MATH DOESN'T LIE

On 2026-06-30, Representative David Schweikert (R-AZ-1) delivered a floor speech titled "MATH DOESN'T LIE" in the House.

MATH DOESN'T LIE

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 109 (Tuesday, June 30, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 109 (Tuesday, June 30, 2026)] [House] [Pages H4354-H4357] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] 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, this is going to be another presentation of basically budget, debt, my frustration with this place, and my frustration with telling the truth. Look, we are a remarkable country, no matter what you hear often from our brothers and sisters, particularly from the left, a quarter millennium of a remarkable experiment. We have brought more freedom to the world, more prosperity to the world, more ingenuity to the world, more health to the world. I think sometimes our dourness, if that is a word, our frustration-- and Heaven knows I am a sinner on this. I am terrified of our unwillingness to [[Page H4355]] tell the truth about basic math. So we are going to walk behind these mikes over and over and over and desperately try to find whatever the dopamine hit is of the day, and yet, we will borrow another $6 billion, $7 billion today. Last week, when I did this, I had my little boy, who had just turned 4 years old that day, running behind us. It was so much fun. Yet, the comments we received from the folks who are unique enough to watch something like this commented on the little boy, not necessarily the math. I was trying to make the point at one moment saying: Here is my 4- year-old we have adopted. It is the greatest gift God has ever given someone, and he is healthy. We were terrified he would never be healthy. He was born with rather severe drugs. This government has made a decision we will need 104 percent of that little boy's lifetime earnings just to pay the Federal Government pensions, to cover Social Security, Medicare, military retirement, our retirement, 104 percent of the generation of young people today, we are so upside-down mathematically. {time} 1910 I also tried--and I am going to do it again because apparently I didn't do it very well. We passed a housing bill. I voted ``no'' because there were too many gimmicks and it made government too big. Fine, personal opinion. I actually have a background in housing economics. However, not once did someone come behind these microphones and say that one of the primary problems in affordability of you being able to purchase a home, Mr. Speaker, is the fact that if we had a normal debt load, then you would be paying 5.5 percent on today's 30-year loan. Instead you are paying 6.5 percent. Why? It is because the United States is going to borrow probably $2.3 trillion this year. We are crowding you out, Mr. Speaker. We are raising the price of money. I have given presentation after presentation saying that if we keep this up for much longer, then the bond market is going to run this country. We will exist in a fear of the weekly and monthly debt auctions. We actually brought some data just trying to show the difference between 2011, and right now the interest rate movement. This is interest rates. We are paying 1 point higher because of the scale of U.S. sovereign debt borrowing that when you buy that 30-year mortgage, Mr. Speaker, on an average priced home--and I think we used an average priced home in Arizona, not here in D.C.--you are going to pay about $2,500 more, and over the life of that loan, $76,000 more. That is just the cost of money because we, as a government, borrowed so much. We are responsible for that higher expense in the interest rates. Except for the problem here is the hallways here are full of armies of people coming into our office demanding more money. What happens when, Mr. Speaker, you and I go home? We tell the truth. Now, we make people angry because I am starting to worry: Voters, do you want us to lie to you? Is that actually what you are asking for? Do you want us to tell you things that set off a good dopamine hit, that make you feel this, but don't tell you the truth about the demographics, debt, and deficit? That is because at that point, it is not a conversation of what else we can give you. It is going to be a conversation of how we are going to fix it. The data is actually pretty darn clear. Our borrowing raises your car loan, Mr. Speaker, and raises the cost of you financing your small business. Heaven knows, it is going to cost on an average home in Tempe, Phoenix--not Scottsdale--about $76,000 more in interest. That is a knockoff effect. Let us actually start. I am going to produce a whole bunch of boards here. My rule used to be that I am going to give you the problem, Mr. Speaker, and then I am going to give you a series of solutions. I am tired of coming here with solutions and then realizing there is not a chance in hell--I can't even get cosponsors because it would mean