DEBT AND DEFICIT WILL TAKE US DOWN

DEBT AND DEFICIT WILL TAKE US DOWN

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 42 (Thursday, March 5, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 42 (Thursday, March 5, 2026)] [House] [Pages H2463-H2466] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] {time} 1900 DEBT AND DEFICIT WILL TAKE US DOWN (Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. Schweikert of Arizona was recognized for 30 minutes.) Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, part of what we are going to do tonight is a little thick. Can you imagine that? Mr. Speaker, I want to walk through a handful of things. Even as Mr. Roy was just touching on it, I need us to understand what is going on in our math. Mr. Speaker, guess what. We had sort of a record today for not being in COVID or whatever disasters. Every day, I send out a text message. It is part of our Joint Economic Committee. [[Page H2464]] I have a few thousand people who subscribe to this. Yes, it is a little geeky. What we are doing is we are capturing the numbers from the Treasury Department. We have built a whole system where we grab those and send those out. Mr. Speaker, you will be happy to know, over the last 12 months--and this will make sense in a moment--if you divide our borrowing, just our borrowing, we are now borrowing $83,720 per second. That is $83,720 per second. Functionally, when we do the 12-month math, that is a new record. Yet, we have flattened out discretionary spending. The things my colleagues and I get to vote on, that is flat, but we only get to vote on about 25 percent of the spending. This is why it is so hard to actually have this conversation here. The majority of our debt--I am going to show some of this, and then I am going to show where we have some of the waste and fraud. I have to get to the alignment. Then, I am going to get to something that I think is actually optimistic. We have to understand that we have a shortage of children. We have functionally the same number of 18-year-olds today as we had 20 years ago and double the number of 65 and up. We have known this was going to happen for a very long time. It is almost like, is it because we are fearful of getting reelected? The White House gets cranky when we talk about these things? It is Republicans and Democrats. We come here and talk about shiny objects, but we have a math problem. In 33 months, over half the spending from the government here in Washington, D.C., will go to those 65 and up. Somewhere here, my 3-year-old is actually running around here. Yes, I am insane. I have a 3-year-old and a 10-year-old. My wife is exactly my age. We have some math. If you use a 6 percent generational discount rate, you need 104 percent of my 3-year-old's lifetime income just to pay Federal Government pensions. That is Social Security, Medicare, military, and Federal. It is partially because we have so few children and so many baby boomers. It is not Republican or Democrat. It is just math. Mr. Speaker, we are going to do what? Once more, the two primary drivers of our borrowing today, that $83,000 per second, what are the two drivers? It is interest and healthcare costs. Interest is a function of: We have $38.7 trillion of borrowing out there, and that has to go to the markets. The market is going to set a price. When we hear the discussions about the Federal Reserve, that is the short-term portion. When we start getting over 5 years, 7 years, 10 years, or 30 years, that is a market. We look at U.S. sovereign debt. What do we want to pay? Mr. Speaker, think about this at the moment. Greece can sell a 10- year bond cheaper than the United States today. Does that set off any alarm bells? Is that just annoying because the hallways are full of people who want nothing more than more money spent? We get two types of folks that come lobby us and walk in our office. Don't always think they are lobbyists. There are often constituents from home who walk in and say, We want more money, or, We want you to control and regulate our competition. Mr. Speaker, I am hoping somewhere here we can convince our brothers and sisters on the Republican side, the conservative side, that we believe in free markets. We believe creative destruction is a rebirth of an economy, and it should be happening constantly. I know some of the populists don't like that. The fact of the matter is, if we don't get remarkable productivity improvements, I don't know how we get wage growth. Remember, unless we can do something crazy in supplies--so, supply- side economics--we are not going to make prices go down. What we do is we make them more affordable by wage growth. Wage growth happens by two things. The first is by inflation. Well, that is just treading water. It also happens by productivity. We do it better, faster, and cheaper through technology, through other systems, and through redesign. That is how we raise wages. What happens in a world where the estimated share of outlays that we are going