factory just devoted to this and it was all stored in 55 gallon steel drums and various formulations which had different colored bands. they were shipped down to gulfport, mississippi -- mississippi, sent to the panama canal and all went to vietnam and then went to three -- a whole number of military bases. three in particular were over a long period of time because people who were doing this, they were told it was, so they were very careless. why is it 85%? it was used the longest and because there was actually a tank farm with -- think of an oil refinery. big steel tanks filled with these herbicides. in one burst -- and one burst in 1970 one and hundreds of thousands of gallons just kind of leaked out so what we have today is contaminated soil. imagine a dump truck.

a large dump truck. imagine that you these dump trucks up running through the city of washington. how far going out to seattle, where i came from, what you have to go before you ran out of this line of dump trucks? i'm not sure but the number you would need to move this stuff from where it is in the ground to a treatment facility is about 48,000. 48,000 dump trucks worth of highly contaminated, really bad for you contaminateted soil and that is what is there. and that is what -- why it is so important to clean it up because it is a danger and the u.s. and vietnam have this huge project which was scheduled to go on for a decade and is in phase one which will end in 2027 with about 40% of this contaminated soil being treated by that point. so first, with the stop work

order, they stopped work. the american contractors, the enemies, everyone stopped work for two months and this was during the dry season when you have to do this work. it is too dangerous to do it during the rainy season. they stopped work and they resumed. funding is still, well, still promised but they will probably not meet the targets of getting 40% of it treated by 2027. and then there is phase two which is to deal with the other 6% so this is a very clear and focused, you know, progress, cleanup. we are very happy it's a modern airport free of dioxin. same story. that's where the dioxin is and we need to continue until it is all destroyed. >> susan, so now, we are going

to go to some of you have already illustrated this, post january 20, with president trump in the white house now, should we have the impression that all work on this has stopped? what is moving forward? what has rebooted and what remains? >> well, the dioxin cleanup has started but when it comes to the programs for victim assistance, the most -- most of those never restarted after the work shutdown. some of them were ending in may and june. >> also the same amount of just extending current tax laws. i don't buy into the fact that you are looking at $4 trillion and i will point out, this one bill, this one big beautiful bill cuts $1.6 trillion.

doge informants has cut $175 billion so this is definitely right along and aligned and one of the biggest, biggest met impacts. you were talking about revenue to gdp spending -- spending to gdp. if you look at the history over the last 50 years, revenue to gdp has averaged 17% and we are currently at 17.2% of revenue to gdp. spending towards gdp has averaged right about 20% for the last 45 years prior to the last five. the last five, it has averaged 26% of gdp. we have a spending problem in this country, not a revenue problem. >> i'm guessing a lot of people in this room are happy with what is on the corporate side of this legislation but let's talk about the individual side, things like no taxes on tips, taxes on

overtime, auto interest, loan deductibility. is there a supply-side case for those? are those things that's not really going to help the stocks? >> this tax bill, this one big beautiful bill was created by going outside of washington, d.c. we went to more than 30 different states over the last two years, meeting with real small business owners, real working moms, real farmers, and to find the issues that they were facing in today's economy. my very first field hearing, as my very first committee hearing as ways and means chairman was in a lumberyard in appalachia. in petersburg, west virginia. that lumberyard closed nine months ago. over 500 people lost their jobs. these are real americans who are facing real problems so the tax bill that we created all came

from the feedback we heard from those people traveling throughout the country, whether it was a farm in oklahoma or a factory in peachtree city, georgia, or a homeless shelter in chicago, these are all places that we went and we heard from people. of course, the main aspect of the bill, it creates permanency of the expiring provisions of the 2017 trump tax cuts and also as the net tax on tips, no tax on overtime. you look at the no caps on overtime and this incentivizes people to be more productive at work when we already have a shortage in labor. this is very proactive. and when you look at tax relief for seniors, we also have different items to incentivize manufacturing in the united states by 100% expensing of factories, by 100% expensing through equipment. research and development.

