U.S. BORROWS $6 BILLION A DAY

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Congressional Record, Volume 171 Issue 57 (Monday, March 31, 2025) [Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 57 (Monday, March 31, 2025)] [House] [Pages H1366-H1369] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] U.S. BORROWS $6 BILLION A DAY (Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. Schweikert of Arizona was recognized for 30 minutes.) Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, forgive me as we get ourselves organized here. Our friends on the other side ended a little faster than we expected. Mr. Speaker, I am going to do something a little dangerous. Have you heard the saying you should never go to bed mad? I think there should be another rule. You probably shouldn't come behind these microphones cranky, but let's have at it. Mr. Speaker, I have been walking through numbers after numbers. For a decade now, I have come behind this microphone trying to walk through the scale of our borrowing, the scale of what is going on. The fact that most of it is driven by our demographics is giving a little bit of an excuse. Saying that makes it so it is not Democratic or Republican; it is just math. At Home, I represent the Scottsdale-Phoenix area. I am trying to figure out what is going on in our brothers and sisters on the left's heads. I get it. They are cranky. As a former Senator that I sat next to from my State was sharing with me, one of the great frustrations of Democrats in my area is, for 15 years, they raised money and ran on marriage equality. Well, that is pretty much settled. They ran on the right to terminate pregnancies. Well, now that is in my State constitution. What do they run on now? They run on rage, apparently. {time} 2045 I want to get this out of my head before I start to walk through some of the math. You have a country that is borrowing about $6 billion a day, about $70,000 a second. In a decade, there is data saying 30 percent of our tax receipts will go just to pay interest. The wheels are coming off, and, instead, the brain trust of some of these folks--okay, I accept the tonal quality of some of the folks out of the White House isn't warm and cuddly, but do you go around neighborhoods, offices, and stick Nazi signs on their cars? My wife drives a Tesla. We bought it a couple years ago. It is funny, at that time she got teased a bit: Oh, now you are driving an electric car. I thought you guys were really conservative. Is this where your heads are at? Sticking Nazi things on people's windshields? There is no way they knew it [[Page H1367]] was my wife's car. She just has a little BASIS sticker, which is a charter school my kids go to. This is really the quality of conversation discourse of communication that is going on with the leftwing activists in my community. It is not: Hey, David, we are concerned about Medicaid. Here are ideas how you can deal with the debt and deficit so we have the resources. No, because it is this really highbrow, intellectual discussion with our brothers and sisters on the other side, stick Nazi things on people's cars. This is what you have come down to? This is what is going on? Come on, people. Look, I almost always start with this chart. You see what is in blue? It is defense and nondefense discretionary. It is--we expect it to be 26, 25 percent of spending. Last year, for every dollar this country took in in tax collections, we spent $1.39, but everything we vote on is 26 percent of the budget. Does anyone see a math problem? We are going to get behind the microphones and have honest discussions of how we are going to save the country. If it is about programs the left cares about, help us figure out how to pay for it. Yet, when you actually look at some of the spending and debt--I think I have the chart. We actually did some of the math. The crazy thing, one of my Democratic neighbors who makes a lot of money, he has a beautiful home: David, is it true that the President is even talking about going back to the 2017 tax rate for high-income earners? Well, apparently the President said something like that on Friday. Well, David, do you think that is fair? This is a guy I know is a Democrat because he has Democratic signs even of my opponents in his front yard. We did the basic math. If you actually were saying, let's just go back to the tax rate for the top earners back to 2017, it is $32.7 billion over 10 years. Okay, we can all divide that by 10, so let's call it $3.2 billion a year. We borrow $6 billion a day. If that is $3.2 billion, you functionally bought yourself 12\1/2\, 13 hours' worth of borrowing for the entire year, and there is the mental breakdown. The left runs around and says: Raise taxes. Okay. We are going to borrow 7.3 percent of GDP, which is my latest number. Some of the other economists are around 7.2 percent of GDP. Either way, you can go to the Manhattan Institute and read the articles. It is from Democratic literature that if you take every tax they have that they have scored: Raise tax on capital gains, raise tax on income, raise tax on businesses, raise tax here. I am sorry for talking so fast. Believe it or not, I live on coffee, and I need to apparently deal with my issue with a 12-step group for coffee. However, the point I am going to, read the article. All those taxes when you do the economic adjustment is about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. This place lies. Excuse me, we make up math because it is really hard to tell people the truth. Almost every cut we talk about as Republicans is about 1 percent or so of GDP. I am