The Math

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, every week I come behind this microphone, and I walk through the demographics and the debt and try to demonstrate that the primary driver of debt is our demographics and our health.

I have brought lots and lots of charts here over the last couple years sort of demonstrating the death spiral the country is heading towards. Total interest this year is going to be maybe just a little shy of $1.2 trillion, making interest the second biggest expenditure in this government. Social Security will be about $1.480 trillion; interest $1.2 trillion, and then, believe it or not, Defense and Medicare are fighting for who is going to be third and fourth.

I thought it would actually be more honorable to come behind this mike and say, all right, we have defined the problem over and over and over and over. I don't seem to be making much progress with my brothers and sisters being willing to accept the actual math because our friends from the left say tax rich people more and that will take care of the problem. Then we show them the economic papers that make it clear that you can maximize people's taxes for those over $400,000 on their income tax, their estate tax, the whole list of taxes, and when you do economic effects, you get about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP.

For us on the right, we have all sorts of things we want to cut, but if we are limited to only nondefense discretionary, we come up with about 1 percent of GDP.

The problem is this year we are borrowing close to--I think our run rate in the last 365 days is like 8 percent of GDP. The long run is 6, 7, 8 percent over the years.

Does anyone see the math problem?

When the left's solutions and the right's solutions are combined, you get 2\1/2\ percent, and you are borrowing 6, 7, 8 percent of GDP, the size of the economy, maybe we need to have a brutally honest conversation of what is the driver of debt and the things that provide a solution that also have a chance of passing here.

Here is the board that gets the most complaints to my office, so let's do it again.

From today through the next 30 years--and this is in the President's math, this is in the CBO's math, this is in the outside group's math-- 100 percent of the debt from today through the next 30 years is interest and healthcare, and if in a decade from now the decision is, hey, the Social Security trust fund is gone, and we are not going to let people take a 21 to 25 percent cut and double senior poverty and we backfill Social Security.

So right here, the new number isn't 116. This is my older board. I think it is somewhere now in the 120, $130 trillion in 30 years. The rest of the budget is flat. It pretty much grows with the growth of the economy. It is healthcare. If you want to disrupt debt, make this society healthier or adopt technology that makes government smaller.

Let's sort of actually walk through some of these things. I brought this board again just to reemphasize what I was just saying. The new number on Social Security for this coming year is $1.480 trillion. My math actually has the interest being a little bit higher, and then you see Defense and Medicare.

Think of that. When you think Defense and Medicare are now down here third and fourth, and Medicare--I think Medicare is spending maybe upwards as much as 10 percent so far this year.

Let's see, if I came to you and said, all right, here is the stack of solutions, in previous years I would come here with all sorts of charts, and I would show sort of my holistic unified theory, saying you had to do things in immigration, you had to do things in fixing the tax code to maximize investment in growth. Over here you had to legalize adoption of technology to crash the price of healthcare. Over here you had to do things to make the society much more competitive and less oligopolies in our economy; you know, big players.

I kept trying to show--and we had like 20, 21 things you had to do almost at the same time. I felt like I was making no progress.

The reality of it is, we are in real trouble. A couple weeks ago I came here and did the demographics, and I knew everyone was right on the edge of their seats wanting to understand the demographics, except demographics is your destiny.

In 15 years, we model this country has more deaths than births. Understand what is going on. Yet, you have your Medicare system, your Social Security that are sort of a pay-as-you-go system, but the number of children, the number of young people, the number of future workers we are going to have in this society--we are in trouble.

You are going to have to do things like technology substitution.

What the hell does that mean? We are going to walk through some of that.

I have a stack of articles, some boards, and we are going to walk through one of those pillars that we talk about. The two biggest changes I expect in society, in the economy, and in the world over the next decade or two will be synthetic biology and artificial intelligence.

Let's talk about one of the things on our list of like 21 disruptions of what we could fixate on policy-wise to make government smaller, more efficient, and more moral, and maybe your retirement doesn't have to implode on you, and maybe my little kids--yes, I have young kids--have a future because the math says right now that child that is young today will be poorer than their parents.

It is the first time in U.S. history when the expectation is, the math says, this young generation is going to be poorer. Does anyone see just the apocalyptic immorality in that?

So what is going on here? Why are we so terrified to tell the truth?

