March 6, 2019 - Issue: Vol. 165, No. 40 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 1st Session
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FIVE PILLARS OF WHAT WE BELIEVE SAVES US; Congressional Record Vol. 165, No. 40
(House of Representatives - March 06, 2019)
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[Pages H2500-H2502] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] FIVE PILLARS OF WHAT WE BELIEVE SAVES US The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Mucarsel-Powell). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2019, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader. Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, and to my friend, thank you for stalling. What we are doing tonight--and we will try to do it somewhat efficiently so you don't have to spend too much time in the Chair--is every week we have been taking a half an hour or so--tonight we may do something less--and sort of walking through what we believe is actually an idea that actually saves this country. And not to be too melodramatic, but let's actually walk through some of the mathematical realities. We have 74 million baby boomers moving into retirement. The peak of the baby boom is just a couple years away from retirement. So baby boom, 74 million over an 18-year period. If you look at Federal spending, the growth in Federal spending from 2008 to 2028 as CBO has calculated--2008 to 2028--91 percent of all the growth in Federal spending is interest, Social Security, healthcare entitlement. I know this doesn't sort of fit the mantra that you so often hear around here from Republicans and Democrats, but it is math. We have a demographic issue. We are getting old much faster than almost anytime--anytime, I think--in our society, and our birth rates have substantially collapsed. So one of the things we have come to is saying: How do you maximize economic vitality in our society so we can keep our promises, those promises of earned benefits like Social Security or promises such as earned benefits of Medicare? We believe we have five pillars, so we always start with this chart, and you can do them in any fashion you want. Last week, we actually did 30 minutes--which I am sure was riveting for anyone who was willing to watch--on labor force participation, but it is important. If you go back over the last couple years and look at some of the CBO reports, repeatedly there are sections in there that talk about: What is the barrier to economic expansion in our country? They will often talk about two things: capital stock, basically, savings rates, money to be lent into the economy to multiply, to build things, to grow things; and the second thing is population, labor force availability. Well, it turns out, since tax reform, the capital stock numbers have been much better than almost any of us had expected in the modeling. So our restraint on economic expansion turns out to be substantially labor force. Okay. So that is what we talked about last week. How do you draw in millennial males? How do you add incentives to those who are older to stay in the labor force? So that was last week. We have also actually talked about what we will have to do--and every week we are going to do one of these--dealing with the earned benefits. Are there things we can do in those earned benefits to add some competition for when someone is buying their medical benefits through Medicare? Can we add certain incentives? Say I am healthy. I wish to work longer. Can we give you certain incentives to either of those programs in the Tax Code to stay in the labor force as long as you are healthy? And we actually see other societies around the world--you know, look at Japan and others--who are actually having to work through this concept as their demographics get older. How do they actually keep as much of their population still within the labor force so the economy continues to stay stable and grow? {time} 2000 Economic growth, we are going to do a whole presentation on everything you do from designing a Tax Code that stays competitive in the world, somewhat like we did a year-plus ago, that incentivizes capital formation, incentivizes investment in plant and equipment and technology, because we had gone functionally almost two decades with very little productivity growth. Do you want to pay Americans more? Well, what is the formula? Do we all remember our high school economics class? What are the two elements that go into typical growth in someone's salary? Well, it is inflation. If you get an inflation adjustment, you are not getting any further ahead. You are just sort of holding steady. It is productivity. When we look at the formulas that end up organically, systematically thought through, when businesses pay their workers more, here is the inflation adjustment. By the way, we bought a new plant; we bought new equipment; we bought new technology. We are able to make this many more widgets now. Our productivity has gone up. We can pay more. That is the key reason. We functionally have gone a couple decades with very little wage growth because we didn't have productivity growth. As we start to talk about economic growth, it is going to be everything from designing a Tax Code that maximizes that type of growth, to trade policy that maximizes economic expansion in our country, all the way down to how you design a rational regulatory environment. Some people like to come behind these microphones and talk about deregulation or re-regulation. I want to make the argument that we should be, as a society, talking about smart regulation. You have a supercomputer in your pocket or your purse, that phone you have. Why aren't we using much more technology to be the driver of our regulatory environment? A simple example: What would happen if you could crowd source data on the environment? You could have a few thousand people. If you are in a large urban area or other areas that have a sensor on your phone that says, hey, I am going to help crowd source ozone, [[Page H2501]] or crowd source volatile organics, or whatever, our environmental regulator is no longer a file cabinet of paperwork where we put paper and document more, document more. Instead, it is almost like a quick reaction for us of: Hey, the sensors are saying there is a hotspot over here. Let's go deal with it. I think it is time we revolutionize what we consider financial, environmental, health