Mr. Speaker, as always, I apologize to the bored staff, and I will try not to speak like a machine gun.
Mr. Speaker, we are going to do basically three things. I am going to make fun of us. I am going to actually walk through some debt and deficit numbers, interest, those things that are scaring my economists, myself half to death; and then I am going to touch on some of the--and it is a technical economics term--bedwetting in regard to the reconciliation budget and how people are making things up. Let's have at it.
Due to the fact that I sit in an airplane 10 hours a week, and I have some weird reading habits, I actually came across a paper written last year, published just recently. It is in Nature Human Behaviour. It is one of those quirky--excuse me, those academic, but actually what they did is they went back to the late 1800s, and they took all of our congressional speeches up until 2022, and they ran a data set on them.
They ran AI, and can you believe it, Mr. Speaker, they figured out that our congressional speeches have become less and less and less based in facts. I know this is hard for us to believe, but apparently the quality of idiots--I mean, people like me--getting up in front of these mikes and doing presentations and walking through our job has crashed in quality, in facts.
As a matter of fact, they used the word intuition. I basically say we make public policy now by our feelings because, God forbid, we go to our voters and tell them the truth about the math.
It made me feel better because I have mocked us for years on how much of public policy we now make on feelings. It is great television. It gets you followers on social media. You get a hit on cable television tonight if you are willing to make crap up, but do it with passion and feelings, but if you actually want to talk about the math of what is going on in this country, it turns out it is how we are rewarded now as elected officials.
Now, what was interesting is they had the curve actually starting to fall in 1970, and it has just gotten steeper. Part of it and part of my conclusion is television, then moving to cable news, and then moving to social media, we have crashed the diet of robust facts in our speeches.
Now that we are going to make fun of ourselves, let's go on to the next thing. Mr. Speaker, for anyone who asks, we have been running the current data on how much we are borrowing. What would you guess we borrow per second right now? Right now, it looks like we are burning $72,000 every second. We are borrowing $72,000 every second. My best guess right now is we will borrow 7.37 percent of the entire economy this year. Try to keep that number in your head because we are going to come back to that in some charts and explain why that is so devastating.
Mr. Speaker, it is like we don't care about people's retirement, our kids, the next generation, and how the hell they will actually cover any of the scale of debt. Then we lie about what drives the debt.
Mr. Speaker, our best guess is we go from that $72,000 a second this year to maybe about $82,000 a second next year. This is hard for people to accept, but it is the math. Over the next 10 years, the baseline borrowing was about $22 trillion. We are trying to figure out how to extend the expiring tax provisions. We have the requests from the White House. We have other disasters and things we are trying to cover.
We are basically looking at--and I am going to show this multiple times--the United States, the day we were elected, Mr. Speaker, how much debt. We will double it. We will double 240 years of borrowing in this 10-year period.
The majority of that borrowing over the next 10 years is interest and Medicare. God forbid we are not allowed to tell people the truth. Most of the debts, deficits, and demographics is the fact we got old. We stopped having children. We have a shortage of young people in this country. We are terrified to tell our brothers and sisters the truth about the math.
Let's have at it. For anyone out there paying any attention--and this number, actually probably right now is a little bit worse. We now think about 75 percent of Federal spending is on autopilot.
Mr. Speaker, when you become a Member of Congress, everything you get to vote on is borrowed. When you vote on nondiscretionary, when you vote on defense, every dime of that is borrowed and about $400 billion of what is mandatory spending, which means formulaic. When we work so many quarters, we get our benefits. When we serve in the military, we get our benefits. For those who are part of a Tribal group or part of our treaty obligations, certain things are coming to them.
Then there are the things we vote on and the things we try to balance the budget over. We need more money for defense, and we have threats in the world. We get down to where we are trying to balance the budget on about 13 percent of our spending because we are terrified to talk about everything else. We can't touch interest.
I am going to show a slide here in a moment. This one should scare the crap out of people. I know my language is becoming more and more inflammatory, but I can't seem to break through.
This is from something called Moody's Analytics. It is one of those fancy subscription services. They have a bunch of economists and they collect data. They have us in nine budget years, 30 percent of U.S. tax collections will go just to interest.
Mr. Speaker, you pay your dollar in taxes, and 30 cents of that in 2035 goes just to interest. Does it not scare anyone? When the interest growth is bigger than everything we are talking about in trying to say--by multiples, by multiples--we calculate this fiscal year, the one we are living in right this second, we could spend $1.1 trillion to $1.2 trillion in just interest.
