September 19, 2019 - Issue: Vol. 165, No. 151 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 1st Session
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OUR GREATEST ECONOMIC THREAT; Congressional Record Vol. 165, No. 151
(House of Representatives - September 19, 2019)
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[Pages H7826-H7828] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] {time} 1915 OUR GREATEST ECONOMIC THREAT The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) for 30 minutes. Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, don't you love that, when we take a few minutes getting organized because sometimes we walk around with so many moving parts? This is sort of the continuing conversation that we have been doing on a theme for well over a year now, in the last Congress and now into this one. It is a combination of a couple things: One, our office works very hard on actually looking at solutions, but first you have got to understand some of the problems. And I want to say this very nicely--and maybe in the next couple weeks we will come back and do it again, we have already done it a half a dozen times here on the floor--and that is: The miracles of technology are about to do amazing things in environmental protection. So to our brothers and sisters on the left who were sharing their heartfelt concerns over global warming and greenhouse gases, well, what is so disappointing is the lack of optimism in the incredible technology breakthroughs that have happened. Think of this: Outside Houston, they are burning coal, they are burning natural gas. And there is no smokestack. They are capturing every bit of this ACO2 . There is just a litany of these types of technologies that--sort of the old Malthusian view of the way you save the planet is we live much poorer. Well, that has been wrong now for centuries. And once again, we are going to prove that the 1968 book, The Population Bomb, which predicted that the world was going to starve by the late 1970s has been wrong over and over and over. We, as policymakers, have an obligation to make sure we are moving those technologies forward, just like the Ways and Means Committee last year actually updated the tax credit for carbon sequestration. And if you follow the literature, there are amazing things that have happened just in that 1 year with that technology and now efficient, good things are happening. But that is not my reason for being behind this microphone tonight. We are going to continue the theme and I will fulfill my obligation from last week when I said I would bring in the new revenue numbers for the first 11 months of the year on what is actually happening in the economy; what is the greatest threat to our future. Let's start with the threat and then let's talk a little bit about the good things and the solutions. Almost every Member at some point has walked behind these microphones and shown this slide. But this is so important to understand what the actual conversation is that drives almost every policy on this floor. It is called demographics. It is the reality of the math. You see this red? That is 1965. I accept that is--what?--55 years ago. But 34 percent of the government spending was what we called mandatory, earned and unearned benefits. Social Security, you earn it. Medicare--this is prior to Medicare--but you earn those things. Today, it is no longer 34 percent of our spending. Today, it has actually crossed over 70 percent of our spending we don't even vote for on this floor. It is a formula: You turn a certain age, you get a benefit. You fall under a certain income, you get a benefit. You are part of a certain group, you get a benefit. [[Page H7827]] The blue, 15 percent of our spending, that is defense. The green here, 15 percent is what we call the other part of discretionary. And that is what we sit here and debate. And that number is going to continue to shrink because we have 74 million of our brothers and sisters who are baby boomers who are moving into retirement. Madam Speaker, 10,300 Americans every single day turn 65. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is math. But as I have joked many times--even though it is a little bit of a dark humor--welcome to a math-free zone. So let's actually continue to talk about what is the greatest threat to our society and also the fact that we have some amazing opportunities to actually deal with it. Here is the math. Take a look at the chart behind me. If I could sit in front of you and say the next 30 years--we are going to remove Social Security, we are going to remove Medicare from the conversation--your government, your Federal Government has, $23 trillion in the bank. But if we roll Social Security and Medicare back into the math, we are $103 trillion upside down--$103 trillion negative--so we are a couple 100 percent of GDP. And that is the 30- year window. Because remember the math, every 5 years, just the growth in Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare entitlements, just the growth, equal the Defense Department--every 5 years. So every 10 years it is as if we added two Defense Departments, just the growth of Social Security and Medicare. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is demographics. Somehow, this place completely forgot there was a baby boom 50 years ago-plus--60 years ago over an 18-year period of time, and we have 74 million of us who are baby boomers moving into our earned retirement and we have not set aside a fraction of the resources necessary. So this is the great fragility for my little soon to be 4-year-old little girl. This is a threat to her economic life, her economic future. But I will argue the future of our country, and actually the economic vitality of the entire world, because when the United States runs into crushing headwinds, the rest of the world also suffers. And once again, look at the chart. The reality of it is--Social Security is huge--but it is an easier fix. It is Medicare. Medicare is what our great fragility is. So let's actually talk about some of the positives because--and it is my very last slide that we typically start with. We come here and talk about, hey, there is sort of five pillars, economic expansion, Tax Code, trade, regulatory that you do those policies to maximize economic growth, incentives to join the labor force. As you know, we still have a math problem. Millennial men into the labor force--even though the August numbers were stunning--now we have broken over--what is it?