David Schweikert: “And to my friend, thank you for stalling. What we are doing tonight--and we will try to do it somewhat efficiently so…”

“And to my friend, thank you for stalling. What we are doing tonight--and we will try to do it somewhat efficiently so you don't have to spend too much time in the Chair--is every week we have been taking a half an hour or so--tonight we may do something less--and sort of walking through what we believe is actually an idea that actually saves this country. And not to be too melodramatic, but let's actually walk through some of the mathematical realities. We have 74 million baby boomers moving into retirement. The peak of the baby boom is just a couple years away from retirement. So baby boom, 74 million over an 18-year period. If you look at Federal spending, the growth in Federal spending from 2008 to 2028 as CBO has calculated--2008 to 2028--91 percent of all the growth in Federal spending is interest, Social Security, healthcare entitlement. I know this doesn't sort of fit the mantra that you so often hear around here from Republicans and Democrats, but it is math. We have a demographic issue. We are getting old much faster than almost anytime--anytime, I think--in our society, and our birth rates have substantially collapsed. So one of the things we have come to is saying: How do you maximize economic vitality in our society so we can keep our promises, those promises of earned benefits like Social Security or promises such as earned benefits of Medicare?…”