technology, the redesigning of incentives, you are going to have to do
dozens and dozens of things, and we are not willing to do that yet.

  All right. Look, this is a complicated board. It doesn't work on
television. It doesn't really work on a floor speech, but I just need
you to understand that what we are looking at is because we are aging
as a population without enough young people, that our percentages of
who are available to us--this is 2026. This is 1977. It would basically
explain that when I was a kid in the 1970s, for every dollar we spent
on seniors, we spent almost $7 on people who were functionally young.
  Today, that number has flipped, and it has just flipped because the
demographics have flipped. It is the same thing as what happened here
with who is available to be in the labor force.
  Much of our labor force population now is much older. The jobs
available for the young are half what we had when I was young. It is
just baby boomers.
  We knew people were going to turn 65 for how many years? I mean, this
place, in some ways, is so incredibly absurd in its unwillingness to
basically do basic math. I remember sitting in a statistics class in
around 1981, and the professor then was talking about what baby boomers
meant to the economy. Here I am, a Member of Congress all these years
later, and it is like we are just now discovering it.
  All right. Here is actually something--it is hopeful, but the next
slide will actually take the wind out of your sails.
  So prime-age labor force participation, so the people we consider
sort of in their prime working years, actually, we are doing really
well here. Some of the growth in the economy, some of the investment in
the economy, for prime age, we have 84 percent. But here is my problem:
Labor force participation of those 55 and up has been crashing.
  There are lots of reasons to debate this and discuss this. Is this
skill sets? Is it the adoption of technology? Is it the wealth effects
of as asset prices have gone up so much, we have people who are able to
retire early? It is a combination of everything, but these workers are
often our most productive.
  So just understand that prime working-aged people are actually doing
really well working and being in the labor force. Those of us who are
older, we have been disappearing like crazy, and we actually see that
in our productivity numbers.
  All right. Mr. Speaker, I warned you this was going to be a little
geeky.
  Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Arizona has 10 minutes
remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Excellent. I am probably going to use every one of
them. No, I will try to go as fast as I can here.
  The U.S. population age 65 and up, and I go back to 2011: 41 million.
This year, I have 63 million.
  Okay. Wonderful. I am one of these. I am basically 64. Now,
understand, my wife and I are both 64, and I have a 4-year-old and a
10-year-old, so we are very optimistic about the future, or we are out
of our minds, but we all knew this was happening.

                              {time}  1900

  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. We did what to shore up the trust funds? We did what
to basically incentivize our brothers and sisters to stay in the labor
force if they wanted to?
  We had dozens of things--I have been here 16 years, and I have spent
most of that time trying to get this place to actually deal with the
reality of let's save Social Security. Let's actually save Medicare.
Let's do those things that help us grow. Let's adopt the technology so
we can crash the price of healthcare.
  I have had some success on the edges, but I lose to the armies of
lobbyists that are in the hallways here that lose their minds because
we may change their business models.
  Mr. Speaker, we are now borrowing about $90,000 every second. Today,
we will borrow about $7 billion. The current burn rate so far this
fiscal year, just this fiscal year, we are going come in close to $2.2
to $2.3 trillion of borrowing, and yet, we have higher interest rates.
  How long is the bond market going to keep saying we are going to
finance you because how much of the benefits that our brothers and
sisters who are older have earned we are actually borrowing the money?
  Seniors per hundred workers--and actually, here is just the simple
math. How many of us grew up always hearing you have got 23 people per
retiree, and that is how we finance Social Security? I have shown some
charts here where in the end of a decade from now, you have about 2.3,
and it is this: In 2011, we had 21.9 working-age folks per senior.
Today, actually, that number has eroded 47 percent increase in that
change. It is almost a 50 percent change in that time, and it actually
steepens. Part of the steepening isn't because we have more seniors. It
is also because we have substantially fewer young people.
  All right. Mr. Speaker, 65 will continue to grow as a share of the
population. In 9 budget years, 21.4 percent of the population will be
in their benefit ages. Our system wasn't prepared for this. In 25 or 26
months from now, I should have double checked the math, over half of
the Federal spending will go to those of us 65 and up. That is not half
of the tax receipts.
  Remember, if we are borrowing $2.3 trillion on top--but think about
that. Our government functionally is an insurance company with an Army.
  All right. This is actually one of my intense frustrations. Let's
take a look. The trustee's report projects this significantly more
optimistically than the other sources. Remember I showed you a chart
there, and I was somewhat mocking the trustee's report, basically
saying they have this magic thing where fertility rates crash and crash
and crash, and that is within the next 9 years, and then suddenly,
magically it explodes upward. No one else has that.
  Here is the Medicare and Social Security actuary's trustees saying,
oh, well, we are going to go along, but magically when we get to 2030,
they are going to start to go up. This has created a distortion. That
is actually why you see groups like my Joint Economic Committee, Penn
Wharton, so many of the others, saying the trustees are missing it. The
debt the United States is in is dramatically more devastating.
  Mr. Speaker, 2030, 2035 isn't that far away.
  I am sure we are all going to get together and decide we are going to
do a debt deficit commission. I am sure we are all going get together
and lay out the incentives of how we actually manage this crisis. I am
sure we are going to do those things to convince the bond markets that
we are creditworthy because here is part of the frustration.
  Greece, today, can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United
States. Greece today has a better forward credit rating than the United
States. We are now 13 or 14 on the credit stack where other countries
can actually sell a 10-year bond cheaper than we can.
  And I keep wondering. I have been coming behind this microphone for
almost a decade and a half. We have been introducing pieces of
legislation that could revolutionize the costs of healthcare, could
actually make government dramatically more efficient, and I almost
can't get a single Member of Congress to consponsor any of this
legislation because you have to go to war with all the lobbyists
because it means changing the bureaucracies or the business models out
there. It is like they basically have this attitude: Screw the society.
Screw my kids. Screw your retirement, as long as I don't have to tell
the truth about the math.
  Today, your government borrowed about $90,000 a second. Yesterday, we
borrowed about $90,000 a second. Tomorrow, we are going to borrow--that
is like $7 billion today. We will argue for hours here on the floor for
millions.
  I need you to see a chart. If this is a billion dollars, if this is a
trillion dollars, millions is basically this tiny little--the lack of
calculators here is a destruction of this Republic.
  There are those who actually tell me, David, it is waste and fraud.
It is this and that. I have done presentations to show you our best
calculations of waste and fraud. It is a problem, but it is a sliver
because the majority of what we call waste and fraud is actually the
waste. It is the way we have designed programs.