types of regulations, realizing we have technology today that would make us healthier, more prosperous, our financial markets much more stable, and the time between a bad act and something getting fixed could be minutes, not years. An example is, if you had certain types of technology, a Bernie Madoff could never happen because you would instantly know his accounts don't match his bank accounts. The other one we are going to do next week is technology disruption. What happens if you could go home and, at home, you have this thing that looks like a large kazoo? You could blow into it, and it instantly tells you if you have the flu or not and then instantly could order your antivirals. A couple hours later, those antivirals could be delivered to your home. How much healthier would you be? We are going to bring in a whole series of healthcare technologies that is a true disruption because, remember, part of our premise is, if you look at the cost curves, so much of it is Medicare. The fact is, we do not have the resources set aside to keep our promises right now. That technology, if we do the adoption, if we remove the barriers, could be an amazing disruption in the price of healthcare because this body--let's be brutally honest--for a decade, we have been having the wrong debate. We have the ACA over here, which, functionally, just moved around who got to pay. We had many of our Republican alternatives that we believed would add some competition and those things, but it was, substantially, who got to pay. It is time the Republicans and Democrats got together to understand there is a technology revolution out there that could be, that can be, that will be the price disrupter on healthcare, if this body is willing to remove those barriers to that technology. Imagine being able to have certain wearables, whether you are the type of person who walks around with a smartwatch or the type of person who has the patch that can read your blood oxygen and these types of things, or the autonomous healthcare clinics that are being experimented with in the Phoenix-Scottsdale market. There is a revolution happening out there. We need more of it. We need to adopt it faster. We need to remove the barriers and stop having these crazy conversations of little, incremental changes. We need the disruption. As we walk through, part of the premise is, if you look at this slide, and I brought this slide in previous discussions, 91 percent of the spending growth between 2008 and 2028, interest, Social Security, healthcare, and functionally the healthcare entitlements. When you look at that, you start to realize these other colors you see here are functionally the other portions of the budget. Nondefense is green. Yellow is defense. Their percentage of the growth and spending is substantially flat. A little growth here, a little growth there, but the explosion in the curve, where you see those lines going up, is interest, Social Security, and healthcare entitlements. Why doesn't this place, why don't we as Members of Congress, have the honest conversation that, if you care about the debt, if you care about retirement security, if you care about these things, this is the honest conversation? Take a look at this slide. Between 2018 and 2048, a 30-year period, and this slide is not adjusted for inflation, you see the little green bar on the far end? That is the rest of the Federal budget. That is the non-Social Security, non-Medicare. It is actually $16 trillion to the positive. How do you end up with $84 trillion in the negative over those 30 years? It is functionally the interest and the spending on Social Security, the interest and the spending on Medicare. I believe we have a moral obligation to protect these earned entitlements. But you aren't protecting them by avoiding the subject, and that is what this place has become famous for doing. Let's talk about this concept we refer to in our office as sort of population stability. Remember, this is just one of our five pillars. In 9 years, our society, and its driven by demographics, will have two workers for every one person in retirement. Think about that for a moment. Programs like Social Security and Medicare, there were four or five, five-plus workers for every one in their benefits. In 9 years, we moved 2-to-1. What also happens in 9 years? It is the end of the baby-boom cycle, so the end of the spiked years. If this slide doesn't make you go ``wow, maybe we should take this seriously,'' because we should have taken it seriously a couple of decades ago because we knew people were going to turn 65 from the baby boom for how many years? Nine years, two workers, one person in retirement. This is absolutely critical, and this is what is coming to us. What are the solutions on this particular pillar we call population stability? We need to be honest and work hard for policies that maximize family formation. I don't even know if I have them here--I hope I do--some of the charts that show you what is happening in the birth rates around the country. You do understand, as a nation, we are now well below replacement rates in our population. This one I particularly like because it is from my home State of Arizona, but the trendline is almost identical. We will go through some of that. If I asked you right now which State had the largest fall in birth rates, how many of you would have said Arizona? It turns out Arizona had the largest fall in birth rates. It is a little complicated. You have to read through the data, but Native Americans and Hispanics, their birth rates fell substantially and are looking much more like the mean of the rest of our society. Apparently, the demographers say, that is wonderful. What it means is, even though this place sometimes spends a lot of our politics keeping us apart, the actual demographics say, when we are all having babies like each other, it is a symbol that the melting pot is working, that we are all starting to have similar education, live in the same neighborhoods, have similar job descriptions. Now our family formations are starting to look very, very similar. That is wonderful. The melting pot is working. But understand what that means in the future, having enough workers to participate in keeping the economy growing and stable. These pay-as-you-go programs, which are Social Security and Medicare, have that vitality, and this is a real threat when you start to see