The Benefits of Morality and Really Good Math

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I say to my friend from Texas, your intro was actually brilliant because we are going to try to do something this evening that is going to make a whole bunch of people really cranky.

Mr. Speaker, let's see if I can frame this in a way that I don't sound too much like a jerk. Week after week after week after week, I have come to the floor here and walked people through saying, the blue here, that portion we get to vote on and that every dime a Member of Congress votes on is on borrowed money.

This is all borrowed, plus actually a portion of your Medicare, if you look at the math, is actually borrowed. Gross interest is going to be $1.2 trillion, making interest the second biggest expense in this government.

One of the arguments I deal with over and over is trying to find moral, effective ways that we can save ourselves; that you could actually impact this remarkable amount of debt where we are hovering around borrowing about $100,000 a second.

Every second of every day, we are just a little below that. Then the really uncomfortable is when you walk through the data, it is interest and healthcare. I am not a doctor; I am good at math.

The dear Lord gave me one thing, I am good at math, but I thought I would try something new and exciting. How about if I brought, A, my friend who just happens to be benefited with a medical school education. That is why we will call him Dr. Harris and talk about if healthcare is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt, why not engage in the morality of a society that is healthier, that could be more vibrant?

I have come here, and we have talked about diabetes being 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare, being 30 percent of Medicare spending, the cascade of conditions that come from obesity in America and the morality of loving our brothers and sisters and having a healthier society.

My economists right now, we are working on our reply to the President's budget. We are vetting all the math, and we are highlighting things. We are still about 2 more weeks from our publication. We estimate that obesity will result in anywhere between $8.2 and $9.1 trillion in excess medical expenditures over the next decade.

Maybe the most powerful thing you and I could do for U.S. sovereign debt and burying your retirement and our children and our great- grandchildren and our great-great-grandchildren in piles of debt would be to actually work on policies to make us a healthier society.

You get the benefits of the morality and really good math. I just happen to have a medical doctor who is a Member of Congress who is on the Appropriations Committee who has an expertise that I don't have and can talk about things that I can't say, but understand, we mean this from a portion of optimism.

There is a path here, but we have to do something that is brutally uncomfortable for us: We have to tell the truth.

Is that a fair set up?

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yet, I promise you, tomorrow, we will have things on our phone attacking us for telling the truth.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to argue our willingness to come here and tell the truth--I love people. I want them to flourish.

Doctor, we are about to have our fifth year of prime-age males where their life expectancy is shorter. You were actually walking me through some of the math earlier.

Does anyone care?

The concentration I see of the lack of family formation, productivity, the ability to participate in society, the healthcare costs--what would happen if we had a society where we were not afraid to talk about the stigma?

We are saying there are policies. I have the stacks of charts and these things, but there are policies we can engage in to make a difference.

This is on topic and uncomfortable, but one of the things I come here and talk about over and over--let's just use this chart down here. Medicare is singularly the primary driver of our debt. It is healthcare costs. It is an earned benefit. You paid your 40 quarters for Social Security, but the average couple will have paid in $227,000 in FICA taxes, the portion that goes toward Medicare, but they get back $725,000. That differential right there is the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt.

Do you do what some of the folks around here want to do, my Democratic colleagues, where they want to basically say Medicare for All? We are going to ration it. It is going to be government everything. The doctors you have are going to be government employees, that sort of model. Or should we actually take on something much more moral, much more creative, and much more, I would argue, doable?

Let's look at the government policies we engage in where we subsidize people's misery. Could we turn some of the very programs we have to make them more moral and help make our society healthier?

Doctor, I know that has been one of your fixations. You have been in front of committees over and over, talking about things we could do, everything from agricultural legislation, nutrition legislation--the things I do in Ways and Means, trying to finance access to therapies to make people healthier.

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. And sicker.

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Doctor, the morality argument I really want us to make is the way we have designed these programs, as they were originally designed decades and decades and decades ago, we now understand, we are financing people's misery instead of financing the opportunity to be healthier, to be part of society, to actually live longer.