enraged right now because I am hearing down the hallway the Senate, they are talking about doing their reconciliation budget and setting a floor, saying: We are not going to allow the Senate to pass budget cuts of less than $3 billion. Huh? I am upset that ours is so anemic at like $1\1/2\ trillion, but if they do $3 billion, it is functionally a half a day of borrowing. This is, yea, go team. Look, at some point, the math is the reality. Why is it so hard to tell the truth? One of the other points I sort of want to make--and I stole this graphic from another group, thank you. Baseline. Baseline. Baseline law, not baseline policy. The law. I will explain that later. Over the next 10 years, we are going to spend $86 trillion. We are talking about, at best, on the House budget resolution cutting $2 trillion over those 10 years. That is 2.3 percent. Oh, God, dear Heaven, you are butchering government. It is 2.3 percent. You are telling me that if we didn't grind through government, look at our programs, look at all the reports the GAO and others have given of the waste and fraud and just programs that haven't been authorized in decades, you couldn't find 2.3 percent, but it is easier to go stick this sort of crap on my wife's windshield than it is to do the intellectual work of saying, hey, we think we have more elegant ideas on how to reform spending in government, modernize it, make it better, faster, cheaper for the American people. No, we would rather burn things down. Are we all proud of ourselves? The fact of the matter is $86 trillion in spending over the next 10 years, and at best our budget reconciliation is 2.3 percent of that spending. This is the one I get complaints from everyone, so please understand, I am trying to offend everyone with facts and math. If you do all this--because we have a number of Senators over there saying: Don't cut any spending. They are Republicans. When you hear someone say: We should do baseline policy, not the law. What they are basically saying is they don't want to have to deal with telling the truth of the math. Let's take a look here. We finished this fiscal year $37.2 trillion in debt as a country. Baseline, we add $22 trillion of additional borrowing over the next 10 years. If we were to do the tax extensions, which we really need to protect the middle class and others by not raising their taxes, but if we were to do it without any offsets and then you add in the interest, that is about another $6.8 trillion of borrowing. Then if we were to take care of the President's requests, that is another $8 trillion, functionally saying we will borrow more in this 10-year period than we did in the previous 240 years. On the day we are elected we are going to double 240 years of borrowing. Are we proud of ourselves? This is how we are going to save the Republic? We are going to continue to just bury it in debt because it is hard to tell people the truth about the math? I have a caveat on this board. We don't have a subscription to Moody's Analytics. It is expensive. Congressional Research Service doesn't have one, but we found four or five articles talking about Moody's saying their model says in 2035, nine budget years from now, 10 years from now, 30 percent of all U.S. tax receipts--so you pay a dollar in taxes, 30 cents of it just paid interest. Think about that. In 10 years, 30 percent. This year, it is 18 percent. Dear Heaven, there is a model out there that actually shows that if interest rates were to go up 1 percent in that nine budget years, it is like 45 percent of all U.S. tax receipts go just to interest. We are playing a very dangerous game here, but at least we can stick things on Teslas and protest and be angry because God forbid we talk about actual math. In 7\1/2\, 8 years from now, the Social Security trust fund is empty. The law says you cut benefits. That is a 21 percent cut. We double senior poverty in America. How many people do you think come behind these microphones are willing to have a conversation of how we are going to save it? The first year, my math, actually the Joint Economic economists' math, the first year--so if the trust fund is gone in 2033, in 2034 it is over $600 billion just to make up that shortfall. That makes what we are talking about here in the budget resolution tiny. Those are only like $200 billion a year. We are talking $600 billion a year, and it grows just to cover the Social Security trust fund being gone. That is 7\1/2\, 8 years from now. Are we going to talk about that, though? No, because they are going to run television ads beating the crap out of us because we tried to figure out a way to save it. The perversity of this place. They don't give a damn about someone's future, their poverty. It is about winning the next election and raising money on it. We have got to tell the truth also what is going on in our country. You all saw the updates from the Census Bureau basically saying after next year if you zero out immigration, our number of prime-age workers starts to fall. As a matter of fact, there is a dataset. Now, we have been using 8 years from now because that was the official Census Bureau number. There are a couple demographers out there who wrote articles a week ago saying, we may have already hit more deaths than births in America. I need you to process what that means. You have a system where Social Security, the financing of Medicare, financing of so many of our pensions relies on a [[Page H1368]] growth of the working population, particularly those prime-age workers. If we are now entering a time of a shortage of young people--in 2027, not that long from