Recognizing Outstanding Citizens of Missouri's Fourth Congressional District

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, sometimes I come behind these microphones and often what I share, what I need to share--it is my therapy--is a bit dour, and it is sometimes fun to listen to someone who actually is happy and joyous.

Now that the uplifting portion of this program is over, let's get to the facts.

The number, $35 trillion, guess when we hit it. We should be very excited and proud of ourselves. We did something that so many economists said we would never get to this quickly. My math says, this coming Friday, 3 p.m., the United States gross debt will cross over $35 trillion.

Now, understand that is not the way Europeans calculate our debt. They calculate our debt dramatically higher because of our obligated unfunded liabilities, but watch the Treasury, Friday, about 3 p.m., post up a number, $35 trillion. We did it. Congratulations.

How many people have you heard come find the microphone today or this week understanding and wanting to talk about that? What we have gotten is people coming behind the microphone and not telling the truth. We all want to protect Social Security. The way you protect Social Security is you know the math and how it actually works.

We are on track in a decade to double senior poverty. God forbid if any of us tell the truth about math because the truth gets you unelected and a bunch of really angry ads at home, so this place runs around and avoids telling the truth.

Let's walk through another little factoid. My math basically says this year 45.68 percent of all the income tax collections, receipts your government takes in, just cover the cost of interest.

I have been coming from behind the microphone and saying interest in 2024, this fiscal year, would be somewhere around a little less than $1.2 trillion. I apparently have that wrong. It is probably going to come in at about $1.140 to $1.160 trillion. Either way, I am off a fraction, but 45.68 percent of every dime we are collecting in your income tax now just pays interest.

I have tried to say it over and over and over at home and other places and you get people that just stare at you and go, huh?

Who really runs this government? Seriously, it is an honest question. I need you to think like adults, maybe those who actually went to a finance class.

Who actually now runs this government? I am going to argue the debt markets, the bond markets from around the world. If you have to bring almost $10 trillion to market this fiscal year--2, 2.25 trillion virgin new issues because we are borrowing--that is like $75,000 to $80,000 a second right now. The economy is good. The actual baseline data on GDP is good, and you are still burning almost $80,000 a second in borrowing.

What happens the second you have a U.S. debt auction that is undersubscribed or there are not enough people there? What happens to U.S. interest rates? How much of the world goes into depression? Are we going to talk about that?

Oh, God, no. No, because that would require math. That would require being serious.

We passed a bill here earlier today. I voted no on it. They worked hard on it. They lowered the top-line spending, but you have got to deal with a really uncomfortable discussion: every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed.

Let's process that. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed and, depending on some of the projections, about a quarter of Medicare.

Social Security has its own trust fund. It runs out in like 9, 10 years, and then we have got to figure out what is going to happen there. We will continue to get Democrats coming behind the microphone lying about it, which makes it almost impossible to actually lay out the math and try to fix it.

Remember, raising the cap, doing the Democrats' plan of $400,000 and up and just raising the cap, only covers about 38 percent of the shortfall.

You had the President in that debate last month saying if we just tax rich people 1 percent more--and I have a chart in here that will show it is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the shortfall. Remember, if you take $400,000 and up, the Democrats' definition of rich, and you tax them at 12.4 percent, you will only cover 38 percent of the shortfall.

This is the nature of our discussion. When every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed, is it moral to borrow money here to send it to entities around the country, even though there are many programs I love? I think they are the right thing. I just think the way we finance it isn't. Is it right to send cash to that city, to that State, to that county, and they have their own taxing authority? They may have more cash in the bank than we do as a percentage.

Do you borrow money? That is what we are doing today; we are borrowing money. The crazy thing is when you do the adjustment for the ability for interest to be tax exempt from municipal debt, we have municipalities in this country that have a better credit rating than the United States.

Remember, Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States today. We are number 14 on the credit stack, meaning there are 13 other countries that can sell 10-year bonds cheaper than the United States.

If you read the instruments, if you read the Moody's, the S&Ps, their documents and their reps and warranties and their analysis on U.S. debt, they don't trust this place. They do not believe Congress. We are supposed to be the adults in the room. We make policy. The White House carries it out.

