Stop Bureaucracy from Crushing Our Opportunities

Floor Speech

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, first, I appreciate being recognized for these 5 minutes, although it is always dangerous when a Member starts walking towards the microphone and they are doing it because something hit their desk and it annoyed them.

We have been working on something in our office to try to explain an intense frustration I have, and that is Washington and its embracing of delusional math. Look, I have only been here 3 years, and I have come to the conclusion that the single biggest problem I see is not the right-left continuum, but those who own calculators and those who don't; those who live in a world where math actually has a value. And this will make sense, hopefully, in a moment.

I am right now holding a CBO report, the ``2013 Long-Term Budget Outlook.'' Yet I have not heard someone else come to this microphone, but there is just the beginning of a paragraph that should terrify you:

Federal debt as a percentage of GDP in 2038 under the extended baseline is projected to be about twice as large as the amount estimated in last year's report.

Do you understand what this report is saying? That because of the policies from this administration, the policies coming out of our bureaucracies and the things we need to actually deal with in this House, the numbers are almost twice as bad as they were last year. That is the speed we are going to hit 100 percent of debt to GDP. And the thing you need to understand is that it is worse than in the long-term budget outlook forecast because there are delusions built into that, because we here as a body instruct the Congressional Budget Office saying, Follow current law; that's what you need to budget off of.

How many of us here come January when the SGR is up, and many of you will know it as ``doc fix,'' are going to hold the numbers, hold the current law with the understanding at the end of about a dozen years, doctors who see Medicare patients are going to be paid 73 percent less. So we will walk onto the floor here probably in December or January and fix the SGR so doctors are compensated so they continue to see their Medicare patients, and we blow up the numbers in the long-term budget forecast, and we do that on lots of things. So when you actually do the adjustment for math reality, policy reality, the long-term budget numbers are much, much worse than we talk about around here.

And now to my point.

A year and a half ago, we actually did something bipartisan. We did something called the JOBS Act. In the scale of things, it was small; but there were some neat things in there. One of the things I fixated on was something called ``crowdfunding,'' an opportunity to help the truly little entrepreneur. This was only up to $1 million, and it was using this thing called the Internet to be able to raise money so if you are the cupcake shop or the mechanic shop, or you have some idea where you can begin getting some angel investment and get going, well the SEC took a year and a half to do what was supposed to be a simple rule set, so they are a year late.

And here is what they brought us: this is the law, these handful of pages, six, seven pages is the crowdfunding portion of the JOBS Act. Here is the 550-page proposed rule-set.

So if we are in a world where we have crushing debt screaming towards us, and some of that is coming now because we are being told that the new normal is a 2 percent GDP growth, we need to be doing things that accelerate that economic growth, or we are in incredible trouble.

So as the House, bipartisan, we passed the JOBS Act, which is one of the little increments that is supposed to reach out and help grow the economy, and then the bureaucracy hands us crushing rules that make it almost impossible to use.

So for whoever is listening, watching, caring about things like the crowdfunding rules that are before the SEC, you have 90 days from now. Please go online, make comments, help them understand that this is supposed to be helping the next generation of small entrepreneurs in this country, and don't make it 550 pages of bureaucratic legalese. It can be simpler. We can handle this. We can do great things in this country, but we can't do it if the bureaucracy continues to crush our opportunities.

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