THE MATH DOESN'T LIE

On 2026-04-23, Representative David Schweikert (R-AZ-1) delivered a floor speech titled "THE MATH DOESN'T LIE" in the House. The speech addressed immigration and also covered healthcare, gun policy.

THE MATH DOESN'T LIE

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 72 (Thursday, April 23, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 72 (Thursday, April 23, 2026)] [House] [Pages H3085-H3088] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] THE MATH DOESN'T LIE (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, there is a certain irony to having the message from the Senate come in just as I am about to actually walk through some of the absolutely fraudulent math in their document, but we will get to that. Let's see. I have been in Congress now 16 years. I believe I am almost to a record, at least over the last decade, of coming here to the floor doing math, doing budget presentations, talking about the demographics, talking about what is going on, and realizing, is there anyone listening? You know, we will do shiny objects all day long: I am enraged about the President doing this or I am mad about Biden doing this. You hear something, and at the same time, Mr. Speaker, I believe today we will borrow $87,000, $88,000 every second. Every second. In 6 years--I think my math is 6 years, 4 months. If you are on Social Security, the way the law is as of today, you get a 24 percent cut in your check in 6 years, 4 months. How many people have you heard come behind these microphones the last 6 months, other than myself, and say we have a moral obligation to deal with this? In 6 years, what, 3 months, the Medicare trust fund is gone, and if you are a hospital, you are getting a 12 percent cut. Do you think you are going to get to see your doctor? How many people have come behind these microphones and said: Here is a path to reform the price of healthcare? We are not supposed to talk about these things, particularly because it is always an election year. I have a 3-year-old we have adopted. He is the greatest gift God has ever given someone. If you use a 6 percent generational discount rate-- that is reasonable, it might be slightly high--you need 104 percent of his lifetime earnings just to pay the pensions of the Federal Government. Is there any understanding out there of what we have done to your retirement, what we have done to our kids? Does anyone actually care about the math? We are going to walk through it one more time, and this time I am going to try to make an impassioned plea. We just had a reconciliation. Remember, the 1974 Budget Control Act built this reconciliation process where you could get around the filibuster in the Senate. The reason we do it is to get around the filibuster in the Senate. Instead, we are going to do the skinny one, as it is being talked about because it is a way to get the DHS funding because the Democrats won't work with us on the budget. However, when we do it, we are giving up an opportunity to maybe actually tell the truth about where the finances are of this country. The hallways this week have been full of tens and tens of thousands of lobbyists, people lobbying and saying: I just need more money for my thing. Then you go and point out, saying--one of the best examples I have is DOGE, okay? Remember when DOGE started, we are going to save $2 trillion. Then it was $1 trillion. Then by the time it was done, if you go to the DOGE.gov website, it is a couple hundred billion, maybe 250. The actual executed portion in this fiscal year is 7. I think that is Congress' fault because there were a lot of ideas we haven't executed because we would have to go tell the truth to people. However, Mr. Speaker, we will borrow more money today, borrow more money today than every dime that DOGE saved us that we put into law. Think about the theater. Think about the speeches. Think about the angry people on cable television talking about it. This is a math-free zone. All right. This is our traditional pie chart. You see the blue portion? That is what I, as a Member of Congress, what every Member of Congress, that is all we get to vote on unless it is a budget reconciliation, and therefore we are allowed to talk about mandatory spending. Understand, this blue area, every dime is borrowed and about $500 billion of Medicare and other things. We had actually--I think it was a year ago because that is the date I had. I think we had multiple months where we had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing. Now, it will change because we just had our month of tax collection we are in, but if you do the first 6 months of this fiscal year, for every dollar that came into this government, we spent $1.47. {time} 1200 Yet, the philosophy around here is, no one ever got unelected by spending too much money, and it is true. I am running for Governor in Arizona. I have given up on trying to save Congress. I will meet incredible people that are stressed out of their mind. They are poorer today than they were in past years because of inflation and wages haven't closed that gap. Then you talk to them about why was there inflation, and I would argue it is the scale of the spending. It is the [[Page H3086]] scale of the borrowing and the lack of fixation on things that raise productivity because wages go up. Remember your high school economics class. What are the two things that raise wages? Inflation--which that doesn't get you anything. It raises wages, but your purchasing power gets eaten away--and productivity. We are starting to see the productivity curve. I would argue that much of that is because of some of the things we have done in the tax legislation over the last year, but we still haven't closed the gap from the Biden inflation years. My brothers and sisters in Arizona, if you are in the working class, you are poorer today when we do your purchasing power than you were 5 years ago, and yet we have another problem. Here is the demographics update from the Census Bureau of the United States. If you dig through it, it basically will tell you a prediction that sometime in the next 5 years, the United States almost goes to negative population growth. It will tell you at this moment we are pretty much at zero or flat population growth. I will get some people that say: Oh, that is wonderful. Great. You tell me how to finance your Social Security and your Medicare because those are designed as Pay-As- You-Go programs. Today's workers pay for today's recipients. You earned it. I have got to figure out a way to finance it. Then my Democrat colleagues say: Oh, we will just raise taxes. Think of this: 2032, 6 years from now, Social Security-Medicare trust fund is gone. Seven years from now, 2033, just to cover that shortfall, our rough estimate is $638 billion of tax hikes for that 1 year. The next year is more and the next year is more. If you run for United States Senate, in your first term in the Senate, the trust funds are gone. During the next Presidential term, the trust funds are gone. The math is so much easier if we step up and deal with it today because we actually get a few more years of actuarial math. I would argue the fact we don't deal with it is absolutely immoral. The fact that when I walk into the political meetings and almost get booed because you got to stop telling people the truth about the math. Let's go talk about more shiny objects, more things to enrage you, and more things that basically are tabloid television to distract you from the fact that, I think, during this speech, we are going to borrow another $250 million, $300 million. Because if we are borrowing about $88,000 a second, that is $270 million an hour. It is insane. Let's actually walk some more through this. Last week was tax day. If you as just a regular middle of the road American, middle income, those things, the day after tax day was your tax freedom day. If you add up the Federal income tax, the State income tax, property taxes, those things, that is where we are at. How do you build an argument that we have a spending problem when in less than 3 years the majority of our spending goes to our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up. It is a demographic problem, back to what the census was telling us. We got a math problem, and it turns out it is not Democrat. It is not Republican. It is demographics. Now, I believe the Democrats absolutely refuse to tell the truth. We will tax rich people. Then I come here and show the math saying, you can take every dime from every ultrarich person in America and you can only pay for 9 months of operating this government. You can actually do every tax that has been offered by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and it actually produces about 2 percent of GDP. So far this fiscal year, we are borrowing almost 8 percent of GDP. Anyone see a math problem? Rage is a political tactic. Welcome to what the political class lives on. If you take a look at net receipts--the reason I show this chart is, we are going to have to do something that is also really difficult. The majority of income to your Federal Government comes from income taxes, but if you look at our economic growth, much of our growth right now is because of building datacenters and capital projects. This dark purple here, that is individual income taxes. This lighter blue here, that is what we call payroll taxes. That is your Social Security contribution, that is your Medicare contribution, and that is your unemployment contributions. This over here, when you start to actually look at these much smaller pieces, that is corporate income taxes. That is customs duties. We got a tax problem because this is fairly stagnant. Why is it stagnant? It is because labor force participation, our brothers and sisters, are getting older. They have saved up their money and are able to retire. The growth in the economy is essentially because of capital expenditures, not of wage growth. We have to cap what we call an income tax stat, income to government's problem in the formula, but yet look at our outl