telling the truth. When I have come here and shown the MedPAC reports, there is $1 trillion, $2 trillion of misalignment because some of it is legal on the edge. We introduced a bill. The preliminary score was $1.84 trillion of savings over 10 years just to fix some of the things in Medicare Advantage that wouldn't cut a single service, and I got told this morning in conference: David, you don't understand. It has the word Medicare. We are not allowed to talk about that in an election year, but we will fix it next year. I have been here 16 years, and it is always next year. Let us take a look at this chart. I often start with this one because so few people understand. Mr. Speaker, do you see the blue area? That is all you, as a Member of Congress, get to vote on, unless it is a reconciliation budget, except we now use reconciliation budgets to pass things, not save money. Here is your math problem: As of today, just this little net interest sliver for this fiscal year will be 20 percent of all tax receipts. So when you pay $1, 20 cents of that is just covering interest. Mr. Speaker, I am going to show you some charts here that in 9 years how big that math actually gets. But understand, your government is functionally an insurance company with an army. I love that line. Think about it. It will make sense. Nondefense and defense, that is all we vote on, and we are about to make this much bigger. People go to war with us when we are trying to cut down nondefense. Mr. Speaker, a moment of truth. Let's have some fun here. DOGE identified $0.25 trillion in potential savings modeling. What has made it through the legislative process is about $7 billion, basically what we will borrow today. I know folks aren't really good at math with lots of zeros. Our government borrows about $1 million every 13 seconds or so. In 13, 13.5 seconds, we borrow $1 million, and then $1 million. So often we will have debates here and say that this will save $3 million. I try to explain that it barely covered 30-some seconds of borrowing. We are now borrowing about 90--if you do just this fiscal year so far, so just this fiscal year, about $73,000 a second. If you do the last 12 months--understand there is a blip in there because we had the extraordinary measures where we didn't have a debt ceiling and we had to refund it. But if you do the last 12 months, we are borrowing about $98,000 per second. I know everyone is going to talk about that, right? All right, let's get to the math. Let's do some speed dating on math. Do you see this chart, Mr. Speaker? This is basically to make a point. We are in the OECD, basically the organization of developed economies. Do you notice the red one down here, Mr. Speaker? If you add up everything, Mr. Speaker, we are borrowing 7.9 percent of our entire economy. We are the worst in the entire industrialized world. Mr. Speaker, if you actually start to take a look, you start seeing countries like Greece--and those are much healthier than we are. Do you realize today Greece can sell a 10-year bond substantially cheaper than the United States? Of course, we are going to work on that and talk about it next year. Let us actually walk through some of what is going on. Remember, Mr. Speaker--I am going to try to make this point a couple of times through the presentation in some of the last slides--the primary driver of the debt is not a tax cut over here. It is our demographics. Next year the data looks like we are going to have fewer under 18 than we had 20 years ago and double the number 65 and up. Are we allowed to actually say that? It is not personal. It is not actually Democrat or Republican, it is just math. {time} 1920 Mr. Speaker, I am blessed to hold the chairmanship for the Joint Economic Committee, so I have a handful of guys who all have Ph.D.'s, and we geek out on this. We are trying to find ways, and they are terrified with me. I have done presentation after presentation here of my chairmanship from [[Page H4356]] Ways and Means over the Oversight Subcommittee, where the fraud we found in so many programs--can I get a piece of legislation? Can we actually have an honest discussion of fixing it? Well, we would have to take on the lobbyists. We would actually have to tell the truth. We would actually have to redesign the programs. We would actually have to have an honest conversation of some of the fraud we found in things like Medicaid and Medicare. Even then, understand, we have worked on this over and over. It is still 7 to 12 percent of the spending we can figure out is missed payments, fraud. The majority of it isn't some international syndicate coming and stealing money from us. It is things we, as Members of Congress, have allowed to happen because when we find it, we don't go back and fix the law because that would be hard because we will have to take on advertising. They will say mean things about us. ``Raising spending, not falling revenues, have driven long-term deficits.'' Here is