Math, Money, and Demographics

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are going to actually do something with a little meat on the bones today. I have to walk through the math.

Repeatedly, I have come behind this microphone over the last decade, trying to walk through our Joint Economic Committee's, my office's, and my personal unified theory. The unified theory is a fairly simple concept: We have an incredibly complex problem.

Last year, for every dollar this country took in, we spent $1.43. Yesterday, we hit over $39 trillion in borrowing. We have been borrowing, so far this year, about--actually, if you do this fiscal year, it is over eight, but over the last 12 months, it is like $7 billion a day.

You realize that yesterday we hit $87,400 per second in borrowing. Our unified theory is, you can't just pretend and say, oh, we are going to pass a balanced budget amendment, so everything will be fine. I am going to show you in the charts where the math, where the money, and where the demographics actually go, but you are going to have to do lots of things. You are going to have to adopt technology. You will have to adopt smart regulations. You will have to legalize competition, which, remember, this place constantly uses legislation, rules, and other things to basically stop competition.

Creative destruction is actually a basic economic principle of free markets, except here in Congress. We are also going to talk about--and this is the tough thing--we are going to talk about moving to a talent-based immigration system because I cannot make any of the rest of these numbers actually work in a society right now where the United States is basically at zero population growth.

Last year, the preliminary number is that we grew maybe 400,000. There is a chance this year we are even closer to zero population growth. You have to embrace it. It is math. It is not Republican and Democrat. It is not my feelings. It is math.

We functionally have the same number of 18-year-olds as we had 20 years ago, and double the number who are 65 and up. It is demographics, yet we lie our heinies off about it.

Remember, yesterday--and I voted yes--we had a ``we are going to balance the budget'' bill. Okay, great. Love it.

Do you understand, with the economic impacts, if you told me to balance the budget tomorrow, I can, but you just have to tell me what half of Federal spending we are ending. It would require cutting Federal spending by 50 percent when you do the economic effects.

That is the reality, so we don't tell the truth around here. We use these platitudes. It is great on campaign brochures, but it is crap math. Let's actually start walking through reality.

Then, I am going to actually try to tell the truth about what the Biden-era years of immigration cost us--millions and millions and millions of low-skilled. The fact of the matter is--I am going to show you the math, but I am also going to show you the math of what high- skill, talent-based immigration does for the finances of this country.

First off, we have an updated chart here, and it still needs another update because of interest rates being higher.

Today, only 25.2 percent of spending is voted on by Members of Congress. Mr. Speaker, you and I only get to vote on this blue portion. Everything in red is on autopilot.

Right now, we have net interest at $1.39 trillion. We actually believe that is actually going to come in closer to $1.112 because of higher interest rates and some of the refinancing demands, but this is based on the CBO report from 2 weeks ago.

If you use our math right now, Medicare is coming in at $1.666 trillion. Social Security is number one. We actually believe interest is number two. Medicare will be number three, but I need you to look at my chart right now. Do you see this Medicare number of $1.63 trillion? In 6\1/2\ years, we go from $1 trillion on Medicare to $2 trillion.

In 6\1/2\ years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. If you are a hospital getting Medicare part A--remember, there is A, B, C is Medicare Advantage, and D is drugs. If you get your resources from Medicare part A, you are getting a 12-percent cut. That is the new updated number from CBO.

Mr. Speaker, in 6\1/2\ years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. In 6\1/2\ years, you get a 24 percent cut in your Social Security check. We will double the poverty of seniors in 6\1/2\ years.

For my Democratic colleagues who keep saying: Well, just raise taxes. Okay, great. This happens in 2032. By 2033, to cover the Medicare shortfall and the Social Security trust fund fall with the trust funds empty, you have got to give us $638 billion, I think is the first year of the shortfall. If defense is $1 trillion, start thinking about that. It is like 60 percent of the entire defense budget is your shortfall.

How often are the conversations behind these microphones absolutely vacuous because this place doesn't own calculators or doesn't have the moral aptitude to tell the truth about the math and the misery we are going to put on our brothers and sisters in this country if we don't step up and fix it.