and also the -- these are all things that if you combine them, the effective tax rate for manufacturing in the united states will be at 15%. >> i promise we are not going to go line by line through this complex bill but there is one thing that has kind of gotten a lot of attention i want to raise. section 899 of the legislation, which makes foreign holdings of u.s. assets subject to an escalating tax, sovereign wealth fund, things like that, can you comment on why this provision is in the bill new you this as a good idea? >> foreign governments, based on agreements entered by the biden administration, is trying to suck away billions of dollars from u.s. companies. in fact, $120 billion from u.s. companies. and this is a way to help put them in check so that they understand that if they do that to u.s. businesses, there will be consequences for their actions. hopefully, it will never take effect.

>> the worry is this willow disincentivized treasury bonds. is that something we should be worried about? >> i think you have to look at everything but it's a valid fear of 120 billion dollars of u.s. profits from u.s. companies being illegally taken. for example, when you look at pillar two with oecd, they don't even recognize r&d expensing in our tax code. we are the first country in 2017 that created a global minimum tax and they don't even accept our global minimum tax. that is completely unfair so we are being punished for actually following what they are trying to do. the fact that the biden administration agreed to this is beyond me. >> one last question and then we will broaden the legislation -- the conversation. what do you see as a path forward here for actual passage? any bright lines from the house that you would tell your senate colleagues to not mess around

with? >> so we have been working hand in glove with the chairman, leader thune, throughout this entire process. i think when you look from a tax perspective, 90% to 95% will stay about the same and you will see some minor changes over there. we have a delicate balance. we could only lose three seats in the house of representatives to pass this bill and we passed it 215-214 and one present and that is as close as you can possibly get. the senate can only lose three votes. they have a 53 majority and so when i started in the house, i figured we were losing two before we started, two people that you just could not get there and we lost those two people. the senate i think is the same way. there's two senator us that regardless of what you do, they will always vote no. and so you can only lose one in both chambers in order to pass

it so you have to thread a very delicate needle and you have to use balance. some of the sticking points is the state and local tax reduction. we had to make sure that it was a good common ground with our friends in new york, new jersey, and california. we have members in our conference that was pushing me to eliminate any deduction, not even one dollar for state and local tax and then you have others that were asking for unlimited such as creating that center ground, i would encourage my counterparts, don't be too drastic. be very balanced and i think they have to be balanced with the makeup of the senate. >> you were in the white house shaping the original -- that this extends. what do you like and what are you less enthusiastic about in the big, beautiful bill. >> what i like the most is we aren't extending the current tax law. you know, i think the horrible

outcome would be to have gone through this eight year period where we simplify the tax code, we made ourselves much more competitive in the world. we lowered rates, we reached all the objectives we set out to an 2017 and then have them all expire eight years later. the volatility of that would just be unsubstantiated and would not make any sense. on the personal or corporate side although the corporate would not change. there would be the trickle-down effect. the fact that chairman smith and his committee understand the importance of predictability and continuity of what we put in eight years ago i think is very, very important so overall, you like what is going on in the chairman braun of the really important topic and if you take nothing else away from it, this is the take away. there was a lot of discussion in 2017 when we wrote the legislation, you know, people talking about it being a giveaway to the rich. this is a tax break for the rich. and the chairman gave you the

numbers. our tax collections as a percentage of gdp actually went up with the new legislation. and that is the important piece. what has happened on the deficit side is our spending, and this relay, you know, you could talk about covid and the need for the federal government to get involved in covid and i think many of us this room was a this is exactly when the federal government should get involved and should spend money is when we are going through a pandemic or national crisis but wants the crisis is over, the government has to remember what steady-state looked like prior to the crisis or the pandemic so the tax revenue side of what we did in 2017, what the committee is doing continues to make an enormous amount of sense. the real issue is on the spending side and that is where people have to understand what steady-state run rate looks like going back to 2019. >> seeing this legislation -- legislative process making you

