January 30, 2020 - Issue: Vol. 166, No. 20 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 2nd Session

[Pages H741-H745]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        DISCUSSING ECONOMIC DATA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. 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, I yield to the gentleman from Indiana 
(Mr. Hollingsworth).


                   Honoring the Life of Lorilee Ward

  Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. Madam Speaker, over the last few weeks, we have 
lost two Americans about whom I want to, here, speak.
  Earlier this month, we lost a valued member of our southern Indiana 
community. Lorilee Ward from Clarksville died of cancer. All of us, her 
friends, her family, are devastated by her loss, and the outpouring of 
support from fellow Hoosiers shows just how large a legacy Lorilee 
leaves behind in her wake created by that strong dedication she always 
had to her community and the values she so fervently believed in.
  Lorilee's warmth and enthusiasm was a staple of our Clark County 
community. Lorilee served on the board of southern Indiana's Clark-
Floyd Counties Convention Tourism Bureau, a group dedicated to 
bettering our neighbors. She furiously believed in the prosperity 
and future of our towns all the way across southern Indiana, and she 
gave liberally of her time and of her energy to make sure that we are 
all the best we can be.

  For Lorilee, the future of our communities of Indiana and of our 
country rests in preserving and promoting our conservative values in 
principles like the value of all life; supporting our troops and 
veterans, which she did so passionately through her involvement in 
Wreaths Across America; economic opportunity and job creation; and 
putting America and Americans first.
  Lorilee always fought to make sure our voices and values were heard. 
She served adamantly as the president of the Clark County Republican 
Women, a reliable and relentless volunteer for her President, and a 
member of our Indiana GOP. She did it all on behalf of others, knowing 
that she was fighting for bettering the lives of future generations.
  Southern Indiana will not be the same, both because of her work and 
because of our loss.
  Lorilee's mighty spirit shown through in all she did. Lorilee has 
always been a fighter. At the age of 18, Lorilee was diagnosed with 
stage 4 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and she was told by her doctors that 
the end was near, that she should expect the worst. But Lorilee did not 
expect the worst. She fought for the best. She fought for her future 
and lived another 37 years.
  Despite the challenges she faced, Lorilee had a smile on her face 
every day and went through life with a positive energy that inspired 
everyone around her. Lorilee was truly a force of nature, and her death 
is a great loss.
  It was once said that success in old age is having a crowded table, 
knowing that your friends, your family want to gather with you on 
special occasions

[[Page H742]]

and spend time with you. This was especially true for Lorilee.
  Lorilee, survived by her incredible family, was loved dearly by them. 
Lorilee put her family above everything else, and I know her husband of 
25 years, Donald; her two daughters, Chantelle and Darci; her father; 
her siblings; and her 14 grandchildren will miss her dearly. That, to 
me, sounds like a crowded table. That, to me, sounds like a great 
legacy.
  Madam Speaker, may Lorilee rest in peace.


