WASHINGTON, D.C. — For his first House floor speech of the 119th Congress, U.S. Representative David Schweikert (AZ-01) took to the House floor offering a thought experiment that compared popular solutions towards conquering our government borrowing in comparison with how much physical time of borrowing the suggestions actually save. For example, cutting all the 4,500 salaries of the Department of Education, which totals about $2.75 billion annually, would save only approximately nine hours of borrowing, according to math calculated by Joint Economic Committee Republican staff. Schweikert also mentions 10-year sovereign debt is actually expected to reach a 5 percent interest rate. If we were to go to 5 percent of U.S. debt, the debt expectation goes from a $13 trillion – $14 trillion current interest rate to $22.7 trillion over the next 10 years. That’s almost $9 trillion in additional interest. That’s double the interest rate exposure going back to something even below historic norms.
Excerpts from Rep. Schweikert’s floor speech can be found below:
Click here or on the image above to view Rep. Schweikert’s remarks.
On communicating the current scale of our debt:
[Beginning at 07:24]
“I’m going to show you a couple of charts in a little while of where interest rates were on U.S. sovereigns way back when. Let’s go back to like December– so, a few weeks ago. Yesterday, the 20-year U.S. bond actually crossed over 5 percent for a while. If 5 percent– and understand if anyone with gray hair, you understand– 5 percent is actually lower than the historic average of the previous few decades. If we were just to go to 5 percent, you’re going to see that’s almost just shy of an additional $9 trillion in debt– double of everything we’re talking about doing in reconciliation. So, just doing this and communicating to the debt markets that we’re serious about what’s going on, because the uncomfortable truth [is]– and I’m going to show it again and it seems to hurt people’s feelings– almost 100 percent of the debt in the next ten years is interest and Medicare. We got older. Baby boomers are moving into their earned benefits. We didn’t have enough children to back-fill, [and] starting in 1990 fertility rates started to roll over. Health care got much more expensive, and we’re almost terrified to basically say almost every dime of debt for today through the next 30 years is interest and demographics. The political class, the press, the dopamine hits on cable television, this and that… telling true math doesn’t make you popular, but it does make you honest.”
On suggested cuts & their implications on our borrowing:
[Beginning at 10:10]
“I’m trying to [find] some way where you make things with lots of zeros understandable. This is one of my favorite ones. Back in December, we sent out some things, and we got members of our community to throw back ideas and one of the favorite ones was [to] get rid of congressional salaries. Okay. In my heart of heart, I think we’re overpaid for the quality of our work product, so maybe that’s what we should do. But, you get rid of every congressional salary, just get rid of all of it. It’s about $1.9 billion– that’s a lot of money! For an entire year’s borrowing, it would cover 6.4 hours. Yay! We made a big impact. We covered 6.4 hours of an entire year’s worth of borrowing. That’s one of the key responses we got. I think actually it might say more about what they think of me… All right, so let’s actually do another one that came back to us from our constituent surveys. Emergency services for undocumented migrants– this is basically Obamacare subsidies, health care spending for those who are here undocumented, they’re illegal. Now, most of this turns out, we believe, to be Obamacare subsidies. You will hear member after member after member and people on television, the talk[show] hosts, you’ll hear it on conservative talk radio, “if we just didn’t spend money…” Okay, so we actually did this thing called research, where we looked up the actual facts of the math. It’s about $2.7 billion for the entire year. We get rid of it– and we probably should– but it’s nine hours of borrowing for an entire year, yet how many times will you hear people say this in front of microphones? Stopping health care subsidies for those who are here undocumented– here illegally– is nine hours of borrowing for an entire year. And there’s our problem; we have people doing theater over honest math.“
On the United States moving towards an un-credit-worthy status:
[Beginning at 21:24]
“We’re probably going to borrow two-and-a-third trillion this year, and we have these debates and discussions; “We’re going to have to do reconciliation…” yes, of course we are. We still don’t have 60 votes in the senate… if we’re going to move policy, of course we are, but understand the fiscal implications if we don’t do it right. The debt markets [will] demand a premium; you see what’s going on around the world. What happened in Great Britain this summer? What did they do to the guild? What happened in France a couple of weeks ago? What’s happening in Germany right now? What’s happening in Canada? What happened in South Korea? All over the world you see governments falling, and one of the primary reasons they’re falling is they actually tried to engage in some fiscal constraint. Are we going to be elegant enough to do it in a way where we can explain to the American people, if we do something smart today, we do not get crushed tomorrow? But small movements in interest rates start to consume everything in this government.“