'I've Given Up On This Place...': Schweikert Issues Exasperated Warning About Debt And Deficits

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]The chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Schwikert, for 30 minutes.

[00:00:05]>> Oh, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Um, and to my buddy, Mr. Gman, >> I know I'm teasing you.

[00:00:14]>> Always tease me. Okay.

[00:00:16]>> I I always appreciate because you actually give me a little time to get organized. So, for this. All right. Um, Mr. Speaker, have you ever had a moment where you think back over the last dozen years And you really really miss something we used to call the Tea Party. You remember for those of us who were involved in that, what was the premise? Premise was fairly simple. We cared about the fiscal status of our country and following the Constitution.

[00:00:51]Um, today, a dozen years later, since the Tea Party was basically put out of business, um, do I have any of my brothers and sisters out there who actually care about what's going on? So, uh, you know, my preference is when I do these sort of weekly presentations, you know, I put my joint economic chairman hat on or my oversight and ways and means hat on.

[00:01:16]This time I'm just going to try to be the guy that cares about financing the US debt and what the hell's going on right now. And often when I do these I like to say here's the problem and here's some solutions. This time you're just getting problems and then the reality what it means. [snorts] I'm going to do this three or four times in this presentation. So if anyone's listening, think about this. From February till this week, the movement on US interest rates, if you do it over 10 years, it's over $2 trillion of additional interest. That's not two trillion we get to spend on a new aircraft carrier or building roads or helping our brothers and sisters get healthier. It's $2 trillion to the bond market.

[00:02:11]I've come behind this microphone for a decade and a half. I have been criticized. Many of those who actually care about the economics of the country been criticized saying the bond market very soon will be the dominant player in this government.

[00:02:31]David, how can you say things like this?

[00:02:33]It's happening.

[00:02:35]Look, let's start with the slide that we keep doing because the math is wrong. Now, a couple years ago when I used to do this, discretionary outlays were 27 28% of spending. Now, it's down to 25% of the spending. This is all a member of Congress votes on unless you have a reconciliation budget.

[00:03:00]And you see how well we're doing on those right now.

[00:03:04]So non-defense and defense.

[00:03:09]The basically the other 75% of spending is on autopilot.

[00:03:16]You get these folks that come in here.

[00:03:17]We did one about three four weeks ago where we basically said we're going to do a resolution to balance the budget.

[00:03:24]Now there was no ideas with it. There was no discipline with it. There was no telling the truth with it. But we did a resolution so we can all put it on our political brochures and say we voted for a balanced budget. Do you know the economists I have on the joint economic committee? We were spitballing some of the math on that. I can balance the budget next year. I got to cut half of US federal spending.

[00:03:52]Last year for every dollar in we spent a $143. So far this fiscal year, for every dollar in, we spent a $147.

[00:04:00]Now, there's a that will balance out a little bit because there's a spike in there from last year's debt ceiling when we had to refund many of the accounts.

[00:04:10]But you when you look at this chart, there's something really important to get your heads around.

[00:04:16]And and I and I and I look, I'm running for governor in Arizona. I've given up on this place. And as I'm traveling around the state, I will do part of my presentation on what's really happening in the federal government. Why it's so important to get the finances of your own state really solid because some of the revenue sharing that goes to states, which is the m which is almost half my state's budget, our total spending, it's going to start to dry up because every dime we send to the states is borrowed.

[00:04:45]But you see this number over here interest our calculations is that right now the interest this fiscal year the one we're in right now will come in over or around 1.2 trillion. So stop and think about what I'm sharing with you.

[00:05:03]Social Security 1.6 trillion interest 1.2 Medicare about 1.1. And remember Medicare doubles in spending over the next six or seven years. And in six years, the trust fund's actually gone.

[00:05:19]Number four is actually Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies. Defense, the thing that's actually in the Constitution, is number five on our spending stack.

[00:05:32]So when we go home and we sit there with our constituents and we do things like happened today to me.

[00:05:40]So, we're doing a ways and means markup and it was parts. They were good, simple bills. It should have been bipartisan, but every Democrat had to get their little video of attacking the president.

[00:05:51]So, we had to sit there for several hours. Okay, great. That's the theater of what we do here in Congress now. But down the hallway and in the basement, um, Republican Study Committee was trying to do a debt fraud forum.

[00:06:06]They had some really good people there.

[00:06:08]They had people had been working on the issue of waste and fraud and they they had one gentleman who's written some really amazing articles.

[00:06:17]He's researched where he found millions of dollars of fraud. My problem is I was actually doing the math of what I was listening to.

[00:06:26]Mr. Speaker, how long does it take us to borrow, not spend, borrow $1 million?