               Honoring the Life of Thomas Lavell Secrest

  Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. Madam Speaker, Thomas Lavell Secrest passed away 
this week after a life full of service to his country.
  Tom was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and attended the U.S. Military 
Academy at West Point from 1966 to 1970. After graduation, Tom served 
in Germany and Fort Knox, achieving the rank of captain, as a tanker. 
Tom is remembered by his West Point classmates as a smart and kind guy.
  After his service in the Army, Tom returned to Texas to attend law 
school at the University of Texas and then went on to a very successful 
legal career in New York City. Over his career, Tom represented 
Polaroid, AT&T, Lucent, and Hunter Douglas in defending their 
intellectual property. Tom's demand for uncompromised performance was 
evident in every pursuit of his life: academic, military, professional, 
and personal.
  Tom spent the last few years of his life in South Carolina with his 
beloved wife, Liz, where they enjoyed their mutual passion for golf. 
Throughout their marriage, they also ensured that their friends, their 
family could participate in their love for golf, including Golf 
Magazine's editor-in-chief, George Peper.
  In 2002, George highlighted his friend Tom's spirit both on and off 
the golf course in an article that tells you exactly who he was: an 
ardent believer in hard work, a fiercely loyal friend, husband, and 
father. He was someone who never missed an opportunity to hit the 
links. And while always staying humble, Tom's golf game was legendary.
  A golfer once said that many golfers argue very frequently, very 
vigorously about where they played or which course was the best; but, 
at the end of their lives, what they will remember is with whom they 
played. Tom truly embodied this by always remembering it was with whom 
you played that mattered most. He played with his favorite friends, his 
family.
  He is survived by his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, his 
brothers, his nieces, his nephews, and his grandchildren. I know each 
of them will miss him dearly but will carry on the legacy of 
earnestness and humor that he instilled in each of them.
  Tom is someone whom those around him could always rely on, but he was 
taken from us far too son. Our country and his family are better off 
because of his life, because of his service, and because of his spirit.
  Madam Speaker, may Tom rest in peace.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I am going to come down to the lower 
microphone because we are going to be using a number of slides, and I 
want to apologize right now, this one is going to be a little thick. We 
are actually going to do some information in regard to what CBO put out 
this week and some other economic data and try to put it in 
perspective. So let me come on down.
  I get teased all the time about the charts and the fact that I can't 
even get my wife to now watch me do these because she says I am boring, 
but it is important.
  Madam Speaker, what I am going to try to do today--and let's see if I 
can do it as well as possible. I want to walk through what is a little 
bit of sort of the political folklore that we engage in here about the 
math when we talk about the deficits and the debt and the economic 
future and when you hear people say things like the debt as compared to 
the size of the economy and what is driving it, because, if we don't 
actually sort of get our act together here and start to become honest 
about just the math and what is driving it, we can't put together 
policy.
  I am incredibly optimistic that there is a path where we can digest 
the realities of these costs that happen from our demographics, because 
we are a society that is getting old really fast, but we do politics 
now.
  The other day, I am home and I am watching a little bit of one of the 
Presidential forums. It is a candidate on the Democrat side running for 
President from the Midwest, and his first comment was: These deficits, 
this trillion-dollar deficit we are going to have next year, that is 
because of tax reform.

  It just breaks your heart because you know these individuals are 
smart, and have we hit this world where, as Republicans--and please 
understand, I beat up both sides--as Republicans, we had this history 
of saying: Well, the debt and deficit comes from waste and fraud.
  The left often said: We don't tax rich people enough.
  All that is lunacy, and the investment in a calculator here would 
really go a long way.
  First, I brought a number of boards because, heaven knows, I am 
incapable of speaking without my charts.
  This, right here, is the change in receipts to the Federal 
Government. Revenues are up, and they are up fairly substantially since 
tax reform.
  Do you understand last fiscal year revenues were up over 4 percent? 
With the size of our economy, that is actually a big deal. Our problem 
is we increased spending just shy of 8 percent.
  Does anyone see a small math problem there?
  Our projection is we will take in over $3.6 trillion in the fiscal 
year we are in right now. Last year, revenues were about $3.462 
trillion. That is a fairly substantial increase in these revenues, but 
how can we keep running these massive deficits?
  Well, it turns out it is spending, but it is spending on what we call 
the mandatory side, the formulas that we don't get to vote on and we 
are terrified as elected officials to talk about.
  I am going to walk us through part of this math. First, let's do some 
of the positive stuff, and then let's get to the really difficult 
policy issues.
  So, revenues are up, and they are going up fairly substantially. A 
lot of this economic growth and receipts is payroll taxes. It is 
because we are having a remarkable period here of employment.
  When you look at what we call the U-6 data put out by the Bureau of 
Labor Statistics, the number of our brothers and sisters who weren't 
even looking for work that are moving into the labor force and all the 
sudden now are paying payroll taxes, Social Security, Medicare, these 
things, is remarkable.
  We should actually, as a society, be joyful, both those on the left 
and those on the right. We should be joyful because, if I had come into 
this room 3 years ago and said we are living in a time where we have 
more jobs than people, we are going to live in a time where it actually 
turns out to be our brothers and sisters who are functionally defined 
as the working poor have the fastest growing wages, double what the 
mean is--this has been our goal around here for years, and it is not a 
Democratic goal or a Republican goal. It just should be a goal of 
lifting people up, and it is happening. So let's take some joy in that. 
And it turns out it is also helping the receipts here to the Federal 
Government.
  There are other things that we should be joyful about.
  When you actually look at this enhanced period of economic stability, 
what happens when what we call the real net worth--the value of your 
homes, the value of your savings, the value of your investments, the 
value of things you hold--well, it turns out the bottom 50 percent, 
their real net worth has gone up fairly substantially, over 15 percent 
in these last 3 years. That is a big deal.
  But then I will get folks who will just make up stuff. Well, the rich 
are the ones. Well, it turns out that is not true.

