parliamentarian, are we? i didn't know what they were talking about. i imagine there were discussions about that in the democratic caucus when things changed in 2007 and i know there were discussions about that when it changed in 2011. the parliamentarian's office and john is the embodyyment. he is the parliamentarian of the house of representatives and that's what makes his service unique and unique to all of our parliamentarians. in closing, i don't know what john's going to do, but, mr. speaker, if john writes a book and i have to pay $147 on amazon.com, i'm going to be honked. i hope when you do write, that you let it come out in paperback so all of us can enjoy it and make it a good read and not so dry. but, to john and dear family, listen, i really appreciate your friendship and your service. you've got me out of a lot of messes, not into too many and for your friendship and guidance to this house over your career, i'm very grateful and i wish you well in whatever you decide to do. mr. speaker, i thank you for your patience and i yield back. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman yields back the balance of his time. the speaker pro tempore: under the speaker's announced policy of january 5, 2011, the chair recognizes the gentleman from arizona, mr. schweikert, for 30 minutes. mr. schweikert: mr. speaker, this is something we try to do out of my office every few months where we try to update a number of the budget numbers we're seeing coming from particularly the president and try to put them in some perspective. and i thought this would be one of those opportunities because we are about to work on the budget the rest of this week, to stand here and help everyone understand some really some scary things that are out there in the numbers and some things we have been talking about in the last year and the fact they are going worse. and mr. speaker, you also being my friend from arizona, you heard me tell the story. a year ago, we stood here and did this presentation and on my way back, got back to the office and the phone was ringing. reached down and picked it up and it was a gentleman from my district, who was nice enough but kept telling me over and over that he didn't believe me that the numbers didn't feel right. and after half an hour of discussing with him, i said i don't know where the feeling is on my calculator and at that point, he hung up on me. look, the numbers are real. it doesn't feel warm and fuzzy, but it's real. i'm not sure i'm going to break one of the congressional rules in communication when we are supposed to talk about at a 30,000 foot level but will drive down into the weeds here. it is important. this is the future of our country. this is our destiny unless we make some substantial changes. the first slide up here and all these are up on our web site within the next week, congressional web site, is just trying to demonstrate how unrealistic many of these numbers coming from the white house are. 2008 was the peak of revenue into the federal government. we'll give you an idea, the president is saying, in five years, revenues are going to be up 50% from where they are today. actually from that peak in 2008. and if you think of that, so we're go to go have that dramatic rise in revenues over the next five years and that's where their deficit projections are coming from. guess what? on the slide we are showing you, we use the president's numbers, but they are based on, i think substantial fantasy when you start to understand the white house's use of what they are predicting as revenue and g.d.p. growth. the next two slides are the easiest to understand and hopefully tell the greatest part of the story. this is 2011. 63% of all of our spending is medicare, medicaid, social security, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits. we'll call those mandatory spending. many people call it entitlements. this year, 37% of our spending is what we'll call discretionary, military, and the line of alphabet agencies that we all think of. foreign aid, veterans, all discretionary over here. 37% of the spending. this is this year. so you see, 63%, 37%. what happens a year from now? so in 2017, basically five budget years from now, do you notice a little difference? we went from 63% to 75% is now in medicare, medicaid, social security, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits. five years from now, 75% of our budget is in mandatory entitlement spending and the discretionary keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller. in real dollars. and i'm going to show you some slides in a little bit that even military goes down in real dollars. no more of this discussion, well you guys are pulling down the growth. no, it actually goes down in real dollars. this is our future. and understand, the mandatory, the entitlement side is growing so fast in about 10, 11 years, if you held everything even, it would consume every dollar of the budget. there's no more military, no more discretionary. everything is medicare, medicaid, social security, debt, veterans' benefits. this is our future and we need to tell the truth. look, washington, d.c., has had a bad habit of avoiding these decisions and almost like they forgot people were going to be baby boomers. we knew people were going to be turning 65 years. we are now day one. at the end of the next 17 years, at the end of 18 years, about 36%, 37% of our population will be on social security. you have to understand that's about 76 million, 78 million of our friends and neighbors will be over age 65. this should have been decades of planning for that retirement and washington, d.c., did not do it. so now members of this house and i'm one of the freshmen need to step up and tell the truth to the american people and if we don't deal with it today, we will deal with devastating consequences a couple of years from now. the next couple of slides, i'm going to try to demonstrate what are the numbers and how they break down. and i'm sorry, i know i'm throwing lots of slides. this is important. this is our future. this is the 2011. everything you see in the blue is the mandatory spending we were just talking about, so you get a sense of what it is. here's social security. here's what we'll call the welfare program. medicare, medicaid, interest on the debt. we are one of the luckiest people to ever live when you think about this year. we expect to spend only about $229 billion on interest on our debt. well, understand our debt now is $15.5 trillion, about $11 trillion-plus is what we call publicly-held debt. a big chunk of our debt we borrow. social security, but the $11 trillion-plus that we have to go out in open markets and sell because we are beholden what the market is willing to buy it. this year, a 10-year bond today is 2.25? we are only going to spend $229 billion is our projection for that $11 trillion of publicly-held debt. what happens when we go to normal interest rates and at the same time, just like this last year we borrowed $1.4 trillion. got to understand, here it becomes one of our akill yees heel. in 2011, $229 billion in interest to 2017, we expect interest to be $565 billion. understand, that's basically in 2017 what defense is. our interest on the debt will equal what defense is. and as we walk through these numbers, please understand it's medicare, medicaid, social security, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits that are exploding because of the demographic issues. it's math. and this is our future. and you'll notice as we were showing in the previous chart discretionary now is down to 25% of all spending. 