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 3 of 3.

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1. “We broke the CBO's model. It went over 250 percent. The problem is their computer only goes to 250 percent. It just hit it. We are now pushing levels of debt so high we are breaking our budget models. Go team. Even with what the Senate just gave us over that 10- year period of time, stack on another $1.1 trillion of interest. We didn't buy anything. It is just interest. The House proposed trying to get to $2 trillion in spending reductions. Dear heaven, I hope we can be tough enough and disciplined enough to get there. I have produced all sorts of documents. I am not one of those people giving speeches. I am showing up with binders of ways you can get there. Much of it isn't cuts. It is just using technology to change the way we deliver services.”

   House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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2. “Some moments, I am hoping that the leadership team that said they would work with me-- because I believe we can find a trillion dollars in savings in just modernization. Remember, those inefficiencies are the people's business models, so you already see the hallways full of lobbyists trying to stop them. Take a look here. Here is the debt we were going to add. Here is the additional debt the Senate adds. They made it functionally even double what we were talking about. Increasing the deficit results in higher interest costs. This is one of the things. We forget to tell people the truth. There is a model out there--CBO actually ran it for me--saying if interest rates went up 1 percent on this policy baseline, and I am tired of talking about it, in the 30-year window, you broke the Congressional Budget Office's model. Let me say that again.”

   House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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3. “For those of us in the House who give these beautiful speeches that it is immoral to do this to our kids and crush people's future retirements, what are we going to do? Are we going to step up and say: Look, Republicans, we have priorities. The White House has priorities. We just have to find ways to finance them. Are we that terrified to tell the truth? A couple more of these, and hopefully, I won't have bored everyone to death. The Senate budget provides for $5-plus trillion in new deficits over the next 10 years. Then, you add in the additional spending. You start to go over. Even our budget reconciliation, I thought, was unacceptable. It was one of the hardest votes I made, and I can't make up my mind how much I regret it. Sometimes, I really regret it.”

   House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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4. “Remember, our math from last year is the first full year with the Social Security trust fund gone. Just the shortfall is over $600 billion. The scale of what we are talking about is brutal. Mr. Speaker, you intend to be here for another decade, so you are going to get to deal with it. Every day we wait, that math gets more and more difficult. Let's go back to the Senate's reconciliation budget. Here is what they gave us. They are using a 2024 gross debt number of $21 trillion. It is really $22 trillion, but we will let them because they made up some numbers in their budget. Remember, they played some games on growth projections. Functionally, 32.7 percent of the next decade they gave us is additional borrowing. They basically decided that, over the next decade, let's add another third of debt. What are we going to do?”

   House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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5. “Last week, I showed a number of charts that, those numbers in 10, 20 years, it is you and your partner, you and your spouse and a little bit more, you have your own retired person you are paying for. That is not Republican or Democrat. It is demographics. In 2033, so 7.5 years from now, the Social Security trust fund is empty. The law says you cut benefits. That would be a 21 percent cut, meaning in 8 years, we double senior poverty in America. Yet, if you talk about how you want to try to save Social Security and all the steps you have to do, all the inputs, because it turns out it is complicated, that side over there is going to run attack ads beating the crap out of you because you mentioned the words ``Social Security'' even though you are trying not to double senior poverty. That is how immoral this place is.”

   House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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6. “Does anyone have kids? Think of this: It may be insane--my wife is my age--but I have a 9-year-old daughter and a 2\1/2\-year-old little boy we have adopted. Yes, they are brother and sister, so that explains it. When my little boy is 24, 25 years old, every tax in the United States, every tax, has to double just to maintain baseline services. We are raising kids that would be part of the first generation to be structurally poorer than their parents because when you borrow money, it is a tax. It just means you are going to let someone else pay it with interest. It is not free money. It is a tax. Sometimes taking on a certain amount of debt is what you have to do because the thing that Republicans and Democrats are terrified to tell our voters is, in the next 10 years, almost 100 percent of U.S. sovereign debt is interest and Medicare.”

   House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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7. “What took us 240 years to build up, we are going to double in the next 9 budget years, next 10 calendar years. Go team. That is the morality of this place. People say: It is hard, David, to explain to people that we need to modernize, we need to change the way we deliver services, we need to use technology, and some programs we should just stop because they have been outdated for decades. This is important here. This is without any of the disaster aid, this is without the economic potential slowdown, so tax receipts are coming down, and this is without a war. I mean just using actually what were optimistic numbers of the next 10 years' tax receipts, and what we are talking about doing right now is over the next 10 years doubling what took us 240 years to build up in debt. {time} 2110 Does anyone care about your retirement?”