I am in a 50-50 district. For years and years, I come behind this microphone. I introduce bills to fix the--MedPAC tells us there is almost $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion in misalignment in Medicare Advantage. Who is the idiot who lays out a bill to fix it and then can't get a single other Member of Congress to sponsor it with him?

The fact of the matter is there is a way--you are not going to pay off the debt. You are just trying to stabilize it. We have got a lot of wonderful articles saying: Well, there is a group in Congress that talk about holding the deficit to 3 percent of GDP. Our interest is over 3 percent of GDP this year.

The CBO report from 2 weeks ago says: In 9 years the structural deficit of this country is $3.1 trillion; and $2.1 trillion of that is just interest. So, yay, we have gotten the deficit down to $1 trillion; but our interest load is so big.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt is interest and our healthcare costs. Are we willing to have that revolution in how we provide healthcare? Legalize technology. Push for the cures.

Diabetes is 33 percent of U.S. healthcare spending. Maybe helping our brothers and sisters be healthier turns out to be one of the greatest economic benefits of society when 47 percent of U.S. healthcare is associated with obesity. Maybe we should change the farm bill. Maybe we should change nutrition support. Maybe we should actually think about helping people be healthier. It is great economics, and it is good for our brothers and sisters.

Oh, but that will piss off--sorry--yeah, lots of the moneyed interest. That means the hospitals and the others who make money on sick people. This place is absolutely immoral and perverse.

I find myself getting angrier and angrier. I have given up. I am leaving this place. I am going to go run for Governor in Arizona. Maybe I can save Arizona because I can't get my brothers and sisters here to do hard things because it is hard.

I have a 3-year-old that we have adopted. I am 64. My wife is my age. Maybe we are insane. It is the greatest gift God has ever given someone. We need 104 percent of my little boy's lifetime income. We need 104 percent of my little boy's lifetime income just to pay Federal Government pensions.

In 33 months, over half of Federal spending will go to those 65 and up. The math problem is we have gone 40 years and there are not enough children. Mr. Speaker, you heard me a moment ago say we are functionally at zero population growth. There is actually one analyst out there that has us at negative population growth because of the people leaving the country.

They come to me, and our hallways are full of people demanding more money. Many of them are things we agree with and we love. We just have to borrow everything.

Let's walk through just, first off, the reality of the math. Then I am going to make the argument to move, to revolutionize our immigration system to a talent-based immigration system that the rest of the industrialized world has moved to.

Let's take a look. There were 3.6 million babies born last year. Okay. Think of this. For every baby that was born last year, that same year we put $600,000 on their credit card in a single year. That is the ratio of our borrowing because we have so few children.

Our model is we are down to 1.59 fertility rate. France actually has a higher fertility rate than the United States. Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States.

Are we going to tell the truth?

Some of my charts are a little bit geeky. The basic principle of this is here is our available workforce. Here is our labor force participation. We are getting down. We are going to be basically getting close to 61, 60 percent of our population in the labor force. It is just demographics.

We had the baby boom. I remember back in the early 1980s I was sitting in a statistics class. I had a professor back then; she was talking about we need to get ready. We had this population bubble. How did we know 40 years ago that we had a baby boom bubble?

Her model was not dour enough for the fact that starting in the 1980s, fertility rates in the United States--and now it has gotten steeper and steeper and steeper. It is all over the industrialized world. We have got to understand. This isn't just the United States. The United States is just better off.

What is one of the miracles we have as Americans? We are the reserve currency of the world. People want to trade in U.S. dollars.

The second advantage we have over the rest of the world is people want to move here. They want to start businesses here. They want to do their research here. They want to bring their talents here. How do we leverage that to maximize economic growth?

If we are at a zero population growth and we need to make up for the years of Biden inflation, the way we do that, the way we do affordability is not somehow magically make prices go down. It is we raise wages. We raise wages by--remember your high school economics class? There are two ways wages go up.

One is inflation. That doesn't get us anything. It is productivity. Wages go up by productivity. We invest in capital equipment. We build a tax system that encourages investment. We bring in the talent that makes us more productive as a society.