now, we actually go negative of prime-age workers. Maybe our committees should maybe invite in a demographer and talk about saying, is this Republican or Democrat? Starting in 1990, we started to roll over the number of children we had. Now we are paying the price for it. Now make these long-run programs, which are pay-as- you-go math, make them work. This should be scaring the hell out of this place. Oh, no, David, we can't tell our voters that. It is harder to raise money when you tell them the truth of how hard the future is. It is fixable. I have done presentation after presentation of adoption of technology, redesigning some of the programs where you don't cut anything, but you do really hard stuff. The problem is our hallways are crowded with people. Here it is all about the money. Understand, Congress is really about one thing: Money. The inefficiencies, the design failures for these bureaucracies, for the business models that make their living off government, that is their profit. They actually like the inefficiencies. We came and showed some charts I think a week or two ago just our calculations that there could be $25 billion a year in duplicative MRIs, X-rays, ultrasound scans in Medicare. Does a duplicative scan when it is not necessary make someone healthier? On the other hand, you could actually do something crazy, take the scan, attach it to one of these things, the little supercomputer in your pocket, and carry it around with you. There it is. Did that cut anyone's service? Mr. Speaker, $25 billion this year times 10? It is a quarter trillion dollars with one little reform. {time} 2100 The perversity of this place when I do that piece of legislation is that I will get attacks saying I am trying to cut benefits. No, I am trying to save the programs. I guess it would cause the difficulty of math, having to design and put something on paper, and getting some of the economists to work through it, but that is our job. We are the board of directors of the biggest economy in the world, the biggest entity in the world. We are going to spend over $7 trillion this year. Of course, we are only going to take in $2 trillion in taxes, meaning we may borrow about $2.1 trillion, $2.3 trillion this year to keep the wheels on. The scale of this should be scaring the hell out of people. Look, the demographic curve, when we start to think right now, in 2024, we have 2.9 people working for every person receiving their benefits. A decade from now, that is going to fall to 2.7, 2.6. Then, it really starts to crash. When we start to look at the 30-year window, we are down to about 2.4. That may not mean much to you, but trying to make these numbers work, it can be done. It is just hard. You are going to hear people come behind these microphones, give these beautiful speeches of how they want to save the Republic, how we care about the future, how we care about our kids, how we care about your retirement, and then we will do nothing that is actually hard. It is just immoral. It is just absolutely immoral. I try over and over. When I am doing these, I am trying to do a better job of bringing examples of where we can save. I am going to admit DOGE and those, I am fascinated with the data mining and those things. I know the quality of the gentleness or gentility of the communications. They have a hard, rough edge. The fact of the matter is a lot of the craziness actually wasn't coming from them. It was coming from people in the bureaucracy trying to throw out stuff to make it more difficult and just really anger people. Then, the government unions have to try to light things on fire, so disharmony. We have five major databases in the Federal Government. Is it Republican or Democrat to just build a world where those databases would talk to each other? If there is potential of $100 billion a year in misallocations and fraud and these things, and you could fix it by just having the databases talk to each other and know this is a fraudster, this person isn't with us anymore, they have gone on to their reward, but somehow they are out here asking for an SBA loan, is that Republican or Democrat? It is just technology. Yet you have protesters out there saying we can't allow the databases to talk to each other. Have we lost our minds? I want to do this just as an example because this one just burns me. Between Christmas and New Year's, I went up and spent 3 or 4 days up in the Navajo Nation. I took my little 9-year-old daughter. Yes, I have a 9-year-old and a 2\1/2\-year-old. That is the definition of pathologically optimistic when you are 63 and have a 2\1/2\-year-old. It is both funny and true. Guess what? We have spent $42.5 billion for broadband equity. Remember, we always like to add that word ``equity,'' except no one has gotten broadband. The Tribal president of the Navajo Nation and a number of the communities called chapter houses basically said screw this. I am not willing to wait another 20 years. You know what they did, something just crazy? Instead of being patient and waiting for us to spend billions of more dollars and run a piece of wire, they went out and stuck up a satellite dish. Forty-eight hours later, for several hundred dollars, they had broadband for the whole neighborhood, for the whole what we call chapter house. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just the adoption of technology, except the lobbyists who run around here wanting billions of subsidies for something they are never going to connect get really upset every time I do this board. Do we care? Does this place care enough to do the hard things, to actually do the math, the creativity. Last week, I came here with the MedPAC report. It is like this. I have no idea how many Members have actually bothered to read it. Yes, I understand there are some anomalies, but they are rounding errors compared to this. I think it had that $84 billion was spent last year in the differential between Medicare part D and Medicare part A. That is Medicare Fee-for-Service and Medicare Advantage. It was supposed to be at 95 percent. If anyone wants to go back and do their history, in 2005, when they started Medicare Advantage, if you do that basic math, that is $104 billion a year. How about if Republicans and Democrats got together and said we are going to fix this, that we are going to get the capitation program to actually work the way it is supposed to, that we are going to have the providers of services actually make money because they help our brothers and sisters who are in their retirement years earning their healthcare benefits, helping them be healthier? They get rewarded by having their population be healthier, not by running around scoring with sicker. Yay, everyone wins. What would happen with that several hundred billion dollars over a decade? That is not a cut. It is actually lining up incentives. Instead, it is just easier to run around and scream stories that they are going to cut things. Let's pay people, so I have hospitals and other groups paying people to fly out here, tell stories, and they have no idea what they are talking about because we make crap up, once again, because everything is about the money. The last board and the one that always seems to upset people because they don't want to know the truth, the Congressional Budget Office-- this one is a year out of date. The numbers are actually apparently worse, but we haven't had the update yet. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next 30 years our country borrows $124 trillion. Now, I have to tell you, this number when we get our updates could be much worse. If you look at their data, they actually have discretionary, the part we vote on, growing slower than tax receipts. That has a $9 trillion positive over the 30 years, but Medicare is $87.2 trillion in the hole. Social Security is $36.8 trillion in the hole over those 30 years. It turns out, even the next decade, almost 100 percent of the U.S. sovereign debt growth is interest and Medicare. There is nothing we can do about interest. We can do some things to incentivize going out on the curve so we are not as fragile to communicate [[Page H1369]] to the bond markets because the bond markets are basically about to run this country. If you have to sell $6 billion a day, $60,000, $70,000 every second, maybe you need to pay attention to your bankers who you are having to sell your debt to, to communicate to those debt markets we are serious and looking at ways to use technology, better models when obesity is the single biggest expense in our society. Yes, we are not supposed to say that. Mr. Speaker, please don't tell anyone. Last year, the Joint Economic economists calculated $9.1 trillion additional of healthcare spending. Is it moral with what we do in food policy, nutritional support, how we deliver healthcare? Maybe the concept of helping our brothers and sisters live healthier when 31 percent of Medicare spending is diabetes--33 percent of all healthcare overall is just diabetes. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just trying to get your policy alignment to the fact we are buried in debt and getting older as a society. I think in a decade, 23 percent of our population is 65 and up. We now know that we are having this remarkable shortage of young people. We are already potentially on the cusp of having more deaths than births in our country. In a couple of weeks, we are trying to roll out a STEM-based, talent- based immigration bill because for the economy to grow and stabilize, we don't have a choice. People say, David, you are not allowed to talk about immigration. People won't understand it. Well, they understand the economic survival of you still getting your benefits when you are a senior. We can make this work. Mr. Speaker, we are now starting to run into articles saying that we are putting the extraordinary privilege. What are the two extraordinary privileges America has? Our currency--the world borrows in our currency, meaning the fact of the matter is when we sell debt, there is a demand to hold U.S. dollars denominated. Then, the second thing is people want to live here. They want to invest here. They want to be educated here. They want to be entrepreneurs here. {time} 2110 Mr. Speaker, we are now running into multiple articles saying some of the things we are doing, particularly our debt stack which is putting our extraordinary privilege of the country at risk. It doesn't have to be this way. A couple of smart economists say we have 3 or 4 more years. At that point the debt gets so hard to manage. The Federal Reserve last week took us from a 2.1 GDP down to 1.7. Just that movement is almost $200 billion a year in tax collection. Just that GDP reduction the Federal Reserve calculated for the next 3 years, taking that out to 10, that is more money than everything in our budget reconciliation. The lack of understanding of the inner dynamics of our debt, the interest, and these dollars terrifies me because there is a path. There is a path for this to work, Mr. Speaker, but we are living on a razor's edge because we are not doing the hard work. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. ____________________

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