REALITY OF THE MATH

On 2026-09-01, Representative David Schweikert (R-AZ-1) delivered a floor speech titled "REALITY OF THE MATH" in the House.

REALITY OF THE MATH

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 138 (Tuesday, September 1, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 138 (Tuesday, September 1, 2026)] [House] [Pages H5418-H5423] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] {time} 1940 REALITY OF THE MATH (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, I wish I had the magic ability to find the powerful words to try to explain the difficulty of the finances, the reality of the math, and the threat to the Republic, but we are going to try again. How do I get my fellow Members, the public, the administration, and the [[Page H5419]] people around me to basically look each other in the eyes and say: Here is the reality of what is going on. Think of this: In the last 5 years, U.S. debt has gone up by one- third. As of, I think it is the last day or so, the 30-year bond is at the highest interest rate in 25 years. We will borrow $1 trillion every 130 days. So every 130 days, we are clicking off another $1 trillion. Mr. Speaker, think about this: This coming January, we are going to hit the debt ceiling again. It was only a couple of years ago that we actually raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, and we have already almost burned through it. I think as of yesterday, we were borrowing $89,980 every second. We are going to walk through some of the charts and some of the math, and I beg of anyone who is crazy enough to watch this, is detailed enough, is actually caring enough to watch this, I need you to open up your mind and bathe in the math with me, not the folklore. Let's actually start to walk through some of this. I have used this chart over and over to sort of open up the discussion. The numbers are actually already out of date because we are this far into the 2026 fiscal year, and the math is actually uglier than we expected it to be, but the reason you should see this: See the blue area here? That is all your Member of Congress gets to vote on unless we have a reconciliation budget. We have been using the reconciliation budgets, functionally, to spend more money because of the dysfunction in the U.S. Senate. When you start to look over here, Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, other things that are in the formulas, and interest, I need everyone to understand something: Social Security is the number one spend in our government and probably will come in about $1.6 trillion. Interest may come in as high as $1.3 trillion this year, becoming the second biggest expenditure in our government. Medicare will be about $1.1 trillion. Medicaid will come in at about $1 trillion, Medicaid and ObamaCare subsidies. Defense, the thing that is in the Constitution, will come in at number five. Your government is an insurance company with an army. I beg of you to think about the math. If you are one of the people saying that it is all waste and fraud, yes, there is a bunch of that, but it is a fraction of this total. The primary driver, if you just listen to those numbers, when interest will be $1.3 trillion this year--and I am going to show you a couple of charts--in a decade, 9 budget years, interest will be the majority of the borrowing. We will be borrowing money to have enough cash to pay the interest. I have done speech after speech behind these microphones talking about interest fragility, and it seems no one knows what the hell I am talking about. Have you paid attention to what is happening in the bond markets over the last couple of weeks? It is happening all over the industrialized world because we are all on a borrowing binge. Interest rates are starting to move up to points where it is absolutely uncomfortable. About 1\1/2\ months ago, I did a presentation here and showed you how you want to deal with affordability on housing, and I showed you the academic paper that basically said that interest rates are a full percent higher in the United States than they need to be because of the borrowing from the Federal Government. If we don't figure out a way to start to convince the bond market--I am going to say this multiple times. If we don't start to convince the bond market that we are going to start being fiscally responsible, the future starts to look really ugly. Let's actually walk through a couple of these things. Have you ever heard someone start to talk about the death spiral? Look, it is not that hard. You borrow lots of money. You basically have to refinance it, so you are constantly subject to whatever the new interest rates are, and I am going to show you some charts that show much of the refinancing--because we have to refinance $10 trillion to $11 trillion this year, and a lot of that was originally borrowed at much lower interest rates. It is not only the borrowing of today. You are going to borrow $2.2 trillion to $2.3 trillion publicly to raise some $100 billion internally. That is where you borrow money from the trust fund, Social Security, Medicare, which those trust funds are gone, functionally, in 6 years. The $10 trillion that has to be refinanced is now subject to the higher interest rates of today. That is interest fragility because you start hitting an expectation where those interest rates drive you up, so you have to borrow more money and borrow more money. You basically end up in the death spiral because now you are borrowing money, and this even happened last year. We had a couple of months where we had to borrow money to have enough cash to pay for our borrowing. Does anyone care? Are we actually allowed to talk about it? Is it just because around the hallways around this place, there are armies of lobbyists, armies of people showing up in our offices, and they functionally want one of two things: Give me more money or regulate, control, push my competition so I have sort of no one to compete with. Washington, D.C., is a protection racket. It is a protection racket for business models and bureaucracies that don't want to reform, don't want to compete, don't want to deal with that economic model we all learned in high school, creative destruction, where someone does something better. Do you remember Blockbuster Video? If they had shown up here, maybe if they had hired enough lobbyists, we would have slowed down the internet so that Netflix wouldn't have put them out of business. That is how perverse this place has become. Where are my free market brothers and sisters? Look, some of these are going to be really thick, but it is important to understand. The interest rate movements, do you see these spikes out here? These are all the different countries--U.S., this one is Germany, Japan, U.K. Understand that the industrialized countries, we all have a demographic problem. We don't have enough young people, and we have borrowed stunning amounts of money to maintain the benefits. All over the world--and the reason I am showing this chart is that if one of these countries, like Japan, was having trouble a couple of weeks ago and starts to hit a cascade event--I know there is probably no one out there who actually paid attention and remembers things like the Tequila Crisis of the 1990s. Cascade events start to shoot up those interest rates, and when you are carrying a total of $40 trillion in debt, $32 trillion to $33 trillion of that we have sold, $10 trillion of it we have to refinance every year, do you understand the danger you have put this country in? We come behind these microphones all day long. We talk about the things we are angry about, worried about, this and that, what is really good politically, you know, set off some dopamine hits. I know this isn't what we like to talk about in our elections. It is also the thing that will bring this Republic down if we don't get our act together. Let's actually have some real fun here. An increase in dependency on the market-based--the reason I am showing you this chart is one of the things that is happening around the world and been happening to U.S. debt for the last couple of years is a lot of the Federal Reserve banks of different countries have been sort of holding their amount of U.S. debt steady as we are still borrowing more money, meaning more and more of our debt is being purchased by bond houses, trading houses. If you actually are someone who is crazy enough to watch bond futures and how many basis points they move, this is one of the things that should scare you. The debt is being purchased by those who trade it, pledge it, buy options on it, sell it. {time} 1950 There is an argument that we have much more fragility. When the central Bank of Japan or Germany or someone else buys U.S. debt, they are holding it basically as an offset to their own currency, and it is stable. We don't have to worry about them throwing it into the market. A whole portion of our debt today is in play, so those of you who used to say: I don't want other countries buying our debt--I can show you chart after chart. We buy their stuff. If they [[Page H5420]] are willing to buy our debt, it pushes down our interest rates, and if it is their central banks buying it, it actually makes our debt more stable. Let's actually start to understand how dangerous what is going on is. U.S. 10-year yields are among the highest in the G10. I will tell you, today Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. Start to understand this: The only country right now in our 10-year bond as a peak of the G10 is Great Britain. They pay a higher interest rate. We hit 4.8 today. We are the red chart here. When you start to realize Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan--but Spain and Greece also are selling 10-year bonds cheaper than the United States. I believe we are like 13 or 14 in the debt stack of industrialized countries. Meaning, the market has decided they are more creditworthy than the United States