Remember that little thing, the Constitution. Maybe someone should try reading it. They don't trust us, and they have no reason to trust us.

How much discussion have you heard, anyone that has been listening to these microphones this week, heard people like me--which maybe I am just an idiot for actually giving a damn--get behind these microphones and actually walk through the math and explain there is a way we keep our promises.

There is a way we meet our obligation from the earned benefits. There is a way to make this work. You don't have a lot more time to keep screwing around, but if you do it in the next 3, 4 years, this is another American century.

I have my 8-year-old sitting over here. I also have a 2-year-old. My wife is exactly my age. Yes, I am pathologically optimistic. The math says her generation will be the first generation to live poorer than her parents. Great morality, Madam Speaker. I am very proud of us.

Madam Speaker, I thank anyone that listens to my diatribes here. I think this is almost like my therapy session because I get angry all week long listening to the absurdity and people saying things that mathematically have no basis in fact.

One hundred percent of the debt--and this makes everyone angry, and it is factual--100 percent of the U.S. debt from today through the next 30 years is demographics. Huh? What are demographics? This is your country's leadership. It is demographics. We got old as a society and we didn't set aside the resources to keep our promises.

Since 1990, U.S. fertility has been falling. I won't use the word collapsing, but last year, we estimate, 2023, 1.63 percent, maybe 1.62 percent fertility. Meaning, the United States now has fewer children than much of Europe.

Now, tell me how I build a pay-as-you-go system to keep our promises to those who paid into Social Security, to those who paid into Medicare? Remember, the Medicare taxes you pay only cover about 38, 40 percent. Why don't we do this right now?

Social Security does not add to the U.S. debt technically but paying back the money that was borrowed from the Social Security trust fund does. There is some $3 trillion that has been borrowed out, and for the last few years, every month, there are not enough tax collections coming in on the FICA tax, that 12.4 percent, to make the payments to Social Security recipients.

I want you just to visualize this. Every month, Social Security says: Hey, Treasury, I am holding a bunch of your bonds. You owe us some money and they cash them in, then Treasury goes and borrows money and pays interest for that borrowed money.

Social Security doesn't create the debt, but Treasury does because the Treasury has to go out and borrow money to pay back the money they have taken out of the Social Security trust fund.

If you add it all up, plus interest--forgive me, I am partially doing this off the top of my head. I calculate maybe $6 trillion, 3-plus in principal, then over time the interest paid back is probably another 3.

How many times have you had anyone just try to be honest about it? It is not Republican math. It is not Democrat math. It is just math to be avoided because we are terrified to tell our voters the truth because we have lied to them for so long.

How many times have you had a Democrat go around here and say, what if we just tax rich people more? I have done entire presentations here and for those of us on the Republican side, if we just cut discretionary spending, damn it, I can come up with about $300 billion in discretionary that can be cut down. They will be screaming, but that is still 1 percent of GDP.

For the Democrats, every tax hike they genuinely propose that could be executed, when adjusted for its economic effects, that would be about 1.5 percent of GDP. You have 1\1/2\ there on tax hikes, you got 1 percent in cuts over here. It is a big 2\1/2\ percent, right? Right? It is 2\1/2\ percent. We are borrowing 7 percent of the entire economy this year.

Madam Speaker, we are doing a great job. I guess part of my anger is, I love some of the people I work with here. They are smart. They care, but they run away from me when they see me coming because I want to talk about this stuff. This chart is the pie chart of America's spending.

Do you see this number? Seventy-four percent is in the red. The red doesn't get a vote from a Member of Congress. That is on autopilot. It is called mandatory. It is earned benefits. Some of the benefits you get because you are part of a certain Tribal group or you fall below a certain income, but this is earned.

Do you see the blue? It is defense and nondefense. Every dime of defense is borrowed. Every dime of what we call nondefense discretionary is borrowed and a wedge of this over here is borrowed.