There is a dataset that if we do some of the things that we were going to do, the Senate's reconciliation budget, with almost no money to pay for it, in 10 years, interest could be a couple of trillion dollars a year. The annual deficit will be three-plus trillion a year. It will probably be $2.3 trillion this year.
Last year, for every dollar we took in in tax collections, take a guess. What did we actually spend? We took a dollar in tax collections last year. What did we spend? We spent $1.39. We take in $1. We spend $1.39. This year was supposed to be better. We were only supposed to spend $1.36.
We have a small problem. With some of the GDP growth numbers, just that adjustment, we may have lost $200 billion in tax receipts in this fiscal year, the end of September, between now and then. It just shows how fragile we are with small movements of interest when we have to refinance $9 trillion.
Think about this. A single point of interest on U.S. debt--and it takes years for it to roll in because of how much we have to refinance. So we will take about $9 trillion to market this year and refinance, we will issue a couple of trillion new this year. A single point of interest over 10 years costs $3 trillion.
Why does this not scare the crap out of people? Why do we not have people coming behind these microphones? But we are better off getting behind these microphones and telling passionate stories, anecdotes, and those things, because that is what gets us on social media. That is what gets people's dopamine hitting. But at some point the math is going to win.
We have the really smart analytic firms saying they are scared about U.S. sovereign debt. We see things happening around the world that makes me very nervous. There is an appetite for going on the long end of the curve.
The United States sells very short-term debt. Then we have 2 years, 5 years, 20 years, and 30 years. We are having real trouble selling the debt on the long end of the curve. Do not pay attention to some of the debt markets over the last month or two. Mr. Speaker, do you want to know why? We are in extraordinary measures. We are up against the debt ceiling. We are not issuing new debt. We are only issuing refinance and what comes due within the cap.
What happens a couple of months from now when we all raise the debt ceiling? I love the brain trust that says don't raise the debt ceiling.
Did I mention last year for every dollar we took in, we spent $1.39? Tell me what 39 percent of the Federal spending we should stop doing. When we don't raise the debt ceiling, we have to end all of that. More than a third of all our spending is functionally borrowed. I am happy to do it. Tell me which third we should stop financing. Those are the very people filling up these hallways, demanding we give them more money.
What happens when we raise that debt ceiling, Mr. Speaker, and we have to come to market--Treasury has to come to market--with $500 billion to $600 billion functionally to catch up and refund all the accounts we have been borrowing from? That is what is done in extraordinary measures. We grab every account and use that cash, now we have to refund it, and you take that much to market.
We have one analyst who is saying we will see a pop in U.S. interest rates, maybe on the 10 year, hitting five, just, boom. Because suddenly we are grabbing so much of the world's capital to finance what we have been borrowing internally and now we have to pay it back.
Be prepared. These aren't surprises. We all know it, but no one reads the damn documents. It is math, and it turns out telling the truth-- remember our story here that fact-based discussions on the floor no longer get us elected. No one listens to them. No one cares about them. We make things up because feelings is now how we make legislation.
This board is almost a year old, but it is to try to make a point to our brothers and sisters, particularly on the left, that keep coming to us and saying: Let's just tax rich people more. We show them--we are going to show the slide here. I am probably going to have to say it two or three times so it sinks in.
We have a detailed report that sort of walks through every tax hike the left has proposed. We are guilty on our side of every cut we have actually proposed. We take every tax hike and then do the economic data on it and get about 1.5 percent of GDP. Our cuts come out to about 1 percent of GDP. If I can do that math, that is 2\1/2\ percent.
Mr. Speaker, do you remember at the beginning of this? We are borrowing 7.3. The next time a politician says raise taxes on rich people. And then they are shown that it is a fraction of a fraction of what we even borrow every single day, that is a great rhetorical use of language. It is horrible math; completely fraudulent math. Remember demographics but we are not allowed to tell people that because it means we as a society have to do hard things.
I have this chart here. I was just trying to make a point how Washington finances 366 days of spending in 2024. The top 20 percent of earners covered 201 days. For the next core tile down, the next 20 percent covered 41 days. The middle earners, the middle 20 percent, paid for 17 days of government spending. The bottom 40 percent pay for 4 days of government spending. Then 103 days we finance by just borrowing it.
I think we are tied for the most progressive income tax system in the industrialized world. When we modernized the tax code in 2017, the United States income tax system actually became more progressive. Yet how many times have we heard Members say: Well, they gave money to the rich? The rich, after 2017, were paying more of the Federal income taxes.
