Time. We are getting out of here right on the nose at 11 40. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you for doing this and having me. Ill say this from the getgo. To both congressman. Thank you. Congressman timmins, congressman style, not only did you take speaker ryans plays but you are a former staffer. I dont think theres a more incredible fiscal hawk in the history of politics then probably, doctor tom who inspired this effort in your former boss and predecessor. We are just curious to hear your unique perspective. Not just as millennials but as millennial legislators, Congress Must timmins in your case, Small Business person similar business background. We will start with you congressman timmins. Give us opening remarks. We would like this to evolve into a discussion. While we have you all online. Youve all got so much in common with the members of this mission. This has been an issue near to my heart. The number one issue that iran on. We have been out of control for decades. I first got elected to congress, debt is one of the most pressing issues. The first year of the congress we spent 1. 4 trillion dollars more than we brought in and revenue. We were at 24, 25 trillion dollars in debt. To the first ten months, and now the Financial Services committee, i was talking about left and right and the quote that i used the most is that in 2025, we would spend more money on our Interest Payment than in the entire Defense Budget. Keep in mind the Defense Budget is 730 billion dollars this past year. That was a huge number. Here we are now, 2020, and the date of 2025 that was the drop date we were spending more on interest than defenses actually probably going to be next year. We are out of control. The only thing that i think is saving us is that theres no alternative to the dollar. The dollar being the global currency is the only thing that is not causing major problems to our economy. I dont know how much more that we can have, so we cannot pinch pennies right now. We have to get our economy back on tracked. Next congress, we have to have serious conversations about what is an appropriate amount of debt and how we are going to stop the deficit spending and how we are going to start chipping away to reduce our debt from what could be 30 trillion dollars next year. That is unacceptable. If this happens again, we will not be in a position to respond. It is a National Security threat. I appreciate you putting this together and i look forward to talking with everybody. I have my own solutions, but really, im coming to the table with an open mind. I will turn it back over to you. Thank you for being able to put this on. Give some opening thoughts of your perspective on the subject, obviously, you had no choice in your previous life as a staffer. You care about this issue. You have been one of the guys new to congress who stepped forward and have been a world leader and thinking about fiscal stewardship. That is what this conversation and purpose of this commission is about. It is about our generation stepping up. Ultimately, i believe, there is not much of an argument that our generation, the millennial generation will be the first to confront the consequences of i described it as an experiment in deficit spending. Nothing like it in human history. Nobody actually knows how dire the consequences are, but we do know that most of the people have conducted the experiment will not be around to see just how damaging the consequences are. I appreciate you organizing this event today. It is great to be with congressman timmon and i. Tomorrow we have a hearing with jay powell. I will be in my office in d. C. Today. Prepping for that. One of the Big Questions is what is the long term sustainability when we have a debt burden. In conjunction with the feds dramatically increasing the Balance Sheet and what it will take the Banking Committee today will deal with Financial Services committee. Tomorrow, that is a whole other ball of wax. I look at it. The most telling statistic is your debt to gdp ratio. That is really one of the driving forces underlying a lot of this concern. We came into the end of last year and our debt to gdp ratio is 80 to keep it simple. This year we are obviously in a recessionary environmentalists. We dramatically increased traditional spending, so the projected cbo congressional budget office, debt to gdp ratio is 100 and 1 . That is the Tipping Point when you talk to micro economists where you get into a danger zone. Two things will occur. Next year, it will bring some level of stability back to that, which is one, we should see Economic Growth begin to increase again, and we should hopefully we will need to pull back the rains on federal government spending. What we need to do is kind of have an adult get back to a sustainable path Going Forward. That is a broader conversation i think, broadly in society about where the spending is occurring. We love to talk about waste. Nobody likes to waste, but that is not the driver of our Long Term Debt. It is heavily on the entitlement site of the ledger. Areas that are functionally running on autopilot that dont require congressional approvals or spending. I think we have to have a broader conversation as a society about what that means, in particular our debt to gdp ratio. It will probably be over 100 by the end of the year. Congressman timmons was spot on with at the beginning of covid, we pushed forward into the market, both in the traditional spending mechanisms under the cares act where we spent two trillion dollars. Total spending outside of traditional corporation, close to 2. 9 trillion dollars. Rough matt, about half of it has been spent. There is about 1. 