David Schweikert

“I move that the House end its work for the day.”

“Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn. The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o’clock and 23 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, September 2, 2026, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.”

“Our national debt is growing too fast, and we are borrowing money just to pay the interest. An aging population is driving up the costs of programs like Social Security and Medicare. If we do not make major spending cuts and fix these programs soon, our economy will crash.”

“Mr. Speaker, I wish I had the magic ability to find the powerful words to try to explain the difficulty of the finances, the reality of the math, and the threat to the Republic, but we are going to try again. How do I get my fellow Members, the public, the administration, and the people around me to basically look each other in the eyes and say: Here is the reality of what is going on. Think of this: In the last 5 years, U.S. debt has gone up by one- third. As of, I think it is the last day or so, the 30-year bond is at the highest interest rate in 25 years. We will borrow $1 trillion every 130 days. So every 130 days, we are clicking off another $1 trillion. Mr. Speaker, think about this: This coming January, we are going to hit the debt ceiling again. It was only a couple of years ago that we actually raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, and we have already almost burned through it. I think as of yesterday, we were borrowing $89,980 every second. We are going to walk through some of the charts and some of the math, and I beg of anyone who is crazy enough to watch this, is detailed enough, is actually caring enough to watch this, I need you to open up your mind and bathe in the math with me, not the folklore. Let’s actually start to walk through some of this. I have used this chart over and over to sort of open up the discussion. The numbers are actually already out of date because we are this far into the 2026 fiscal year, and the math is actually uglier than we expected it to be, but the reason you should see this: See the blue area here? That is all your Member of Congress gets to vote on unless we have a reconciliation budget. We have been using the reconciliation budgets, functionally, to spend more money because of the dysfunction in the U.S. Senate. When you start to look over here, Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, other things that are in the formulas, and interest, I need everyone to understand something: Social Security is the number one spend in our government and probably will come in about $1.6 trillion. Interest may come in as high as $1.3 trillion this year, becoming the second biggest expenditure in our government. Medicare will be about $1.1 trillion. Medicaid will come in at about $1 trillion, Medicaid and ObamaCare subsidies. Defense, the thing that is in the Constitution, will come in at number five. Your government is an insurance company with an army. I beg of you to think about the math. If you are one of the people saying that it is all waste and fraud, yes, there is a bunch of that, but it is a fraction of this total. The primary driver, if you just listen to those numbers, when interest will be $1.3 trillion this year--and I am going to show you a couple of charts--in a decade, 9 budget years, interest will be the majority of the borrowing. We will be borrowing money to have enough cash to pay the interest. I have done speech after speech behind these microphones talking about interest fragility, and it seems no one knows what the hell I am talking about. Have you paid attention to what is happening in the bond markets over the last couple of weeks? It is happening all over the industrialized world because we are all on a borrowing binge. Interest rates are starting to move up to points where it is absolutely uncomfortable. About 1\1/2\ months ago, I did a presentation here and showed you how you want to deal with affordability on housing, and I showed you the academic paper that basically said that interest rates are a full percent higher in the United States than they need to be because of the borrowing from the Federal Government. If we don’t figure out a way to start to convince the bond market--I am going to say this multiple times. If we don’t start to convince the bond market that we are going to start being fiscally responsible, the future starts to look really ugly. Let’s actually walk through a couple of these things. Have you ever heard someone start to talk about the death spiral? Look, it is not that hard. You borrow lots of money. You basically have to refinance it, so you are constantly subject to whatever the new interest rates are, and I am going to show you some charts that show much of the refinancing--because we have to refinance $10 trillion to $11 trillion this year, and a lot of that was originally borrowed at much lower interest rates. It is not only the borrowing of today. You are going to borrow $2.2 trillion to $2.3 trillion publicly to raise some $100 billion internally. That is where you borrow money from the trust fund, Social Security, Medicare, which those trust funds are gone, functionally, in 6 years. The $10 trillion that has to be refinanced is now subject to the higher interest rates of today. That is interest fragility because you start hitting an expectation where those interest rates drive you up, so you have to borrow more money and borrow more money. You basically end up in the death spiral because now you are borrowing money, and this even happened last year. We had a couple of months where we had to borrow money to have enough cash to pay for our borrowing. Does anyone care? Are we actually allowed to talk about it? Is it just because around the hallways around this place, there are armies of lobbyists, armies of people showing up in our offices, and they functionally want one of two things: Give me more money or regulate, control, push my competition so I have sort of no one to compete with. Washington, D.C., is a protection racket. It is a protection racket for business models and bureaucracies that don’t want to reform, don’t want to compete, don’t want to deal with that economic model we all learned in high school, creative destruction, where someone does something better. Do you remember Blockbuster Video? If they had shown up here, maybe if they had hired enough lobbyists, we would have slowed down the internet so that Netflix wouldn’t have put them out of business. That is how perverse this place has become. Where are my free market brothers and sisters? Look, some of these are going to be really thick, but it is important to understand. The interest rate movements, do you see these spikes out here? These are all the different countries--U.S., this one is Germany, Japan, U.K. Understand that the industrialized countries, we all have a demographic problem. We don’t have enough young people, and we have borrowed stunning amounts of money to maintain the benefits. All over the world--and the reason I am showing this chart is that if one of these countries, like Japan, was having trouble a couple of weeks ago and starts to hit a cascade event--I know there is probably no one out there who actually paid attention and remembers things like the Tequila Crisis of the 1990s. Cascade events start to shoot up those interest rates, and when you are carrying a total of $40 trillion in debt, $32 trillion to $33 trillion of that we have sold, $10 trillion of it we have to refinance every year, do you understand the danger you have put this country in? We come behind these microphones all day long. We talk about the things we are angry about, worried about, this and that, what is really good politically, you know, set off some dopamine hits. I know this isn’t what we like to talk about in our elections. It is also the thing that will bring this Republic down if we don’t get our act together. Let’s actually have some real fun here. An increase in dependency on the market-based--the reason I am showing you this chart is one of the things that is happening around the world and been happening to U.S. debt for the last couple of years is a lot of the Federal Reserve banks of different countries have been sort of holding their amount of U.S. debt