   House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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8. “When you hear someone say $37 trillion in debt, remember, Mr. Speaker, there is a portion of that we borrow internally. We reach in debt trust funds and other things. We borrow the money there. We pay interest on it. People say: Oh, you borrowed my Social Security money. Yes, and they got actually a pretty good interest rate back. Here is the baseline. Remember, Mr. Speaker, why is this not $22 trillion? It is because they were using a 2034 number. We caught them playing a game there. Then they added another $6.9 trillion on top of that, and what do you get, Mr. Speaker? Here is what you get: Functionally when we all got elected this last November, the United States sovereign debt was around $28 trillion. When we finish this 10-year cycle, we are going to add another $28 trillion if we do what the Senate sent us.”

   House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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9. “If we borrow $6 billion a day and their budget resolution is 3, actually our borrowing is actually a little more than $6 billion, it is 10, 12 hours of borrowing for an entire year, and this is for a 10-year budget. That is what they gave us. Oh, but, David, when negotiations start, it will actually get filled in. Except we are negotiating--we put $1.5 trillion of savings with the hope of getting to 2, and they give us $3 billion. Remember, 1 trillion is 1,000 billion. Mr. Speaker, you wonder why some of us are cranky when our colleagues down the Hall give us basically crap to work with. Let's actually start to walk through what this actually means to us as a body. When we finished the last budget year, we were $28 trillion of publicly held debt. That is the debt we have to sell.”

