the FBI, foreign aid, the park service, our salaries, Congress, the White House. It is all on borrowed money now.
Here is the other thing we need to make part of our discussion: We can't play this game of we are going to talk about discretionary and we are only going to use the last 2 years as our baseline. We had a big plus-up, substantially during COVID. So let's actually use a true linear line. Let's go back to 1990, adjust the math for inflation.
Discretionary is up 154 percent. If you go from 1990 and do inflation, all that growth of inflation, but now we are at 154 percent growth. Defense is only up 35 percent since 1990 if you adjust for inflation.
The wheels are coming off, Mr. Speaker. I am terrified because, at this rate, if some of the predictions are true a decade from now, just the interest on U.S. sovereign debt, if we stay at these interest rates, could be approaching $2 trillion a year, more than all discretionary, defense, nondefense included. That is the future we are handing to America right now. It is time for great discipline.
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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The number has actually been going up fairly dramatically. In the first 7 months just interest carry, just because the increase in interest, went up $108 billion.
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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Actually, if 400, I think, was the baseline number, with the higher interest rates and the amount of borrowing, you could be approaching 600.
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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. There are also other things going on. People don't realize, it is not just the $2 trillion of excess spending that has to be borrowed, how much of the debt has to be refinanced all the time.
You actually have, let's say, $26 trillion of publicly borrowed debt. There is something called a weighted daily average. Half of that has to be refinanced functionally every 5 years. Basically that means every year you are bringing $2 trillion and plus you are bringing a few trillion additional to market, and now those new issued bonds are at the new much higher interest rates.
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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Interest is killing us.
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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Congressman Buck, one of the best ways to think about this--the budget window we are working on in functionally about 9 budget years, interest is going to be more than all of defense. That is already baked into the cake.
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