Schweikert Exposes the Reality of the Avoidance of the Last Decade in House Floor Speech

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Arizona Congressman David Schweikert presented his weekly House Floor speech explaining the realities of interest fragility in our country. When you have a total of $36 trillion in debt, $29 trillion being publicly financed, almost $10 trillion to refinance in just over a year, and maybe $2.3 trillion in new issuances to bring to market, those little movements in interest rates can end up totaling a boatload of cash. Although our economy is doing pretty well, the United States, in tandem with some other countries, has an increasing appetite to continue consuming debt, which signals to the bond markets to keep raising interest rates. Does anyone understand that we are on the brink of the bond market being the #1 influencer of US policy?

Excerpts from Rep. Schweikert's floor speech can be found below:
Click here to view Rep. Schweikert's remarks.
On the United States falling short in the credit-ranking stack:

[Beginning at 12:17]
"One of my predictions for 2025 is- Moody's is the last of the three big ratings services- I think we'll get downgraded if we do this stuff without even an attempt to pay for some of it, offset some of it, [and] modernize our costs in how we deliver our services. If we do that, we're going to get downgraded by all three ratings services. The other two have already downgraded us. Anyone here care? Or we just want to do happy talk and sugar highs- you know, a good dopamine hit on social media, but don't give a damn about the math. The fact of the matter is, most of the industrialized world today has a better credit rating, and you see it- not by the credit rating services, but what they can sell their debt for- cheaper than the United States. When you hear people talk about the extraordinary privilege the United States has- there's actually two of them- the fact the world uses the U.S. dollar as the ultimate arbiter of exchange. Great. Let's not screw that up. The other one we also never talk about that I'll do in a future presentation- it's actually, from an economist's standpoint, (maybe) bigger than the fact that we get to buy and sell in our own currency- is actually the extraordinary privilege that smart people from around the world, entrepreneurs from around the world, investors from around the world, want to do it here. They want to live here, go to school here, produce their products here, invest here… From an economist's standpoint, the United States has two remarkable, extraordinary privileges: our currency, and people want to be with us."

On putting aside our egos to prioritize economic development:

[Beginning at 24:02]
"This is a new chart, and I'm trying to actually sort of explain, [that] our brothers and sisters on the Left- who want basically a socialized, planned economy, industrial policy, they did on the Chips Act, and then their version of- I guess they call it the Inflation Reduction Act- there's some good economic data that says if you wanted to do something that's much less expensive, create a much broader economic growth, and create much more productivity, you should not do what the Democrats did, which is, "Let's bring some of our favorite executives and investors, they'll write us political checks." If you'd done something like research and development expensing, and expensing when a company buys a piece of equipment to be better, faster, cheaper, it's dramatically less expensive, and has actually more economic growth and spreads through the economy. The problem with the Democrat industrial policy- "We're going to give all this money to the green technology, we're going do the Chips Act," is you're writing checks for last generation technology. There is a little part of that I would have voted for, for primary research and development to do it better, faster, cheaper. It's like the old joke; what's the fastest way to make every computer in America worthless? Have someone invest a quantum computer. It's like when all of a sudden, you have a photo-voltaic panel, if goes up 20 percent- as there are experiments in the lab now- all the others now are out of the money and don't make economic sense anymore. Creative destruction is one of the hallmarks of a society that becomes more productive, and the way you get that is not the arrogance."

On having no choice but to implement innovation in order to keep our country prosperous:

[Beginning at 28:36]
"If anyone is interested in what we're really up against, go online and grab the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) report from yesterday. Every year, they do an estimate on population, fertility, [and] growth in the society. We were using the Census Bureau's data, and I've come behind the microphone and said, "Our quick look at the Census Bureau data shows in 11 years, the United States would have more deaths than births." CBO yesterday came back and said, "Nah, the way they're calculating where fertility rates are in the United States, in eight years the United States will have more deaths than births." Demographics is destiny. You want people like me to figure out the financing of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security- which were all designed systems for population growth. Remember, today's worker pays for today's beneficiary. And in eight years- even when we do the adjustments for net immigration- you pick up a couple more decades. Think about that… living in a society with more deaths than births in eight years. Matter of fact, I believe there were 17 states that, last year, had more deaths than births. This goes back to my productivity argument. If you want a society and a country that still economically grows, that can still defend themselves, and is still the envy of the world, and has the extraordinary privileges, are we going to adopt regulatory tax policies that maximize economic growth? Well, turns out you're going to have to do things that maximize productivity, maximize labor substitution, use that technology, [and] use the supercomputer in your pocket. It's shocking how many people freak out about starting to use AI and these things. You don't have a choice!"

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Congressman David Schweikert serves on the House Ways and Means Committee and is the current Chairman of the Oversight Subcommittee. He is also the Vice Chairman on the bicameral Joint Economic Committee, chairs the Congressional Valley Fever Task Force, and is the Republican Co-Chair of the Blockchain Caucus, Telehealth Caucus, Singapore Caucus, and the Caucus on Access to Capital and Credit.