steady as we are still borrowing more money, meaning more and more of our debt is being purchased by bond houses, trading houses. If you actually are someone who is crazy enough to watch bond futures and how many basis points they move, this is one of the things that should scare you. The debt is being purchased by those who trade it, pledge it, buy options on it, sell it. There is an argument that we have much more fragility. When the central Bank of Japan or Germany or someone else buys U.S. debt, they are holding it basically as an offset to their own currency, and it is stable. We don’t have to worry about them throwing it into the market. A whole portion of our debt today is in play, so those of you who used to say: I don’t want other countries buying our debt--I can show you chart after chart. We buy their stuff. If they are willing to buy our debt, it pushes down our interest rates, and if it is their central banks buying it, it actually makes our debt more stable. Let’s actually start to understand how dangerous what is going on is. U.S. 10-year yields are among the highest in the G10. I will tell you, today Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. Start to understand this: The only country right now in our 10-year bond as a peak of the G10 is Great Britain. They pay a higher interest rate. We hit 4.8 today. We are the red chart here. When you start to realize Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan--but Spain and Greece also are selling 10-year bonds cheaper than the United States. I believe we are like 13 or 14 in the debt stack of industrialized countries. Meaning, the market has decided they are more creditworthy than the United States even though we are the reserve currency of the world. Doesn’t that set off some alarm bells to anyone with an intellect? So, more charts. Let’s see if I am making a point yet. U.S. 10-year yields are among the highest in the G10. You start to take a look at what is going on, and we are up here. You must understand it is not only the bonds we can sell, but the interest rates carry. There is a risk premium. In the bond market we call it a term premium on U.S. debt. Shouldn’t this actually drive us crazy? If you actually look at the compounding piling of new debt being sold--remember, in the United States this year--and we have a fairly decent economy--for every dollar we are taking in in tax collection, we are spending $1.40. It is actually better than last year. Last year for every $1 we took in, we spent $1.43. Mr. Speaker, $1 in, $1.40 out? Come on, people. Yet, I see polling. None of this is an election issue because we have a public that wants things. I am sorry. I have done all these budget presentations in my own State. I love my State. I represent one of the greatest districts on Earth, but I have even done some in other places around the country. The number of times I will spend 45 minutes with these slides showing what is going on, showing data that a child born today--so I have a 4-year-old we have adopted. It is the greatest joy. My wife and I, I cannot express how blessed we are. My little boy who just turned 4 about 3 weeks ago, we need 104 percent of his lifetime earnings just to pay the pensions of the Federal Government. Is that moral? Is that what our country has become is basically screw the next generation? I want every dime I can get my hands on? This is the morality of what this country is. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of things we could be doing, but this game of sitting here and saying, well, I am going to save a million dollars here, because I am going to be speaking here for almost an hour. During that hour we are going to borrow about $320 million. We will often have debates here where during the time of the debate we will have borrowed substantially more than everything we debated trying to save. We are borrowing about $7.5 billion a day--$7.5 billion a day. We have had some days where we are borrowing $8 billion. Some days we are borrowing $7 billion. It is close to $90,000 every second. And yet, time after time after time when I do those presentations around the country, the first hand that goes up is someone that says: I want more money. I want more benefits; I want more this. A few years ago I did a presentation on the debt and deficit and demographics. Remember, the primary driver of our debt is our demographics. I would love to blame the Democrats. The things they did in the Inflation Reduction Act now we are still paying the price for because there was a report a couple days ago about what is happening in Medicare part D and the explosion of some of the costs there. It is great. And we have done things also. But it is demographics. We as a country basically, and the entire industrialized world, we haven’t had enough children. We have functionally gone 30, 40 years without having enough children. So think of this: In the next year or two we will have fewer people under 18 than we had 20, 25 years ago but double the number of people 65 and up. God knows, I will be one of them. In some of the reports, I think--one I got from Manhattan Institute a couple years ago--was basically saying for every dollar I will have put into Medicare I am going to get about $6, $7 back in spending. And most of Medicare is borrowed--excuse me, most of Medicare comes from the general fund. This is the reality. Are we allowed to tell the truth about math or at this moment is there someone on a blog saying: I am going make crap up about math because it hurts my feelings. It is not about feelings. It is what comes off of a calculator. So let’s actually walk through a little bit more there. Estimated annualized cost of refinancing. This is something that is really important. If you can’t convince the debt markets that we are creditworthy, that we belong having lower interest rates--all this has to be refinanced, and we are refinancing it now at higher interest rates. This is what we were borrowing before. Remember back in 2021 during parts of COVID or even a bit after the 2008 financial debacle, interest rates stayed very low and we spent and borrowed and borrowed and borrowed. Guess what. We have to refinance it now. Now, often we are refinancing things that were coming in at half of a percent, 1 percent, and now we are coming in at 5 percent, 4.5 percent. Remember, today’s 10-year bond hit 4.8 today. The bond futures, if you actually go and look at it right now, are predicted to be over 5 percent by the end of the year, on the 10-year. You do realize what that means? That means over 7 percent mortgage rates on a 30-year debt. Does anyone care? I know these types of charts are almost impossible to read and impossible to see, so come back over here. Do you see the light purple compared to the darker purple? All I am trying to show you there is that most of the future financing is driven by interest, not the actual debt. The CBO number for 2036, 9 budget years from now--and I am going to show you the number that CBO gave us back in February is wrong because of interest rates moving up. But back then in February, the number was, in 2036, 9 budget years from now, you will have a $3.1 trillion debt. Mr. Speaker, $2.1 trillion of it was just interest. Mr. Speaker, $1 trillion was actual structural deficit. What happens in a world where the primary driver of your debt is actually paying the interest on previous spending? The moral question I want you to think about is: Is borrowing a tax hike? I am serious. We have spent money. We are obligated now to pay interest on it. We are pulling that cash out of the economy so it doesn’t go into the investment of you buying a house or a new business or those things. Is it a tax hike? I would argue it is a tax hike with interest. Now back to reality. The primary driver of U.S. debt and the debt from the entire industrialized world is our demographics. Here is where the numbers need to start sinking in of how difficult this math actually is. At current interest rates, the deficit grows to $3.8 trillion in 9 years. Remember a moment ago, I told you the CBO from February said 3.1 in 2036, which is 9 budget years from now? Now it is 3.8. David, where did $700 billion come from? It came from just the changes in interest rates. Do you somehow think magically the interest rates are about to go down? It is