                              {time}  1330

  The top 1 percent aren't having most of that growth in their personal 
wealth. It is the bottom 50 percent is where most of the growth is.
  Can we take some joy in that? This is one of the most unique economic 
cycles because it has been so stable for so long. You also have the GDP 
numbers that came out today basically saying:

[[Page H743]]

Hey, looks like we are just going to be in a steady, healthy 
environment.
  We really need this because you get really positive math when you hit 
this type of economic stability.
  All right, last one on this. When you look at what we call real wage 
growth, who are seeing their incomes go up? I know this is thick, but 
the politics--and I accept that we are in an election year, but we have 
to stop--what do you call that? Oh, yeah--lying.
  The fact of the matter is it isn't the top income earners who are 
seeing the most actual movement in their wages.
  Take a look at this red line. That is what is really going on right 
now. The blue is what we thought was going to happen. You see that 
inflection point.
  I have been on the Joint Economic Committee for years now, and it was 
only about 3 years ago we were having some of the smartest economists, 
the experts, coming in and saying: Well, you have to understand, Joint 
Economic Committee, those who don't have a high school education, those 
who have moderate skill sets, you need to prepare, because they will be 
part of the permanently poor, the permanent underclass of your country 
forever.
  Then, all of a sudden, something has happened the last couple of 
years where their labor now has some of the most value in this economy. 
Look at the wage growth for our brothers and sisters who didn't 
graduate high school, who have moderate skill sets. That is where the 
substantial, almost double the growth of the mean is.
  We should be joyful about this because all of those fancy economists 
who were in front of us just a couple of years ago said that it 
couldn't happen, that we should be planning for this to be a population 
that will have to live in a subsidized world for the rest of their 
lives. It turns out they were wrong.
  We have sort of a family saying: Figure out what you do right and do 
more of it; figure out what you have done wrong and do less of it.
  Maybe we should stop inviting those particular economists to come to 
testify in front of us.
  Where is the trillion-dollar deficit coming from? Well, it is a 
combination of a bunch of things. This is one of the things that will 
frustrate you, particularly about Congress. We seem incapable of 
dealing with complexity because the solution to this is also really 
complex. We will sort of close on that.
  This chart, it is almost impossible to read this chart, so I stole 
some notes from myself.
  The point I am trying to make here is this is 2017, before tax 
reform, and where we are at today. The top one is net interest. It 
looks like our projection of what we are going to spend in interest 
costs has gone down and gone down fairly substantially.
  The argument here is one of the things that happened in tax reform 
that we didn't expect is that savings rates are much better than we 
expected and what they call repatriation, cash that has been coming in 
from overseas--remember, we had that cycle for almost 20 years where 
businesses would move their headquarters out of the country and then 
keep their profits there because if they brought them in, they were 
substantially taxed in the United States. We made a deal with sort of 
the world and those businesses saying: Here will be the new tax rates. 
Bring your money in.
  That money, I think, in our reports we had last summer, we were 
seeing about $400 billion more than we had modeled for. I have not seen 
a more recent number, but there is an argument that we are afloat with 
cash in North America, in the United States, and that drives interest 
rates down.
  Is that a first- or second-degree effect? Let's not geek out too much 
on that.
  But take a look here. Let's use, like, 72 percent of the budget, of 
our spending here. It is what we call mandatory. It is on autopilot.
  The other portion is what we call discretionary. About half of that 
is defense, and about half of that is everything else you think of as 
government, from the Park Service to the FDA to this and that. That is 
the other, let's call it 14, 15 percent of government. That is what we 
vote on, the discretionary side.
  Take a look at this. Where you see that little orange bar, you see 
that big piece of growth. Those are things we have voted on in just the 
last 2 years, and it is up substantially.
  We have some other charts I am going to show you that if you look at 
the growth in deficit--not debt, the deficits from this year, even the 
next couple of years--a big driver of it is our own votes. It is the 
discretionary side.
  This here is the growth in mandatory, and there is something 
wonderful about this. Do you notice that it is getting smaller? I know 
these look like tiny, little increments, but when you are talking about 
a trillion dollars, that is a lot of money.
  It turns out, because of the economic expansion, we are seeing a 
reduction in some of the demands for entitlements.
  We always have to be careful when we talk about this because this is 
sort of the--what is the term?--third rail for a lot of us who are 
elected officials to explain this.
  There are earned entitlements. You earned your Social Security; you 
earned your Medicare; you earned your military pension. Those are 
earned entitlements. You paid for those. You earned them with your 
service and your contributions.
  There are other types of entitlements that are part of this mandatory 
formula. It is a treaty obligation. You are part of a certain Native 
American population, other things. They are obligations we took on. Or 
you fell under a certain income. You know, you are having really rough 
times in your life, so there is certain income support or access to 
certain healthcare or housing allowances and those things.