Mr. Speaker, I will tell you one of the reasons you should tell the truth. You come here and walk people through the actual math of Social Security and Medicare, how we are going to save it, what we have to do, and you will get attack ads because, God forbid, you told the truth. This side particularly over there cares much more about winning the next election than saving this country, saving your retirement, the morality of you receiving the earned benefits you worked for.

It is because the politics are so much more important. Winning the next election is so much more important than doing what is right.

Let's actually sort of walk through some ideas here.

First off, I am going to do this in the next couple of weeks. There are now starting to be economic models and discussions talking about how the debt is going to make us all poorer and how it is starting to do that.

The fact is, as far as your taxes, I have shown things here where every dime a Member of Congress votes on today is on borrowed money. So far this fiscal year, every dime of discretionary, every dime of defense, and, actually, one-quarter of Medicare are on borrowed money. The fact is that this year, you are going to spend about $1.2 trillion of your tax receipts in interest.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, over the last 12 months, I think we have had 1 or 2 months, maybe 3 months, where we actually had to borrow money to pay for our borrowed money to pay the interest.

Think about that, Mr. Speaker. The fact of the matter is that now we are starting to see the economists do articles explaining we are all going to be poorer because of the financing costs now on this debt and deficit.

Let's actually walk through what you would do if I came to you right now, Mr. Speaker, and said that you live in a time of miracles. We are curing diseases, and we are going to cure more diseases. We don't have to live with misery. We are on the cusp of having major disruptions in diabetes and other diseases. We could make government more efficient and smaller.

Let's actually just talk about artificial intelligence tonight. There is an article from Stars and Stripes talking about the Pentagon being substantially unauditable. We do not know where almost $4 trillion in assets are. There are parts of this article and parts of other articles here talking about the Pentagon buying things because they don't know if they have it in inventory.

There are other articles saying that we could actually use technology to crawl through government, and it would be the ultimate whistleblower.

Some of us have been trying, saying: Why don't we do something creative?

Mr. Speaker, I need you to think, if you watch too much cable television over here, AI is going to destroy the world. There is generative artificial intelligence that crawls through and can write its code. Over here is a stack that just wants accounting data, that just is looking for assets, inventories, liabilities, and those things. That is what we are talking about at this moment.

How about if we did something creative? If you have just had I think the eighth year where the Pentagon has functionally come back as unauditable because we cannot do the asset list, how about allowing an artificial intelligence crawler, an artificial intelligence accounting package, to go up and down those assets lists and identify what we own, what we don't own, what we think we have, what we don't think we have, and what we really own so you don't get crazy articles like this one from Stars and Stripes basically saying: This was not surprising. Pentagon again failed its audit, and $3.8 trillion in military assets, we are not sure where the hell they are.

We are going to offer this as an amendment in the next day or so on the national defense authorization bill. We will see if our brothers and sisters here are willing to say maybe some technology is better than building after building full of people looking at accounting lists unable to figure out what the hell it says. Maybe we should actually protect the American taxpayer but also protect our national defense by knowing what we own and what we don't own.

It is a simple solution. It is also the adoption and the future of what could we do in this government if we would allow artificial intelligence crawlers to go up and down inventories, assets, where there is misallocation, where there is proper allocation, and where there are people who may be playing games with resources.

Why wouldn't we do that? The Government Accountability Office can only do so much, but the crowdsourcing of the data, the constant crawling, this exists today. Let's do it. It is just, once again, the concept of: Can we use technology to make government smaller? Of course, we can.

Mr. Speaker, I have to be brutally honest. Here is an article that was talking about using artificial intelligence in certain parts of healthcare. It was a crash and burn, but if you actually get into the academic article, they were using ChatGPT. May I suggest you don't try to use chat as your diagnostician?

However, it turns out I have four or five times more articles talking about when they use specific artificial intelligence designed to look at cancer and other things. It was remarkable.

Let's actually sort of go on through the changing of government. What would happen if you have had the experience of trying to call the IRS and sit on hold, and then you get to someone and talk to someone who may not have the specialty, may not understand what you are asking.

There is an experiment. I have to give the IRS credit on this one. It is a small experiment. They did it last tax season and this tax season: For a small portion, when you called, you were actually talking to a chat AI.