not in the futures market. It is not happening in any of the other countries. Look at what is happening in Japan. I believe Japan today hit interest rates they hadn’t seen in decades and decades and decades. Maybe the entire world is tired of giving those who are bingeing on debt a free ride. Understand, these numbers should scare the hell out of you because you are looking at a world where, in 2036--so 9 budget years--we take in $8.3 trillion. Hey, yea. However, we spend $12.17 trillion, and that is based on today’s models. Will there be a war? Will there be another pandemic? Will there be another disaster? Think about what is going on at this moment. I was in the Grand Canyon this last weekend and watched the floods. Is the super El Nino going to require spending? The last big one like this, we spent $1 trillion around the world in damage. Are we going to ever have anything like that? Are we going to have another earthquake? Are we going to have any fires? There is this concept of fragility both in interest rates and when you run, pretending that everything is going to be fine--we are just going to follow the law as it is. When you see CBO numbers, remember, Congressional Budget Office is required to follow certain rules. That is one of the great scams here. Do you follow what we expect to happen or do we say, hey, remember the paygo? The rule is: Hey, if the spending stops in 5 years, you don’t have to count it against future deficits, so we do that with things. Hey, we are going to just do this, and then, boom, it is going to go away. You notice that it never happens. Please, I have one or two more boards here that I want you to memorize if you care. If you actually look at current interest rates, debt to GDP grows to 162 percent in 10 years. If you do total debt-- remember, this is total debt--so you are over 100 percent of debt to GDP. Remember, the U.S. economy is basically estimated to be about $32 to $33 trillion. Right now, we are close to $33 trillion in publicly sold debt. That is when we sell it to your pension plans, sell it to your retirement account, sell it to a nice family on the other side of the world, sell it to another sovereign reserve bank. However, if you do also the internal borrowing--when we borrow money from the trust funds, we have to pay it back with interest. The rest of the world actually calculates their debt that way. When you hear us say, well, we are only at 101 or 102 percent of debt, that is publicly sold debt, not debt we owe. We are at 127 percent right now. In 9 budget years, we will be at 162 percent. Now, here is why that should set off alarm bells. I am going to give this to you in two ways. Understand, when you pay your taxes on your income, here is what we call the FICA tax, this is your payroll tax, this is the Social Security tax, this is your Medicare tax, this is the unemployment tax, this is disability. Those are designated for certain uses. The other part of your income tax, the corporate income tax, tariffs, excise taxes, those things are over here. If I say I segregate the things that are going functionally to your retirement and your unemployment, segregate those, of the other types of taxes this year, 29 percent will just pay interest. This year. In 9 budget years, 10 years from now, 2036, almost half of nonpayroll taxes--once again, your Social Security, your Medicare, unemployment, those things--almost half of the taxes this country will collect will be just interest. Is anyone starting to see the problem? This is what you call interest fragility. This is where you start to burn down. This is where you are chasing your tail, where you are actually having to raise taxes or dramatically cut spending just to be able to cover your bonded indebtedness. How many care? Well, the bond market finally has woken up and is starting to care. Let’s actually walk through--this next one, if this doesn’t scare you half to death, you aren’t listening. We took a look. AEI did a model, Columbia, University of Minnesota, the Penn Wharton Budget Model basically built models saying, hey, when you hit this level of debt to the size of your economy, the interest you are producing makes it so you hit a death spiral. Basically, their models crash. We have models crashing at 154 percent. Do you remember the last chart I just showed you? It was maybe two charts ago. It said in 9 budget years, in 2036, you actually have over 160 percent of debt to GDP. You already have models saying we have crashed, the economy no longer works. I hope it is wrong, but I need you to understand, this isn’t decades from now. This isn’t your great-grandkids who are going to figure out how you screwed--excuse me--what you handed them. This is now. This is in the next decade. What the hell is wrong with us? Let’s save that here because this is the point I am trying to make. This is here safe, we basically have enough cash flow to cover our interest and our obligations and still be a decent credit risk. However, when you start to hit 2035, you have enough models--how long is 2035 from now? In 2035, you are basically walking into what is technically referred to as a crisis zone. That is when any damn thing, something goes wrong on the other side of the world--we have a hurricane, we have an earthquake, this and that, the credit markets, the debt markets start to get nervous, start to raise our costs. Remember that joke you have heard over and over? How did you go bankrupt? Slowly at first, and then suddenly very fast. Understand how bad these numbers are. In 2050, we are basically what we refer to as the default zone. You have such a debt and interest obligation that you have functionally no capacity. This number isn’t even 2036, it is 2035 the models say we start to step into the danger zone. This is somewhat assuming that today’s interest rates don’t continue to go up on us. Those of us who are children of the 1970s and 1980s, today’s interest rates are still low compared to that. My first house, I had a 12 percent mortgage on it. Yet, I try and try and try to do things. Let’s have a deficit commission, let’s deal with it. David, we can’t talk about that, voters will get cranky. The voters want free stuff. Really? You are willing to burn down the Republic? Does anyone do math? For my liberal friends here who say: Why don’t we just raise taxes? Go onto the internet, there is this amazing thing called the internet. Go look up the Manhattan Institute. Look up Riedl, an economist, who did a great paper about a year and a half ago, basically took every tax hike that the Bernie Sanders and the Warrens of the world and shows it basically will raise about 1.5 to 1.78 percent of GDP. I am going to say this multiple times, Mr. Speaker. Just to cover the deficit, you need 7.7 percent of GDP. If you don’t have a 7.7 percent growth in GDP right now, you cannot keep up with how fast the debt is growing. Interest this year, interest this year just will be 3.2, maybe 3.3 percent of the entire economy, so that interest is growing faster than this economy is. However, Mr. Speaker, we are really not supposed to tell people the truth about that, so I beg of you, everyone who just heard that, please wipe it out of your memory. Mr. Speaker, if this doesn’t terrify you, then you are not paying attention or you don’t do basic math. I beg of you, Mr. Speaker, net interest is a share of revenue and GDP in 2056. Now, why is Schweikert saying: Hey, that is 30 years from now? I would love to sell bonds that are long into the curve. Mr. Speaker, you buy a 30-year bond today, did you notice over the last couple weeks we have had a little bit of a problem? We have had the Treasury basically offering to do a twist. Twist is where you borrow short term and spend it over here by buying longer term bonds to try to create a shortage there so the interest rate goes down. When there is demand for a bond, then the price goes down. When there is not enough demand, Mr. Speaker, then you have to pay a higher interest rate. In 2056, that is 30 years from now, the calculations from the Treasury itself, so the Treasury is trying to sell you a 30-year bond, the Treasury itself says that we are over 250 percent of debt to GDP. I am going to go out and buy a 30-year bond today because I trust this place that we are going to get our fiscal act together. When we get down to the