This chart is going to upset people, but it is vetted math. It is vetted math. Take a look. These are the populations that deposit a 30- year impact on the Federal budget. If you get over here, people with STEM, with a master's, with a Ph.D., they functionally add about two-- let's get this right. That individual adds about $2.5 million in taxes they pay.

We always talk about the DACA recipient with the Ph.D., but that is not the mean. They are positive. But they are not positive by very much. This is the abstract. You can actually see detailed methods to look at this on, I think it is the Manhattan Institute. Their immigration study actually has a whole thing where we can put in someone with this education of this age--remember age is very sensitive on these numbers. We can actually see what type of immigration system maximizes the benefit to America.

Remember that if you want our Social Security, if you want our Medicare, it is a moral, societal obligation we have to you. Help me make the finances work. We need this as part of the unified theory to make the math work.

Let's actually do something--this is my favorite chart of the week. This will upset some of my Democrat colleagues, but it is called math.

Here are populations with less than a high school education. We calculate over those 30 years they cost society about $100,000. They cost. What happened at the border during the Biden years, the millions and millions and millions and millions of people that crossed, each one of those, on average, is going to cost us $100,000 over the next three decades.

If we come over here, these are people with graduate degrees. We collect over $3 million from them in taxes.

Does anyone start to see just here on this chart the basic math that if we are going to start to bend our debt curve, yes, we have to adopt technology. We have to add competition in our society. We have to revolutionize the price of healthcare, and we need to move to a talent- based immigration system.

Remember, we are, functionally, the last country in the industrialized world that uses a familial--a family--sponsorship model, and for a lot of my religious groups: David, it is moral. We like being able to sponsor our family. I understand.

Tell me how I deal with the bankruptcy of Medicare. Tell me how I deal with the 24 percent cut in Social Security coming in 6\1/2\ years. That is moral also, and there is a way that I can slow down this hemorrhaging of cash.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, in the last 12 months, we have borrowed $2.77 trillion. We thought this fiscal year, we would come in about $1.7 trillion, $1.8 trillion. Running math right now is we are way off, and are we heading toward a supplemental? Are we heading to other things? Why is telling the truth so hard around here? Why is doing hard things--well, maybe it is because they are hard things, answering my own question.

I actually think that the voters understand that there is something really screwed up out there. They may not understand all of these details. They may not--look, I am blessed. I chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am number four on the Ways and Means Committee. I chair the Oversight Subcommittee. I have six--well, five--one is actually, I think, defending his Ph.D. Let's call it six Ph.D. economists.

Most people in their life don't have a bunch of freaky smart people shoving information into their head all day long, my one great joy in this job.

There are solutions to stabilize the debt. We are still going to borrow. It is demographics. Help me. Help us. Help our brothers and sisters in this country. We have to do these things.

Oh, David, we can't talk about Medicare or Social Security or, Heaven forbid, ever use the word ``immigration.'' The trolls on the internet will say mean things about us.

So we are willing to have grandma live in poverty because we are worried about trolls on Twitter? Is that really what we have become?

Look, tax revenues from a 30-year-old immigrant with a college degree versus someone with just no high school diploma, income tax, we functionally get $80,000. The person without the high school degree, almost nothing. It is just you start to look at the economics. Stop using the word ``immigration'' and only visualize people running across Eagle Pass in Texas.

The fact of the matter is, also, if we can fix our system--and I am going to show you some quotes from President Trump. President Trump has talked about this repeatedly saying that it is insane that this country educates people and then sends them home to compete with us.

How do I get this body to start actually understanding policy is economics, and economics is math? You start to look at--this number is wrong already. We were looking at saying, hey, you know, there is-- okay. I need to explain this. The 2025 deficit, we book as $1.7 trillion.

Now, you understand we played some games with it. We rolled the student loans, pulled them back so we got a credit. There were certain bills we owed. We paid them in October instead of the end of September. So we played some games to lower that number, but I need you to look at what was going on.

