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Congressional Daily Record
This section captures a floor statement or debate entry. It mentions members such as David Schweikert.
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September 1, 2026
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Download official House Record PDFReturn to issue contextUnder 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.
the
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
about interest fragility, and it seems no one knows what the hell I am talking about.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 even though we are the reserve currency of the world.
Doesn't that set off some alarm bells to anyone with an intellect?
So, more charts. Let's see if I am making a point yet. U.S. 10-year yields are among the highest in the G10. You start to take a look at what is going on, and we are up here. You must understand it is not only the bonds we can sell, but the interest rates carry. There is a risk premium. In the bond market we call it a term premium on U.S. debt. Shouldn't this actually drive us crazy?
sold—remember, in the United States this year—and we have a fairly decent economy—for every dollar we are taking in in tax collection, we are spending $1.40. It is actually better than last year. Last year for every $1 we took in, we spent $1.43. Mr. Speaker, $1 in, $1.40 out? Come on, people.
Yet, I see polling. None of this is an election issue because we have a public that wants things. I am sorry. I have done all these budget presentations in my own State. I love my State. I represent one of the greatest districts on Earth, but I have even done some in other places around the country. The number of times I will spend 45 minutes with these slides showing what is going on, showing data that a child born today—so I have a 4-year-old we have adopted. It is the greatest joy. My wife and I, I cannot express how blessed we are. My little boy who just turned 4 about 3 weeks ago, we need 104 percent of his lifetime earnings just to pay the pensions of the Federal Government.
Is that moral? Is that what our country has become is basically screw the next generation? I want every dime I can get my hands on? This is the morality of what this country is. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of things we could be doing, but this game of sitting here and saying, well, I am going to save a million dollars here, because I am going to be speaking here for almost an hour. During that hour we are going to borrow about $320 million.
we will have borrowed substantially more than everything we debated trying to save. We are borrowing about $7.5 billion a day—$7.5 billion a day. We have had some days where we are borrowing $8 billion. Some days we are borrowing $7 billion. It is close to $90,000 every second. And yet, time after time after time when I do those presentations around the country, the first hand that goes up is someone that says: I want more money. I want more benefits; I want more this.
demographics. Remember, the primary driver of our debt is our demographics. I would love to blame the Democrats. The things they did in the Inflation Reduction Act now we are still paying the price for because there was a report a couple days ago about what is happening in Medicare part D and the explosion of some of the costs there. It is great. And we have done things also. But it is demographics.
haven't had enough children. We have functionally gone 30, 40 years without having enough children.
So think of this: In the next year or two we will have fewer people under 18 than we had 20, 25 years ago but double the number of people 65 and up. God knows, I will be one of them. In some of the reports, I think—one I got from Manhattan Institute a couple years ago—was basically saying for every dollar I will have put into Medicare I am going to get about $6, $7 back in spending. And most of Medicare is borrowed—excuse me, most of Medicare comes from the general fund.
This is the reality.
there someone on a blog saying: I am going make crap up about math because it hurts my feelings. It is not about feelings. It is what comes off of a calculator.
So let's actually walk through a little bit more there. Estimated annualized cost of refinancing. This is something that is really important. If you can't convince the debt markets that we are creditworthy, that we belong having lower interest rates—all this has to be refinanced, and we are refinancing it now at higher interest rates. This is what we were borrowing before. Remember back in 2021 during parts of COVID or even a bit after the 2008 financial debacle, interest rates stayed very low and we spent and borrowed and borrowed and borrowed.
Guess what. We have to refinance it now.
percent, 1 percent, and now we are coming in at 5 percent, 4.5 percent. Remember, today's 10-year bond hit 4.8 today. The bond futures, if you actually go and look at it right now, are predicted to be over 5 percent by the end of the year, on the 10-year.
You do realize what that means? That means over 7 percent mortgage rates on a 30-year debt.
Does anyone care?
impossible to see, so come back over here. Do you see the light purple compared to the darker purple? All I am trying to show you there is that most of the future financing is driven by interest, not the actual debt.
show you the number that CBO gave us back in February is wrong because of interest rates moving up. But back then in February, the number was, in 2036, 9 budget years from now, you will have a $3.1 trillion debt. Mr. Speaker, $2.1 trillion of it was just interest. Mr. Speaker, $1 trillion was actual structural deficit.
actually paying the interest on previous spending? The moral question I want you to think about is: Is borrowing a tax hike? I am serious. We have spent money. We are obligated now to pay interest on it. We are pulling that cash out of the economy so it doesn't go into the investment of you buying a house or a new business or those things. Is it a tax hike? I would argue it is a tax hike with interest.
