David Schweikert

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372 held · 139 searchable for David Schweikert. The searchable lines are below in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 2 of 3.

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1. “That is what is referred to as the world's savings pool. Ray Dalio talks about this repeatedly. The problem is our need for the savings or the need for the borrowing is now starting to outstrip the world's excess capital. When that happens, interest rates go up. When you take a look at what we are doing right now, for the fun of it, let's just say it is only 60 basis points and it is over the next 10 years. Just that bond interest rate we have had recently over the last couple of months, it is $2 trillion of additional interest over the 10 years. It is called interest fragility, little bits of interest increases, and you are basically borrowing $40 trillion. That little bit kicks us in the head, and that is how you start to head toward that interest debt spiral.”

   House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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2. “It is functioning at pretty close to the highest it has been in a year and some of the highest it has been in many years. Let's play a game here. Let's assume that it is 60 basis points, 70 basis points higher than the average we were having before. Remember, you are going to keep having people say: Well, the reason the interest rates are up is because of the war in Iran. They were ticking up before that because of the worldwide battle for capital. Other countries are also bingeing on debt. We have data centers and other things coming to market bingeing on debt. We are all competing with each other. Because when you borrow money, you are borrowing from the world's pool of savings. It could be your savings account, your pension, a family in China. We all put our moneys into our banks and savings institutions and investment institutions.”

   House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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3. “That is where we have misdesigned programs, and outsiders, businesses, insurance companies, bureaucracies have figured out how to bleed those programs because we screwed up on their design and haven't been willing to go back and turn around and fix them. We end up having to borrow more money. When we borrow more money, we push up interest rates. When we push up interest rates, we have just made everything less affordable. We have created this doom loop. The only way to break it is to convince those markets we are not just going to keep borrowing like crazy. Then we have these charts, and I keep trying to explain this. There is this concept--it is a big word--interest fragility. Interest goes up, and it beats the ever living crap out of us. Think about what has happened today. Today, I believe the 10-year bond closed at 4.65, 4.67.”

   House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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4. “Technically, governments don't go bankrupt, but basically what we are going to have to do is monetize this debt. Don't laugh at me. My wife and I are the same age. We have a 4-year- old boy. He was here a couple of weeks ago, cute as can be, just turned 4. For his fourth birthday, he wanted to go to work with Daddy. We need 104 percent of his lifetime earnings, every dime he will ever make in his life, plus another 4 percent, just to pay for Federal Government pensions: Social Security, Medicare, military. That is 104 percent. This is what we have done to our kids. Now, part of it is because we have so few children and so many of us that have gray hair. It is called baby boomers. It is just math. So I'm trying to explain a simple concept. We do more borrowing and spending, but we also have this thing called leakage.”

   House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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5. “{time} 2050 Let's actually walk through something, just a simple concept. A week or two ago, I did a presentation here showing you the academic literature and the things that our economists have worked on showing that government borrowing has made your mortgage one point higher. Today, when you go out and try to get a new 30-year loan and it is, what, 6.7 today, it would be 5.7 if we weren't grabbing so damn much money out of the marketplace. We are partially responsible, if not substantially responsible, for affordability in America. But when we go home and do a townhall or meetings, it is person after person that wants more money from us. Maybe Congress is just basically representing the interests of the public. They don't care about the bankruptcy, the stress, those things.”

   House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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6. “Maybe they will hire social media stars. I tried do a reform and a fix on some of the things we saw from the MedPAC report where it was costing us hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, not fraud. The Department of Justice may actually have an opinion on this one. It was on Medicare part C. We call it Medicare Advantage. The next day, some marketing firm defending one of the insurance companies was hiring social media stars to beat the crap out of me for talking about trying to fix the bleeding of Medicare Advantage. That is one of the reasons we get so cowed around here. We are trying to explain why we are trying to save these systems, and there is so much money in that waste. Part of that money goes to beat the crap out of us to stop us from reforming government.”