   House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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10. “We are about to squander this extraordinary privilege we have because the world trades in our currency. They need to buy our debt because they need to hold our currency because that is what they dot nominate in, that is what they trade in, and that is their peg. If you look at this chart, Mr. Speaker, new Senate budget resolution, that is functionally another $8.5 trillion in deficits. Here is extending the tax cuts in 2017, and then they made a margin there for additional spending, either it be some of the other priorities, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, those things, and then we have another $520 billion in additional spending. Can you see this line here, Mr. Speaker? You can't really see it. It is $3 billion of cuts. That is what they put on to their budget resolution.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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11. “Speaker, do you really think the United States with our exorbitant privilege of having the world's reserve currency and being the country that people want to come and do their business in, move to put their capital in, do you think that is our birthright? Remember, Mr. Speaker, up until World War II it was Great Britain that had the world's reserve currency. We are squandering our place in the world. People run around saying: Well, we need to push down the value of the dollar. You have trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars around the world that are held by people, and you are going to push down the value of their holdings. Just understand every time someone says something like that, Mr. Speaker, you can actually start to see the full faith in the United States start to taper away.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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12. “Remember $86 trillion in spending, the House was just trying to do 2, and I thought 2 was absolutely anemic. We should have covered all 4, $4.5 trillion. One of the hardest votes I made in my decade-plus here was standing right there and swallowing saying: I am going to vote for this, but I am really unhappy because we are capable of doing more. And if we don't start to telegraph to the bond markets we are going to do something serious, at what moment does the bond market say: Screw these people. They are just not serious. They are consuming the world's capital. Let's charge them more. Mr.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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13. “If you basically add then a number of the President's additional priorities but don't pay for them, don't try to find a way, then you end up at $74 trillion of borrowing in functionally 9 budget years, 10 years. I am going to show you a couple of boards here, Mr. Speaker. If you actually add it up, we are functionally talking about almost doubling what took us 240 years in debt to build up, we are talking about doubling it, well, close to doubling it, in the next 9 years. Have we lost our minds? This is what you heard a number of us fussing about, Mr. Speaker. We can't figure out what the Senate was thinking. Were they just in avoidance of we don't want to tell anyone, we are going to try to do something that should not even be that hard.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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14. “I am one of only four or five people still on Ways and Means who actually helped to write the 2017 tax reform, and those portions expire at the end of this year. I believe it is the absolute right thing to extend them. We should just pay for it, because when we don't pay for it--our base number, now you are going to see two differences here. We are using the next 10 years, so that takes us to 2035. The Senate budget, they did a gimmick. They used 2034. We couldn't figure out why we couldn't get the numbers to match up. They played a game. They only used 9 budget years. We are scheduled to borrow over $22 trillion over the next 10 years. If we do all the tax reform but don't do pay-fors, but add interest on it, that is another 6.8.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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15. “If we go to 9 percent, it is the majority of U.S. taxes go to cover just interest. Part of that is because right now we are sitting what, $29, $30 trillion of publicly sold debt, so the actual debt is about 36.6 or something like that. We are in extraordinary measures so the actual debt number is a little distorted right now because we are borrowing internally and we have got to pay that all back. So watch interest rates pop when we finally raise the debt ceiling, and now we have to refund all that money back to the accounts plus the interest that they missed. Mr. Speaker, you start to think about we have to refinance--and some of this gets refinanced two, three, four, or five times in a year because you are borrowing 30 days, 6 months, so we will refinance about $9 trillion, and we are going to issue about two, $2.2 trillion new debt.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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16. “Am I just an idiot for coming behind this mike every week and trying to show the math? I get my brothers and sisters around here: That was interesting, David. I am still going to vote for piling on more debt because, well, let's be honest, my voters want stuff, and I will be out of here by the time this blows up. It probably doesn't blow up. What happens is you hit a moment where the money required to finance the debt like this consumes everything. You hit a moment. I showed a chart a couple of months ago, 1 month ago, that showed if we went back to a six handle, so it is 6 percent interest rate on U.S. sovereign debt, which we were right up against in, what, the mid-, early 2000s, 2005 and 2006. We went to a 6 percent interest rate. About 45-plus percent of all U.S. taxes went just to cover interest.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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17. “There was another thing that happened last week that really should have taken people's breath away. This is sort of behind the paywall. We have found other articles that write about it. Moody's Analytics, the people who study what is going on in economics and businesses, put out a paper that in 9 budget years, 30 percent of U.S. tax collections are going to go to just pay interest. {time} 2100 So, Mr. Speaker, you pay your $100 in income taxes, 30 percent of it just went to interest, and this is before the Senate or what we are trying to do in the budget reconciliation. Remember, Mr. Speaker, I am going to show you the Senate document is completely unserious. It piles on stunning amounts of debt. Mr. Speaker, does this scare anyone that in 9 budget years, 30 percent of your taxes you pay go to just cover interest?”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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18. “That is the real reason we do this whole dance. Remember how many people are so upset. David, you are going to cut spending over the next 10 years. This is the baseline money. We are scheduled to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years. At best, the House resolution adds $2 trillion of spending reductions and modernization over 10 years. $86 trillion is the baseline spending. We are talking about trying to trim $2 trillion out of the $86 trillion. This causes people to lose their minds. Have we lost our sanity in this country? We can't find--that is what--2.3 percent? Forgive my math. I am trying to do it quickly. That is Armageddon? Does that give us a sense of just how addicted the bureaucracies, the society, and the business models out there are to U.S. borrowing?”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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19. “The Budget Control Act of 1974 created this mechanism that if we are going to cut spending--and it gives us one of the few times in life where we can actually work on mandatory spending, the things that are on autopilot. For most Members of Congress in their entire career, everything they vote on is borrowed money. When we vote on defense, when we vote on nondefense discretionary, the things we do get to vote on, every dime of it is all borrowed. Last year, about $300 billion or $400 billion of mandatory, earned benefits, those things were on borrowed money. Mr. Speaker, start to understand. Here is what is going on. You have heard we are doing these reconciliation budgets, because that is a whole mechanism to be able to move something through the Senate, where only 51 votes are needed so it doesn't hit that 60-vote filibuster.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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20. “The basis of the problem is there is not enough capital in the world to deal with the bingeing of debt coming from the United States and coming from China. Now it is starting to come from Europe. In Germany, it looks like they are going to be lifting their debt cap. When we borrow, we are also competing with other countries in the world. The United States, I think, is now maybe 13, maybe number 12 on the credit stack. Think of this. I believe Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. That is worth thinking about. Let's actually walk through what is going on right now with the reconciliation budget. Let's sort of explain. Why do we do the reconciliation budget?”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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21. “We are stressing the crap out of the markets. Why that is important is this country borrows about $60,000 to $70,000 every second. That becomes $250 million every hour. Last year, for every dollar we took in, in tax receipts, we spent $1.39. The reality of it is you borrow 39 cents out of every dollar. For the $5 trillion we are going to take in, in tax receipts and we are going to spend $7.1 trillion or $7.2 trillion. Maybe we don't screw with the bankers. Mr. Speaker, the reality of it is your savings, this government's bond fund, the family on the other side of the world that has savings, that is the money that buys our debt. Ray Dalio, the Bridgewater founder, has written these articles that say we have a problem.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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22. “If this is a negotiation between the House and the Senate, for example, Mr. Speaker, if you have ever bought a car or been in a negotiation, when one side gives a completely unserious offer, the other side often has to walk away until they get serious. There are real things going on in the world. Here is an article from the other day. I have a small stack of these. It is talking about bond markets and debt markets and others starting to unload U.S. debt. Mr. Speaker, today, if you are a geek and are watching the 10-year bond--I was watching it over a period of an hour or so. I saw the 10- year bond move by about 20 basis points. Now, in geek speak, that is a big deal. Apparently, it has been 5 years. Think about some of the crazy things that were going on 5 years ago to see that sort of movement.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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23. “It was about taking the top tax rate and just letting it expire. I think I said it was $32.7 billion. That is for a single year. Just multiply it by 10. That is what the actual math would be. Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons I am sort of stressed out of my mind right now is more than the chaos we see in some of the financial markets and trying to understand the tariff issues and our leverage on other countries and their leverage and what is going on there. I don't think we are spending enough time talking about our own work. Last Friday--actually, it may have been Saturday morning--the Senate passed their version of a reconciliation budget. It was a completely unserious document. I am going to show over and over here how they took a pass on doing what was difficult.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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24. “Mr. Speaker, let's have some fun with math and the reality of what is going on in the world. First, let me get something off my chest. I hate it when I make a mistake. Mr. Speaker, have you ever had that moment when you say something as you are walking down to your next meeting and you go: oh, damn it? Last week, I was walking through a series of different numbers, and one of them was a proposal, or a discussion coming out of the White House.”