When we say net interest, I have tried to explain the difference between net interest and gross interest. Net interest this year will be $892 billion. That is interest we pay to people out in the world: your pension fund, a nice family on the other side of the world, the union retirement fund over here. They buy U.S. debt.

The other debt is what we owe to the trust funds. We have borrowed the money from the trust funds, but we still have to pay it back. We still have to pay interest. It is one of the great cons we do in our budgeting here. Well, gross interest is only $890 billion, Schweikert; why do you keep going around saying $1.2 trillion?

Interest just this year is because of that other chunk of interest we have got to pay, and we are going to have to pay back the principal. The same as I just explained on how Social Security works.

Once again, if you are a Member of Congress and you are doing a townhall or putting out something and you are not showing this chart, you are not helping our brothers and sisters across the country understand how serious this election is, how serious putting people in office that will stop pandering to your need for a dopamine hit in your brain, but maybe own a calculator.

Once again, I can make this math work. You can't pretend that we can tax rich people, and we can just cut our way there. You may have to do a bit of both of those, but it is policy.

I have done presentation after presentation after presentation on how you could crash healthcare, how you could adopt artificial intelligence to reduce the size of this government dramatically and still have better customer service. How the mechanics of talent-based immigration could actually grow the economy but shutting down the border--stop importing competition to our working poor, making our working poor poorer.

You have got to think like an economist. The folks here want to talk down to you. They talk to you like you are a child and say, well, if we just did this, we would be fine. It doesn't work that way.

We are now so upside down debt-wise that unless you do something that is holistic with lots of moving parts, none of the math works. We are uncomfortable telling that truth.

Let's actually walk through a board I don't think I have ever shown before. Fiscal year 2024, here is where we are at to date. We have taken in $3.755 trillion.

Do you see the red here? The red is the individual income tax. Your country is an income tax-based economic system where other countries may rely more on a value added tax, which is a really regressive tax and crushes the middle class.

The blue over here, when you start to look at that, we call it social insurance and retirement programs. It is Social Security. That is actually going out the door immediately, and we have to borrow some to cover it.

The blue over here is actually corporate income taxes. Remember, the United States, back in about the late eighties, early nineties, changed much of the corporate tax structure when we started having passthroughs. Do you remember LLCs, subchapter S, partnerships, those things? Much of what is corporate activity in the United States flows through to that individual tax line.

When you get the brain trust here that says we are going to raise corporate taxes, great, okay. Is that going to solve something?

We are trying to vet the paper I got the math from, but we have a paper from about a year or year and a half ago that said, in the 2017 tax reform we did, 67 percent of the corporate tax rate reduction went to wages.

When you have someone from the left who runs around here saying we are going to raise corporate taxes, what they are doing is basically screwing over the working men and women of the country. That is how it works.

When your wages go up, the old saying used to be it is inflation-- that doesn't get you anything--or it is productivity because you built a tax code that said we can afford to buy the next better piece of equipment, build better processes, build better supply chains, become more productive, and workers get part of that.

Part of that productivity also is a tax system that maximizes economic vitality. Economic growth is moral. If we want to have fewer poor people in society, if we want to close income inequality, don't do it through transfer payments. We have data over data that many of the transfer payments, at the end of the decade, make people poorer because you dissociate their lives from being part of the society, part of work. The secret is having an economy that grows, that needs them. Getting economics right is moral.

This is the reality. Do you see these tiny little wedges there? That is excise taxes. Some will think of it as tariffs, when you actually see some miscellaneous. Society is functionally financed by income tax. This is FICA, and this is corporate.

Mark my words--and I will probably be long gone from this place-- because of what the Democrats are doing policy-wise and, honestly, the Republicans' unwillingness to actually do tough things, at the end of this decade, we are all going to be having a discussion of having a national VAT, a value-added tax, just like the rest of the world.

All of the crap discussion that it is not progressive enough, that it is regressive and hurts working men and women, working men and women are going to get their heads kicked in because it is the only way to start to confiscate enough resources from people.

Let's actually talk through and knock down some of the craziness that keeps being said around here. This is a brand-new chart for me: U.S. fiscal dynamics, now and then. We are going to go way back. Let's actually do from 1984 to 2023 and then current.