   House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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7. “Gross interest is actually closer to like--sorry. We will be close to $1.280 trillion because we owe the interest back to the trust funds. The other parts here are what we call mandatory. We owe Medicare. We made a deal. We owe Social Security. We made a deal. Does that mean we can't do things to revolutionize the cost of healthcare and Medicare and make it more accessible, more efficient, more price effective? When we think, we actually will spend $350 billion over the next 10 years in duplicative MRI scans, X-rays, ultrasounds, CTs. How about this crazy idea of: Hey, I got a scan. Put it on your phone so when you go to your next doctor, they hit the button and it is there on the screen. There will be an army of lobbyists who work for companies that make money on the duplicative scans, and they will fight us and embarrass us.”

   House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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8. “They had numbers saying 12 to 14 years--I am going to show you that I have it even sooner on some of our data--interest is the number one expense of this government. It surpasses Social Security. There was a discussion if we go with current policy--and we are going to talk about that, current policy, not current law, because this is the scam we keep doing here. We keep extending our spending and extending these things. The current policy in 14 years, the United States actually can't sell any more bonds. We have hit the wall. We hit a debt spiral. I have been here 16 years. All right. Let's do this. Let's run through these boards. Everyone has seen this over and over because, traditionally, I start with this one. This is just the pie chart.”

   House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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9. “I am sorry the staff has to sit here and hear an idiot like me constantly coming back up behind this microphone and saying the same thing week after week, but what do we do to cut through? I am going to show a couple boards here. If you are the public and run into a Member of Congress or someone running for Congress, look at them and don't say, what more are you going to give me? I want more money. Ask them, how are you going to save the country? Because about a week ago, our team met with, I think it was the Penn Wharton Budget Model, and the paperwork and the discussion I had with them after, I walked out of the room and my stomach hurt. They had numbers where in 14 years we hit a wall.”

   House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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10. “economists who are just smart, yet I walk into a room of my brothers and sisters, Democrats, even Republicans, with my charts and almost get booed because we don't want to hear it. We are going to bring down this Republic, and it is not going to be some mob coming over the border. It is going to be our own fiscal insanity. Remember, in about 25, 26 months, the majority of our spending, not tax collection, spending, will go to our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up. We are functionally an insurance company with an Army. Last year, for every dollar we took in taxes, we spent $1.43. If you do the basic math, and forgive me, I did this off the top of my head. If I make a mistake, send me an angry text like everyone else. I think right now, so far this fiscal year, for every dollar we are taking in, we are spending $1.47.”

    House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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11. “In 6 years, when you are on Social Security and you are getting a 22 to 24 percent cut in your check, and we double poverty of seniors, 7 years from now when we double the number of baby boomers who live on the street, maybe some of this will make sense, that we should have done something much sooner, but math is math. Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons I am a little exercised this week-- and you have been in conference with those things. I accept I have been a bit of a jerk. I am just trying to find some way to be heard. I have been doing the same damn thing behind this microphone for 15 years, and it has only gotten worse. Something is wrong when--I am number four in Ways and Means. I chair Oversight in Ways and Means. I chair the Joint Economic Committee. We have a handful of Ph.D.”

    House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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12. “Gross borrowing is borrowing from the public and from the trust funds. Anyone want to take a guess how many days it takes us to borrow another trillion dollars? It is 123 days. Every 123 days, we are ticking off another trillion dollars. Total U.S. debt as of today is $39.660 trillion. By the end of this summer work period, whatever we want to call it, we are going to be at $40 trillion. Doesn't this make anyone pucker up, or is the joke that is often said here, never near a microphone because we would be an idiot to say in front of a microphone, no one ever gets unelected by spending too much money because the public wants it.”

    House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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13. “Here is the publicly sold debt, and over here is the money we borrow from the trust funds, which we do pay interest back. We have to intellectually be honest: It is borrowing. Often we quote what we borrowed from the public because that is in the public bond market, but when we borrow from the trust funds--Social Security, Medicare, railroad, retirement, everything else. We pay an interest. We owe it back. We are now at $2.022 trillion in borrowing this fiscal year. This total year, the original projections were $1.6 trillion, $1.7 trillion. We are heading to borrowing $2.3 trillion. I know it is hard to see 12 zeros. I know no one cares, but just understand, this is really crappy. Maybe we all understand this number. At the current rate of total borrowing--remember, net borrowing is borrowing from the public.”