    House of Representatives7 April 2025Source ↗

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25. “Mr. Speaker, forgive me as we get ourselves organized here. Our friends on the other side ended a little faster than we expected. Mr. Speaker, I am going to do something a little dangerous. Have you heard the saying you should never go to bed mad? I think there should be another rule. You probably shouldn't come behind these microphones cranky, but let's have at it. Mr.”

    House of Representatives31 March 2025Source ↗

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26. “One of the benefits we had in the previous decade and the decade before that is there was fairly substantial savings stacks that went into U.S. sovereigns and other things. We expect, in the next few years, we will actually start to see that roll over. Then, you get the concepts of term premiums and those things. I know it is geeky, but the fact of the matter is, if you don't have a substantial modernization of government, you can't make this math work. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.”

    House of Representatives25 February 2025Source ↗

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27. “Mr. Speaker, first, is there a chance to get the amount of time that we are splitting so we have a sense of the run time here?”

    House of Representatives25 February 2025Source ↗

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28. “Mr. Chairman, I am prepared to close, but I would like to inquire on how much time is remaining.”

    House of Representatives25 February 2025Source ↗

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29. “Mr. Chairman, I would inquire once again on how much time is remaining.”

    House of Representatives25 February 2025Source ↗

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30. “Madam Chair, may I inquire as to the time remaining.”

    House of Representatives25 February 2025Source ↗

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31. “Madam Chair, may I inquire as to how much time remains.”

    House of Representatives25 February 2025Source ↗

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32. “Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn. The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 3 o'clock and 56 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, February 12, 2025, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate. ____________________”

    House of Representatives11 February 2025Source ↗

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33. “Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Moore). ____________________”

    House of Representatives11 February 2025Source ↗

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34. “Those of us with a fixation on watching the bond futures, the debt markets, today's interest rates are almost a full point higher than they were December 1. If that 1 percent works its way into U.S. bonds over the next 10 years, it is almost $3 trillion of additional spending. It is almost everything we are talking about trying to cut. Grow up. Figure out how to actually act like we are the board of directors of the biggest economy in the world, understand math, and start being fiscally disciplined. It doesn't mean cruel. It is not cutting and slashing. If you don't communicate to the world, who we ask for money, they raise our interest rates, and those interest rates are much more cruel than anything we could possibly do. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.”

    House of Representatives23 January 2025Source ↗

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35. “Mr. Speaker, tonight is going to be a little thick, so I apologize to everyone, but we are going to actually try something a little bit broader. We are going to actually play economist.”

    House of Representatives23 January 2025Source ↗

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36. “Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn. The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 3 o'clock and 49 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, January 15, 2025, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate. ____________________”

    House of Representatives14 January 2025Source ↗

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37. “Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.”

    House of Representatives14 January 2025Source ↗

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38. “Madam Speaker, I think we are going to try to do a bit of a continuation of what we were doing last week. If you don't like math or economics, please turn off C-SPAN. There are a couple of things that we have to walk through.”

    House of Representatives14 January 2025Source ↗

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39. “Mr. Speaker, for the gentleman from Pennsylvania, a bit of reference, in the old days when we were put in the chair, particularly when we were freshman, it is because we had been annoying to the Speaker. I don't know if anyone remembers that.”

    House of Representatives9 January 2025Source ↗

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