David Schweikert: “What we are going to do right now is, and we are going to hopefully only take about a half an hour, actually walk…”

“What we are going to do right now is, and we are going to hopefully only take about a half an hour, actually walk through sort of the continuing theme of how at least our math--and particularly in our office, we have been trying to put together sort of a unified theory of how do we deal with the reality of what is happening in our country with our demographics. We are getting older much faster, and our birthrate has fallen dramatically. Repeatedly, we have come up here with other boards that basically show, over the next 30 years, the greatest threat to our economy, to our society, to our country's priorities, is the fact that our interest, Social Security, Medicare, healthcare entitlement costs consume everything. The rest of the budget is functionally imbalanced. I know this is uncomfortable because it is one of those things that is hard for us to talk about. It is not Republican or Democratic. It is demographics. It is math. Part of that baseline, to understand 2008 to 2028, take those 20 years, 91 percent of the spending increase here in Washington, if you remove interest, 91 percent of the spending increase is--actually, I think it does include interest--interest, Social Security, healthcare entitlements. We need to understand the basic math. And now, how do you actually deal with it? How do you maximize economic growth? How do you maximize labor force participation?…”