    House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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14. “The Joint Economic Committee actually built a system where every single day, every workday, we reach into the Treasury's management system where they have these charts and graphs, and we capture what was borrowed today, what was brought to market today, and what was sold today. Who in this room, the handful of us who are here and hopefully the thousand televisions we are on, understand over the last 12 months--if I do the last 12 months average, $93,763 is what we are borrowing every second. Every second, we are borrowing over $93,000. I understand some of these numbers bounce up and down because we also had some refunding issues after the last debt ceiling issue a year ago, but in the last 12 months, we, as a government, have borrowed $2.948 trillion if you just want to do this fiscal year.”

    House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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15. “It turns out--and this isn't solely the Speaker's fault--it was really hard to convince a lot of our Members how difficult it is to go home and tell the truth about math. Mr. Speaker, if your staff is out there listening, I expect you and this institution to keep your promise to our team, that we are going to take these bills seriously, we are going to bring in the leadership from the committees, and we are going to pound it out how we move them forward. There is a reason--I am sorry, I don't mean to sound like a melodramatic jerk. {time} 2040 How many of you get our daily debt?”

    House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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16. “Even when the leftist Democrat Governor of New York says, yeah, it is fraud, maybe we could do something together. We have worked over and over and over to try to write bills. Many of them are very uncomfortable because they are complex. They require changing things in what we call entitlements. They are moral, and they are necessary. I hope I am not a fool. One year ago, when we actually did part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Family Tax Cut Act, yes, we had an obligation to extend the tax policy and do some of the pro-growth things. When we came back, many of us thought we had negotiated an agreement that when we did the second reconciliation bill, we were going to start to save the future of this country, save the future of the economy, convince the bond market we weren't going to continue to borrow ourselves into oblivion.”

    House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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17. “Turns out it is harder than you think because the fraud, as it turns out, it is fairly easy to identify. It is a little hard to stop. Often, it is money that has already gone out the door, so we have to hunt someone down, try to collect the money, and put someone in jail. When you hear the term ``waste,'' it is often our fault. We designed a program that has leakage, or certain companies have found ways to take advantage of it, certain bureaucracies. I will give you a simple example. This is going to make sense in a moment. In New York City, in the last 5 years the number one job creator turns out to be a Medicaid program for home visiting. Think of that. The number one job creator for half a decade in New York City is a Medicaid program.”

    House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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18. “Mr. Speaker, let's try something I have never done before, but I also need to sort of lock something down. Mr.”