Our tax revenues are up. We are taking in more receipts. Technically, they are not revenues. Revenues are what you earn. Receipts are what you confiscate. That is just a little bit of tax lingo there.

You see tax receipts are up, but our spending is way up. When you see the white line over here, deficits, it is just basically the derivative of tax receipts are up, but we are spending faster than those receipts are going up. Therefore, you get a deficit.

If someone says those 2017 tax cuts--no, tax receipts are up. I have another chart I am going to show. Corporate tax rates, corporate tax collections--don't think about the rate; it is about what you take in-- are actually above the mean.

How much of this spending is the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act? The Democrats lost their mind when we did 2017 tax reform. Remember, it was actually a few trillion dollars--$5 trillion, $5.5 trillion--but functionally $4 trillion of it was also covered, direct taxes.

We just moved things around to maximize productivity. It was about getting companies to move back to the United States, move their organizations, their intellectual property, the things they were making money on, getting them back to the United States. We had to become competitive in the world again.

The other $1.5 trillion, the Democrats say that is the driver of the debt. No, it is not. It turns out it wasn't $1.5 trillion. The latest data is almost $900 billion of that has been covered by economic growth. Yet when the Democrats controlled this place in the last session, they dropped $2 trillion in subsidies, handouts, to big business. All of that is borrowed money.

When was the last time that a reporter actually covered this fairly? When was the last time you met a reporter who owned a calculator? The public has no understanding of what is going on out there.

I keep trying to provide this chart over and over. This is U.S. Government revenues. The sign should say ``receipts.'' This is mislabeled. Green is individual income taxes. Remember, we are mostly an individual income tax country. When you see spikes like this, this is the dot-com bubble of 1999, 2000, 2001, the dot-coms. That is capital gains.

This spike here is actually people were getting lots of COVID money, so it was direct spend from the Federal Government. We borrowed it, gave it to them, and they had to pay taxes on it.

This line here, the blue, is FICA taxes. That is your Social Security and Medicare--very stable.

Down here, this is corporate taxes. Do you see the line? Remember, this is the regime of the new corporate tax rate since 2017. Tax receipts, the actual tax dollars, are up. It is above the mean of the last couple of decades.

We need vitality, dynamism. There are lots of things we can do policy-wise. The United States is becoming a bit more of an oligopoly. Many of our businesses are becoming far too big and far too protectionist. That is government. Government likes big organizations because they are easier to manipulate to get them to do what they want. Here is a subsidy, wink, wink, nod, nod. Engage in our social policy, engage in our political policy, and we are going to hand you billions.

Instead, what you do is tax reform for everyone. Knife fight, battle it out, the best product, the most dynamic company, the one who moves the fastest and most innovative wins. That is the way a market economy is supposed to work.

Instead, now our brothers and sisters on the left here go behind these microphones and use: Our industrial policy is this. Our planned economy is this.

I keep waiting for them to build a 5-year plan and hold up little red cards. If you don't get that reference, go look it up.

This is the driver of the debt. Remember, I showed tax receipts are up, but our spending is up more. Where is that spending? It is in what we call mandatory.

In many ways, this isn't Republican or Democratic. It is what we are as a society. We calculate in about 10 years, 22 to 23 percent of our population will be 65 and up. The politics will weaponize that very sentence I just gave, but it is math. It is what we are. It is demographics. We are having and have had, for the last couple of decades, dramatically fewer children. We got older. If we tell the truth about that, we can look at what the cost driver is. Then, folks come in and say: Well?

Almost all the cost driver is interest and healthcare costs. A decade from now, when the Social Security trust fund is gone, do we backfill it? The brain trust here will say: Let's do this. We will do the ACA, ObamaCare, the Republican alternative, or Medicare for All.

Those are financing bills. Once again, if our body here would tell the truth, that is who gets subsidized and who has to pay. They don't change what we pay.

Technology, cures, disruptions are better ways to do it, but we keep much of the technology that could crash the price of healthcare here illegal because there are armies of lobbyists in our hallways who don't want to compete against your ability to use technology to keep yourself and your family healthier.