  We haven't done all the analysis yet, but we think that is where part 
of this drop all of a sudden in mandatory spending has come from. As 
the economy is growing and we are seeing our brothers and sisters who 
were--the term is often marginally detached or detached from the 
workforce--are coming back in, all of a sudden, they are leaving 
certain programs. So that is another benefit we are seeing 
mathematically and budgetarily in the growth of the economy.
  Is that a first-degree effect or second-degree effect from tax 
reform? Okay, fine.
  Other spending, these are other types of programs that may have their 
own individual trust funds or those things, and you will take a look 
and notice that their spending is up just a little bit.
  Here is where, when we talk about the tax reform, we see lower 
corporate taxes; we see substantially higher payroll taxes because 
people are working; and we see lower individual taxes.
  When you have someone walk up behind one of these microphones and 
say, ``Well, it was the tax reform. That is why we are''--no, it is 
not. Tax reform is part of it. I mean, we always modeled that tax 
reform was going to cost about $1.4 trillion over 10 years.
  If we could get the economic expansion and employment statistics, 
that number would come down. You all saw now--because I know everyone 
immediately grabbed their CBO update report--that from August to the 
report this week, there is a $705 billion reduction in the deficit 
projection over the 10 years.
  A lot of that, I think, are these first- and second-degree effects. 
Some of that was interest rates are lower, like you see up here in this 
top line, because people are saving more, and payroll taxes, which you 
see down over here, because more people are working.
  I don't want to sound whiny up here and frustrated, but these numbers 
are complex. I will go through this three or four times with a 
highlighter to get my head around the numbers, and then I will turn to 
the freaky smart staff of the Joint Economic Committee and others to 
make sure we are understanding it correctly.
  But I beg of my brothers and sisters who are elected or policymakers, 
stop spouting off in political terms, because if we can start to get an 
honest understanding of the math, maybe we can come up with some honest 
approaches on how to deal with the crushing level of debt that is 
coming at us.
  Let's start walking through what is driving the deficits and the 
debt. One of the comments I heard the other day from an economist on I 
think it was CNBC--now, it was ideological. It was a politically 
liberal economist from a university: Well, if we could have some 
substantial cuts in defense, we would see all these changes in these 
deficits.

[[Page H744]]

  That is lunacy. Look, the model on defense is pretty flat and stable.
  Here is a number I am going to give you two or three times, and I beg 
of you, I know a number of people don't want to hear this, but it is 
math: Just the growth of Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare 
entitlements over the next 5 years equals the entire Defense 
Department.
  Is that Republican or Democrat? It is neither. It is demographics.
  There are--what?--74 million of us who are baby boomers. We are about 
halfway moving into our retirement cycle, turning 65, qualifying for 
certain benefits. It is like Congress only just recently discovered 
there were baby boomers. But when you hear someone start to say 
something like, ``Well, if we would just cut defense, all of a sudden 
the numbers are better,'' it is lunacy.
  You could get rid of all of defense tomorrow, and it only gives you 5 
years of the growth in Social Security, Medicare, healthcare 
entitlements. Why is it so hard to tell the truth?
  Here is another one. This is sort of building a chart right out of 
CBO, Congressional Budget Office. CBO projects budget deficit rise is 
entirely--this is CBO--driven by soaring Social Security and Medicare 
shortfalls.
  I know it is the third rail. I know we are not supposed to talk about 
it. But if you believe like I do, I believe it is a moral obligation to 
protect Social Security and Medicare. How can you step up to that 
ethical obligation and then not tell the truth about the math? You 
know, you can't fix a problem unless you are willing to accept it.
  Look, the chart is the chart is the chart. This is from the 
nonpartisan arbiters of what is going on. It is demographics. And the 
sizes of these numbers are just devastatingly large.
  Let's take a look at another one. There is a bunch of the tax reform 
that expires in the next couple of years, and we go back to other sort 
of tax rates and those things, but this one, we just pretend everything 
is permanent, that those revenue gains that are coming in a couple of 
years don't happen, assuming they would create multipliers in the 
economy, which they won't. They probably won't pay for themselves, but 
that is a completely different chart and models. This also misses a 
bunch of the expanded spending that happened late last year when we 
lifted some of the budgetary restriction caps.
  But once again, 90 percent of the budgetary shortfall is Social 
Security, Medicare, healthcare entitlements, but mostly Medicare, yet 
this body is terrified to talk about that. It is the math.
  One more on this, just to sort of get our head around it because I am 
frustrated, because for those of us who do believe there is a policy 
set, and I have been behind this microphone--and the poor folks who 
have to try to keep up with me. Tell me if I am starting to speak too 
quickly. I have had a lot of coffee today.
  There is a way to get there. Now, when I say ``get there,'' that 
means to sort of stay about 95 percent of debt to GDP and hold it as we 
wait for those of us who are baby boomers to meet our reward and go 
back to more normal population demographic numbers. This is hard, but 
it is the reality. Then we put this together.
  And, I am sorry, we don't typically try to do something that is this 
blatant, but it is. This is one of the things that comes into our 
office, saying: ``Well, if you would tax rich people more, you would be 
fine.'' It is lunacy. It only covers about 4.7 percent of--8.3 percent 
of GDP. It doesn't even cover close to half of the total shortfall when 
you put everything together.