It is uncomfortable, but we have to have a moment of honesty. I don't understand the left's fixation on basically using borrowed money to finance misery.

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes. On the economic side, we call it knock-off effects, second-degree, third-degree effects. In some ways, they are not even that. They are just the principal effects.

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes.

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. And?

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Yes. Would this explain my ice cream problem?

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Doctor, look, my personal philosophy, I am probably a little bit more libertarian here. Have what you want, but understand, A, should government finance things that make our population less healthy, and, as a matter of fact, make much of the population very sick? The reality of it is when the majority of healthcare partially is financed in some fashion through government, we have an interest. In some ways, it sickens me, but that is the reality we have to sort of mechanically deal with.

The statistics, the data, are just crashing on us since the pandemic, the curve of our brothers and sisters who are getting sicker and sicker. Now, I am dealing with some of the data we are looking at of those moving into their retirement benefits being also much sicker and trying to figure out how we finance that. We are financing it with partially borrowed money.

It is honestly a good economics and moral argument. Maybe we should change the way we do nutrition assistance in America. Maybe we should change even down to some of the agricultural policy of adding more variety. I have given presentations on the concentration of certain crops and the whole way commodity pricing works, and the black swan theory of that level of concentration, God forbid something ever happened to one of the crops, but it all ties together. It is a unified theory. If I care about healthcare spending--and, understand, ObamaCare was a financing bill. It was about who got subsidized and who had to pay. Our Republican alternative was a financing bill.

We are right now doing the hardest thing in Congress. We are actually talking about what we pay for. Could we actually reduce healthcare spending by having a healthier country, a healthier population? That would actually be much more egalitarian with prosperity.

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It is fascinating when I am home in Arizona, the number of folks I walk up to who will almost pull me aside and say: I can't believe you were willing to talk about that. You told the truth.

It is almost like they weren't ready to have those of us from the political class do something that is uncomfortable.

The math is the math. If you take a look at mortality statistics, is it moral to have a society, particularly working, prime-age males--I mean, you were actually quoting some of the statistics in our previous conversation. They are dying younger and younger.

What we have done to younger people in the country, what we are doing to seniors, we can fix this. We just have to be willing to do some difficult policy here--it is not difficult policy.

There are some experiments out there--and you and I have not talked about this before, so we are winging it--where it was the food box and saying that we are going to deliver to our brothers and sisters who need nutrition support a box. There was a problem. Sometimes, the fruits and those things were thrown away, so they experimented with other ways to deliver it.

It was in a microwave pouch, and it turned out that it was working. They were making people healthier, and then that pilot program disappeared.

We are talking billions and billions of dollars, which means there will be armies of lobbyists in the hallway here tomorrow really cranky about what we talked about.

Can we make the argument that we should do the right thing? Is this Republican or Democrat? It should be just the right thing.

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I am more optimistic than you.

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. We are already crushing the next generation, the next three generations. My wife is my age, and I have an 8-year-old and a 23-month-old.

Mathematically, my 23-month-old, when he is 20 years old, U.S. taxes will have to be double what they are today to maintain baseline services.

This is what we are doing to our society. We are coming behind these microphones, and we have done the economic presentations. We can do the Democrats' tax scheme. You get about 1.5 percent of GDP if you were able to tax maximize everything.

For those of us who want to cut things, we get about a point of discretionary nondefense. That is $300 billion there if we could cut that much, so 2.5 percent.

This fiscal year so far, we were expecting to borrow about 5, 5.5 percent of GDP. We are closer to 9. Does anyone see a math problem there?

If this is the political rhetoric, that they want to raise taxes and we want to cut, and you only get this much, maybe we need to promote policies that disrupt the cost of government and the cost of healthcare.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a series of presentations here on using technology, using AI, those things, to make government much smaller. We can do things like this. There are paths.

Mr. Speaker pro tempore, are we up against time?

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank Dr. Harris for joining me, and I yield back.

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