[00:06:39]Every 12 seconds. Every 12 seconds, we borrow another million dollars. So everything that was being discussed in the room was didn't even actually add up to a whole minute worth of borrowing.

[00:06:52]And here is the problem in this place because of the financial illiteracy. Ex.

[00:07:00]Sorry, I I withdraw that. That's being a little mean. The lack of batteries in the calculators around here.

[00:07:07]You'll see members come behind these microphones on both sides.

[00:07:13]We're going to save a million, 10 million, 20 million on this. And we will have borrowed more money during the debate on the piece of legislation than the bill saves.

[00:07:26]Yesterday we crossed over $90,000 every second in borrowing.

[00:07:34]We will borrow over 7.7 plus billion dollar today.

[00:07:44]Is anyone listening? Do I say it in a way that's not understandable? Is there another way I could make my charts so it's absorbable?

[00:07:55]Or have we hit a society where where the desire for government spending? Because there's tens of thousands of people from home, from lobbyists, others walking up down our hallways, in our offices all day long telling us how much they care about the debt and deficits. And then they demand more money.

[00:08:18]We can stabilize the debt.

[00:08:23]We can convince the bond markets to give us lower interest rates. And for those of you who are watching and you think, "Well, we'll just have the Federal Reserve lower interest rates." It doesn't work that way.

[00:08:39]God, you remember your high school economics class? The Federal Reserve, the Fed funds rates, the open window policies basically are what we call the short end of the curve. They basically influence those things that are two years and shorter. Your mortgage is based on the 10-year instrument. That is a market rate and it's based on the borrowing and available savings, excess savings that's loaned to sovereigns and your mortgage and everything else from the entire world.

[00:09:09]It's not just finance from us here in the United States. It's the entire world. And the entire world, at least most of the industrialized world, is binging on debt.

[00:09:22]You got to understand, we have to convince the world debt markets that we're going to tame inflation, that we're creditw worthy, that we're going to get our act together. And there's a report that just came out about an hour ago, and honestly, I've only read the first half of it, that basically was doing the calculations that even publicly sold debt in nine budget years will be over 126% of debt to GDP. We just passed 100%.

[00:09:53]Do anyone care?

[00:09:57]In six years, well, slightly over six years, if you're on social security, you get a 24% cut in your check. That's the law. In six years, the Medicare trust fund is empty. In six years, a little over six years, the Social Security trust fund is empty. Does anyone care?

[00:10:14]Is anyone here willing to tell the truth?

[00:10:17]And yes, you will have the the other side beat the crap out of you. You'll have some of your own people in a primary. He talked about Social Security and Medicare. just trying to save it.

[00:10:31]>> And for the idiots who go around saying, "Well, we'll just raise this tax."

[00:10:35]Understand 2033 to cover the shortfall of the Medicare and Social Security trust fund is over 638 billion dollars just that year, just to cover the first year. And then it goes up and goes up and goes up and goes up.

[00:10:50]It's demographics.

[00:10:52]We don't have enough children. We don't have enough young people. We don't have enough young workers in our society.

[00:10:57]It's math. Your country basically is at zero population growth. Census Bureau about a month ago did a report. If you dig dig through it, sometime in the next five years, I think the mark benchmark was three years. The United States at current policy goes negative in population. And those people go, "Yay, we're going to get smaller." Fine.

[00:11:18]You figure out, you tell me how I'm going to finance Social Security and Medicare. You tell me how I finance the debt. You tell me how I'm gonna convince the bond markets not to keep raising our interest rates.

[00:11:31]I know how to do it, but you got to do and I've come behind the damn microphone how many times and talked about the unified theory of you're going to have to adopt technology. You're going to have to revolutionize the cost of healthcare. And that's one of the things we're about to talk about. You're going to have to move to a talent-based immigration system so the population you bring into the country maximizes economic growth and tax collections. You don't have a choice anymore. You can't import mass poverty anymore.

[00:12:03]There is a way to stabilize the math.

[00:12:06]Mr. Speaker, we would just have to do everything at once and we'd have to do hard things.

[00:12:16]So two days ago I had a couple PhDs I think they were from Brown University visiting one of their researchers meeting with my economist from the joint economic committee and all we focused on what what was going on in Medicare not Medicaid Medicare the benefit we've promised our seniors and we were talking about the hundreds of billions of dollars that you'd hear some people come behind the mo, we'll call it waste and fraud, but it's legal because we screwed up the laws, the rules, the mechanisms, the reimbursements.

[00:12:55]Is this place willing to do the hard things?

[00:12:58]And let me give you a conceptual let me let's just walk through one simple conceptual idea.