                              {time}  1345

  The entire defense budget, if you get rid of that, we have already 
talked about that, it only covers 5 years of the growth in spending.
  We actually have an entire chart list if anyone ever wants it. You 
are welcome to call our office where we actually have been laying out 
all of these proposals.
  If we tax this bunch more, or Republicans, if we do this in waste and 
fraud, or this and that, and you start to see, we are talking about 
slivers that functionally have almost no impact. Because if you do them 
solo and not tie it in with lots of other economic growth dynamics, you 
don't get anywhere.
  The last column is just things that are being proposed in the 
Presidential race. So we are talking about trillion-dollar deficits, 
and then you look at that last bar on this chart and those trillion-
dollar deficits don't even have these things in it. That is about 
another 25.6 percent of GDP going to debt.
  You can't get there. The fact of the matter is, the economy blows up 
a long time before that.
  So, can we move back a little bit from the lunacy and actually sort 
of say: Okay, how do you get there? Schweikert, you keep coming to the 
microphone. You keep begging your Democrat colleagues and Republican 
colleagues to open up their minds and think more creatively--think with 
a calculator--actually, in some way optimistically. We joke in my 
office that I am 57 with a 4-year old. I am optimistic.
  But first off, you have to grow. We have to grow like crazy. You do 
tax policy that maximizes economic growth. And we saw that in some of 
the earlier boards here when you see what is happening in the labor 
force participation and payroll taxes.
  You will have to fix the immigration system. The economic modelers 
keep coming to us saying: A talent-based immigration system will give 
you much more economic lift.
  We are going to have to also come up with policies that encourage 
family formation. Birth rates are collapsing in our country. And it 
turns out that that has a really devastating effect over the coming 
decades in what happens in economic growth and we just need to be 
honest about that. But there are other things. So that is population 
stability.
  There are other things you can do in economic growth. I am not happy 
with the term ``deregulating.'' I argue that you need to move to a type 
of smart regulation. We all walk around with these super computers in 
our pocket, and we don't stop for a second to think what would happen 
if we actually started to use technology as part of our regulations.
  There are arguments, like in financial markets, the ability to use 
technology to find bad actors, instead of the lunacy of the model used 
today, which is almost like a 1938 model where people fill out pieces 
of paper. They may email them in, but they are still filling out pieces 
of paper instead of using technology to watch the markets.
  It turns out you could crowdsource data for water, for air, and so 
many of these things, and have instantaneous information if there is a 
bad actor in your environment. And it turns out it is dramatically less 
expensive because you don't have to be crushing each little business 
with regulations. If one of them screws up, you catch them immediately 
because you are using technology.
  There are lots of ideas like this. They are not Republican. They are 
not Democrat. They are technology. But, yet, you have to be willing to 
take on the bureaucracy. And as a lot of us are learning around here, 
it is the bureaucracy now that basically runs Washington, D.C.
  Technology disruptions. We need to have an honest discussion. You saw 
in the charts; Medicare is the primary driver of our debt. You have to 
be honest with it. How do you have a disruption in healthcare prices? 
And there are lots and lots of ideas that you are going to have to put 
together.
  We had a meeting in our office earlier today. We were walking through 
the math on pharmaceuticals. Did you know the misuse or lack of use--
which is misuse--of pharmaceuticals is over half a trillion dollars a 
year? Sixteen percent of all healthcare spending is because of the fact 
that people didn't take, or took too much, or screwed up taking their 
hypertension medicine, or other things.
  But there is a simple technology solution. It turns out it is not in 
the pharmaceutical pricing. It is actually in the cap of the 
pharmaceutical bottle that says: ``Hey, Bob, we calculate you did not 
take your hypertension medicine,'' and you ping the phone. You can do 
that for a couple of dollars. Or the thing that distributes pills to 
grandma who has to take two in the morning and one in the afternoon--
this and that--and when she screws up, she ends up in the hospital. It 
is efficacy of when you take your pharmaceuticals.
  What would happen if I could walk up and say, just changing this 
technology

