WASHINGTON, D.C. — Congressman David Schweikert (AZ-01) delivered a speech on the House Floor this week where he discussed the Congressional Budget Office’s baseline projections of the federal budget over the next ten years. Congressman Schweikert also continued to rebuff President Biden’s claims that Republican Members of Congress are considering cutting Social Security and Medicare, and he urged both parties to work together to keep these entitlements solvent through the next decade. Excerpts from Congressman Schweikert’s floor speech can be found below:
Click here or on the image above to view Congressman Schweikert’s remarks.
On CBO’s latest budget projections:
“I keep coming behind these microphones to try to explain, and I continue to be just enraged, particularly with my brothers and sisters on the Left, the avoidance of the math. My little boy, who’s eight months old, in 25 years — according to the CBO — his taxes will have to be doubled. Corporate taxes will have to be doubled. Tariffs will have to be doubled. Everything has to double just to maintain baseline services. That’s the math. How many discussions have you heard here even today, over the last month? The reality of the math and the math will always win.”
On President Biden using Social Security and Medicare as props during his State of the Union address:
“And for everyone here who says, ‘We’re going to balance in ten years.’ Okay. I can do it. But you’ve got to understand the amount of bloodletting that’s required to actually make that math work and the actual structural problem. It’s actually not on the Left, not on the Right. It’s demographics. Something we are terrified [of.] And what the President did in his State of the Union speech was just unconscionable. When he basically used Social Security and Medicare as props for his re-election [campaign] instead of telling the truth [that] in a decade, the Medicare Trust Fund is gone. In a decade, the Social Security Trust Fund is gone. Does the Left plan to help us fix it? Because if they don’t, they get to be responsible for doubling senior poverty in this country. It’s the math.”
On declining labor force participation:
“We’re actually seeing what we call a ‘marriageability’ gap. And we see that across the board, across ethnicities. And it’s actually now starting to show up in our economic data, basically, slowing down our economic growth projections. So when you get someone that says, ‘I’ll do a tax cut here, I’ll do this here, and I’m going to get all this economic growth,’ I [have] a problem. I [have] a whole bunch of my society that is not entering into the workforce. They’re not forming families. They’re not having kids. The basic structure that builds both a society, a healthy community, but also actually builds that economic underpinning of that society. It’s worth studying. It’s worth digging into. We [have] to understand what’s happening with young men. Because it’s such a large number now. We see it in our economic data as basically stultifying — if that’s a word — the economic growth. So you have a world now where my brothers and sisters on the Left run around saying, ‘Well, we have this low unemployment.’ And then you look at the available populations that should be in the labor force, but they don’t show up in the data because they’re not even looking. Remember, we have fewer people today in the labor force than we did before the pandemic — by millions.”
On using technology to create market disruption and help solve the nation’s looming fiscal crisis:
“The reason I walk through all these [slides] is the first part of this presentation [was understanding] how devastating the debt is. And it’s not pretend. You can’t just say, ‘We’ll just pretend. We’ll print a $1 trillion coin and walk away from it.’ You’ve got to stop the clown show. Yes, there’s a whole bunch of government that we can do without. But you saw the very first couple boards that basically said ten years from now, you can get rid of all of what you think is government and you still [have] to borrow money. You got rid of all of defense. You got rid of all discretionary, and you still had to borrow money to be able to cover Medicare. And the punchline there was, ‘It’s the next year.’ That was all a 2033 number. The next year, 2034, the Social Security Trust Fund is gone. A 23% cut. Is that going to be allowed to happen or do we have to take it out of the general fund? The next year, 2034, the Medicare Trust Fund is gone. The next year, the Transportation Highway Trust Fund is gone.
“The second half of this [presentation] was hope. I know some of this stuff is hard to process. It’s hard sometimes to think saying, ‘I’m going to disrupt. I will eventually legalize disruption.’ I’ve used this [analogy] before. How many of you went to Blockbuster last weekend? Come on, work with me here. How many of you went and got that little silver disc last weekend? ‘Of course not, Schweikert, that’s absurd!’ The fact of the matter is that technology came along, we started streaming, and now you have [too] many choices. So you sit there because you [have] too many choices and can’t make up [your] mind instead of standing in line for the disc that wasn’t there that you really wanted, that you promised your family. So you come home with some crappy one and they’re all mad at you. That’s not that long ago. We have these types of disruptions in our society all the time. Stop being afraid of it, Congress. Stop acting like a protection racket where you protect incumbency. Not incumbent-elected, [but] incumbent bureaucracies, incumbent business models. Design the tax code. Design the regulatory code. If the Democrats continue insisting [to] subsidize everything, fine, design it so there’s competition. Not the chosen favorites that they want to hand a grant out to. And in that competition, I think actually becomes the disruption that saves us.”