nostalgic for 2017 or are you glad you are away from the west wing right now? works both. what we did in 2017 was almost nothing short of extraordinary. we were told we could not get it done, that it was 32 years since we were sitting here in the reagan library. 32 years since tax reform have been done and it's impossible to get done. it's very difficult to lower rates, very difficult to lose corporate taxes, very difficult to touch many of the, you know, sort of embedded deductions. you know, state and local taxes, one of the embedded deductions we couldn't touch. we managed to get those things through and then there's always massive gyrations inside and we were talking about this before we came on. the subtlety behind the tax code and how difficult it is and how many moving parts there are is really extraordinary. i said to jason when i did this in 2017, we had about $1.7

trillion of negative revenue deficit to work with. in our problem over the 10 year window but to get to that $1.7 trillion of negative revenue, we basically spent about six point $7 trillion and brought in about $5 trillion so it netted to $1.7 trillion so literally, when you are writing tax code, you are touching every part of the code and it's very complicated and i know the chairman went through this time. he was telling me how big the members were so it's very complex when you touch on all these things and every time you touch a line of a tax code, there is an interest group somewhere that has an equal, i would say more than an equal and opposite reaction to what you are doing so it doesn't matter how few dollars it is or how many. there is someone who wants that the way they left it in. i will throw one out.

in my day, i was the villain that tried to take carried interest out of the tax code. jamie is laughing. i was vilified by have to leadership in the house and the senate. >> people in this room, too. >> it was me. the good news is i think mcconnell, hatch, ryan, and brady, you know, the four of us were sitting there, writing tax code and they said we are going to do a lot of things here but not touch carried interest. i said, ok, i got it. there's things like that that you just have to deal with. >> if you would like to have a question, go into the app and click on this panel and you can put in the question. we will layer those in as we proceed. jerry, you own and run businesses. what do you think this tax legislation means for the growth outlook, capital spending, capital stock, as you look at it as a businessperson and investor. what is the upside here? >> i start with a proposition, having been in the government

and as you say, looking from the corporate standpoint. and i look at president reagan's directive. bipartisanship is something that is critically important. winning tax bills by one margin is not bipartisanship. we need that. and i think we need a tax code that is simpler and that is more progrowth oriented. growth can solve, address many of the issues. we can talk a little bit about what we have seen in california. california is a big part of the economy today and going forward. and we set up a commission to deal with tax reform as well as public pension reform and we can talk a little bit about that but

from my standpoint observing, i think this is a time where we are edging towards crisis. and we got to be careful in that context on the economic side. markets are very volatile. when you are overly dependent on the personal income tax, it is the most volatile form of tax and businesses cannot plan. investors cannot hesitate on whether they should buy or sell companies so we have to step back. i am not sure a big beautiful bill that guarantees somebody will object to this or that will get us there, but it's better than doing nothing. as long as it is oriented around minimizing the reliance on the personal income tax. you need to broaden the base and

be able to predict so you can budget carefully. question mentioned earlier that there's some signs that bond markets are a little jittery about u.s. assets. we have seen this pattern where in turbulent moments, the dollar falls and yields rise. how worried are you about the bond market and the ability to keep sustaining these deficits going forward? >> well, i would be interested in garry's point of view, too. i'm not as concerned about the bond market in one sense. increased borrowing delivers interest payments to those that own the debt and the people that own the dead are about two thirds here. one third abroad. so i am less concerned about that than i am about the wide swings in volatility which i think can cross real economic

problems soon. >> gary, something changing and capital markets that we should be nervous about? >> have a failed debt auction in the united states. i think they are highly correlated to each other. you know, the interest rates market, the risk-free interest rate market as we like to believe it, u.s. treasury market drives a lot of underlying investment in the world, not just the united states and you know, the reality of it is we have the most robust debt market in the world until we don't. in the way the system is set up, i'm not going to go to the primary system. there's a lot of checks and balances in the way that we sell debt in the united states but is not a foolproof mechanism. you know, if there lacks interest from foreign investors and from u.s. investors and people don't think it's an