last couple of boards here, we are going to start to talk about what fiscal consolidation is. That is because people keep throwing out these fancy words and don’t explain what it means. I beg of you, Mr. Speaker, take a look at this chart. In 30 years, my 4-year-old son will be how old? Thirty-four. It is not hard math. Hopefully, he will just really be getting his life and his economics going. Hopefully, starting to consider having a family, the things that I dream of for him. Mr. Speaker, 11.3 percent of the entire economy will be just interest from the Federal Government. Noninterest will be another 22 percent of Federal spending. Add that up in your head, Mr. Speaker. We are basically saying: Hey, we are going to have to have 35-some percent of the entire economy, 34 percent of the entire economy will just be Federal spending. However, every model we have basically says that we are only going to be about 18, 19 percent of the entire economy taking in taxes. Does anyone see a math problem? Time after time after time I have been here, and we play tough. We negotiate for a deal. In 2011, we were going to actually do sequestration. Then the very next day, I cannot tell you how many Senators said: David, we need to break the sequestration. I need more spending on something. I want a new aircraft carrier. I want this. I want that. Take a look at the number of times we have done debt deals, Mr. Speaker. Do you notice the curve still goes up? It is because spending is an addiction, and it buys us votes. It buys us love, and we screw our kids and our own retirement. Remember, how I showed you a little while ago, Mr. Speaker, how some of this is now hitting in the next 10 years? How many of you intend to still be alive and maybe in your own retirement in the next 10 years? This isn’t generations away from now. This is us. There was a comment the other day that, well, we are just going to start taking the general account. That is basically, right now the Treasury is holding almost $1 trillion in cash. I assume they are building up cash from everything, from having to pay tariff refunds to the fact that this coming January we are back up against the debt ceiling. If we don’t raise the debt ceiling, we will do what is called extraordinary measures where you basically are spending some of your cash reserves and reaching into all sorts of other accounts and spending them. And you do owe that money back. I was told: David, we are going to just cover things off of the general fund accounts. Mr. Speaker, you need 41 of them. Really? We say things and we hear things like this. They are told this on cable television, on the internet. We will get people who will call us and say: David, if you just took care of waste and fraud, then we would be fine. Then you send them the paper saying: Hey, there may be a couple hundred billion dollars of waste and fraud. Let’s talk about that for a moment. We are borrowing about $2.5 trillion this year. Understand, Mr. Speaker, when we say waste and fraud, fraud over here is criminal. Waste is much more uncomfortable to talk about. I can show you paper after paper after paper, Mr. Speaker. Let’s talk about Medicaid. It is the Federal-State program with which we are supposed to be helping indigents and poor people. It is perverse to say this, Mr. Speaker, but do you know States actually have an economic incentive to look the other way with things that you and I would consider almost criminal or waste? That is because it is Federal cash coming into their State stimulating their economy. So when they do things like a bed tax, which is basically a three-legged stool on a disproportionate share where you will actually look the other way. But David, it is cash coming into our State. But we are borrowing it. My State of Arizona, 45 percent of the entire State’s budget--when you look at the total spend, Mr. Speaker, not what is appropriated from the legislature, total spend--45 percent comes from the Federal Government. We borrow most of that money. We are borrowing money over here. You don’t see a problem, Mr. Speaker? Now let’s talk about the fancy term that is being thrown around: We need to do fiscal consolidation. Yay. How many of you know what the hell that is? We have countries like, I think I actually put a couple of them on my charts, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, but there have been others that did what is called fiscal consolidation. Basically they cleaned up their finances. Greece has been doing it now for one decade, and remember, once again, Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States because its future creditworthiness is better than ours. The average of these countries is about 85/15, that means 15 percent new taxes, 85 percent cuts in spending. What we learned is we always have to do the cuts in spending first. That is because when we think about our President George H. Bush, he made a deal saying: All right. We are going to do some fiscal consolidation. We will allow these taxes here to go up, but we are going to cut all this spending. They did the taxes. They never got a dime of the cuts. Mr. Speaker, you always have to do the cuts first. The cuts don’t have to--there is so much of our government we could revolutionize: The cost of healthcare, if we legalized technology, if we do things better, faster, and cheaper. Yet here today we had some of my brothers and sisters here introduce a piece of legislation that basically made adopting technology to reduce the price of healthcare illegal, because that is what the lobbyists want. Why don’t they care about the future? Do they not see the math? Every single workday I have been texting out something we call the daily debt. I have been doing this for years. I am blessed to chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am number four on Ways and Means. I have been doing the investigations of the fraud. We send this out. I have had more Members of Congress cancel it than subscribe to it. The excuse is: I don’t want the negativity, David. It is not negativity. It is called math. My reason--and this is almost hard to understand--is these different countries, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand that did fiscal consolidations, the underlying message in here is they cut spending. Once they had met those goals, they did changes in their tax system to get rid of leakage, but they did the cuts first. Debt reduction in the United States has been and will be possible with fiscal consolidation. We can do it. There are ways to do it, but you have to see what is happening over here. That spike in spending and borrowing isn’t a new bridge or new military spending. It is demographics. Our brothers and sisters have earned benefits. We owe them, and we are not willing to do the things to do it better, faster, and cheaper. I have done presentation after presentation over the years of the unified theory: How do you maximize economic growth? How do you maximize fairness? How do you maximize the future to be stable? There are a lot of inputs. You have to have really uncomfortable conversations, Mr. Speaker, talent-based immigration, the adoption of technology, the redesign of smart regulations, instead of bureaucratic regulations. Stop the leakage where States basically are scamming parts of our expense sharing. We have laid out all these steps as a unified theory because it turns out one of them doesn’t get you well. We introduced a piece of legislation over 1 year ago: MedPAC. It is this big binder that is on every Congressman’s--actually it is probably in their trash can. We get it a couple of times a year. This was the organization that was designed to keep an eye on Medicare, particularly Medicare Advantage. These are the experts. We pay them. They will tell you there is a trillion to almost $2 trillion of leakage just from Medicare Advantage. I like Medicare Advantage. I have some simple suggestions: Stop the risk scoring and make it a true capitated model; get rid of the ObamaCare-type of star ratings, where you basically make it a true capitated model where you are paid to help people stay healthier. What if it is a trillion dollars over 10 years? What if it is $1.5 trillion? We had a preliminary score on a piece of legislation. We came in at $1.84 trillion, making it the single biggest savings bill in