At some point we are going to have to have this really uncomfortable discussion. Is it on the tax side or the spending side? I have done entire presentations here on the floor where I have shown my colleagues--go back to the last 65 to 75 years. Here is a time of very high marginal tax rates. We take in about mid-17 percent of the economy in tax collection. Very low marginal tax rates, we take in about mid-17 percent of Federal taxes. When we go up, the actual economy slows down. This is what is taken in.
The secret is: How do we adopt regulations and modernize it? How do we adopt tax policy that incentivizes productivity? How do we do the whole thing and get them to interact?
We maximize economic growth, and that growth becomes tax collection stability and gets us to the top of the total dollar amount, but we will probably still constantly fall back into that mean of the percentage of the economy. So have a bigger economy. It is not that complicated.
Upper-income taxpayers overwhelmingly finance the Federal Government. I know this isn't good politics. People like me are supposed to say: Yeah, the rich need to pay their fair share. The top 20 percent of earners pay 25.2 percent. The next core tile pays 15.8 percent. The middle covers 11 percent. The fourth core tile down, the next one down, covers 5.5. We send the bottom 20 percent of income earners money.
Remember that we have sort of this negative tax income system, earned income tax credits, and those things. If someone is in the 20 percent of the bottom core tile, we send them money.
Mr. Speaker, as a matter of fact, we have data--I didn't bring the chart--that shows functionally in America, if you are in the bottom half of the income earners, post-inflation, your life is miserable because wages haven't gone up as fast as inflation did.
That inflation was substantially created by stupid policies from the previous White House and the Democrats
Mr. Speaker, it is your high school economics class, and here we are a couple of years later. The poor are still poor because we still haven't gotten wages growing faster yet.
What scares the crap out of me is I am now seeing some data saying that we may have a year where inflation could be hovering around 4 percent by the end of the year. We have to do policies to get those wages growing.
I have a chart that will show you, Mr. Speaker, that the bottom 50 percent pay about 4 percent of the income tax, but the bottom one-third actually get money.
In some ways, that is just being compassionate, but we have the data from post-2017, when we did tax reform, when we had the miracle of income inequality starting to really shrink. We had 3 years there where the poor were getting dramatically less poor. Why isn't that moral?
Good regulatory policy and tax policy maximizes that velocity.
Let's really annoy some of our leftist brothers and sisters. This is an article in the Manhattan Institute written by, I believe, Jessica Riedl. It is now about 1 or 1\1/2\ years old. What they did is they went through basically all the proposals the left has on raising taxes and, step by step, here is the tax raise, the economic effects, and what we actually take in.
Remember, Mr. Speaker, our rules about the size of the economy, 17.1 or mid-17 percent of the GDP.
Individual income tax, investment tax, raising the corporate taxes, and raising the State taxes, when you got to the end, Mr. Speaker, you functionally were getting about 1.5 percent of new tax receipts for the economy.
I look forward to the Democrats actually proposing this and being willing to vote on it. That is because they throw these things out and get them scored. They controlled everything here 1 year ago, a couple of years ago. You notice they never did them, Mr. Speaker. They pretend this solves the problem.
You get 1.5 percent, Mr. Speaker, and you will have stagnated the economy.
Mr. Speaker, you have already heard the discussions of how close you are to stagflation, which is partially driven because of the economics.
Remember, Mr. Speaker, at the end of the decade or within 9 years or so, 22 or 23 percent of the population is 65 and up. We have a demographic issue for productivity.
The point of showing this chart is the solutions you will hear, Mr. Speaker, if, God forbid, you go on leftwing cable television, sometimes even rightwing. They are mathematical lies.
We are borrowing 7.3 percent of the economy this year. Are we willing to engage in a revolution of using technology and modernization? How many businesses still run themselves as if it is still the 1990s? Government does.
I had someone bring me, just the other day, a piece of healthcare paperwork. I think it might have been from the Indian Health Service. It was a three-part NCR paper for a purchase order for a healthcare procedure that you fill out and, I think, faxed it in. Have we lost our minds?
Yet, we get protesters from the left saying: Don't use technology.
You have seen article after article of the five major databases the United States has, Mr. Speaker. None of them talk to each other. If you are willing to actually read, then you saw the stories of the Small Business Administration having--what was it?--3,300 people who had taken out loans. Except the small problem was that all of them were 114 years old and up, meaning they were on to their rewards. They weren't with us anymore. It turns out $300 million in loans, no one had paid a dime back, but the Small Business Administration didn't have the ability to bounce off the Social Security mortality or death file.
We have designed these walls to functionally--it is as if the fraudsters designed our data systems here in the Federal Government. Let's go fill out things, go get money, and steal the taxpayers' money, but we are going to make sure that there is no way to check the data that is being filled out because we want to protect their privacy.