adequate risk-adjusted rate of return, rates will move out dramatically and dramatically quickly and one or two auctions later, you can be in a completely different system and then when the government gets to a point where it cannot efficiently finance itself, we have a completely different position and when we are there, it's almost too late to deal with it. >> how much does that set of worries hang over you and your colleagues as you are writing these bills? >> it's one of the biggest conversations especially with our debt and deficit hawks. when you look at the fiscal health of the nation, that is your number one criteria. unfortunately, we have been added deficit spend the majority of the last 70 years. i think four years, we were not at a deficit spend but other than that, every year has been a deficit spend so looking at the revenues coming in versus the expenditures, it's very crucial on the economic outlook of the

viability of our nation. >> there is this herbert's timeline that if something cannot go on together -- go on forever, it won't. what is the forcing event that makes it -- does this come to a head and can it be done without a crisis? >> look, i agree. i don't think this goes on forever. we have got another major event coming up in 2033 where we are looking at the report on social security. social security publishes numbers every year onto how the funds will work and when they are going to run out of money. the one thing we know is that they will run out of money. what does that mean? that means bylaw that they draw payments back down to a level where they can make sustainable payments based on the money that is in the fund. >> it means automatic cuts to recipients. >> right now, they are about 20 plus percent cuts.

if you model that out, you see 20% cuts in social security coming 2032, 2033, 2034. it moves around the loss of actuarial data. my strong view is, and i'm sure i'm probably right on this, i don't think that there is an elected official in the united states that is going to allow anyone social security check to be cut so i assume we will find a way to try to deficit finance our way out of social security and we are not talking about something far away so you take the normal operating deficit that we have today, the normal amount we are funding, the interest on that and master adding on top of that the whole social security trust issue and that is when i think you run into a potential real problem that is almost unsustainable. i don't want to go off on a tangent but the social security trust fund thing could be solved. it's a really interesting 80 year actuarial algebraic equation. when you have 80 years of value

to work with, it is not that hard to solve. unfortunately, we need to solve it today and avoid getting to that. >> there have been commissions established. i hesitated repeating all of the commissions either for the president or for the governor of california that i have been involved in, none of which have been listened to by the legislature. and we had -- there was a social security commission under -- that president george w. bush. relatively straightforward recommendations relating to retirement age, how you deal with retirement age, how you accumulate the obligations that exist there. in terms of cost-of-living adjustments. no one would listen. same thing happened in addition

to social security, california is going to bring to washington -- at least that is the prediction of some of us, the unfunded liabilities for public employees in california. the idea of unfunded liability, i never heard of such a thing until i got involved with the government. unfunded liabilities. it's not in the budget. it is not brought forward. it's just a liability that is going to come due and for public employees benefits, we did an analysis -- another commission, not listened to, but we did an analysis of the unfunded liability just for california and it was $118 billion in 2008 and now, it's $290 billion. this means this is an obligation that will come due. what will happen?

california is going to go to washington and say bail us out. a number of you in the audience probably remember -- it ages me, but that's perfectly ok. new york city had a problem. 1975. came down to washington. i was in the treasury department. and i said we have a problem. you have to give us a guarantee or help us. george, who was a trustee here and a great friend of mine said to president ford, we should not be doing this unless they get their house in order. headline and the daily news, president ford is in new york city, dropped dead. that was the response we got.

the same issue on public pension liability. it and social security, the crisis will be coming. >> how much awareness is there of this looming set of issues in congress? is there any appetite to start working, maybe not in a public facing way but behind the scenes to work through possible solutions now? >> it is extremely frustrating when within congress, is that congress tends to always kick the can down the road with all the issues. i just look back at this one big beautiful bill, for example. since november, november, i have been pushing every moment that i breathe that we have to pass the permanency of the expiring provisions of the 2017 tax cuts and we need to do it soon. it took us until memorial day and i had numerous colleagues that i like you can do it at the end of the year.