Now back to reality. The primary driver of U.S. debt and the debt from the entire industrialized world is our demographics.
{time} 2000
this math actually is. At current interest rates, the deficit grows to $3.8 trillion in 9 years. Remember a moment ago, I told you the CBO from February said 3.1 in 2036, which is 9 budget years from now? Now it is 3.8.
David, where did $700 billion come from? It came from just the changes in interest rates.
down? It is not in the futures market. It is not happening in any of the other countries. Look at what is happening in Japan. I believe Japan today hit interest rates they hadn't seen in decades and decades and decades. Maybe the entire world is tired of giving those who are bingeing on debt a free ride.
you are looking at a world where, in 2036—so 9 budget years—we take in $8.3 trillion. Hey, yea. However, we spend $12.17 trillion, and that is based on today's models.
Will there be a war? Will there be another pandemic? Will there be another disaster?
Think about what is going on at this moment. I was in the Grand Canyon this last weekend and watched the
floods. Is the super El Nino going to require spending? The last big one like this, we spent $1 trillion around the world in damage.
Are we going to ever have anything like that? Are we going to have another earthquake? Are we going to have any fires?
you run, pretending that everything is going to be fine—we are just going to follow the law as it is. When you see CBO numbers, remember, Congressional Budget Office is required to follow certain rules. That is one of the great scams here.
the paygo? The rule is: Hey, if the spending stops in 5 years, you don't have to count it against future deficits, so we do that with things. Hey, we are going to just do this, and then, boom, it is going to go away. You notice that it never happens.
memorize if you care. If you actually look at current interest rates, debt to GDP grows to 162 percent in 10 years. If you do total debt— remember, this is total debt—so you are over 100 percent of debt to GDP.
Remember, the U.S. economy is basically estimated to be about $32 to $33 trillion. Right now, we are close to $33 trillion in publicly sold debt. That is when we sell it to your pension plans, sell it to your retirement account, sell it to a nice family on the other side of the world, sell it to another sovereign reserve bank.
from the trust funds, we have to pay it back with interest. The rest of the world actually calculates their debt that way.
debt, that is publicly sold debt, not debt we owe. We are at 127 percent right now. In 9 budget years, we will be at 162 percent.
Now, here is why that should set off alarm bells. I am going to give this to you in two ways. Understand, when you pay your taxes on your income, here is what we call the FICA tax, this is your payroll tax, this is the Social Security tax, this is your Medicare tax, this is the unemployment tax, this is disability. Those are designated for certain uses. The other part of your income tax, the corporate income tax, tariffs, excise taxes, those things are over here.
retirement and your unemployment, segregate those, of the other types of taxes this year, 29 percent will just pay interest. This year. In 9 budget years, 10 years from now, 2036, almost half of nonpayroll taxes—once again, your Social Security, your Medicare, unemployment, those things—almost half of the taxes this country will collect will be just interest.
Is anyone starting to see the problem? This is what you call interest fragility. This is where you start to burn down. This is where you are chasing your tail, where you are actually having to raise taxes or dramatically cut spending just to be able to cover your bonded indebtedness.
How many care? Well, the bond market finally has woken up and is starting to care.
We took a look. AEI did a model, Columbia, University of Minnesota, the Penn Wharton Budget Model basically built models saying, hey, when you hit this level of debt to the size of your economy, the interest you are producing makes it so you hit a death spiral. Basically, their models crash.
We have models crashing at 154 percent. Do you remember the last chart I just showed you? It was maybe two charts ago. It said in 9 budget years, in 2036, you actually have over 160 percent of debt to GDP. You already have models saying we have crashed, the economy no longer works.
from now. This isn't your great-grandkids who are going to figure out how you screwed—excuse me—what you handed them. This is now. This is in the next decade. What the hell is wrong with us?
Let's save that here because this is the point I am trying to make. This is here safe, we basically have enough cash flow to cover our interest and our obligations and still be a decent credit risk. However, when you start to hit 2035, you have enough models—how long is 2035 from now?
to as a crisis zone. That is when any damn thing, something goes wrong on the other side of the world—we have a hurricane, we have an earthquake, this and that, the credit markets, the debt markets start to get nervous, start to raise our costs.