Some of that is not privacy. They are asking for a government-insured loan over here, and we can't check the death file? What idiots allowed this to happen? Yet, we get protesters in front of our congressional offices saying: Don't let DOGE and those actually make the system work. I am sorry they are scared of change.
Did I mention that we borrow $72,000 a second?
How do we convince our brothers and sisters across the country that we, as Members of Congress, the administration, and the bureaucracy, are taking it seriously if we are not even willing to make the data talk to each other?
Back to one of the things that has just annoyed the crap out of me--I used this board a handful of times for some of my leftwing protesters the last couple of weeks, and to their credit, some of them were actually shockingly intellectually honest saying: Oh, that is not part of our talking notes. No one told them the truth.
Mr. Speaker, it is on the internet. Trust me, I am not that bright. I just looked it up. It is there. You can find it.
The next 10 years, the Federal Government baseline was spending $86 trillion over the next 10 years--$86 trillion. All we are talking about in trying to modernize and change spending in this reconciliation budget, if we did the high end, so the House, full, all in, high end-- which, please God, let us get there. The high end is $2 trillion. $86 trillion, we are trying to get 2, that is 2.3 percent, and that is creating the bedwetting. Do they really love their money, this spending?
Remember, Mr. Speaker, if you don't want tax hikes--I don't want tax hikes. Borrowing is a tax hike. It is just paid for in the future with interest. Stop thinking borrowing is free.
My wife and I have adopted a couple of kids. I have a 2\1/2\-year- old. We are incredibly blessed. It looks like he is going to be fine. He is going to be normal. He is absolutely a joy.
When he is 22 or so, just to maintain baseline spending in the United States, we have to double every single tax. That is the morality of this place.
For the lobbyists and the groups that are walking our Halls saying, ``We want more spending. Don't do this horrible, devastating 2 percent cut in spending over the next 10 years,'' I say: Thank you for screwing over my 2-year-old. You are absent in morality. If you are going to walk into our office and demand more spending, then tell us where you think we can modernize and change the cost of government.
We have come here and done presentations that the single biggest expense we have in government, it turns out, is obesity. We did a whole model for the last couple of years, huge amounts. Remember, Mr. Speaker, I chaired the Joint Economic Committee, so I have five Ph.D. economists. We did the data: $9.1 trillion in additional healthcare costs.
It turns out the morality if we would help our brothers be healthier--but we have to do it through the farm bill. We have to do it through nutrition support. We have to decide we are going to have access to glutides and other things. Are we going to use technology, the wearables and the other things? I have one of those data rings on.
What would happen if one of the most powerful things we can do for U.S. sovereign debt stabilization is a healthier society? Somehow, that becomes a fringe conversation around here because people make money off of our brothers and sisters being sick. It is absolutely perverse.
Mr. Speaker, if you actually go--I think it was 1 year or so ago. I think Goldman Sachs did this huge report on GLP-1 glutides, and somewhere in one of the footnotes that was sent to me, it had this line, a couple of lines, saying that if there was wide adoption and the United States actually became much healthier with much less morbid obesity, there would be healthcare systems that would go bankrupt because they wouldn't have enough multi-chronic sick people to pay their bonds. Think about that.
Everything is about the money here, not about the morality of having a society that is growing and prospering. Prosperity, I would argue, Mr. Speaker, is moral.
How much of the crap we do here is not just satiating today's Twittersphere screaming at us or something that is completely made up but actually building a plan saying:
I probably have already had too much coffee today.
This is just to make a point, and this is more to mock the Senate. I was talking to one of the Senators last night, who is also concerned, as I am. Maybe they hear our voices.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, these are just the base numbers when they are first scored. This number actually came in one-half of that. No interest is attached to it. We stole this from someone else, but it was to make a point.
Democrats complained about that. In the CARES Act, we complained about the excess of spending. In the American Rescue Plan, we complained about that. Then you add in the bipartisan infrastructure act--it wasn't bipartisan. I think they had a handful of Republicans who wanted projects in their district. If you add it all up, Mr. Speaker, all the things we have fretted over over the last decade don't even add up to the amount of borrowing that is in the Senate reconciliation budget because it is so much easier here just to spend and borrow it. There is this attitude here of: Give it to me now. You guys will figure out something in the future.
We have worked with some of the DOGE folks because I have the economists, but go on their official website right now. They think, next year, 2026 fiscal year, we can save $160 billion. That is real money. If we borrow $6 billion a day, that is 24, 23 days of borrowing. That is everything we have gotten.
