PRESENTING THE MATH

On 2026-06-25, Representative David Schweikert (R-AZ-1) delivered a floor speech titled "PRESENTING THE MATH" in the House.

PRESENTING THE MATH

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 107 (Thursday, June 25, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 107 (Thursday, June 25, 2026)] [House] [Pages H4257-H4260] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] PRESENTING 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, this is sort of our weekly attempt to see if we can use math to annoy people, so let's actually have some fun here. I am going to try three different things in this presentation. One, we are going to actually talk about the real driver of interest rates, housing affordability. The second thing we are going to actually talk about is sort of the cycle of fraud in so many of these government programs. Yesterday, in my Joint Economic Committee, we did a high-level fraud in government- sponsored healthcare, Medicaid, and other programs--some wonderful data. Then, the third thing, we are going to step on one of the third rails of politics, and we are going to tell the truth about demographics and the financing of Medicare and some of the things we are going to have to do to actually keep it stable. Let's actually start to tell the truth. How many of you have seen this chart? It has been one of my opening charts for year after year after year, trying to help everyone--staff, Members of Congress, anyone who is crazy enough to watch this--with the reality. You see the blue area here? That is functionally the only thing a Member of Congress gets to vote on. You get to vote on defense and nondefense discretionary. Everything else is substantially on formula. Why this is so important is that I keep trying to explain to people to understand that Social Security is the number one spend. It is going to come in about $1.65 trillion. Interest is the second biggest spend in our government at $1.2 trillion. Medicare is $1.1 trillion. Medicaid and ObamaCare, ACA subsidies, are about a trillion. Defense is actually number 5. The thing that is in the Constitution is number 5 in our spending stack, and we have a problem. If anyone was paying attention in the math there, if we are going to take in $5, $5.5, $5.25 trillion in tax receipts, did you notice that by the time I got to the Medicaid ACA subsidies, we were out of money? That means this year, my math is we are going to borrow about $2 to $2.3 trillion. Once again--think about this, Mr. Speaker--last year, for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.43. Remember, Congress just passed the housing bill. I voted no on it because there are a number of things in there--being a guy who actually has a background and actually even a degree in finance and housing, I don't believe it built another house. It created some programs, expanded this and that, but it didn't produce another house. It didn't do the things necessary. One of the hardest parts is having an honest conversation around here--I am going to show you. We have actually done some academic literature. Your 30-year mortgage today is going to be at 6.5 percent. Mr. Speaker, how would you like to be 5.5 percent? Do you know why it is a full point higher? U.S. government borrowing. When almost [[Page H4258]] every single day we are borrowing about $7 billion, about $98,000 a second, you are competing with your own government. Here, we put together a couple of helpful charts. Housing affordability sensitivity to interest rates--think about this. If we were at 5.5 percent--and this is sort of using what would be a mean mortgage size in my community, Tempe, Scottsdale, your house payment would be $2,828. Add in that extra 1 percent of higher interest rates because we borrowed so damn much money, it is not $2,800. It is $3,100 a month. That premium that you are paying is an object of our borrowing. Did you hear a single discussion around this place saying, hey, we are going to talk about housing affordability, maybe we could actually convince the debt markets we are going to stabilize our borrowing. Instead, every data point we have, it gets dramatically worse over the next 10 years, and it is the thing we are not allowed to tell the truth about, Mr. Speaker. We have a problem. Some of the math says, next year, we will have fewer under 18 than we had 20 years ago, but we will have double the number of 65 and up. I will be one of them. If you look around somewhere here, I think my 4-year-old is running around--yes, my little boy turns 4 today. I am 64 years old, and I have a 4-year-old and a 10- year-old and a wife my age because we are really optimistic about the future, or we did really bad retirement planning. Look, this is just math. I have tried presenting this, and Members of Congress get mad at me because the hallways here are full of people showing up at our offices right now demanding more money. {time} 1430 So let's actually have a little fun here. ``Household Cost Impact of Legislative Fiscal Policy. Cumulative Legislative Contribution Since 2015''--what the hell does that mean? It basically is saying if you and I go back to 2015 and had 30-year mortgages, just the amount of borrowing the Federal Government does has made that 30-year mortgage $76,000 more over that 30-year time. That is what a single point of interest on an average loan is in my part of the country. What is the likelihood that we are going to convince our brothers and sisters here that we are going to borrow less money? The frustrating thing is you and I will go home, and we will have a townhall or meetings, and this and that, and the public will turn to us and say: It is all waste and fraud. I am going to show you the slides. Waste and fraud are a big deal, but it is a sliver. Our problem is our government functionally is an insurance company with an army, and we are terrified to tell the truth about it. So let's actually have some fun here. Let's actually try to understand where the real mismanagement of spending is. We have more spending and leakage. What is leakage? I would argue leakage is what we in the Joint Economic Committee have identified over and over when we have written a piece of legislation poorly or the lawyers, or CMS, or the Treasury have actually designed it, where the smart lawyers out there find ways to exploit it. We have done entire presentations here on something called Medicare part C, Medicare Advantage. Mr. Speaker, 55 percent of our brothers and sisters on Medicare use this managed care model. There is something in there called risk scoring. There's something called a MedPAC report. It is about that thick. We write it. We get it every year. No one bothers to read it. It basically says: Hey, Member of Congress, there is $100 billion, $150 billion a year in what we would define as leakage, where these insurance companies are able to come in and score grandma as being sicker and, therefore, they get risk scoring, additional cash. Well, that extra spending means we have to raise our borrowing. Do you understand the problem? I just showed you our borrowing is raising your interest rates. We get over here, and higher interest rates cause us a real problem because we make everything less affordable, and now interest is the second biggest expense in our government. Some of the models actually say that in a decade, interest will be our number one expenditure. Look, when you have an almost $40 trillion debt, CBO's own report said in 9 budget years--and this is without the recent higher interest rates, without some of the additional supplementals and other borrowing and spending we are about to do--in 9 years, the deficit is going to be $3.1 trillion, and $2.1 trillion of that was just interest. $1 trillion was actually the structural deficit. Hey, we are spending too much money. Over here was $2.1 trillion that was just interest, and there becomes the fragility. I love that fancy word. Fragility means small movements of interest going up, and it is a technical economic term, Mr. Speaker. It means we are screwed. The reality of it is, there is this whole concept--I have done presentation after presentation after presentation about it--that is called interest rate fragility. The bond market is about to run this country. We aren't. What are we going to do to convince that bond market--because, remember, we borrow money. The entire industrialized world is borrowing money. China is borrowing money. Japan is borrowing money. Now Germany is borrowing money. We are competing with everyone for what is left in the world's savings. What happens in the industrialized world when people are getting older, and they are moving into their retirement years, and they are not saving in the same numbers? You start to have this stress. Ray Dalio talks about this all the time, and that is the world's savings compared to the borrowing appetite. We have got a mismatch, and that means interest rates go up. Let's actually start to dig through some of the perversities we identified in our Joint Economic Committee hearing yesterday, when we were talking about where some of the leakage is in programs we have designed. This isn't a--well, some of it is. This isn't something where foreign nationals sneak into the country and set up a scam. Some of this is we wrote a law, and we just did a really crappy job writing it. So High New York Caregiver Pay--Medicare actually has a program where States can set up a program where it is visiting. So you can have your child, your cousin, your sister visit you on your Medicaid. We actually have States like New York where the caregivers' salaries, just these people who are coming and visiting you, are 50 grand. Well, what happens if I come to you and say, over the last 5 years, this program in New York City was the number one job creator? You start to actually look at what is happening by categories, so Federal outlays by major categories. We are going to bounc