Remember that joke you have heard over and over? How did you go bankrupt? Slowly at first, and then suddenly very fast.
Understand how bad these numbers are. In 2050, we are basically what we refer to as the default zone. You have such a debt and interest obligation that you have functionally no capacity. This number isn't even 2036, it is 2035 the models say we start to step into the danger zone.
rates are still low compared to that. My first house, I had a 12 percent mortgage on it. Yet, I try and try and try to do things. Let's have a deficit commission, let's deal with it.
David, we can't talk about that, voters will get cranky. The voters want free stuff.
Really? You are willing to burn down the Republic? Does anyone do math?
For my liberal friends here who say: Why don't we just raise taxes? Go onto the internet, there is this amazing thing called the internet. Go look up the Manhattan Institute. Look up Riedl, an economist, who did a great paper about a year and a half ago, basically took every tax hike that the Bernie Sanders and the Warrens of the world and shows it basically will raise about 1.5 to 1.78 percent of GDP.
I am going to say this multiple times, Mr. Speaker. Just to cover the deficit, you need 7.7 percent of GDP. If you don't have a 7.7 percent growth in GDP right now, you cannot keep up with how fast the debt is growing.
Interest this year, interest this year just will be 3.2, maybe 3.3 percent of the entire economy, so that interest is growing faster than this economy is.
However, Mr. Speaker, we are really not supposed to tell people the truth about that, so I beg of you, everyone who just heard that, please wipe it out of your memory.
{time} 2010
Mr. Speaker, if this doesn't terrify you, then you are not paying attention or you don't do basic math.
I beg of you, Mr. Speaker, net interest is a share of revenue and GDP in 2056.
Now, why is Schweikert saying: Hey, that is 30 years from now?
I would love to sell bonds that are long into the curve. Mr. Speaker, you buy a 30-year bond today, did you notice over the last couple weeks we have had a little bit of a problem?
We have had the Treasury basically offering to do a twist. Twist is where you borrow short term and spend it over here by buying longer term bonds to try to create a shortage there so the interest rate goes down. When there is demand for a bond, then the price goes down. When there is not enough demand, Mr. Speaker, then you have to pay a higher interest rate.
Treasury itself, so the Treasury is trying to sell you a 30-year bond, the Treasury itself says that we are over 250 percent of debt to GDP.
start to talk about what fiscal consolidation is. That is because people keep throwing out these fancy words and don't explain what it means.
I beg of you, Mr. Speaker, take a look at this chart. In 30 years, my 4-year-old son will be how old?
Thirty-four. It is not hard math.
going. Hopefully, starting to consider having a family, the things that I dream of for him.
Mr. Speaker, 11.3 percent of the entire economy will be just interest from the Federal Government. Noninterest will be another 22 percent of Federal spending. Add that up in your head, Mr. Speaker. We are basically saying: Hey, we are going to have to have 35-some percent of the entire economy, 34 percent of the entire economy will just be Federal spending.
Does anyone see a math problem?
Time after time after time I have been here, and we play tough. We negotiate for a deal. In 2011, we were going to actually do sequestration. Then the very next day, I cannot tell you how many Senators said: David, we need to break the sequestration. I need more spending on something. I want a new aircraft carrier. I want this. I want that.
It is because spending is an addiction, and it buys us votes. It buys us love, and we screw our kids and our own retirement. Remember, how I showed you a little while ago, Mr. Speaker, how some of this is now hitting in the next 10 years?
This isn't generations away from now. This is us.
start taking the general account. That is basically, right now the Treasury is holding almost $1 trillion in cash. I assume they are building up cash from everything, from having to pay tariff refunds to the fact that this coming January we are back up against the debt ceiling. If we don't raise the debt ceiling, we will do what is called extraordinary measures where you basically are spending some of your cash reserves and reaching into all sorts of other accounts and spending them. And you do owe that money back.
Mr. Speaker, you need 41 of them.
Really?
We say things and we hear things like this. They are told this on cable television, on the internet. We will get people who will call us and say: David, if you just took care of waste and fraud, then we would be fine.
Let's talk about that for a moment. We are borrowing about $2.5 trillion this year. Understand, Mr. Speaker, when we say waste and fraud, fraud over here is criminal. Waste is much more uncomfortable to talk about. I can show you paper after paper after paper, Mr. Speaker. Let's talk about Medicaid. It is the Federal-State program with which we are supposed to be helping indigents and poor people.