to spend in government--we have an obligation. Society made promises. When we turn 65, we get our Medicare. When we turn 62 to 70 or 72, we can actually take Social Security. We made promises. If a person works for the Federal Government or if a person works for the military, they have pensions. Right now, my demographics, ``Estimated Share of Outlays by Group,'' what does this government spend on populations? If a person is under 18, right now we spend 7 percent. In 2036, it goes down to 6 percent. Here is the punch line right here. This is my 65-and-up population. In the next few years, over half of our Federal spending will be to those--look, I am only a year away now--65 and up. Are we supposed to talk about this? Those are obligations. We owe them. Do my colleagues see this down here? In 2036, we are down to 12 percent of Federal spending. Mr. Speaker, 12 percent of Federal spending is defense, and 52 percent will be to pensions and healthcare. Do my colleagues see the scale? Remember, today, Social Security is the biggest spend. It is $1.6 trillion. What is the number two? What is the number two spend in the Federal Government? It is not defense. It is interest. Then, it is Medicare. Then, it is Medicaid and ObamaCare subsidies, ACA subsidies. Number five is actually defense. As Chip Roy was just saying, I have been coming behind this microphone for over a decade. I am wondering, where are people's intellect? Is it you need the satiation of being angry instead of thinking through the scale? What takes down a republic? I would argue debt and deficits and this financing are what will take us down. The bond market is now almost in the place where it will run this country. Let's actually walk through a couple more of these and see if we can sort of make the argument so it makes sense. The second half of this chart is, in my personal opinion, garbage, but it is a projection. I want us just to look right here, from this point here, 2025 to 2036. {time} 1910 This is actually the population of 18-year-olds coming down because we can actually sort of calculate that right now. You have to understand--ignore this stuff. By 2036, we have only 4 million 18-year- olds. The fact of the matter is: You tell me how I keep growth in an economy when I have shortages of young people entering the workforce, entering the economy? I have done presentation after presentation. You are going to have to accept technology. You are going to have to accept synthetic biology. You are going to have to accept robots and labor substitution. If you want wages to go up in America and make things more affordable--one of the reasons President Trump has talked about this in many different ways at the White House and others, we had a population problem. The math right now says that the United States is fairly close to zero population growth. Do you remember your high school economics class where they taught you that GDP growth is a combination of step-ups in productivity and population growth. What happens when we don't have the population growth? No, you are not magically going to create an army of new little babies. Bless them, but this is not just the United States. It is all over the industrialized world. Oddly enough, the United States is still much better off than many, many countries. France actually has a higher fertility rate than the United States, even when you adjust for their immigrant population. We have been trying to promote what we call a unified theory that says that the adoption of technology, the legalization of healthcare disruptions that will make us healthier, better; move to a truly talent-based immigration system; move away from the family sponsorship system, and President Trump has talked about this. Remember that he says that it is insane that we educate someone and send them home to compete with us. There are about a dozen things on our unified theory, and you have to do them all at once. It is one of the reasons that I am not running again. I had an agreement that we were going to do a second reconciliation. [[Page H2465]] Part of that reconciliation, we were going to do all of these ideas that saved money but didn't take away services. We were going to get rid of the waste and fraud and the misalignment and the way some of the things are scammed, and that became too hard. You do realize that $83,000 a second is $7.4 billion a day. If you want something that is uncomfortable--maybe I shouldn't talk about this, so that means I am going to--DOGE. I absolutely loved DOGE's mission, but once again, you have to be able to execute it. You need Members of Congress who are tough SOBs to execute it. When we started DOGE, it was going to be $2 trillion. Excuse me. When the White House started DOGE, it was going to be $2 trillion. Then it fell to $1 trillion. You can go to doge.gov right now. It will be $200 billion-plus of identified savings. What have we actually executed? What have we helped them actually execute? It was about $7 billion. We borrowed more