Upcoming Changes in the Economy

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROY. Will the gentleman yield? Just making the Parliamentarian happy.

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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, for everybody watching at home, Social Security is predominantly on autopilot, mandatory accounts.

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Mr. ROY. Interest is effectively on autopilot.

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Mr. ROY. You don't want to default.

Now, you put defense over here as discretionary, although there are some issues in there in terms of some social spending. Call that discretionary. You have got Medicare, which is effectively mandatory. What you don't have on that chart is that obviously Medicare is growing and exploding, correct?

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Mr. ROY. Right, and it is going up in perpetuity.

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Mr. ROY. We have got a bubble that is going to----

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Mr. ROY. Also not on there are significant other mandatory things. For example, we have veteran spending. We just voted on MILCON-VA. We have veteran spending based on burn pits and stuff that is about a $500 million or $600 million mandatory account.

We have what we do with food stamps on the farm bill and other things that we categorize as mandatory but are a little bit more discretionary.

My point is--and I don't want to take the gentleman's time; I will yield back--that you are putting up there stuff that we pretty much have to pay.

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Mr. ROY. Will the gentlemen yield for one quick question?

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Mr. ROY. Do our revenues for this year, FY24, cover what is on that chart?

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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, my main point for the average user is that the revenues we bring in from general taxes, corporate taxes, FICA taxes, the chart that the gentleman was just showing, does not cover even all of what the gentleman just put forward, much less the remainder of the government, the remainder of the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI.

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Mr. ROY. I don't want to take up the gentleman's time, although I have time on the back end, and we are happy to bleed them together, but I would just add to the gentleman's point.

We have to address the drivers that the gentleman comes down and talks about every week for the most part and comes down with regularity that get to the heart of those numbers.

We look at it like some monolithic amount that we can't address when, in fact, if you drive the price of healthcare down through the innovations the gentleman talks about, through cures, competition, and the things that we know we could do, you could massively reduce that Medicare burden, reduce interest, and deal with a lot of the expenses. Then, as we grow our economy, we get ourselves into a good place.

Does the gentleman agree?

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Mr. ROY. Correct.

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Mr. ROY. Will the gentleman yield?

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Mr. ROY. Would the gentleman agree that the fundamental obstacle to achieving what the gentleman just outlined is that it has a lot of complexities in it?

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Mr. ROY. We will go through committees, figure out the work. It is tough work. We will do it.

Would the gentleman agree the primary obstacle to that is, and I am going to use this term broadly, the buildup--the gentleman referenced K Street and the army of lobbyists--the sort of corporatization of all things that we do, meaning healthcare is driven predominantly by the massive corporations--pharmaceutical, hospitals, pharma. My life got saved by great innovation in pharmaceuticals when I had cancer. I am for it.

But the corporatization, the corporate cronyism, the extent you have these massive entities, including, by the way, those that are driving our food supply, all the regulations prohibiting small farms and small meatpacking plants to ship the stuff to have local produce and local foods so that you can eat healthy. It is the massive corporate interests that come here lobbying for benefits and tax breaks that, by the way, are going to be front and center among Republicans when everyone says that we must go back and put in place all the tax benefits, which some are good, as I was talking about earlier.

Does the gentleman agree that some of these are part of the problem?

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