ECONOMIC ANXIETY

On 2025-05-01, Representative Chip Roy (R-TX-21) delivered a floor speech titled "ECONOMIC ANXIETY" in the House.

ECONOMIC ANXIETY

Congressional Record, Volume 171 Issue 73 (Thursday, May 1, 2025) [Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 73 (Thursday, May 1, 2025)] [House] [Pages H1795-H1801] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] ECONOMIC ANXIETY (Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. Schweikert of Arizona was recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.) Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, as always, I apologize to the bored staff, and I will try not to speak like a machine gun. Mr. Speaker, we are going to do basically three things. I am going to make fun of us. I am going to actually walk through some debt and deficit numbers, interest, those things that are scaring my economists, myself half to death; and then I am going to touch on some of the--and it is a technical economics term--bedwetting in regard to the reconciliation budget and how people are making things up. Let's have at it. Due to the fact that I sit in an airplane 10 hours a week, and I have some weird reading habits, I actually came across a paper written last year, published just recently. It is in Nature Human Behaviour. It is one of those quirky--excuse me, those academic, but actually what they did is they went back to the late 1800s, and they took all of our congressional speeches up until 2022, and they ran a data set on them. They ran AI, and can you believe it, Mr. Speaker, they figured out that our congressional speeches have become less and less and less based in facts. I know this is hard for us to believe, but apparently the quality of idiots--I mean, people like me--getting up in front of these mikes and doing presentations and walking through our job has crashed in quality, in facts. As a matter of fact, they used the word intuition. I basically say we make public policy now by our feelings because, God forbid, we go to our voters and tell them the truth about the math. It made me feel better because I have mocked us for years on how much of public policy we now make on feelings. It is great television. It gets you followers on social media. You get a hit on cable television tonight if you are willing to make crap up, but do it with passion and feelings, but if you actually want to talk about the math of what is going on in this country, it turns out it is how we are rewarded now as elected officials. Now, what was interesting is they had the curve actually starting to fall in 1970, and it has just gotten steeper. Part of it and part of my conclusion is television, then moving to cable news, and then moving to social media, we have crashed the diet of robust facts in our speeches. Now that we are going to make fun of ourselves, let's go on to the next thing. Mr. Speaker, for anyone who asks, we have been running the current data on how much we are borrowing. What would you guess we borrow per second right now? Right now, it looks like we are burning $72,000 every second. We are borrowing $72,000 every second. My best guess right now is we will borrow 7.37 percent of the entire economy this year. Try to keep that number in your head because we are going to come back to that in some charts and explain why that is so devastating. {time} 1215 Mr. Speaker, it is like we don't care about people's retirement, our kids, the next generation, and how the hell they will actually cover any of the scale of debt. Then we lie about what drives the debt. Mr. Speaker, our best guess is we go from that $72,000 a second this year to maybe about $82,000 a second next year. This is hard for people to accept, but it is the math. Over the next 10 years, the baseline borrowing was about $22 trillion. We are trying to figure out how to extend the expiring tax provisions. We have the requests from the White House. We have other disasters and things we are trying to cover. We are basically looking at--and I am going to show this multiple times--the United States, the day we were elected, Mr. Speaker, how much debt. We will double it. We will double 240 years of borrowing in this 10-year period. The majority of that borrowing over the next 10 years is interest and Medicare. God forbid we are not allowed to tell people the truth. Most of the debts, deficits, and demographics is the fact we got old. We stopped having children. We have a shortage of young people in this country. We are terrified to tell our brothers and sisters the truth about the math. Let's have at it. For anyone out there paying any attention--and this number, actually probably right now is a little bit worse. We now think about 75 percent of Federal spending is on autopilot. Mr. Speaker, when you become a Member of Congress, everything you get to vote on is borrowed. When you vote on nondiscretionary, when you vote on defense, every dime of that is borrowed and about $400 billion of what is mandatory spending, which means formulaic. When we work so many