I have been able to attach a handful of AI and algorithm bills to provide customer service at the IRS, the VA, or other things, and then we have gotten hate from the government employees unions.

The fact of the matter is, it is moral. It would be better customer service for our constituents. It would be faster, better, and cheaper. The fact of the matter is, there is no pension with it.

There are solutions that are not tax or cut and burn. It is a policy. This place won't engage in the policy because we are afraid. We are protectionists. We are protectionists of the government bureaucracies and incumbent business models.

Is that Republican or Democratic? It is math. Not going to bother you with that.

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, for those trying to take down my words, I am sorry for talking so fast.

Tax revenues are projected to be billions of dollars. Once again, I want to make the point that individual income taxes are projected to be up dramatically. Payroll taxes are up fairly substantially. Corporate income taxes are fairly healthy. Other types of receipts are also up.

Where I really want to get back to is trying to make this point, and then we are going to do some actual tax history.

This is from the CBO, Congressional Budget Office. This is not Republican or Democratic. It is math. One hundred percent of the next 30 years of debt is healthcare and interest, and then, in 10 years, if we backfill Social Security. The rest of the budget is calculated to have an almost $9 trillion positive balance.

When was the last time this place actually was willing to have one of the most difficult discussions? About a month, month and a half ago, the Joint Economic economists on the Republican side took the leap and told the truth. We wrote a detailed report about demographics, tax policy, maximizing economic growth. Then we talked about health.

This is where I get the crap kicked out of me for telling the truth. Obesity in the detailed line item--and we spent months and months working on these numbers and vetting them--could be as high as $9.1 trillion of additional healthcare costs over the 10 years.

Having a society where we are about to have the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger, is that moral? Having a society where we calculate, in 3 to 4 years, 50 percent of America will be obese, is that moral?

What we do in the farm bill, what we do in nutrition support, and what we do in trying to have a healthier society, is that Republican or Democratic?

I often accuse my Democratic friends of wanting to engage in policy to maintain people's misery, where others, at least myself, want to cure the misery. I want to end the misery, cure diseases, move the types of investment but also the policies so the FDA can use technology to bring cures to market faster. We have a whole portfolio of these ideas. Not one of those was a tax. Not one of those was a major cut.

We calculate that 16 percent of all U.S. healthcare, $600 billion, is people not staying on their statin or taking their insulin improperly or their calcium inhibitors so they are having a stroke.

There is a 99-cent pill bottle cap that beeps at you, and I can't get a damn hearing on that for years. These are simple ideas that could crash the price of healthcare.

Our society is dying. In 15 years, we calculate that we have more deaths than births. Oh, but that doesn't work in the next election. That is not what I am going to use in my propaganda. The attack ads that are going to come at you, Schweikert, well, we are going to say you mentioned the words Social Security and Medicare, but we are going to lie that you are one of the few idiots here trying to find a mathematical way to save it. This place is absolutely immoral.

I have done this before; I have tried to walk through the actual cost to the poor on what we are doing at our border. I will do this quickly. You are the individual or the couple who didn't finish high school. What you sell is your talents. You are willing to go out and hang drywall, you work yourself off as hard as you can, and then you get a White House that engages in border policy where millions of people with the same skill set as you have come in, and they consume the housing stock. You want to know why the lowest tiers, the least expensive housing has had some of the highest inflation, why they can't find a place to live, and now their wages are going down because you are competing against millions of people with the same skill set. The cruelty of the current border policy crushes the working poor.

Can we have a discussion like economists instead of ``Well, you are immoral, you want to . . . `' No. Then on the flip side, we have entire charts that talk about how talent-based immigration--and talent could be a skilled carpenter or synthetic biologist--grows the economy.

I will argue a number of the economic policies I propose I cannot make work math wise unless we actually--because in the 1970s, 1980s the world fought for hydrocarbons. Last decade we fought for rare earths. I can build you the math model that says this decade and the next three decades, we are going to fight for smart people, the entire world. We educate people here, and then we send them away. Are we out of our minds?