U.S. history, and I can’t get another Member of Congress to sponsor the bill because you have to get your head kicked in by the lobbyists from the insurance companies. I would argue it is free market. When we use the term ``waste and fraud,’’ you have to understand the waste is how we design programs. I guess we would rather borrow $90,000 a second, put your retirement at risk, and basically live in a world where every dataset says our children will be the first American children to be poorer than their parents. Yes, you have technology, AI, synthetic biology, all the things, automation, but remember, you also have a country that is at basically zero population growth. We can make the math work, but once again, unless you are ready to deal with the reality of the math, just to cover the current growth of debt, you need a GDP that grows 7.7--not 3--7.7 percent a year. How do I get our brothers and sisters who are in positions of power-- whether it be us here in Congress, the administration, the think tanks, the groups out there that just want more money--to bathe in the truth? I guess for many of them, saving this Republic isn’t worth it. I am going to go down fighting for this. This is an amazing country. We have done more good for the world than any country in human history. If we don’t get our act together, we are going to bring down the world economy with us. Mr. Speaker, I yield back.”

• Little substance
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  Speech in the House

  Signal 44 of 100

  Much of this statement went to praise, blame, greetings, routine procedure or general stories rather than reasons, requests or specific points.

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“Our national debt is close to $40 trillion, and we are borrowing another trillion every 123 days. Soon, paying interest on this debt will cost more than Social Security or the military. Congress must keep its promise to act on bills that cut waste and stop this borrowing before it ruins our economy.”

“Mr. Speaker, let’s try something I have never done before, but I also need to sort of lock something down. Mr. Speaker, if there is anyone from your staff watching--and we said we would make it public-- my team and myself were made a promise today that when we get back we are going to sit down with a couple of the committee chairs and some of my joint economic economists because we have been sitting on pieces of legislation for over a year to cut spending and borrowing, without removing services. There will be lobbyists who will yell and scream. There will be activists who make their money. Mr. Speaker pro tempore, over and over and over around here, we spent the last few months--as a matter of fact, I came behind this microphone probably half a dozen times talking about waste and fraud and walking through all the things we found. How many bills have we moved through here that actually take those things on? Turns out it is harder than you think because the fraud, as it turns out, it is fairly easy to identify. It is a little hard to stop. Often, it is money that has already gone out the door, so we have to hunt someone down, try to collect the money, and put someone in jail. When you hear the term ``waste,’’ it is often our fault. We designed a program that has leakage, or certain companies have found ways to take advantage of it, certain bureaucracies. I will give you a simple example. This is going to make sense in a moment. In New York City, in the last 5 years the number one job creator turns out to be a Medicaid program for home visiting. Think of that. The number one job creator for half a decade in New York City is a Medicaid program. Even when the leftist Democrat Governor of New York says, yeah, it is fraud, maybe we could do something together. We have worked over and over and over to try to write bills. Many of them are very uncomfortable because they are complex. They require changing things in what we call entitlements. They are moral, and they are necessary. I hope I am not a fool. One year ago, when we actually did part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Family Tax Cut Act, yes, we had an obligation to extend the tax policy and do some of the pro-growth things. When we came back, many of us thought we had negotiated an agreement that when we did the second reconciliation bill, we were going to start to save the future of this country, save the future of the economy, convince the bond market we weren’t going to continue to borrow ourselves into oblivion. It turns out--and this isn’t solely the Speaker’s fault--it was really hard to convince a lot of our Members how difficult it is to go home and tell the truth about math. Mr. Speaker, if your staff is out there listening, I expect you and this institution to keep your promise to our team, that we are going to take these bills seriously, we are going to bring in the leadership from the committees, and we are going to pound it out how we move them forward. There is a reason--I am sorry, I don’t mean to sound like a melodramatic jerk. How many of you get our daily debt? The Joint Economic Committee actually built a system where every single day, every workday, we reach into the Treasury’s management system where they have these charts and graphs, and we capture what was borrowed today, what was brought to market today, and what was sold today. Who in this room, the handful of us who are here and hopefully the thousand televisions we are on, understand over the last 12 months--if I do the last 12 months average, $93,763 is what we are borrowing every second. Every second, we are borrowing over $93,000. I understand some of these numbers bounce up and down because we also had some refunding issues after the last debt ceiling issue a year ago, but in the last 12 months, we, as a government, have borrowed $2.948 trillion if you just want to do this fiscal year. Here is the publicly sold debt, and over here is the money we borrow from the trust funds, which we do pay interest back. We have to intellectually be honest: It is borrowing. Often we quote what we borrowed from the public because that is in the public bond market, but when we borrow from the trust funds--Social Security, Medicare, railroad, retirement, everything else. We pay an interest. We owe it back. We are now at $2.022 trillion in borrowing this fiscal year. This total year, the original projections were $1.6 trillion, $1.7 trillion. We are heading to borrowing $2.3 trillion. I know it is hard to see 12 zeros. I know no one cares, but just understand, this is really crappy. Maybe we all understand this number. At the current rate of total borrowing--remember, net borrowing is borrowing from the public. Gross borrowing is borrowing from the public and from the trust funds. Anyone want to take a guess how many days it takes us to borrow another trillion dollars? It is 123 days. Every 123 days, we are ticking off another trillion dollars. Total U.S. debt as of today is $39.660 trillion. By the end of this summer work period, whatever we want to call it, we are going to be at $40 trillion. Doesn’t this make anyone pucker up, or is the joke that is often said here, never near a microphone because we would be an idiot to say in front of a microphone, no one ever gets unelected by spending too much money because the public wants it. In 6 years, when you are on Social Security and you are getting a 22 to 24 percent cut in your check, and we double poverty of seniors, 7 years from now when we double the number of baby boomers who live on the street, maybe some of this will make sense, that we should have done something much sooner, but math is math. Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons I am a little exercised this week-- and you have been in conference with those things. I accept I have been a bit of a jerk. I am just trying to find some way to be heard. I have been doing the same damn thing behind this microphone for 15 years, and it has only gotten worse. Something is wrong when--I am number four in Ways and Means. I chair Oversight in Ways and Means. I chair the Joint Economic Committee. We have a handful of Ph.D. economists who are just smart, yet I walk into a room of my brothers and sisters, Democrats, even Republicans, with my charts and almost get booed because we don’t want to hear it. We are going to bring down this Republic, and it is not going to be some mob coming over the border. It is going to be our own fiscal insanity. Remember, in about 25, 26 months, the majority of our spending, not tax collection, spending, will go to our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up. We are functionally an insurance company with an Army. Last year, for every dollar we took in taxes, we spent $1.43. If you do the basic math, and forgive me, I did this off the top of my head. If I make a mistake, send me an angry text like everyone else. I think right now, so far this fiscal year, for every dollar we are taking in, we are spending $1.47. I am sorry the staff has to sit here and hear an idiot like me constantly coming back up behind this microphone and saying the same thing week after week, but what do we do to cut through? I am going to show a couple boards here. If you are the public and run into a Member of Congress or someone running for Congress, look at them and don’t say, what more are you going to give me? I want more money. Ask them, how are you going to save the country? Because about a week ago, our team met with, I think it was the Penn Wharton Budget Model, and the paperwork and the discussion I had with them after, I walked out of the room and my stomach hurt. They had numbers where in 14 years we hit a wall. They had numbers saying 12 to 14 years--I am going to show you that I have it even sooner on some of our data--interest is the number one expense of this government. It surpasses Social Security. There was a discussion if we go with current policy--and we are going to talk about that, current policy, not current law, because this is the scam we keep doing here. We keep extending our spending and extending these things. The current policy in 14 years, the United States actually can’t sell any more bonds. We have hit the wall. We hit a debt spiral. I have been here 16 years. All right. Let’s do this. Let’s run through these boards. Everyone has seen this over and over because, traditionally, I start with this one. This is just the pie chart. If you see what is in blue, that is what I, as a Member of Congress, typically get to vote on. Do you see the red? That is actually on autopilot. I need you to understand Social Security is the number one spend. Interest is the number two spend. Medicare is the number three spend. Medicaid and the ObamaCare subsidies are the number four spend. Defense is number five. How many times do we get liberals saying if we just cut defense, we will balance everything? No. Interest will be bigger than all of defense this year. It is not that hard. When we talk about these reconciliation bills, and now we are talking about possibly doing a fourth one, and that is what I am banking my sanity on is most of this red--now, you don’t get to do anything on interest. Interest we owe. Remember, this is net interest. Gross interest is actually closer to like--sorry. We will be close to $1.280 trillion because we owe the interest back to the trust funds. The other parts here are what we call mandatory. We owe Medicare. We made a deal. We owe Social Security. We made a deal. Does that mean we can’t do things to revolutionize the cost of healthcare and Medicare and make it more accessible, more efficient, more price effective? When we think, we actually will spend $350 billion over the next 10 years in duplicative MRI scans, X-rays, ultrasounds, CTs. How about this crazy idea of: Hey, I got a scan. Put it on your phone so when you go to your next doctor, they hit the button and it is there on the screen. There will be an army of lobbyists who work for companies that make money on the duplicative scans, and they will fight us and embarrass us. Maybe they will hire social media stars. I tried do a reform and a fix on some of the things we saw from the MedPAC report where it was costing us hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, not fraud. The Department of Justice may actually have an opinion on this one. It was on Medicare part C. We call it Medicare Advantage. The next day, some marketing firm defending one of the insurance companies was hiring social media stars to beat the crap out of me for talking about trying to fix the bleeding of Medicare Advantage. That is one of the reasons we get so cowed around here. We are trying to explain why we are trying to save these systems, and there is so much money in that waste. Part of that money goes to beat the crap out of us to stop us from reforming government. Let’s actually walk through something, just a simple concept. A week or two ago, I did a presentation here showing you the academic literature and the things that our economists have worked on showing that government borrowing has made your mortgage one point higher. Today, when you go out and try to get a new 30-year loan and it is, what, 6.7 today, it would be 5.7 if we weren’t grabbing so damn much money out of the marketplace. We are partially responsible, if not substantially responsible, for affordability in America. But when we go home and do a townhall or meetings, it is person after person that wants more money from us. Maybe Congress is just basically representing the interests of the public. They don’t care about the bankruptcy, the stress, those things. Technically, governments don’t go bankrupt, but basically what we are going to have to do is monetize this debt. Don’t laugh at me. My wife and I are the same age. We have a 4-year- old boy. He was here a couple of weeks ago, cute as can be, just turned 4. For his fourth birthday, he wanted to go to work with Daddy. We need 104 percent of his lifetime earnings, every dime he will ever make in his life, plus another 4 percent, just to pay for Federal Government pensions: Social Security, Medicare, military. That is 104 percent. This is what we have done to our kids. Now, part of it is because we have so few children and so many of us that have gray hair. It is called baby boomers. It is just math. So I’m trying to explain a simple concept. We do more borrowing and spending, but we also have this thing called leakage. That is where we have misdesigned programs, and outsiders, businesses, insurance companies, bureaucracies have figured out how to bleed those programs because we screwed up on their design and haven’t been willing to go back and turn around and fix them. We end up having to borrow more money. When we borrow more money, we push up interest rates. When we push up interest rates, we have just made everything less affordable. We have created this doom loop. The only way to break it is to convince those markets we are not just going to keep borrowing like crazy. Then we have these charts, and I keep trying to explain this. There is this concept--it is a big word--interest fragility. Interest goes up, and it beats the ever living crap out of us. Think about what has happened today. Today, I believe the 10-year bond closed at 4.65, 4.67. It is functioning at pretty close to the highest it has been in a year and some of the highest it has been in many years. Let’s play a game here. Let’s assume that it is 60 basis points, 70 basis points higher than the average we were having before. Remember, you are going to keep having people say: Well, the reason the interest rates are up is because of the war in Iran. They were ticking up before that because of the worldwide battle for capital. Other countries are also bingeing on debt. We have data centers and other things coming to market bingeing on debt. We are all competing with each other. Because when you borrow money, you are borrowing from the world’s pool of savings. It could be your savings account, your pension, a family in China. We all put our moneys into our banks and savings institutions and investment institutions. That is what is referred to as the world’s savings pool. Ray Dalio talks about this repeatedly. The problem is our need for the savings or the need for the borrowing is now starting to outstrip the world’s excess capital. When that happens, interest rates go up. When you take a look at what we are doing right now, for the fun of it, let’s just say it is only 60 basis points and it is over the next 10 years. Just that bond interest rate we have had recently over the last couple of months, it is $2 trillion of additional interest over the 10 