--63.2 percent labor force participation. I know that is geeky, but when tax reform was done, the modelers all said, Well, we are fearful that capital stock and labor will be the headwinds that keep us from being able to grow. Well, it turns out, that thing they call capital stock has worked in our favor. It is working great. The amount of resources coming back in--we call repatriation, that was part of the Tax Code--have exceeded the models. Americans saving have exceeded the models, and now that we are, in many ways, still the healthiest economy in the world, the amount of resources that are flowing into our economy from around the world have exceeded what any one modeled. Capital stock is in great shape. Look at our interest rates. It turns out labor is our fragility. But think about this: If I had come to people in this room, Republicans, Democrats, and said, Hey, 3 years ago--we are having this conversation 3 years ago--you are going to live in a country in 2019 with substantially more jobs than available workers, that in the last--like we saw in the August data, in the last 3 months for--we will call it our brothers and sisters--and I hate this term, but there is not a better way to talk about it--who are in some of the lower income quartiles, they will be having wages growing faster than 4 percent. You would have thought I was out of my mind. Yet, it is happening. You would think there would be just joy from our friends on the left and a little more talking about how wonderful that economic growth being moral, because it helps so many of our brothers and sisters who have had some really rough decades. The math is still early, and it is going to be hard to do, but there are a couple modelers out there that I had these conversations with that are saying this may be the year, that because of income growth in those--our brothers and sisters who didn't finish high school, who had those types of equivalent of moderate-to-lower-skilled jobs, but their wages are growing so fast, this may be the first year where income inequality actually shrinks a bit. And our friends on the left say that is one of the biggest moral imperatives in their vision. Guess what? Something we are doing is working in the economy. Look at our brothers and sisters, the Hispanic population, African American population, handicap population--all these different subcategories we do to do our U6 math--either at or bypassing some of the best employment numbers in modern history. You would think there would almost be joy. And you would think actually the debates around here would be, how do we keep it going? Instead of who we intend to punish next. So part of the amusement I have had so far this year, particularly-- and it is sometimes hard, but never do it, come up here behind the microphone, and we have this whole binder of some of the crazy things that were said a couple years ago when we were doing tax reform: Revenues are going to collapse. The economy is going to be thrown into a recession; all of this sort of darkness. And it was wrong. So think about this: The chart behind me is the yellow--I think that is yellow--is the, what we call receipts for the first 11 months of this fiscal year. Remember, your Federal Government's fiscal year begins October 1. The blue is 18; the green is 17. Receipts for the first 11 months of 2019 in hard dollars, in inflation-adjusted dollars, are the largest revenue receipts in U.S. history. And I was doing the math off the top of my head. I need to grab it and sit in front of a calculator, but off the top of my head, I believe that is a 4 percent growth rate in revenues. Yet, the argument around here is the tax cuts are these horrible--and they are going to crack--they are wrong. And the math is here. Do you think we are going to get an apology? That number is also--if I inflation-adjust it so I do constant dollars over the last few decades, it is the second-highest revenue in U.S. history. And think about what is happening in our economy. How many of our brothers and sisters are working? How many of our brothers and sisters are seeing the value of their homes, the value of their paychecks--the best they have been in decades. I don't know how we come here to the floor, we claim we care about working men and women in the country, and then don't take joy in the fact that the math is actually stunningly positive, and how we don't engage in a debate and discussion on how we keep it going. But politics, as you know, in D.C., have become absolutely perverse, where the weaponization of everything--the rage is now a business plan of certain media outlets to, God forbid, you say something positive about the economy, because you will lose viewership. But the math is the math. So let's even take it a bit farther: Because we live in a society that is so honest about what is actually happening in the economy, you all saw industrial production numbers a couple days ago. I know I am geeking out a bit, but, remember, wasn't it on this very floor just a couple months ago we were all talking--well, one side was talking about we are going into recession, things are crashing, you know, the sugar high is over. Except for the fact that industrial production last month had a .6, which is a nice, big spike and revision of previous months. It is working. The United States is working. Our economy is working, and compare it to the rest of the world. Where is the joy? Where is the excitement? If you say you care about people, these are people not only working, but [[Page H7828]] why do we fixate on industrial production? What are the two factors that allow a business concern to pay their workers more? Well, it is traditionally inflation, which doesn't mean a bigger paycheck buys you anything more. It is productivity. When productivity goes up, people get paid more. And the purchasing power is more. Industrial production is linked to productivity. It means this is part of the reason our brothers and sisters out there, who are out there working their hearts out, are getting paid more, and their purchasing power is better. I know this is geeky. I know I come behind this microphone and sometimes sound like an accountant on steroids, but these things are important because it is real. It is not some emotional blaring of, you know, we hate this person, we like this person. We made the math work. And we are seeing the results of good things for hardworking Americans. Growth is moral. And where I want to take that is my experience in Phoenix of visiting the homeless campus, and St. Joseph the Worker there having jobs because we are so desperate for workers in our market that employers are trying to recruit workers from the homeless campus. {time} 1930 And we actually brought someone last year to testify in front of the Ways and Means Committee. We are so desperate for carpenters and plumbers and