Mr. Speaker, 70 percent of our spending just went to net interest, and 16 percent went to defense. Interest was more than defense last year. Think of this: 2025 fiscal year, Social Security, interest, Medicare, Medicaid, and it is Obama subsidies and defense. Defense was number five. The thing that is in the Constitution was number five in our spending stack.

The majority of our spending in 33 months--and I will be one of them--will go to those 65 and up. I will say it again for, like, the fourth or fifth time. It is demographics. We don't have enough young people in our society, and the baby boomers are moving into their earned benefit years.

Can we think we are just going to borrow all of the money? Do we really think the credit markets are going to keep loaning us, like right now, $7 billion today, $87,000 for every second I stand here?

We have debates on this floor that the money borrowed during the debate is more than the entire debate was trying to save because we want shiny objects because it looks good on social media. It gets me on FOX News tonight, as the finances of our country burn down.

Look, estimated share of outlays by group--and this upsets people, but I am trying to make a point. So I am a kid in the 1970s. Yes, disco and bell bottom pants. It was not a pretty time.

At that time, the rough estimate is children, those under 18, got about $7 of Federal resources for every dollar that went to 65 and up. Today, that is reversed. That is just because of our population dynamics, but it is going to get bigger and bigger.

The reason I grabbed this chart is to show that, in 2036, we will be well--and it has actually happened. Our math is 33 months. The majority, more than half of all Federal spending will be to those 65 and up, but take a look down here. For those under 18, we are going to be under 6 percent.

Am I insane for coming to the floor and actually telling people the very math that is in all of our publications? No one seems willing to open up the binders and actually read them.

Look, I want to give President Trump credit. He has repeatedly stood up in front of audiences, stood up in front of crowds, stood up in front of the cameras and talked about the insanity of having a country that is not attracting and keeping talent.

Before I do the President's quotes, I have a professor friend who used to talk about this--and when I say ``used to,'' it is a couple of years ago--the 1980s, the 1990s, the war had conflict over hydrocarbons. We need oil.

Last decade, rare earths.

His model basically says that in this decade, next decade, and probably the one after that, the world is going to compete for smart people, people who are educated, people who have entrepreneurial skills, people who have unique talents because there is going to be so few young people, and those with the degrees that grow economies, that create productivity, therefore raise our wages, we are all going to fight over them.

Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, all of these countries have built talent-based immigration systems. Do you know who hasn't shown up, Mr. Speaker? United States because we are so terrified to have an adult, professional, academic, economic-based discussion of we are falling behind.

Talent is portable. Do you have a graduate degree? Do you have an engineering or STEM degree? What is it--I co-chair the Singapore Caucus. I think in 6 weeks, you can get status to live in Singapore.

Do you know what we do to that person here in the United States? We send them home to compete with us, to another country. Have we lost our minds?

Look, we have a whole bunch of boards from President Trump's quotes talking about this.

Because we are often intellectually vacuous when we are in front of a camera, when we are talking to our folks at home, it is immigration. We immediately grab the hordes coming across the border. I just showed you that is costing us a fortune.

Months ago, we did an entire report that showed what President Biden allowed to happen at the border will suppress wages for the working poor for a decade. What they did made the working poor poorer in this country for a decade. You hang drywall. Now, you are competing against how many other people who hang drywall?

We have the academic research, the economic research, and the economic modelling that make it clear that if we could flip over to what the rest of the industrialized world is now doing, a talent-based immigration system, it gives us a fighting chance. It raises tax receipts. It raises wages when designed correctly.

As part of my last portion here, we have been working for a year with our economists and some of my office staff to rewrite--and we are doing some pretty radical stuff. We have been following the papers that say the H-1B model actually does create certain wage suppression because that visa is owned by an employer. If you want to get lobbied and have people really angry, say that.

The fact of the matter is that a model that allows the talent to get a job sponsorship, but you are portable within the economy, gets rid of that wage suppression.

I believe we can move to an economic model that grows wages and the economy, and helps us stabilize this insane growth of our debt. There is hope, Mr. Speaker. It just requires us to do hard things and stop living behind folklore and start living behind a calculator.

That is my pitch, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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