Rising National Debt

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I think I heard applause and happiness that I am only allowed to go for 13 minutes.

For anyone that is paying attention, it is because of the lateness of the hour. My brothers and sisters on the Democrat side, we have to split the remaining time.

That is what is about to happen, so I am going to talk faster than normal. I apologize to those trying to take our words down.

Let's see if I can make the point. I actually edited my boards down because I wanted to go through, once again, the actual mathematical facts and my intense frustration that our brothers and sisters around the country running for office are promising things that there is no mathematical way to make them work and a complete void of an honest conversation of demographics and debt and the reality of what is going on. Let's actually race through this because I think I now have 12 minutes.

Please understand this. For every dollar of tax collection this year that your Federal Government takes in, we spend $1.39.

Now, work with me. I used to come behind this microphone just a little while ago and say: We borrow 30 cents out of everything--no, we borrow 39 cents. If you remove interest, for every dollar we take in, we spend $1.21. I need you to process this.

Please process this. For every dollar of tax collection the United States takes in, and that is this year, in a time when the economy has actually been pretty good. GDP growth has been pretty good. Tax collections have actually been pretty good, and we spend, meaning we are functionally borrowing, 39 cents for every dollar we take in.

Here is the point. How many of you, as Members of Congress--and if someone's watching, if you don't see people in the room, that is the way it is supposed to be. People are supposed to be back in their offices or other places actually doing their work.

One of the reasons you do these presentations is you are probably on a thousand televisions around this campus, and hopefully there are still some minds that are open to math.

Do you see this chart? Do you see the blue? We call that defense and nondefense. That is all I, as a Member of Congress, get to vote on. It is 26, 25 percent of spending.

Back to this board. For every dollar of tax collection, we have to borrow an additional 39 cents on top of it. Does someone see a math problem?

If what I get to vote on is 26 percent of the budget, it means every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed as well as a big chunk of what we call mandatory spending.

How many people are willing to tell that story, whether it be on the left or the right? The hallways in this place are full of people begging us for more spending. It is an investment, David. We need the money.

I have done chart after chart after chart over the last few years, coming in here and showing when we have had very high marginal tax rates, we get about 17, 18 percent of the economy in taxes. When we have had very low marginal tax rates, we get about 17, 18 percent of the economy.

Will this place start to take it seriously? You have to adopt tax policies, regulatory policies, and code policies that dramatically do growth. Understand, what is the biggest change that has happened the last couple of years? What is the thing that has moved these numbers so dramatically?

I am going to play with this just a little bit.

Interest. The fact of the matter is, Social Security, $1.460--480 billion. Total interest, because remember you have to pay the interest back to Social Security, the pension plans, all those things, and then interest to those who bought our bonds. Remember, the vast majority of our bonds are actually bought by Americans.

Interest now is the second biggest expenditure in the Federal Government. It is going to come in total gross interest maybe $1.140-- 160 billion.

Then the next biggest, the third biggest expenditure is now Medicare, and number four is actually defense. The thing that is in the Constitution now is number four.

One of the points I want to make here is I was just showing you a chart that about 25 percent of what we get to vote on is defense and nondefense, and we are over 14 percent is just interest now. Understand, in about 10 years that a little less than $1.2 trillion is going to be approaching $2 trillion a year.

Tell me how many things we got to buy with that interest when for every dollar of tax collection we take in, $1.39, so 39 cents on top of it is borrowed. That is the mathematical reality. This is the thing that I get booed at, I get people online saying: Oh, that hurts my feelings.

One hundred percent of the debt for this country from today through the next 30 years--go look at CBO's reports, Medicare--sorry, I don't mean to get so agitated, Medicare and the interest. In 9 or so years when the Social Security trust fund has been depleted, do we reach in the general fund and backfill it?

The insanity is, you hear the debates here: We will just tax rich people.

Even documents from the left say, well, if you do every tax that has been proposed on those over $400,000, and you adjust for the economics, you get about a point and a half of GDP. A point and a half of the size of the economy. For those of us who want to cut spending, add up everything we have talked about cutting, it is about one point of GDP. You have got a big 2\1/2\ percent there, 2\1/2\ percent for every policy on the other side, every policy on our side.

We are borrowing just a little less than 7 percent of the entire economy this year, and the economy is healthy. Dear Heaven, what happens if there is a war? What happens if there is another pandemic? What happens if parts of the economic clouds come and we have a recession? This is the time when things are good. We should be paying things back.

You look at the math. I know some of these charts are impossible to read from a distance. I am trying just to make the point that interest is our fragility. I have said it here multiple times. Do you want to know who really is about to run your country? It is not the Democrats; it is not the Republicans. It is not rich people; it is not the unions. It is the bond market. If you are borrowing seventy, eighty thousand dollars per second every day and you have got to go to the market, remember, this year, this fiscal year we will bring $10 trillion to market. About eight of that is refinancing of the bonds that roll over. It is actually a little more than that.

If you look at the short end of the curve, they have to roll over a lot. Then there are a couple trillion of new issuances. If the world, if the bond vigilantes say, well, we don't want those things, we want a premium, you look at the charts, and this is actually assuming everything is wonderful.

When you see the CBO projection, and they talk about debt coming into the future, this is no pandemic, no war, no recession, yet if you listen to these microphones, it is person after person after person coming up with new brilliant ideas to spend money. Many of them you love. They are moral, they are helpful, and we have no damn way to finance them.

This delusion that we will just tax rich people, I have already shown chart after chart after chart, you confiscate all the wealth of those designated rich, you run the country for a few months. You crash every market, there is no retirement accounts, but you wipe out everything. It is just sort of a mathematical delusion.

There are ways to make this work, but are we going to legalize technology?

Last week, I actually did a presentation, and I was trying to show that all these projections of: We are going to take in this much money in additional enforcement at the IRS, and we have only hit like a fraction, a fraction of what was promised.

Remember, we are 2 years in. Remember, we originally appropriated 80, then it went down to 57. According to CBO, we were supposed to be up around 10, 11 billion of additional tax collections coming in from the rich. We have hit 1, so we have hit basically 10 percent of the promises. That is story after story after story, we are not coming anything close to our fantasies.

Remember, the Inflation Reduction Act was going to pay for itself, and then we realized, hey, the subsidies, the planned economy, the new managed industrial policy that is America now, it is turning out to cost dramatically more. The tax collections didn't come anywhere close.

We are really bad at math here. We are really good at making public policy by feelings, but just try to say, let's have thought experiments. What would happen if the IRS used Chat and other things to answer the phone, customer service, so the vast majority of people who call the IRS could actually have their phone answered? I remember one person online said: Well, that would lose jobs.

I tried to show all that money we set aside for the IRS; it went down. Their auditors went down by 8 percent. We gave them billions of dollars, and it turns out we have a demographic issue.

Remember, starting in 1990, birth rates in the United States started to roll over. It turns out a lot of people don't want to work for the IRS.

There are ways to use technology to crash the price of healthcare, to make the environment healthier, cleaner, to move transportation, to actually do tax collections in an honest, fair, moral fashion.

This place is a protection racket. It is a protection of incumbent bureaucracies, incumbent business models. The hallways are full of lobbyists right now trying to stop us from disrupting and making our brothers and sisters healthier.

Diabetes is 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare. It is immoral what we allow to happen. We can make our brothers and sisters healthier. We can do amazing things for the debt and deficit. We just have to be willing to do things differently.

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