these sorts of numbers and understand what that means. How do you reach a level of population stability? This is a brand-new slide for us. We are going to do a little more on what is happening population-wise. Once you substantially look at, we will call it the green line, the second one down, do you see that precipitous fall? If we are right here, that was sort of our last time of being in the positive, a bit before 2010. Since then, we have continued to fall, and fall, and fall. Now our demographers are coming back and saying, yeah, this is sort of the new normal, because it is not just the United States. Apparently, this trend is all over the industrialized world. A lot of the great writers and thinkers on demographics are saying the next prized asset in the world isn't going to be lithium for batteries or petroleum products. It is going to be people, smart people. You are starting to see that around the world where other countries right now are even starting to change some of their immigration rules to say, if you have talent, you are given a much faster path to enter our country. We are going to have to have that very honest conversation of a major change in our immigration system. The last slide here, and then we are going to talk about some of the solutions in this, this is just sort of fun to understand that it is a trend. We have one or two States that are still bucking the trend of having positive population growth, and that is through birth rates. But the rest of the country is substantially collapsing. [[Page H2502]] What do you do for population stability? Okay, back to family formation. Are there things we can do that will work? We have spent about a year in our office reading literature from around the world, what they have done in Scandinavia, what they are doing right now in Hungary, what has been done in a province in Canada, trying to promote native births. Small, incremental changes--no one has found the magic formula. Maybe we as a society have to have this discussion. What works? What can we do? Is it something you do in the Tax Code? Is it something you do in family friendly policies? What do we do to maximize family formation in our country? Right now, when you start to look at the cost, I have only one beautiful little girl, and you realize, children are the greatest thing that ever happened to my wife and I, but it is expensive. The second part of that population stability discussion is, if you are over here working on family formation and making sure society understands the blessing of children in our society, are there immigration policies that if you are bringing in populations into the United States that maximize the economic vitality? {time} 2015 So part of this thought experiment, based on the actual numbers in the last 10 years, the U.S. fall in birthrates functionally equals 4 million children that we expected that with the fallen birthrates will not be part of our society. You do realize that over 10 years that is functionally 4 full years of legal immigration. So let's say we actually were effective in being serious about family formation here, and we actually started to have an honest discussion of as a society do we start to do the things such as New Zealand, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and others are doing where substantially it is a talent-based immigration system? Why do you want to fixate on that? It is an immigration system that actually has the elegance of we don't care about your gender, we don't care about your religion, and we don't care about your race. But what we care about as a society is we care about the vitality, the energy, and the talent you bring to our society to maximize the economic growth so we can keep our promises, particularly on Social Security and Medicare. Remember, demographics are really the biggest issue we as a society are facing, except it is really hard to talk about it because the math is complex. So are we as a body willing to take on complex issues and understand you can't just do one of them? There was a time here a decade ago or so people would come to the microphone and say: Well, if we do entitlement reform, then we get this. We have missed that window. Now my argument to this country, to my brothers and sisters here in Congress, is we have to actually reach out to at least the five pillars we have laid out of maximizing economic growth, and that is everything from tax policy to trade policy to regulatory policy, and labor force participation. How do you design programs, everything from Social Security Disability to TANF to food stamps to this and that, saying we want you in the labor force? What can we do so you have your safety net, but we have got to get you into the labor force? What do you do for population stability as we have talked about right now? What do you do for dramatic disruptive technology adoption, particularly for healthcare, but it can also be for environment? We are going to actually do that in the coming weeks. Then we will have to step up and have an honest conversation of as the promised earned benefits, we call entitlements, how can we adjust and refine them so they incentivize to stay in the labor force, but they incentivize efficiencies of how healthcare is purchased? We need to do this as an entire society. Once again, remember, in 9 years, two workers, one person in retirement, one person 65. Over the 20-year period, 2008 to 2028, 91 percent of all the growth in spending will be interest, Social Security, and healthcare entitlements. In 9 years--the CBO report that came out last month has a beautiful graph in there--in 9 years, 50 percent of all the noninterest spending coming from Washington, D.C. will be for those who are 65 and older. So if you care about keeping our promises, if you care about this country being able to maintain its place in the world, it is math. It is demographics. There is a path for us to succeed, but it no longer works. The math no longer works by just doing one thing or these little, incremental, petty things I see happening around here on this floor where it is political power grabs instead of the things that stabilize and grow our country and protect my 3-year-old daughter and her economic future and her opportunity to actually live the American Dream. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. ____________________
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