5 trillion dollars spending that is yet to go out the door. The death, the current death, 25 trillion does not take into account. You will not actually pull the debt until you spend the money. Congress is allocated another rough rough math. The Federal Reserve is dramatically increasing their Balance Sheet. As we saw on 2009 recession, where we came in and it quantitative easing, the Federal Reserve dramatically increased their Balance Sheet during that period of time. I think what we are looking at or going to be looking at is as we get out of this first phase of covid, as we get into kind of phase two, for early next year, we will have to have a serious conversation about how we begin to turn the ship to get ourselves on a path towards fiscal stability. As you noted, the very beginning of my career, 15 years ago, i worked for paul ryan. We are fighting the same battles today that we were before. Ten years working in the private sector, doing a lot of merger and acquisition work for global companies. Publicly traded operations. I think were going to need to take a real serious disciplined approach coming out of this to get ourselves back on a path of sustainability Going Forward. I really appreciate you guys having the dialog on today as we begin to look out of what reforms, what things are going to be needed. Making sure we do it from a politically practical way, which is making sure people understand the situation that we are in and why some challenging steps are going to be required to get us back on a sustainable path. Ill pass it back to you, that i really appreciate todays conversation. Grateful for you guys for your time. Weve had some audio issues, with jane has a question. Lets see if we have you working here. Hello . There you go. We hear you. There we go. Thank you. I have a question about the solution. For the National Debt, we have two solutions. Increase revenue, increased tax which we all do not want to see. On the side of the medicare and medicaid, i have a question. I never really understand why the medicare cost this year in the u. S. Is so high. Its a fundamental question. Why do you have to pay such a high medical fee and how do we fix that . Is there any obstacle, im thinking of this administration, they are trying to change the health care. We have a lot of problems with that. What are the obstacles for the medically ensured, Health Insurance and the medical cost an expense there . Thank you jane. Guys, did you get that question . I will lead the way. I think of this question in three parts. The first part is what is acceptable debt . That is currently being disputed. Different people in congress would say that 50 trillion dollars is too much. I personally think that ten to 15 trillion is probably the most that i could deal with. That is the first question. We have to fully litigate and get a consensus around that. That is number one. Number two, if you agree that we have too much debt. If you agree that we need to reduce it, not only do we have to balance a budget, but we actually have to start paying down our debt. We had conversations on the Budget Committee in january of last year. There was no policy that anyone was willing to support that would balance the budget over a decade. I will say that again. There was no legitimate proposal that the republicans, democrats, white house, anybody who was even willing to touch, that would balance the budget over the next decade. Keep in mind, that is just balancing the budget, not chipping away at the debt. We have to stop deficit spending. Over one trillion dollars a year there are all conversations around waste fraud abuse. But we have to get more sustainable. Two things. Three things. One, medicaid, medicare. That is an overall in the health care system. We have to align the interests of all the different parties in the health care industries. Whether its the individual, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies. The list goes on. We have to have a basic realignment in the health care system. Its not working. Social security is going to be different from my doubts. I will work longer. I will get less benefits. That conversation has to be had. Its really challenging politically. It is a requirement in order to address this. Last thing, which not a lot of people including this conversation is immigration. We immigration there is a number of different components. If we could get everybody in this country on the radar. Find a path where we have a reasonable approach to immigration. Everyone is contributing, i think that will make a big difference. First we talk about that, then the major drivers, medicare and medicaid, social security. But this is the last thing. Nothing can be off the table. If republicans go in the room and say we have to cut social and we are not talking about revenue, that is not a good faith effort. We all have different ideas about how we are going to fix this. I will go in with all options on the table. That includes defense, revenue, because that is the only way we can responsibly had these conversations. Congressman steil, an enormous amount of the budget goes to Health Care Costs as jane said. The Health Care Cost in america is going through the roof. The combination has got to be a part of a productive conversation about long term deficit reduction. Is everybody having a little bit of an audio issue . Im not sure i picked up the whole question. Wave at me if you guys cannot hear me. I think your spot on when you are thinking about this. On the mandatory spending site in 2019, it was roughly 2. 