Think about the experiment that they agreed to do and where this may take us. Imagine if you called the IRS, Mr. Speaker, and it stays on the phone with you because it picks up the phone because it has ultimate capacity because you are actually talking to a plain language computer that sounds every bit like a person. It stays on the phone with you, listens to you, and walks you through how to fill out your form. If you need the form, it can email it to you. It can text it to you. It can even walk you through other forms you might need because of what you are doing.

That is morality, and it would make government less expensive. It would shrink the size of government. This is heresy and brutal, but the fact of the matter is that people are really expensive in government.

One of the ways you can start cutting budgets, yet you still want efficiency and the morality of accessibility for the public, Mr. Speaker, is to start thinking about many government agencies because they are always marching in here complaining that they can't hire anyone. Well, let's replace those slots with technology that will give you the answers you are looking for because it has the full information set in front of it. This is the moral way to do it.

Let's walk through some of this more. If I came to you, Mr. Speaker, right now and said: What is the most powerful thing you could do if I only gave you several months and you had to come up with some way to disrupt the cost of healthcare?

We estimate and have multiple academic articles that say that about 16 percent of all healthcare spending is people failing to stay on their pharmaceutical regime. They have hypertension. They don't take their calcium inhibitor. They have cholesterol that is clogging their arteries. They don't take their statin. They don't adhere.

It turns out you could do things just like this where is it really artificial intelligence or just using basic technology where the pill bottle cap beeps at you and says: Hey, you haven't opened me today, and it is really important because this pill only costs 7 cents, but if you stroke out, it could be $1 million.

It turns out on my next board I think there is a math problem here. This one basically says that the estimate for people not taking their prescriptions is $528 billion per year. My math was closer to $600 billion. I think my math is right, because if it is 16, 17 percent of all healthcare spent, this is simple. It is moral. It is not really artificial intelligence, but it is use of technology to crash the price of delivering healthcare. We have had pieces of legislation in this place for years saying: Why don't we just start drug adherence so people stay healthier? David, we can't run a bill like that. We would have to explain it.

Mr. Speaker, here is an article I grabbed just 2 days ago about the largest ever antibiotic discovery by artificial intelligence. We just discovered a whole new category of antibiotics.

Mr. Speaker, do you remember the panic over the previous couple of years that so many of our antibiotics were becoming inefficient and superbugs? Guess what, Mr. Speaker? Artificial intelligence may have just discovered new ones to actually work through it.

This is an Apple Watch on here, but about 3 weeks ago, Apple just got its next generation of watch approved by the FDA for monitoring your heart. Now, the heart portion of it is a medical device.

Mr. Speaker, I want you to think about the morality. We keep talking about how we keep our brothers and sisters healthier, yet we are heading toward a world--and I am going to show some more boards in this concept--where you can have it on your wrist, the thing you are able to blow into, the thing you lick, the sort of personal medical lab you can have in your home medicine cabinet or on your body.

I met with some folks a week ago. Forgive me if I mispronounce this, sepsis. You had surgery, and once the doctors, nurses, and medical professionals see it, it is often really dangerous, but using AI and a couple sensors on your body, they can see the tiny movements in temperature and the tiny changes in respiration and know there is something going on and know there is something that has to be dealt with.

How much healthier would we be by just adopting that bit of technology? It is here. It is here already, and now we are living in a world where you can actually have a medical lab attached to you.

Why don't we actually legalize some of this technology? The thing you can blow into that has an incredibly high level of accuracy can tell you that you have a virus, can bang off your phone your medical records and know you are not allergic to a certain antiviral and order your antivirals.

You know that is essentially illegal in this country. Your ability to have that breath biopsy, that flu kazoo, is functionally illegal, but it would help crash the price of healthcare, and you would be healthier.

There is an army of people in these hallways around here demanding that we need to subsidize more people because we don't have enough medical professionals because we are getting older. Yes, we have been talking about that for years. Maybe we could do some substitution effects with technology and the morality of having a healthier society.

Mr. Speaker, we are about to see a revolution in cures. One of our arguments is that the most moral thing this Congress can do is not help you maintain your misery. It is one of my great angers at our Democrat colleagues.

You realize they passed legislation that functionally hands $16 billion of your tax money to Big Pharma. Yes, I am using their language, not mine, their language, Big Pharma. We are going to give $16 billion to buy down the price of insulin. At the same time, 75 miles from here, there is a co-op making three types of generic insulin. Go look them up, Civic RX. Three types are cheaper than the subsidized price, but the Democrats have an ability to basically have it both ways: Big Pharma is evil. Here is some cash. Here is $16 billion.