quarters, we get our benefits. When we serve in the military, we get our benefits. For those who are part of a Tribal group or part of our treaty obligations, certain things are coming to them. Then there are the things we vote on and the things we try to balance the budget over. We need more money for defense, and we have threats in the world. We get down to where we are trying to balance the budget on about 13 percent of our spending because we are terrified to talk about everything else. We can't touch interest. [[Page H1796]] I am going to show a slide here in a moment. This one should scare the crap out of people. I know my language is becoming more and more inflammatory, but I can't seem to break through. This is from something called Moody's Analytics. It is one of those fancy subscription services. They have a bunch of economists and they collect data. They have us in nine budget years, 30 percent of U.S. tax collections will go just to interest. Mr. Speaker, you pay your dollar in taxes, and 30 cents of that in 2035 goes just to interest. Does it not scare anyone? When the interest growth is bigger than everything we are talking about in trying to say--by multiples, by multiples--we calculate this fiscal year, the one we are living in right this second, we could spend $1.1 trillion to $1.2 trillion in just interest. There is a dataset that if we do some of the things that we were going to do, the Senate's reconciliation budget, with almost no money to pay for it, in 10 years, interest could be a couple of trillion dollars a year. The annual deficit will be three-plus trillion a year. It will probably be $2.3 trillion this year. Last year, for every dollar we took in in tax collections, take a guess. What did we actually spend? We took a dollar in tax collections last year. What did we spend? We spent $1.39. We take in $1. We spend $1.39. This year was supposed to be better. We were only supposed to spend $1.36. We have a small problem. With some of the GDP growth numbers, just that adjustment, we may have lost $200 billion in tax receipts in this fiscal year, the end of September, between now and then. It just shows how fragile we are with small movements of interest when we have to refinance $9 trillion. Think about this. A single point of interest on U.S. debt--and it takes years for it to roll in because of how much we have to refinance. So we will take about $9 trillion to market this year and refinance, we will issue a couple of trillion new this year. A single point of interest over 10 years costs $3 trillion. Why does this not scare the crap out of people? Why do we not have people coming behind these microphones? But we are better off getting behind these microphones and telling passionate stories, anecdotes, and those things, because that is what gets us on social media. That is what gets people's dopamine hitting. But at some point the math is going to win. We have the really smart analytic firms saying they are scared about U.S. sovereign debt. We see things happening around the world that makes me very nervous. There is an appetite for going on the long end of the curve. The United States sells very short-term debt. Then we have 2 years, 5 years, 20 years, and 30 years. We are having real trouble selling the debt on the long end of the curve. Do not pay attention to some of the debt markets over the last month or two. Mr. Speaker, do you want to know why? We are in extraordinary measures. We are up against the debt ceiling. We are not issuing new debt. We are only issuing refinance and what comes due within the cap. What happens a couple of months from now when we all raise the debt ceiling? I love the brain trust that says don't raise the debt ceiling. Did I mention last year for every dollar we took in, we spent $1.39? Tell me what 39 percent of the Federal spending we should stop doing. When we don't raise the debt ceiling, we have to end all of that. More than a third of all our spending is functionally borrowed. I am happy to do it. Tell me which third we should stop financing. Those are the very people filling up these hallways, demanding we give them more money. What happens when we raise that debt ceiling, Mr. Speaker, and we have to come to market--Treasury has to come to market--with $500 billion to $600 billion functionally to catch up and refund all the accounts we have been borrowing from? That is what is done in extraordinary measures. We grab every account and use that cash, now we have to refund it, and you take that much to market. We have one analyst who is saying we will see a pop in U.S. interest rates, maybe on the 10 year, hitting five, just, boom. Because suddenly we are grabbing so much of the world's capital to finance what we have been borrowing internally and now we have to pay it back. Be prepared. These aren't surprises. We all know it, but no one reads the damn documents. It is math, and it turns out telling the truth-- remember our story here that fact-based discussions on the floor no longer get us elected. No one listens t