7 five trillion dollars. When you think about that breakdown, the question here from jane is really focused in on the cost of health care. If you look at that, 775 billion are medicaid, 400 billion dollars is medicare, and that is only picking up the federal side of the ledger. There is also a large state component. Being spent on those two mandatory pieces. Many of the Broader Health care systems in the United States will not reconcile all of that on this call, but it is imperative to realize that one of the drivers of this is our ability to deliver High Quality Health Care at a Cost Effective manner. There is a broader opportunity here to look at ways in the United States, where we continue to deliver the high quality that the United States is known for for their health care. If you look at surveys, Empirical Data on the quality of health care in the United States, it is topnotch. The challenge is, on the cost side, providing that level of high quality care. Not only is that going to be critical from the general population, private sector Harris Health care, private insurance of the United States but also obviously plays a key role as it relates to the death, federal funds are being spent on medicare and medicaid as well as state level spending for those exact programs. We are not going to solve it all on todays call but i do think that by continuing to look at opportunities to deliver High Quality Health Care in an affordable way, i think there is an opportunity to really put in place some real competition in the marketplace to drive down costs. We could get in the weeds. I think it will be an imperative staff of taking the overall driver of the debt of medicare and medicaid spending, continue high quality delivery of a product that overall, big picture, on a global perspective, u. S. Would be satisfied with the quality of their Underlying Health care. Theyre very unsatisfied with the cost structure. On the private sector side, where people are paying for their insurance out of pocket or often in conjunction with their employer shows up on the federal debt sided medicare and medicaid. I think were going to have to continue to look from improvements on the delivery structure of health care in the United States. Jane, you are spot on, that that is one of the key components here, as we look to bend the curve on our debts gdp ratio. This man from new illinois has a question. I apologize if youre having issues with the sound but you look you sound great on the. So thank you congressman. Thank you for your efforts and the National Debt and the debt fight. Its a two part question. Congressman earlier talked about the issues in regards to getting enough of a voice on this issue when there are other more pressing issues and senior senators and congressmen feel that are more important aspects. How do you feel is the best way for such as yourself, to get the National Debt as an attention seeking aspect, without being bombastic, where like the congressman on the other side of the aisle is trying to solve their issues . At this point, i think the issue from a death standpoint, these Public Opinions will look inward and unfortunately nobody wants to look at their own credit card debt, Student Loans, issues in regards to states, admissible debt. This aspect of having to look inward and talk about issues that we have death. Largely has people avoiding it. It is an issue that you cant down the road. Thank you. I will jump in first. It will take political courage. These are really hard conversations to have. Everyone in the Republican Congress spoke about that they all agreed that the number one National Security issue we face in the country is the debt. I have fewer friends across the aisle but there are many and they all agreed that this is literally the number one National Security issue facing our country. The question becomes, are we going to proactively address this or are we going to react to plea address this . If we get into a situation where our policies of being dictated to us by our ability to borrow money. If the world tells us yeah we cant do anymore that will be really bad. How do we get the political courage to Start Talking about these Debt Reduction measures that are necessary without the political consequences . We are not talking about social security, health care. It is very easy to do a political ad and say, they want to take away your social security. I dont want to take away anybody over 40 50 or 60. My social security, mathematically cannot be my fathers. It is not possible. We cannot keep spending money that we do not have. We cannot keep spending our children and grandchildrens money. We just need to do things like this. We need to focus on debt and focus on that as i filed a bill last year with a california democrat. It requires cbo to start using debt to gdp as a metric that it reports on. These are all the conversations that we need to have. It just takes courage. To build on that, i think part of this is going to be pertinent. The risk of course, is after it is too late, as you look at the level of debt we have in a low Interest Rate environment, it is in a short to medium term, probably sustainable, but in the long term less so, in large part because most people projects and inflationary period an Interest Rate that will rise from these historic lows. Interest rates rise. This will put significant pressure on the debt and deficit. I think one of the questions we will be having tomorrow, is what are the long term implications carrying this burden of debt in conjunction with the increase in the deaths Balance Sheet. What tools are left in the tool kit to control and environment that at some point, we have a risk of entering into. The key is gonna be to continue to identify the risks today so that there is a