electricians, they brought a young man to come testify in front of the Ways and Means Committee who wasn't like our typical witness. He wasn't wearing a suit. He had a number of facial tattoos. As a matter of fact, he had a number of facial piercings. He opened up his testimony to the Ways and Means Committee saying: I am a three-time convicted felon. I am an addict. But because of a private group that was so desperate for workers, they took a chance. They were doing training--in his case, electrical training--in the prison before he got probation, and they guaranteed him a job when he got out. It didn't mean they were going to keep him. He had Republicans and Democrats and everyone in the room, as well as the staff, crying because he told the story: I am a three-time convicted felon. He was an addict, and he was saying he had not touched drugs or alcohol for a year. He gets to see his family again. He gets to see his child again. And he is now up to $22 an hour, and he is so busy working that he hasn't had the chance to relapse. It is stories like that that need to be part of our lexicon. It is part of the joy that economic growth is moral because it helps and solves so many problems, and particularly in our earlier slides where I had this absolute fixation on retirement security and our discussion of growing the economy and labor force participation and technology and incentives, bringing that package all together so we keep our promises around Social Security and Medicare. But we have the first pillar that we are living in right now, and that is a proof that policy--policy--can work, whether it be the tax policy we did a couple of years ago or whether it be some of the regulatory changes we have embraced. Madam Speaker, could you imagine if we could actually get that extra half a point of GDP growth by finishing the NAFTA replacement, the USMCA? How many of our brothers and sisters in this place will drop their politics or their terror of giving this White House a victory and actually do what is good for the workers in this country--actually, the workers for all of North America, because, as supply chains are moving away from China, wouldn't we like to have them here in our hemisphere? Or do politics blind people to the point that basic economics in math and opportunity don't count? So, back to one of the other things, and I put up this slide. Partially, it is one of my Democrat friends here who brought this to my attention, because we have been working on this concept that there is a disruptive revolution coming in healthcare. We have done the presentations here on the floor many times of the thing you can blow into and it instantly tells you you have the flu, and the algorithm, if we could just legalize it, could actually order your antivirals, except for the fact that that technology is illegal under current law. But, also, the concept of, in just a few months, there is going to be a drug that cures hemophilia. It is going to be really expensive, but, for our brothers and sisters who have one of the most expensive diseases in our society, they are cured. So what would happen to those numbers I was showing you on Medicare if I came to you and said: Hey, there is one disease group that is 30 percent of Medicare spending in the model for the next three decades? It turns out it is diabetes. It is one of the reasons this body has been investing in things like the Cures Act and other miracles that are now happening in what we call synthetic biology, in the new types of biological drugs--you have all seen the stories, and it is still a bit of optimism--that we may be able to start growing pancreatic cells again. Could you imagine if we cured just diabetes? It is not only the noble thing of curing a disease that is part of our chronic population; we often don't think about what is the economic cascade that it has to, actually, retirement security. It turns out, if 30 percent of Medicare future costs are just somehow related to first-degree or second-degree or third-degree effects of diabetes, it is part of the reason so many of us in this body have worked so hard to say: Put the money in. Let's invest in the disruptions. Because I do believe, if we could buy a calculator for our Members here and help them understand the technology disruptions that are going to make the environment and healthcare and so many other things just amazing--and, then, if we could legalize many of the technologies that, oddly enough, are illegal under our reimbursements and under our rules today, there are some really amazing things. These next few decades could be just amazing, particularly for my little 4-year-old girl. But these amazing things don't happen when everything is political and everything is weaponized and, if it is not a melodrama, we don't do it. So we typically start with this, but I am going to close with it this time. We have been trying to help our brothers and sisters in here understand, the old discussions of, well, we can do this little bit of entitlement reform or raise taxes over here or do this and that fixes the fragility that is the future of, particularly, Medicare, but those days are over. We lost that mathematical opportunity a decade and a half ago. But there is a way to survive the debt bomb that is coming at us if we do the things that are necessary for economic expansion, do the things that are necessary to encourage our brothers and sisters to be in the labor force, actually embrace the disruptive technologies instead of being fearful of them and being fearful of sort of telling many of our incumbent business models that they are going to have to adopt. And we are going to have to tell the truth that, within the benefits, we need incentives for you to think about, if you are healthy and can do it, staying in the labor force. And the other thing is we are going to have to actually talk about, just as Mr. Yoho before me, things we do in immigration and population stability, of an immigration system that maximizes economic vitality, sort of the talent-based system the President talks about. But, even in a country where our birthrates have collapsed, how we encourage family formation, if you mix all these things together and with a couple good lucks, like with the technology we are talking about that cures diabetes, we can make the math work that the $103 trillion of debt that we expect over the next 30 years, substantially because of our demographics, does not have to destroy this country, because we can cut that in half. If we do that, we have some amazing decades ahead of us. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. ____________________
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