75% is those mandatory. what we like to call entitlements. and this is our future. and as i was just trying to share -- and this is important because i got this question at a town hall this last saturday, well, when you say that defense is going to be taking cuts, you mean just cuts in the growth. no, i mean in real dollars. if we expect the way the budgets are being laid out right now, the way the president's numbersr by 2017, actual actual real dollars, not adjusted for inflation not a portion of growth, real dollars, are going to be substantially less than they are today. our projection in the 2012 budget about $709 billion. in 2017, $582 billion. one of the -- what is the federal government's constitutional obligation? protection of the country? defense? and you'll notice in real dollars it's going down. what will even be the purchasing power of that money five years from now? you'll start to understand the reality of what's going on. and please understand, it's being driven, why? because the mandatory spending, the entitlements, are continuing to explode so everything else in government will shrink and be crushed. we thought we would try to pry a little more detail. these are brand new slides for us and these will be up on our web site hopefully sometime this week in sort of helping put percentages on the numbers. you saw the big graph that hey, in five years, 75% of all of our spending is social security, medicare, medicaid, interest on the debt and veterans' benefits and here are the percentages so you can see what is going on there. 2011, defense, 18.8. in five years, defense will be 12.4% of the budget. department of health and human services, which is substantially medicare and medicaid, this year is 24.7% of the spending. in five years, it's 26.8%. but where else is the explosion? department of treasury, which is substantially debt, paying interest on our debt, will go from 14.9% of the total budget in five years, it will be 20.5%. what i'm trying to demonstrate here is we're being consumed by our own interests having to finance our own debt. we are being consumed by the basic demographics of our nation because washington, d.c., did not tell us the truth and did not tell us the resources to deal with the baby boom population and we will have 76 million brothers and sisters in this cycle. remember it's 36% of the population on social security. i'm fearful unless we step up and make the policy changes that are absolutely necessary and thank heaven for paul ryan and many of the hard-working budget members here in the house, they are laying out the truth and laying out what is absolutely necessary to keep this republic operating and to tell the truth about the budget and the numbers. so one of the things we got this last weekend back home, i had a couple come up to me and say, if you would do things like the buffett rule, then it would be ok. so one of the things i like to do -- let's face it, when i talk about $15.5 trillion in debt, it's overwhelming, number wise. we came up with the idea of a clock. and we've done this for a number of different things. here's the good news. and the bad news. we're borrowing a lot less money right now than we were borrowing a year ago. that's the good news. the bad news is, we're still borrowing $3.5 billion every single day and we project for the next 365 days, $3.5 billion, every single day. but when you hear the president and my friends on the left saying, if we just had a buffett rule where rich people had to pay taxes because they're escaping what does it actually pay? what does it actually mean? if you use the president's own model and don't pretend that there's going to be certain tax avoidance and smart lawyers finding ways arn it an it doesn't slow down the economy or all the other things that happen when you raise the tax, is every dime comes into the budget, what does it buy us? it would pay for 3:30 -- three minutes and 30 seconds of the daily borrowing. when you see members walk up to the microphones an talk about things like, if we just had the buffett rule, we would be fine, they're not tell you the truth. or it's back to the story before, they found a feelings button on their calculator an it makes them feel better but it's not real math. the entire buffett rule would pay for three minutes and 30 seconds of borrowing a day at the current rate of borrowing, which is $3,500 million a day. i know this is a lot of math. i know this is a lot of numbers to throw out. but it's our future. when you see what's happening in europe, when you realize people in greece and so many other countries lived in a fantasy and a lot of it was perpetuated by their own government not telling them the truth. i'm telling you the truth an i'm using the president's own numbers to get there. it's why the decision -- decisions that are going to be made here this week as we start to set out our budget documents, it's why we desperately need the senate to step up an tell the truth to the american people that if you want to save this republic, we've got to deal with the retall -- reality of our math because our math is the single most dangerous thing to this republic right now. mr. speaker, i yield back. thank you. the speaker pro tempore: does the gentleman have a motion to adjourn? mr. schweikert: forgive my tezztans -- hesitance, i didn't know if we ha another member. i would like to make a motion toed adjourp. the speaker pro tempore: the question is on the motion to adjourn. those in favor say aye. those opposed, no. the ayes have it, the motion is dopped. next, the oral argument over whether the government can require people to have health insurance. in two