It is perverse to say this, Mr. Speaker, but do you know States actually have an economic incentive to look the other way with things that you and I would consider almost criminal or waste?
stimulating their economy. So when they do things like a bed tax, which is basically a three-legged stool on a disproportionate share where you will actually look the other way. But David, it is cash coming into our State. But we are borrowing it.
you look at the total spend, Mr. Speaker, not what is appropriated from the legislature, total spend—45 percent comes from the Federal Government. We borrow most of that money.
Now let's talk about the fancy term that is being thrown around: We need to do fiscal consolidation. Yay.
How many of you know what the hell that is?
charts, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, but there have been others that did what is called fiscal consolidation. Basically they cleaned up their finances.
again, Greece can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States because its future creditworthiness is better than ours.
new taxes, 85 percent cuts in spending. What we learned is we always have to do the cuts in spending first. That is because when we think about our President George H. Bush, he made a deal saying: All right. We are going to do some fiscal consolidation. We will allow these taxes here to go up, but we are going to cut all this spending.
They did the taxes. They never got a dime of the cuts. Mr. Speaker, you always have to do the cuts first. The cuts don't have to—there is so much of our government we could revolutionize: The cost of healthcare, if we legalized technology, if we do things better, faster, and cheaper.
a piece of legislation that basically made adopting technology to reduce the price of healthcare illegal, because that is what the lobbyists want.
Why don't they care about the future?
Do they not see the math?
daily debt. I have been doing this for years. I am blessed to chair the Joint Economic Committee. I am number four on Ways and Means. I have been doing the investigations of the fraud. We send this out. I have had more Members of Congress cancel it than subscribe to it. The excuse is: I don't want the negativity, David.
It is not negativity. It is called math.
countries, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand that did fiscal consolidations, the underlying message in here is they cut spending. Once they had met those goals, they did changes in their tax system to get rid of leakage, but they did the cuts first.
with fiscal consolidation. We can do it. There are ways to do it, but you have to see what is happening over here. That spike in spending and borrowing isn't a new bridge or new military spending. It is demographics. Our brothers and sisters have earned benefits. We owe them, and we are not willing to do the things to do it better, faster, and cheaper.
There are a lot of inputs. You have to have really uncomfortable conversations, Mr. Speaker, talent-based immigration, the adoption of technology, the redesign of smart regulations, instead of bureaucratic regulations. Stop the leakage where States basically are scamming parts of our expense sharing. We have laid out all these steps as a unified theory because it turns out one of them doesn't get you well.
We introduced a piece of legislation over 1 year ago: MedPAC. It is this big binder that is on every Congressman's—actually it is probably in their trash can. We get it a couple of times a year. This was the organization that was designed to keep an eye on Medicare, particularly Medicare Advantage.
{time} 2020
These are the experts. We pay them. They will tell you there is a trillion to almost $2 trillion of leakage just from Medicare Advantage. I like Medicare Advantage. I have some simple suggestions: Stop the risk scoring and make it a true capitated model; get rid of the ObamaCare-type of star ratings, where you basically make it a true capitated model where you are paid to help people stay healthier.
What if it is a trillion dollars over 10 years? What if it is $1.5 trillion? We had a preliminary score on a piece of legislation. We came in at $1.84 trillion, making it the single biggest savings bill in U.S. history, and I can't get another Member of Congress to sponsor the bill because you have to get your head kicked in by the lobbyists from the insurance companies.
I would argue it is free market. When we use the term “waste and fraud,”
you have to understand the waste is how we design programs.
I guess we would rather borrow $90,000 a second, put your retirement at risk, and basically live in a world where every dataset says our children will be the first American children to be poorer than their parents.
automation, but remember, you also have a country that is at basically zero population growth. We can make the math work, but once again, unless you are ready to deal with the reality of the math, just to cover the current growth of debt, you need a GDP that grows 7.7—not 3—7.7 percent a year.
whether it be us here in Congress, the administration, the think tanks, the groups out there that just want more money—to bathe in the truth?
I guess for many of them, saving this Republic isn't worth it. I am going to go down fighting for this. This is an amazing country. We have done more good for the world than any country in human history. If we don't get our act together, we are going to bring down the world economy with us.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back.