    House of Representatives22 July 2026Source ↗

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19. “Speaker, I don't believe my brothers and sisters here are actually willing to do the hard things and tell the truth about the math and then redesign these programs because it means getting the crap kicked out of you by the lobbying and the business models out there. That means creating a revolution of taking on the debt and deficits. We will pay a remarkable price for the fact that the Penn Wharton models within a decade had us actually already approaching the no-go numbers of being able to sell our U.S. debt. At that point the bonds explode, and the bond market runs this country. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. ____________________”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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20. “We are now 13 or 14 on the credit stack where other countries can actually sell a 10-year bond cheaper than we can. And I keep wondering. I have been coming behind this microphone for almost a decade and a half. We have been introducing pieces of legislation that could revolutionize the costs of healthcare, could actually make government dramatically more efficient, and I almost can't get a single Member of Congress to consponsor any of this legislation because you have to go to war with all the lobbyists because it means changing the bureaucracies or the business models out there. It is like they basically have this attitude: Screw the society. Screw my kids. Screw your retirement, as long as I don't have to tell the truth about the math. Today, your government borrowed about $90,000 a second.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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21. “That is actually why you see groups like my Joint Economic Committee, Penn Wharton, so many of the others, saying the trustees are missing it. The debt the United States is in is dramatically more devastating. Mr. Speaker, 2030, 2035 isn't that far away. I am sure we are all going to get together and decide we are going to do a debt deficit commission. I am sure we are all going get together and lay out the incentives of how we actually manage this crisis. I am sure we are going to do those things to convince the bond markets that we are creditworthy because here is part of the frustration. Greece, today, can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. Greece today has a better forward credit rating than the United States.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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22. “Remember, if we are borrowing $2.3 trillion on top--but think about that. Our government functionally is an insurance company with an Army. All right. This is actually one of my intense frustrations. Let's take a look. The trustee's report projects this significantly more optimistically than the other sources. Remember I showed you a chart there, and I was somewhat mocking the trustee's report, basically saying they have this magic thing where fertility rates crash and crash and crash, and that is within the next 9 years, and then suddenly, magically it explodes upward. No one else has that. Here is the Medicare and Social Security actuary's trustees saying, oh, well, we are going to go along, but magically when we get to 2030, they are going to start to go up. This has created a distortion.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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23. “I have shown some charts here where in the end of a decade from now, you have about 2.3, and it is this: In 2011, we had 21.9 working-age folks per senior. Today, actually, that number has eroded 47 percent increase in that change. It is almost a 50 percent change in that time, and it actually steepens. Part of the steepening isn't because we have more seniors. It is also because we have substantially fewer young people. All right. Mr. Speaker, 65 will continue to grow as a share of the population. In 9 budget years, 21.4 percent of the population will be in their benefit ages. Our system wasn't prepared for this. In 25 or 26 months from now, I should have double checked the math, over half of the Federal spending will go to those of us 65 and up. That is not half of the tax receipts.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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24. “I have had some success on the edges, but I lose to the armies of lobbyists that are in the hallways here that lose their minds because we may change their business models. Mr. Speaker, we are now borrowing about $90,000 every second. Today, we will borrow about $7 billion. The current burn rate so far this fiscal year, just this fiscal year, we are going come in close to $2.2 to $2.3 trillion of borrowing, and yet, we have higher interest rates. How long is the bond market going to keep saying we are going to finance you because how much of the benefits that our brothers and sisters who are older have earned we are actually borrowing the money? Seniors per hundred workers--and actually, here is just the simple math. How many of us grew up always hearing you have got 23 people per retiree, and that is how we finance Social Security?”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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25. “Now, understand, my wife and I are both 64, and I have a 4-year-old and a 10-year-old, so we are very optimistic about the future, or we are out of our minds, but we all knew this was happening. {time} 1900 Mr. SCHWEIKERT. We did what to shore up the trust funds? We did what to basically incentivize our brothers and sisters to stay in the labor force if they wanted to? We had dozens of things--I have been here 16 years, and I have spent most of that time trying to get this place to actually deal with the reality of let's save Social Security. Let's actually save Medicare. Let's do those things that help us grow. Let's adopt the technology so we can crash the price of healthcare.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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26. “It is a combination of everything, but these workers are often our most productive. So just understand that prime working-aged people are actually doing really well working and being in the labor force. Those of us who are older, we have been disappearing like crazy, and we actually see that in our productivity numbers. All right. Mr. Speaker, I warned you this was going to be a little geeky. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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27. “Here I am, a Member of Congress all these years later, and it is like we are just now discovering it. All right. Here is actually something--it is hopeful, but the next slide will actually take the wind out of your sails. So prime-age labor force participation, so the people we consider sort of in their prime working years, actually, we are doing really well here. Some of the growth in the economy, some of the investment in the economy, for prime age, we have 84 percent. But here is my problem: Labor force participation of those 55 and up has been crashing. There are lots of reasons to debate this and discuss this. Is this skill sets? Is it the adoption of technology? Is it the wealth effects of as asset prices have gone up so much, we have people who are able to retire early?”