hours, reaction from capitol hill with a group of democratic senators. senate republicans and state attorneys general on today's supreme court case. >> follow c-span abroad local content vehicles throughout the weekend looked to be in american history tv. saturday at noon eastern on book to be on c-span -- booktv on c- span2. on american sharecroppers. >> you have calls going up and down saying that blacks were in revolt. the next morning, between 601,000 -- 6000 -- 601,000 men -- 600 and 1000 men began shooting down blacks. and bruce lindsay ion immigration. >> we do not know what is going to happen. we do not realize what is going to happen. they seem to because the crowd is with us now. the momentum is behind us. there are pushing us up the stairs. >> these stories and others from the local content vehicle in little rock this weekend on c-span2 and 3. >> the budget would increase pentagon spending, create two tax rates, 10% and 25%, and give seniors a set amount of money to buy health insurance from medicare or private insurer. the debate gets underway at noon eastern and you can watch it live here. today was day two of the supreme court or all of -- arguments in the constitutional challenge to the president's health care law. the justices consider the constitutionality of the requirement that american's purchase law insurance -- health insurance or pay a penalty. the oral argument was two hours. >> we will continue argument this morning in case 11398, the department of health and human services vs. florida. >> mr. chief justice and it may please the court. the affordable care act addresses a fundamental and enduring problem in our health- care system and our economy. insurance has become the predominant means of paying for health care in this country. insurance has become the predominant means of paying for health care in this country. for most americans, for more than 80% of americans, the insurance system does provide effective access. but for more than 40 million americans who do not have access to health insurance through their employer or government programs such as medicare or medicaid, the system does not work. those individuals must resort to the individual market and that market does not provide affordable health insurance. it does not do so because the multibillion-dollar subsidies that are available for the employer market are not available in the individual market. it does not do so because of hippa regulations that preclude discrimination against people based on their medical history do not apply in the individual market. that is an economic problem and it gets another -- >> those are problems that can be addressed directly. >> they are through this act, regulating the means by which health care is purchased. that is the way this act works. under the commerce clause, what congress has done is to enact reforms of the insurance market directed at the insurance market that preclude discrimination based on pre-existing conditions that require guaranteed issue community rates and a uses -- it uses, the minimum coverage provision is necessary to carry into production those reforms. >> [unintelligible] >> that is not what is going on here, justice kennedy. we're not seeking to defend the law on this basis. what is being regulated is the method of financing the purchase of health care. that in itself is economic activity with substantial effect on interstate commerce. >> any self purchasing -- if i am in any market at all, my failure to purchase something in that market subjects me to regulation. >> no. that is not our position at all. the health-care market is characterized by the fact that aside from the few groups that congress chose to exempt from the minimum coverage requirements, those who for religious reasons -- reasons do not want to participate, those who are incarcerated, indian tribes, virtually everyone else is in that market which will be in that market. the distinguishing feature is they cannot -- people cannot generally control when they enter that market or what they need. >> the same it seems to me would be true for the market in emergency services. police, fire, ambulance, roadside assistance, whatever. you do not know when you are going to need it. i am not sure that you will but bush -- the same is true for health care. he did not know if you need a transplant or if you ever will. to extend -- there is a market. can the market require you to buy cell phone? that would facilitate responding when you need emergency services? you could just dialed 911 no matter where you are? >> no, i think that is different. i do not think we think of that as a market. this is a market. this is regulation. you have a situation in this market not only where people enter in voluntarily as to when they enter and will not be able to control when they enter. >> that is in the same as my hypothetical. you do not know when you will need police assistance. you cannot predict the extent of emergency response you will need. but when you do and the government provides it. that was an important part of your argument. when you need health care, the government will make sure you get it. >> when you need police or fire assistance or ambulance assistance, the government is going to make sure to the best extent it can that you get it. >> the fundamental difference, mr. chief justice, that is not an issue of market regulation. this is an issue of market regulation and that is how congress look at this problem. there is a market, insurance is provided through a market system. >> do you think there is a market for burial services? >> for burial services? >> yes. >> suppose you and i walked around downtown washington and we found a couple of healthy young people and we stop the man said, "do you know what you are doing? you are financing your burial services because eventually you will die and someone will have to pay for it and if you do not have burial insurance or you have not said money, you will shift the cost to somebody else ?" isn't that an artificial way of talking about what someone is doing? is it not equally artificial to say that no one is doing anything -- was doing anything about health care is financing health care services? >> is different. the reason is the burial example is -- the difference here, while regulating the method by which you are paying for something else, health care and the insurance requirement -- the key thing here is my friends on the other side acknowledge is that it is under the congress's power to guarantee the waiting to end, to impose the minimum coverage position. their argument in -- is it has to occur at the point of sale. >> i