Madam Speaker, I am going to skip a bunch of the boards and just try to close this out with just a couple more. This is 2023. Total outlays, total spending, $6.1 trillion; total receipts, $4.4 trillion. What is that? $1.7 trillion borrowed. This year, borrowing is going to be about two-and-a-quarter, and this is a time when the economy is doing remarkably well. Now, it is subsidized, so it is basically a sugar high, but it is still doing well.

Now, our problem is, in 2023, gross interest was about $700 billion. This year, we are heading toward $1.14 trillion, $1.16 trillion, but this differential here, almost every dime of that $1.7 trillion borrowing, the growth on it--now, much of it is Inflation Reduction Act, the shortfall from tax reform, but we have never been given the run to show how it is growing tax receipts. I am showing you even corporate tax receipts where the different rates are up.

It turns out it is healthcare and interest now. As we are moving back to more normalized interest--How many of you live in a fantasy world where you think interest rates are going back to 0? You realize the current interest rates on 10-year notes still aren't at historic norms when you take away the years of suppression on the rate.

For my brothers and sisters on the left, who like to say, well, you gave away to rich people, today, the rich, as defined by you, pay a higher percentage of Federal income taxes than they did before. The Republican tax reform was more progressive than the previous Tax Code.

When we get to some of the other charts, here is my chart showing that President Biden in the debate said something insane about covering Social Security. Let me see if I can find one. In 10 years, gross debt will be $56.8 trillion.

However, here is one of the points I desperately want to make. Historically, when we have had very high marginal rates, we get 17.6, 18, 18.2 percent of GDP in taxes. When we have had very low marginal rates, we get 17.6, 18.2 percent of the economy in taxes because the economy changes in growth. When you look at it, the black line is receipts, revenue. The line above it is interest and healthcare.

When our friends keep saying, well, we are going to tax the rich more. Great, but I have already shown you if every tax worked absolutely to its maximum efficiency, you get a point and a half, a percent of GDP, and we are borrowing 7 this year.

We will make this the last one. Until we are actually willing to first have the same definitions of here is the drivers of debt, here is the innovations we are willing to bring into our society, this is our future, our future is just absolutely crushing, and it is percentages of GDP. We expect Social Security and Medicare outlays, as we start to head to the 30-year budget, 17.6 percent of the entire economy, where revenues are 6.3. Okay, no one has any idea what you are talking about. My basic point is, today through the next 30 years, it is demographics. It is mostly healthcare, and then the cost of financing that shortfall.

Helping people live longer, live healthier, live freer of disease is moral. It isn't Republican moral, Democrat moral, it is just moral, and yet every piece of legislation I have brought here over the last few years can't get a hearing or gets shot down because the bureaucracy despises it. The interest groups care more about their money than they care about my 8-year-old's future.

There is a path where the math can be made to work, but for everyone around here, you think there is a simple solution. My father used to have this great saying, for every complex problem, there is a simple solution. That is absolutely wrong. We will have to do complexity to save our future, save my retirement, save my children.

We have put it on paper. We have done economic modeling; we have had multiple Ph.D. economists do the math. There is a way it works. Will this place step up and buy a calculator and put batteries in it and then sit down with those of us who want to save our future and make this another American century? Instead, we run around terrified from doing what is hard.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the therapy session of letting me vent. I am going to bite my tongue from saying what I have to say, but I am going to throw one last thing. There are a number of people who watch these presentations on YouTube. Half the comments are bots, they are fake, they are Russian troll farms. Half the remaining half are people who care more about saying ideological insanity, but there is about a quarter of them that help, that actually have sometimes brilliant ideas, are engaged in saying, what if you did this, what if you looked at that? We are diving into ideas on things of consolidation, things that are mandatory. Those ideas actually came from the population that has been willing to watch these presentations over the years.

One of my last great hopes is when I would do these economic presentations 5 years ago, 12 people would watch them. Today, I will have several hundred thousand. Maybe, just maybe, Democrats, Republicans, the people who are Independents are tired of being treated like children, and they are ready for us to start talking to them like honest brokers of policy.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Mooney).

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

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