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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28. “It would basically explain that when I was a kid in the 1970s, for every dollar we spent on seniors, we spent almost $7 on people who were functionally young. Today, that number has flipped, and it has just flipped because the demographics have flipped. It is the same thing as what happened here with who is available to be in the labor force. Much of our labor force population now is much older. The jobs available for the young are half what we had when I was young. It is just baby boomers. We knew people were going to turn 65 for how many years? I mean, this place, in some ways, is so incredibly absurd in its unwillingness to basically do basic math. I remember sitting in a statistics class in around 1981, and the professor then was talking about what baby boomers meant to the economy.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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29. “If you are a hospital, you are taking at least a 12 percent cut. This is what is happening in the numbers. Why this is important is that: One of the ways you grow an economy is either with a stable or growing population, and particularly if that population has risen in skill sets. That is why so many countries around the industrialized world fight like hell for talent-based immigration. You don't bring mass poverty across the border. You go out and recruit really smart people, because they pay a hell of a lot of taxes. This chart is basically saying that in just a few years, our labor force actually starts to decrease, and that is 2.8 million in 2030. That is how many years from now, Mr. Speaker? It is 2026. So think of this. In 4 years, the data says that the U.S.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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30. “That means the doubling of senior poverty in 6\1/2\ years to 7 years from now. The Medicare trust fund will be empty. One of our problems in the Medicare healthcare spending is that we refuse to have a conversation of how to lower healthcare prices. We keep having discussions of how to manipulate and do financial engineering on healthcare. So we have turned healthcare into a financing issue instead of the adoption of technology, where you can functionally wear your own medical lab, you can use technology to actually refer yourself, those things. Because we are terrified to actually explain to the armies in our hallways who are here lobbying us that in less than 7 years, Medicare spending will double. It will go from $1 trillion last year to some 6 years to 7 years from now, $2 trillion, and, at that time, the trust fund is empty.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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31. “When you have people talking about in 6 years to 6 years and 3 months, the Social Security actuaries have the trust fund being empty, but don't worry, because the long-run rate is we are in real trouble. But it actually has, we believe, completely unsupportable population statistics in it. All right. So that was my attempt to mock the Social Security actuarial report. I am sorry for me going fast, but I only have about 20 more minutes to try to do this. This chart is really, really important, and it is new to us. So net entries into the labor force. If the Social Security trust fund is empty in 6 years and 3 months, if the Medicare trust fund is empty pretty much at the same time, the model says that if we follow the law, those of us on Social Security will take a 22 percent to 24 percent cut.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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32. “population and they have it falling and falling and falling. So a little beyond--so call it 2027, and then, suddenly, they have the U.S. population coming back up. We don't see this on Census Bureau data. We don't see this in some of the university data. We don't see this on some of the population statistics groups. Somehow the actuaries for Social Security actually say that we are going to get several years down. The population is going to--you know, birthrates are going to continue to fall. Fertility rates are going to continue to fall, but then, suddenly, magically, they are going to come back. And that is why so many of us are so concerned about the long-run numbers they have published, because this growth rate in fertility population, I don't think matches reality.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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33. “This is basically us right now, particularly what has been happening over the last several months. Our employment rates are actually really starting to spike up more; we are starting to see a real differential in Arizona compared to the rest of the country. This is what happens when you don't fixate on bringing the next generation of employment into your marketplace. All right? So let's geek out a little bit more. I am going to show you this chart because it is absurd. It is a chart that makes me-- Social Security actuaries basically published a report, what, 3 weeks ago, and, yes, I have a tabbed copy, and I meant to bring it up here, but we were out doing the tour. I want you to see something. You tell me how the Social Security actuaries came up with this number. So right here, this is actually the U.S.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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34. “Much of this type of job has now become automated, and now we are starting to see it in our job numbers and the number of people who are actually choosing to leave the labor force because they are older and they actually have given up looking. But take a look at this chart, and you start to understand what we are seeing, and this number is actually fairly recent. This is as of May 2026, so this is old data. We always think of Arizona as being this remarkable growth center. The reality right now: We have stumbled, and we are going to have to really do some things to actually start to deal with the reality of what is going on in our labor market. As you actually take a look at it even further--just because I love my State and I care--this is the national unemployment rate. You see this spiking here?”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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35. “Now, I did this one because I am going to do a whole section here on labor force participation. You go, who cares? {time} 1850 It is a big deal, and we are seeing some really funky numbers out there in some of that, and some of it is because we are getting older. Some of it is younger people are entering the labor force later, but there is some hope on that side of the ledger. But there is some difficulty here. So I decided I would actually grab a couple of slides from Arizona just to sort of demonstrate labor force participation rates in Arizona. You see this red line here? So the blue is America. Why has Arizona crashed? Well, we actually had some problems. Arizona, particularly the Phoenix and Tucson area, had become sort of the back office, the call centers, the back-office accounting centers of America.