years. It is called interest fragility, little bits of interest increases, and you are basically borrowing $40 trillion. That little bit kicks us in the head, and that is how you start to head toward that interest debt spiral. Let’s actually dig into this: 30-year Treasury yields are approaching their longest stretch above 5 percent since 2007. It is here. It is not some theory of mine. You know, Schweikert is an idiot. He is going to talk about interest fragility. No one cares. Ta-da, it is here. I can show you some interest rate future contracts out there. Jamie Dimon, I think it was yesterday--and I am reading a third-party article--is basically saying he would not buy long-term U.S. debt, the tens, twenties, thirties. Should that tell us something? Because expectation is interest rates are going to go up, because when interest rates go up, the existing bond crashes in value. You have got to understand. It is here. It has begun. If we as a body don’t start to convince the bond market that we are starting to get control of our ravenous borrowing, that bond market is going to run this country. Because--what was it--Carville basically said in the nineties, talked about how the bond market basically shaped policy. Our debt is dramatically bigger today, and our competition for borrowing--how do I put this? Mr. Speaker, how many of us believe the United States is the most creditworthy country in the world? We have the most liquidity in the markets. We are the reserve currency, though we are starting to lose that because of the way we treat our currency and the way we borrow. When Greece, Spain, and these sorts of countries can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States--Greece can sell it substantially less expensive. So can Spain. When Italy can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States, should we start to worry? Last I looked on one of my industrialized countries list we were like number 13 on the credit stack. You have got to understand what is going on here. This is one of the ones that just stresses me out. Maybe I shouldn’t drink so much coffee, and maybe I should double up on my hypertension medicine. But outside of that, let’s take a look here: Gross interest will surpass Social Security in 2037. This is 10 budget years from now. Our math is now saying--now, when we say gross interest, that is the interest we are paying back to Social Security, Medicare, all of the trust funds, and what we have to sell to the public. This is baseline policy, not current law, baseline policies. We have been doing it. I need you to think about something. This is with no wars. This is with no pandemics. This is with no disasters. In functionally 10 years interest is our number one expense of the United States Government. Someone out there help me have the language to move people’s hearts and their intellects. This is terrifying. I know we are not supposed to tell our voters this because we are supposed to happy-talk about how much more we are going to give them. In 6 years and 2 months, the Medicare trust fund is gone. If you are in healthcare, your hospital is getting a 12 percent cut. How many are going to get to see their doctor at that hospital? During that time, the spend on Medicare goes from $1 trillion to $2 trillion. It is demographics. One or two more boards and then you will be rid of me. More than 30 percent of the Federal revenues will go towards interest in 9 budget years. We have actually done a stressor on this. So the math right now--and this is sort of baseline policy--in 9 budget years, you pay a dollar of taxes, and 31 cents of that--so this is all taxes. This isn’t just income tax. It is not just tariffs. It is all taxes, and 31 cents of that dollar--and in my model because I had a couple of other stressors and slightly higher interest rates built in, but this was using the CBO baseline interest rates, which were already above, it was 33 percent. Are you ready in 9 budget years to have 30 to 33 cents out of every dollar just paying interest? This isn’t crazy. This is actually already in our numbers. It is just that no one dives into them and digs through and goes, oh, dear Heaven, how could this be our country? We are going to avoid actually having the conversation until we get back and the Speaker will keep his promise to our team that have been working on this for a couple of years now of optionality. Yes, it will drive the lobbyists insane. It will drive some of the groups insane and some of the bureaucracies insane because they don’t give a damn about the future of this country. What they care about is their current paycheck. I am going to save the future of this country, or at least give it one more shot before I leave here. These two are really, really important and absolutely dystopian, and I know it is hard to read. Interest costs are projected to eventually consume more than half of all revenues. Not tax revenues, not income tax. All revenues. But here is the punch line. I know this chart is a little hard to read, so I don’t know if the camera can pick it up. When we are saying the 50 percent, it is just the red baseline. If interest rates were to go up to 5.2 percent--Mr. Speaker, what is the 30-year bond at right now? It is pretty much at 5.2 percent. I know that is not our blended rate, but you see the elevation. At current interest rate models, which is actually at 4.2 percent-- which I believe we are now well above because the 2-year is at 4.2 percent. Functionally, let’s take a look here, and it looks like by about 2041, which sounds like a long time--it is about to become the 2027 budget year. It is not that long from here--it is half of all revenue. If interest rates go up, this is actually the collapse of your Republic because you will owe more interest than every tax receipt, every tariff, every corporate tax that everything we sell can produce. The interest load takes us over. It is called the death spiral, and we are not that far away. Some of this starts to hit where you are hitting 80 percent, 90 percent in 14 years from now. You have to understand that those higher interest rates actually just brutalize us as a country. Mr. Speaker, and to the team, last board. I do wish you were allowed to applause and be happy for these things. This is Federal interest costs under various interest rate scenarios. Look, this is a little more the way--if you and I were playing economists, we actually don’t do dollar amounts. We do percentages of GDP because the GDP can grow. But often it is inflation so when we actually start to look at the actual numbers, we actually, right now, estimate this year’s borrowing--now, think of this. The Treasury Secretary, the Budget Director, our own budget team, we all said that we are going to--actually, hundreds of us, I think, actually cosponsored a piece of legislation. We are going to only borrow 3 percent of GDP because we are going to grow at 3 percent of GDP, except we have a problem. As of today, interest is at 3.1 percent to 3.2 percent of GDP--not borrowing. Interest is already over that target. Does anyone pay attention to the actual math, or do we just tell each other stories? But when you start to see the gradual interest rates, we are actually starting to hit a world where I am believing a model where a decade from now, we could be having 11 percent of the entire economy just be interest. Remember, CBO’s numbers from the beginning of the year--and the numbers are worse today--had us, in 9 budget years, total borrowing in 2036 being $3.1 trillion, $2.1 trillion of that just being interest, and the math is worse today. We are not going to pay it off, but we can stabilize it. By stabilizing it, the growth of the economy, those things, we have to get through the baby boomers. It is just math. It is not personal. I am not saying something to hurt someone’s feelings. It is math, and I know Congress and much of our politics now are a math-free, fact-free zone. The bond market will live in facts, and, eventually, it is going to kick us in the head unless we can do some tough things to convince it that we are creditworthy. Mr. Speaker, I am yielding back because I think I used my half hour. I apologize if I hurt someone’s feelings. Please send me a note. I already have prewritten apology notes. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.”