[[Page H745]]

platform is 16 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending? We have to be 
willing to think creatively and disruptively.
  There is the thing you can blow into. It looks like a large kazoo and 
instantly tells you you have the flu; instantly can bang off your 
medical records; and instantly order your antivirals.
  Would that make us healthier, more productive, less time getting 
sick? Of course, it would. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just 
technology, except it is illegal. That type of technology today, the 
way our laws are set up, is illegal.
  How do we actually drag in the willingness to engage in those 
disruptions? It is one of my running arguments. Should we have 
protected Blockbuster Video from Netflix? We love it when it comes into 
our home and makes our lives easier. But what happens when it makes 
many of our constituencies that are filling up the halls here lobbying 
us really nervous?
  There are technology disruptions out there that could crash the price 
of healthcare and raise productivity and raise GDP. We know what they 
are. But the arrogance of this place often thinks we know what the 
future is, and we keep getting it wrong. So we need to legalize 
technology.

  Employment. We still have a problem with millennial men. We have lots 
and lots of people who have gotten older who want to stay in the 
workforce. What do you do in programs to incentivize as many people as 
possible to be in the labor force?
  It turns out to be simple ideas that I can't believe we can't come to 
an agreement on and we have been working on it for years; things like 
Social Security disability. Should someone say: ``Oh, I got a job,'' 
boom, they hit the cliff and their benefits, and that sort of safety 
net goes away.
  How do you actually smooth the off-ramp on these programs so it 
incentivizes people getting attached into the labor force? Because 
labor force attachment is one of the most powerful things you can ever 
do for someone's future and for the economy. That is true for lots of 
programs, even the earned entitlement.
  Should we give you a spiff on Social Security and Medicare if you 
will stay in the labor force? Because as it turns out, you lower our 
costs. You lower society's costs.
  So we really, really need to think about that. And that ties into the 
earned and unearned benefits of how do you build incentives in there to 
be part of the labor force to actually use the technologies that make 
your healthcare much less expensive but keep you healthier. How do we 
do those things? We know the policy, but this place seems to think 
about them in silos of: ``Well, I have this piece of legislation that 
does this,'' instead of understanding it will be dozens of pieces of 
legislation that are complex. They are politically difficult and have 
to be put together.
  And the reason those are so important--I have been working on this 
model now for years saying, if we do everything here and do it right, 
the future is actually really bright. If we don't do it, we are 
crushing my little girl. We are crushing our country to just a time of 
anemic growth and crushing debt. At some point, Members of Congress and 
the armies of lobbyists in these hallways will have to step up and 
admit that we squandered the opportunity when we were in this time of 
just almost a miracle Goldilocks economy where things are stable.
  If we are going to do this, this is the time to step up and make it 
work. But, yet, this has been a couple of years that I have come behind 
this microphone, and I will get one or two offices that will reach out 
and want some of the slides and some of the backup information.
  I will have--probably next week--certain associations, lobbyists come 
marching into my office and saying: ``David, you can't talk about 
technology that way. Don't you understand, you are going to screw up 
our business model?''
  We have got to get honest. We know the math. We know how devastating 
it gets. And just to make a point, before tax reform, CBO was still 
predicting in these next couple of years we are going to have trillion-
dollar deficits. We have known this is coming. The game here is to find 
someone or something to blame.
  How about actually starting to expect us to start offering solutions? 
That is why I am behind this microphone. There is a path. It will be 
hard. It will be complex, but there is a path where it works.
  Let's try it.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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