There is this inability for Members of Congress, our staff, and the public to understand the scale of what we are up against.
This basically just reiterates what I am going to show a couple of times here because I need it to sink in. If we do the Senate reconciliation budget with our baseline, we double U.S. debt in 10 years. I am going to say it a couple of times so it sinks in. Debt held by the public--and they are using 2034. We prefer to use 2035 because that is more of an honest budget window. We start to look at what the Senate resolution--this was baseline debt. They add another 32.7 percent to the debt. If we do what the Senate put out in their budget reconciliation, we functionally double publicly held debt in the United States.
What took us 240 years to do, bless us, we can do in 10 because we are good at borrowing money, handing things out, telling people there are no consequences, and making crap up, saying it is healthcare for illegals. Okay, we shouldn't do that, but it is only a couple of days of borrowing over 1 year.
We have to do lots and lots of difficult things. We have done entire presentations where we have shown we could revolutionize the cost of healthcare. We have actually looked at one dataset. We have been studying this now for months. If I came to you, Mr. Speaker, and said, just in Medicare, duplicative MRI scans, PET scans, X-rays, and ultrasounds could be as much as $25 billion a year, duplicative scans. Mr. Speaker, what if you have your knee scanned and attached it to this thing so it is portable with you? That is one-quarter trillion dollars over 10 years. Is that a cut? No. It is just a simple use of almost a free technology that is out there where you can load them on this and it is portable with you, Mr. Speaker.
We get lobbyists who don't like that idea because, apparently, they make money on the duplications. The inefficiencies and the frauds, those things are a business model now. Government controls functionally one-quarter of all the spending in the United States, of all the GDP. A big chunk of that is functionally waste, fraud, misallocation, or bad design. Give it whatever title you want, Mr. Speaker.
Many of the lobbyists who are walking these Hallways are here to stop us from modernizing the system and bringing us into this century. Just use the technology. We walk around with a supercomputer in our pocket.
This could crash the price of healthcare, make you healthier, give you access, all these things, and there is an army of people trying to stop us.
Remember, telehealth here was an absolute war. There were millions being spent to stop it because it screwed up people's business models.
I am going to do this a couple more times, and then we are going to do one more example.
If we do what is being planned right now, we finish the next decade, 10 years from now, with either $73.7 trillion of debt--our other chart actually gets it up to $74 trillion of debt.
You will hear a Member on the Democrat side or Republican side running for office: I care about the debt, but I am more afraid of telling you the truth of what drives the debt. The fact of the matter is, the people walking the hallways here, often our own constituents, are screaming at us for more spending. Don't they have kids? Don't they even care about their own retirements? It is the absolute vacuousness of immortality.
I grabbed this from The Wall Street Journal. I can't imagine anyone here has had protesters and people showing up in their office about Medicaid, which is supposed to be our safety net for indigents and the poor. I have some old experience with that. For a short time, I actually chaired the Healthcare Committee in the Arizona State Legislature when I was a child. For a while I actually worked on the AHCCCS budget, which is the Arizona Medicaid system. We do something unique. We actually buy managed care HMO policies for our poor people. It is actually shockingly efficient. As a matter of fact, if you took the rest of the country and adopted the Arizona model, you could save hundreds of billions of dollars over those 10 years.
The Wall Street Journal did us a favor. They actually took the Arizona system, which actually has a shockingly high satisfaction rate and good outcomes. We can make it much better. The punch line here is they are showing something called a provider tax. This was a scam--a scheme. I have to openly admit, on part of it, which was the disproportionate share--this is geeky stuff--I was actually part of managing that many years ago. I was county treasurer, I managed money, and we were part of the swath.
Part of the scam out there is to raise the cost of healthcare, create a tax, capture that tax, and because you raise the price, you also capture more money from the Federal Government in their percentage match.
What The Wall Street Journal did was brilliant. They just produced this chart that says: Do you know the Arizona government--and this is most State governments--actually use this provider tax washing machine and they make money. They actually take in more money. They are not meeting their obligation of--it was supposed to be a partnership. It was supposed to be a match.
Is this a cut? It is just saying there was a deal made in the late sixties that we were going to share some of the risks and some of the costs with our poor by providing healthcare. Then when Obama came in, they did this expansion and 90/10 percent, even though it was going to people who were still work eligible and those things.
Then States--we all knew this was going on, but it was supposed to be temporary. It was supposed to be when coming out of a major recession. We were going to go back to normality. Instead, it is padding for State budgets. That cash isn't going into healthcare; it is financing other things and raising the U.S. debt. This is borrowed money.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) for the purposes of a colloquy.