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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36. “That technology can't be financed because the Federal Government pushed up interest rates and consumed the capital. All right, that hopefully is making sense. Let's do this. Remember I was trying to talk about housing affordability? This is also another chart to just sort of understand what this means. On an average-priced home in my marketplace, which is the Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe sort of area, a home is just a little under $500,000 with no downpayment, so we just mortgage the whole thing. What if you could get what our model says, if we weren't borrowing so much, and get a 5.5 percent rate in today's market? If you actually look at what we have done to mortgage rates, that differential costs homeowners several thousand dollars over that year, just to understand what this does. Let's have a little more fun here.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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37. “They need to finance those benefits, and almost everything we are doing now is on borrowed money. Just to understand, there is a principle out there, whether it be your home loan being actually over a full point higher in interest rates because of Federal Government borrowing, but we are also suppressing your wages. Because that capital, when it is in the market, helps a business, plant and equipment, keep investing in more productivity. Higher productivity actually means you can pay people more. Remember your old high school economics class? The two ways you raise wages: inflation--well, that doesn't get you anything; it just means your wages go up, but your purchasing power has gone down--or productivity. You are making more whatever you did because you invested in plant and equipment or better processes or better technology.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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38. “I would cut spending dramatically. I voted that way, and I am in a tough district. Let's be honest, what is the running joke here, Mr. Speaker? No one ever got unelected by spending too much money. It is sort of perverse, but the bond market will basically be running the Federal Government in the next few years because of the influence it will have and the damage it can do to us. That is a percentage to understand. Let's actually dig in a little bit more. The boards, because I started late, are all upside down. So forgive me, I am going to be bouncing these around. The rising national debt will lower wages. This is something we have been looking at over and over. We keep talking about affordability.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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39. “All right. Let's keep doing this. Net interest as a percentage of total revenues would approach 30 percent, and understand, we have a model that actually is over 30. It is actually as high as 33 percent. Here we are. Right now, we are in this slot here, so 19 to 20 percent of all of our tax receipts is going to interest in 9 budget years. This should terrify you. How many bridges, how much helping people get healthy, how many benefits is the interest paying? No. I mean, it does benefit those who buy the bonds, and there is the Ray Dalio theory that it is still money circulating back into the economy, but it is money that does not go to meet the mission of the Federal Government. It is basically paying for past spending. The ethical question here is: Is borrowing a tax hike? Now, for some of the antitax groups--I love them.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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40. “bonds, it is the second biggest expense in the Federal Government, so Social Security, interest, Medicare, Medicaid and ObamaCare subsidies, defense--once again, remember, defense, the thing that is in the Constitution, is actually number five. That interest may come in close to $1.3 trillion this year. That is about 20 percent. One of my charts is going to say 19, but my math is closer to 20 percent of all tax receipts go just to pay interest. I am going to say this two or three times in different ways. In 9 budget years, we have a model that says 30 to 33 percent of all the tax receipts will go just to interest. So you pay a dollar. In 9 years, what happens if a third of that money's function is just covering the interest on the debt pileup? It is important to understand this chart and why I show it. I start with it all the time.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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41. “What is blue here is what you remember that Congress actually gets to vote on. What is red here is almost all formulaic, and that is part of the problem. As Members of Congress today, we could all hold hands, sing kumbaya, love each other, get rid of every dime that is discretionary--now, that is nondefense and defense, but it is what we vote on--and you still couldn't balance the budget. Remember, last year, for every dollar we took in, we spent $1.43. So far this year--and, look, I am hoping it bends back down, but this year, the number is even worse. Interest this year, our model--just interest, total interest, so the interest we have to pay back the trust funds, the interest we have to pay the people who are willing to buy U.S.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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42. “What is the number one driver of U.S. sovereign debt? It is shocking how many of even our brothers and sisters here in this building get the math wrong. It is demographics, and it is the one thing we are really not supposed to tell the truth about. Next year, there is a model that says we will have fewer under 18 than we had 20 years ago, but we will have almost double 65 and up than we had 20-plus years ago. It is baby boomers, and we have gone decade and decade without enough children. It is just math. Is that Republican or Democrat? It is just math. Once again, all right, let's do this. For those of you who have actually paid attention over the years, you have noticed that over the time we talked about discretionary outlays. Today, it is down to about 25 percent.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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43. “If you don't like math, if you don't like demographics, if you don't actually want to deal with the math I am going to give you, now would be a good time to go find something on Netflix. I have been trying to make a point over and over around here that our borrowing is terrifying, and it is much worse than almost anyone is willing to talk about. We actually had some of the Joint Economic economists meet with some of the Penn Wharton modelers over the last couple of days. When they used their population statistics, some of the coming years are even uglier than we get from CBO, what we get from OMB, and actually what we get from some of the other scorers. Let's actually just sort of start this and put this in perspective and then understand there are solutions. You don't pay off the debt, but you can stabilize it.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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44. “Mr. Speaker, and to the room, I apologize. I was doing a tour for a former firefighter, who actually was paralyzed in the scope of his duties, but we were close. Mr. Speaker, I am going to take 1 or 2 seconds here to try to straighten this out just a little bit. The presentation tonight is going to be a little bit technical. Sorry about that.”