“Our government is borrowing too much money. We borrow about 90,000 dollars every second. Soon, more than half of all federal spending will go to seniors, and there are fewer workers paying into the system. Congress refuses to fix Social Security, Medicare, and high healthcare costs because members are afraid of lobbyists. If we do not stop borrowing, our debt will ruin the country.”

“We did what to shore up the trust funds? We did what to basically incentivize our brothers and sisters to stay in the labor force if they wanted to? We had dozens of things--I have been here 16 years, and I have spent most of that time trying to get this place to actually deal with the reality of let’s save Social Security. Let’s actually save Medicare. Let’s do those things that help us grow. Let’s adopt the technology so we can crash the price of healthcare. I have had some success on the edges, but I lose to the armies of lobbyists that are in the hallways here that lose their minds because we may change their business models. Mr. Speaker, we are now borrowing about $90,000 every second. Today, we will borrow about $7 billion. The current burn rate so far this fiscal year, just this fiscal year, we are going come in close to $2.2 to $2.3 trillion of borrowing, and yet, we have higher interest rates. How long is the bond market going to keep saying we are going to finance you because how much of the benefits that our brothers and sisters who are older have earned we are actually borrowing the money? Seniors per hundred workers--and actually, here is just the simple math. How many of us grew up always hearing you have got 23 people per retiree, and that is how we finance Social Security? I have shown some charts here where in the end of a decade from now, you have about 2.3, and it is this: In 2011, we had 21.9 working-age folks per senior. Today, actually, that number has eroded 47 percent increase in that change. It is almost a 50 percent change in that time, and it actually steepens. Part of the steepening isn’t because we have more seniors. It is also because we have substantially fewer young people. All right. Mr. Speaker, 65 will continue to grow as a share of the population. In 9 budget years, 21.4 percent of the population will be in their benefit ages. Our system wasn’t prepared for this. In 25 or 26 months from now, I should have double checked the math, over half of the Federal spending will go to those of us 65 and up. That is not half of the tax receipts. Remember, if we are borrowing $2.3 trillion on top--but think about that. Our government functionally is an insurance company with an Army. All right. This is actually one of my intense frustrations. Let’s take a look. The trustee’s report projects this significantly more optimistically than the other sources. Remember I showed you a chart there, and I was somewhat mocking the trustee’s report, basically saying they have this magic thing where fertility rates crash and crash and crash, and that is within the next 9 years, and then suddenly, magically it explodes upward. No one else has that. Here is the Medicare and Social Security actuary’s trustees saying, oh, well, we are going to go along, but magically when we get to 2030, they are going to start to go up. This has created a distortion. That is actually why you see groups like my Joint Economic Committee, Penn Wharton, so many of the others, saying the trustees are missing it. The debt the United States is in is dramatically more devastating. Mr. Speaker, 2030, 2035 isn’t that far away. I am sure we are all going to get together and decide we are going to do a debt deficit commission. I am sure we are all going get together and lay out the incentives of how we actually manage this crisis. I am sure we are going to do those things to convince the bond markets that we are creditworthy because here is part of the frustration. Greece, today, can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. Greece today has a better forward credit rating than the United States. We are now 13 or 14 on the credit stack where other countries can actually sell a 10-year bond cheaper than we can. And I keep wondering. I have been coming behind this microphone for almost a decade and a half. We have been introducing pieces of legislation that could revolutionize the costs of healthcare, could actually make government dramatically more efficient, and I almost can’t get a single Member of Congress to consponsor any of this legislation because you have to go to war with all the lobbyists because it means changing the bureaucracies or the business models out there. It is like they basically have this attitude: Screw the society. Screw my kids. Screw your retirement, as long as I don’t have to tell the truth about the math. Today, your government borrowed about $90,000 a second. Yesterday, we borrowed about $90,000 a second. Tomorrow, we are going to borrow--that is like $7 billion today. We will argue for hours here on the floor for millions. I need you to see a chart. If this is a billion dollars, if this is a trillion dollars, millions is basically this tiny little--the lack of calculators here is a destruction of this Republic. There are those who actually tell me, David, it is waste and fraud. It is this and that. I have done presentations to show you our best calculations of waste and fraud. It is a problem, but it is a sliver because the majority of what we call waste and fraud is actually the waste. It is the way we have designed programs. Mr. Speaker, I don’t believe my brothers and sisters here are actually willing to do the hard things and tell the truth about the math and then redesign these programs because it means getting the crap kicked out of you by the lobbying and the business models out there. That means creating a revolution of taking on the debt and deficits. We will pay a remarkable price for the fact that the Penn Wharton models within a decade had us actually already approaching the no-go numbers of being able to sell our U.S. debt. At that point the bonds explode, and the bond market runs this country. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.”