[00:13:04]We did a research project a year ago just on duplicative scans. You got an MRI, you got an X-ray, you got an ultrasound, you got a CT, and the top end of the number was almost $35 billion in the United States in a year. So you you hurt your knee skiing, you go to the town, you get an MRI of your knee, they send it, you go back to your home community a couple a week later, and they do it again. Instead of attaching that scan to this, done a piece of legislation saying, "Hey, when you can, you attach the scan to an app or something so it's portable with you." That didn't cut your service.

[00:13:48]That didn't make you less healthy. It just potentially saved $35 billion a year, over almost $400 billion over 10 years.

[00:13:57]Is that bill ever going to get a hearing? The next day I had lobbyists walking down the up and down the hallways here saying, "David, you don't understand. Those duplicative scans are our profit margin.

[00:14:13]We have dozens and dozens and dozens of ideas and things we've scored and pieces of legislation to revolutionize the cost of government. But it turns out, here's the fraud about talking about fraud.

[00:14:30]And please someone quote me on this and attack me on it.

[00:14:37]Members of Congress, both in the left and the right, we want free options. Oh, it was fraud from a foreigner. That way, there's no constituents, there's no lobbyists, there's no one in our home district making money on it.

[00:14:53]But if you actually read the documents from our auditors, from MedPAC, from others that are doing their work, we know where there's hundreds of billions of dollars.

[00:15:06]Problem is that money has constituents.

[00:15:10]There's people that make their living on it. They cover their investments on it.

[00:15:14]Look at how many times a handful of us have tried to provide options in healthcare, but it would change your business model and the next day we get the crap kicked out of us. I look, I worked on teleaalth for years and years and years was never going to get a hearing on it because groups that made their money having you walk into their urgent care center, walk into their emergency room, would spend whatever was necessary to stop it. The only reason you have teleah health today is co and it's still getting dialed back access to that digital health. The fact of the matter is today you can wear a medical lab on you. Look, the Apple Watch, the newest version of the Apple Watch is an FDA approved medical device for the heart.

[00:15:57]As that technology gets better and better and FDA approves more things, should that technology be allowed to prescribe if it's statistically competent?

[00:16:10]Yes. No. It would help crash the price of healthare. It would help dramatically raise access access to health care. You know, as we add provide digital health and the ability to have communication, you know, Wi-Fi, those things, broadband in most rural parts of our country, you could have a revolution access to healthcare. And there'll be lobbyists in this hallway tomorrow trying to stop and being angry because I even talked about this. Everything here has become about the money. So remember, when you think about the pie chart of federal budgets and spending, your members of Congress are only voting on 25% of it. The rest of it is a formula. Interest now is the number two expense in government.

[00:16:52]Medicare is going to double in spending over the next six, seven years.

[00:16:57]It's demographics.

[00:17:00]Next year we will have fewer 18 year olds than we have I think 20 than 20 years ago, but double the number of 65 and up. In 28 29 months, over half of our federal spending will go to our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up.

[00:17:14]And I'll be one of them.

[00:17:20]And we're going to do what?

[00:17:24]And we're going to do what? We're going to just make more promises. We're going to run more fake. We're gonna balance the budget bill with no plans.

[00:17:34]So, let's actually walk through a couple things that are also really uncomfortable. Debt financing costs double in 10 years. This is already where we're at. So, the CBO baseline budget from last February had in nine budget years the US debt. Now, this is before the movement in interest rates. This is even before some of the additional spending proposals that have come up. In nine years, US debt borrowing will be 3.1 trillion.

[00:18:10]Mr. Speaker, think about this point.

[00:18:14]2.1 trillion of that borrowing in nine budget years, 10 years from now, it's just interest. One trillion is the structural debt.

[00:18:26]The other 2.1 trillion is just interest coverage.

[00:18:31]What's happened just in the movement of our bond markets in the last couple months, if this is the new benchmark for interest rates, could even come down.

[00:18:40]We're up about what 70 basis points since the low in February, that's over$2 trillion dollars of additional interest over the 10 years.

[00:18:51]I know it's math. We're supposed to tell stories about, you know, crazy things or bad people or im, you know, illegal immigrants. This is what's going to take down our republic.

[00:19:04]This is what's going to destroy your retirement. This is what's going to take my three-year-old and make my kids the first generation that truly lives poorer than their parents. So, let's walk through just a little more fun with charts and math just for the fun of it.

[00:19:24]Come here. We're up over 60 basis points. We're actually closer to 70, but let's use 60 because some of the interest rates went back a little bit today. And we say it over 10 years.

[00:19:35]That's over $2 trillion on today's projected budget and spending and current debt.

[00:19:45]Now, if we plus up defense, if we plus up other things, that number gets even uglier. But right now, just structurally, it's called interest fragility.