    House of Representatives15 July 2026Source ↗

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45. “Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn. The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 21 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, April 8, 2025, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate. ____________________”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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46. “Yet, if you pay for it, you don't screw up the capital stack, the money that you borrow for your small business, for your home, or for your car. It looks like we are going to screw it all up. Let's not let that happen, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. ____________________”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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47. “I have a couple of really good friends who are over in the Senate, and they were just desperate to avoid doing what was difficult, so they threw it in our lap. Mr. Speaker, we as House Members get to make a decision: Are we going to do what is right and moral and what actually sets up the future for economic growth? Very last point. Almost 2 months ago, the Congressional Budget Office did a model that says, if you want to maximize growth over the next decade, pay for as much of the tax extensions as you can. Do them because that will maintain consumption. You don't get a lot of growth from it. Where you really get the growth is the expensing side and continuing some of the business tax, the passthrough tax portions.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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48. “Yet, we have shown the studies over and over that every Democratic tax that has actually been proposed and scored produces about 1.5 percent of GDP. The cuts we have talked about are about 1 percent of GDP. You have a big 2.5 percent there if we both did everything. Mr. Speaker, we are scheduled to borrow about 7.3 percent of the economy this year. Does anyone see a math problem? Why is it so hard around here to tell the truth? We say things that are just not mathematically true. My family used to have a saying: At some point, the math is going to win, and it always does. Mr. Speaker, thank you for tolerating a bit of my rant, but it is my way of just saying how disappointed I am with even my friends.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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49. “It is completely unenforceable. We should be ashamed of ourselves. Look at something like this. Understand the scale of what the Senate--you know, the 2017 tax reform, in its full score of debt, it turns out to have come in at less than half that. Take a look at the CARES Act, the American Rescue Plan, and all these things that we as Republicans railed against because of the data produced. This is the Senate reconciliation budget. Do you see why I am angry or disappointed or just bewildered? These are tax cut extensions without trying to make any attempt to pay for it. Remember how a moment ago I was telling you we start to break the budget models? {time} 2120 The driver of our debt ultimately is our demographics. The left will say: No, Republicans need to tax people more. Okay.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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50. “The Senate, remember, a billion dollars and a trillion dollars are very, very different things. They functionally gave us $4 billion in spending reductions. That is what they thought we were worth. Mr. Speaker, I know I am being a bit redundant on these boards, but I am trying to make a point. We sure give a lot of great speeches around here of the greatest threat to our Republic. It turns out to be the scale and the speed we are burying this society in debt. Then, we hit moments like this, and we are going to happy talk our way through it. We are going to lie about things. Oh, we are going to make up a pretend growth rate, and that is going to produce $2.6 trillion. Our own reconciliation budget, there is going to be $1.7 trillion of additional cuts in discretionary, but you can't really do that in a reconciliation budget.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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