Their idea of morality is that they are going to functionally finance your misery.

Over on our side, I have been passionately trying to get this place to fixate on some of the cures. We think we are getting close to a cure for type 1. There are some miracles happening on type 2.

Actually, in a week, this Friday, we are going to publish a report in the Joint Economic Committee that I am going to get crap for, but you are going to see a top line number that, over the next 10 years, obesity will cost this country as high as $9.1 trillion over the next 10 years, the single biggest spend in this government. Our brothers and sisters are dying. I think we are about to have the fifth year in a row where prime-age males are dying younger.

Think of that. You have a country where people's life expectancy is falling. We are going to pass a farm bill, nutrition support, and not actually think about should it actually be nutrition support, or is it calorie support?

This government fights against itself. We actually give you an EBT card to go buy onion rings, and on this side we are going to cover your healthcare costs when you are sick. Have we lost our--yes, we have lost our minds, but we are actually seeing all sorts of data, and I have some of the articles here.

AI tool finds variant for heart disease. AI figured out there are 17 genes to look at that will actually give us an indicator if you are going to have certain types of heart disease.

AI traces mysterious metastatic cancer to its source. This is one of the most fascinating, and I actually have almost a binder just on this one. How Google's new AI could revolutionize medicine, but if you go on there because I know all of you are really smart and you read this crazy stuff--I mean, you have all read about the Google Fold, folding of protein over certain things so it can be actually delivered and actually withstand in your body and actually start to help cure you.

You live in the time of miracles, and this place here is one of the biggest barriers to those miracles coming to market. It is absolutely immoral.

FDA does some amazing things, but it was designed decades and decades and decades ago. We have these things called supercomputers today. We have AI that can grind through data and look at article after article and population statistics and these things.

There is actually lots of data right now saying we can cut the time down in half bringing cures and miracles to market. I would argue this is our obligation. This is people's lives. Besides the fact of the morality, it is also really good economics and would be great for the borrowing.

Remember, we are hovering between sort of $80,000 and $100,000 a second in borrowing. The majority of that growth in borrowing is interest and healthcare costs. Crash the price of healthcare.

Incorporating AI creates cost savings. We actually had some success in this idea last week. We were able to get two AI amendments attached to the VA bill, just to actually start with the claims side, the bureaucracy side, to actually move some of that faster.

The vast majority of our brothers and sisters here, it started to pass. Even though maybe the union didn't like it, but this is the right thing to do. We started.

We actually got another one passed. This is just for the VA, but toward studying how we streamline and mitigate the financing mechanisms to make the VA more efficient and much more nimble and actually reduce the cost. These are just inch by inch by inch.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Oh, heaven forbid. I don't know if I could actually talk any faster. I'm so sorry. Sometimes I start to talk like a machine gun.

Mr. Speaker, another piece of legislation we have is you talk to doctors' offices, you talk to surgery centers, you talk to clinics, and they will tell you half their cost is just administrative, the people having to do the back paperwork, the people in the front office.

Just walk through a concept because this actually exists today. You walk up to the counter in your surgery center or your doctor's office. You talk to a screen, and it writes down. You don't actually have to fill out the little thing on the pad.

You say: Hi, I am David, and here is my number. Here is this. Here is that.

In the back office, they use technology, not a room full of clerks doing paperwork to fight back and forth with the insurance company. You could crash the price of a healthcare clinic in half. We already have some companies starting to do this.

Mr. Speaker, we have another one that starts to actually help the concept of telehealth. Why isn't it digital health, the ability to use technology to help you take care of yourself?

Then, article after article that we live in the time of miracles. How do I get my brothers and sisters here to help us realize if we would just change some of the incentives in this place? There is another generation of miracle drugs coming. There is actually the ability of another generation of things that cure people.

I keep trying to argue here. You want to crash the debt and deficits? You want to crash spending? Cure diseases. Make people's lives less miserable. There will be armies of lobbyists in our hallways because these disrupt their business models.

I am going to ask our brothers and sisters here to do the right thing. Don't be afraid of the technology. The disruption is the morality, is the future, and is one of the ways and just one of the levers that we save ourselves from this crashing and crushing debt.

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