[00:19:56]And I'm sorry if someone's watching, you have a better word for it that's not so complicated because the other day I was at a meeting and I had to explain fragility.

[00:20:08]The bond market is about to run this country. And when small movements of interest rates when carried out over the decade are a couple trillion additional interest, doesn't this freak out anyone?

[00:20:30]So, look, I was going to bring a bunch of charts and show, you know, hey, here's the sensitivity to interest rates. Here's what's going on.

[00:20:42]We habitually attack Congressional Budget Office when they tell us things we don't like.

[00:20:54]Turns out when actually looking at the projections and what's happening, CBO has actually been most accurate.

[00:21:02]Um the House budget resolution second most accurate.

[00:21:09]OMB a little too optimistic and that's on the 10-year when we look at it on even looking at the three-month same thing.

[00:21:21]But there's only a couple other points I want to make here.

[00:21:28]Average interest rates by security type.

[00:21:30]And you go, who cares?

[00:21:35]This year, our government will have to refinance almost 11 trillion dollar.

[00:21:43]Okay.

[00:21:44]We're going to borrow about two trillion, let's call it virgin, new issuances.

[00:21:50]But here's your what? Remember that big word interest fragility? I'm going to show you a chart here in a moment where a bunch of what we do there's these things called notes and bonds and and and they actually have they're just names for different durations, but a bunch of our debt we keep very short. Now, that's actually what the Federal Reserve also does have an impact on on, you know, the the Fed's funds rates, but the two-year right now is over 4%.

[00:22:23]And guess what? We have a whole bunch of our debt that every 30 days, 90 days, 6 months, we have to come back to the market and refinance. So, if something goes haywire during that time, we're subject to that. I think last year and the year before that we had three four months where we had to borrow money to have enough money to cover our borrowing.

[00:22:50]Now yes tax receipts are cyclical. You have because we're an income taxbased government. Um uh the reason I show this is these right here are notes. This is basically debt from think of it as from 5 years to 10 years.

[00:23:17]But you see this big thing here, bills, 21% of our debt, that's all short-term.

[00:23:24]That's coming to market. Coming to market, coming to market because it rolls off, you got to refinance. Rolls off, you got to refinance. Rolls off.

[00:23:31]When you have this much at short bonds here are over 10.

[00:23:38]But even today, Mr. Speaker, the 30-year bond, the 20-year bond, remember 20 is sort of a stepchild, so it often has a bit of a premium on it.

[00:23:50]The 30-year, I think, was coming in at 41, 4.16, something like that. It's It's been a day or so since I looked at it.

[00:24:00]Do you care about your mortgage rate?

[00:24:02]Well, what is it? 30-year conforming home loans now are over what, six, six and a half.

[00:24:11]You want lower interest rates. You want an economy that has more capital for plant and equipment and new technology and new jobs to make us more productive so we can raise wages.

[00:24:25]You can't have a government that chews up every damn dime.

[00:24:37]a child born today. And I know I've said this over and over, but and I'm waiting for the moment. What breaks the reason I keep saying it is no one seems to care enough to say, "Well, David, that number scared the crap out of me." A child born today, Mr. Speaker, you need 104% of that child's lifime income just to pay federal government pensions.

[00:25:06]Is that Republican or Democrat? I would just say it's absolutely immoral.

[00:25:14]And we're going to squander one of our reconciliation budgets. Reconciliation budget is a way to get around the filibuster in the Senate. Has all sorts of rules because it's from the 1974 budget control act. Okay, I understand we got to get the final portion of the DHS budget through and I know we're having all sorts of fights on it, but why wouldn't we do something simply moral on it and say we have dozens of ideas and bills that don't take away people's services, but could help us at least try to convince the bond markets we're paying attention to the debt and actually cut the waste and fraud and cut some of the spending and realign some of the programs where we can make people's lives better. But that would be hard and we'd have to say no to a bunch of lobbyists and we're scared to death to do it.

[00:26:03]And so those of you with kids, give them a hug tonight and apologize to them for me as I'm going to do with my three-year-old which graduated the first part of preschool today.

[00:26:19]of what I've done to his economic future.

[00:26:22]But these numbers are so ugly we've also done it to your retirement.

[00:26:28]And with that, Mr. Speaker, I'm going to go find some other place to be angry. I yield back.

[00:26:37]The gentleman yields back.

[00:26:53]Actually, I think I can make a privilege request.

[00:27:09]Do you need me to close?

[00:27:14]>> Okay.

[00:27:15]>> The gentleman's recogn.

[00:27:17]>> Mr. Speaker, I'd like to make a motion that the House do stand adjourned.

[00:27:23]Pursuant to clause 13 of rule one, the House stands adjourned until 10:30 a.m.

[00:27:27]tomorrow.