the 27 million small businesses that don't know if the tax rate is going to be 43.4% or 25 point -- 25 to 28%, they are investing. they are deciding. they are making decisions now so why would you wait? same way with the social security trust fund and medicare. why do you wait until the last moment? unfortunately, that is how congress operates and that is what they will probably do. there are reasonable reforms but it has to be bipartisan. medicare and social security are two such important programs for all americans and this is not something one party can do so we have done over 20 different roundtables just in my first two years as chairman with house democrats and house republicans to try to figure out where can we find that common ground question i will tell you, passing bipartisan legislation is not easy. i passed a bipartisan tax bill i negotiated with senator wyden, my counterpart at that time, and

we got 84% of the vote in the house of representatives but then the senate killed it for political reasons. if the senate would have passed it, it would have saved our country $450 billion and r&d bonus and interest could be made permanent very easy in this tax code but unfortunately, bipartisanship is not always there but i am willing to do anything as long as it is delivering for the american people. >> let's talk about some of the demographic long-term things that might change that trajectory. we have a survey that was done by the form on popular opinion -- get that slide up. you know, increasing the working age population either through having more babies, immigration, peopleey are older would change some of this mass. is that on the horizon? >> all these things are potentially on the horizon.

i mean, they are all variables, right? the average workday, the average work week, family size, all of these things are definitely on the horizon. and try to figure out what your chart says here. it says, you know, views on raising taxes -- it seems to win at the end of the day. it seems to always be the path of least resistance. the issue we have here in this country on the tax issues -- everybody in this room will know what i'm going to say. we have an extraordinarily progressive tax system. we have a system where the top 10% of earners pay 75% of federal taxes. the bottom 50% of earners in the united states pay less than 10% of federal taxes so if we want to just keep raising taxes, you know, the question is what is the effect on the population here? you keep going after the same 10% of workers in the

question is are you willing to make fundamental changes in the tax system that i think would be harmful to our country? we were having this discussion last night. we are known because we are a risk-taking country, because we have at risk capital. you know, it is not a mistake that most of the start up companies in the wall got started here in the united states and over half of them were started by owners because they came to the united states because we had capital. one of the reasons we have risk-based capital is because we have a tax system that incentivize taking risk. we tax risk bake -- risk based capital at a different rate. a lot of that wealth and income is in returns on risk based capital paid i would not be an advocate for changing the system of how we have grown our economy but if you are going to get more money out of the top 10%, you are going to have to look at things that i think are relatively draconian and are

going to change the way we as a nation have grown and we have grown by putting risk based capital to work which ultimately creates jobs and huge opportunities in this country. >> one thing we did in california, we set up a commission to deal with the tax code and similar to what gary is saying on a national level, dominant in california. less than 1% of the taxpayers account for about 50 to 55% of the revenues for california. and it used to be that the budget was reliant on the sales and use tax and that shifted. it used to be 60% sales and use tax, 25% or so personal income tax. the officer now. so a bipartisan group appointed by the legislature, seven appointed by the governor, came

forward and said let's recommend changing the system. take the personal income tax brackets from six to two. make the top -- take the top rate from about nine to 10 down to 6%. reduce it. eliminate the corporate tax. eliminate the state component of the sales and use tax and among other things, establish a business that receipts tax, a form of value-added tax develops by -- helped develop by a brilliant mind, my good friend, michael. recommended across-the-board by the seven democrats and seven republicans. it's not every democrat who agreed to it but over a majority . what did the legislature do? nothing.

i would recommend that any commissions that were established to deal with economic policy require in establishing those commissions that a vote be taken by the legislature on each of the recommendations made. do not let it be a staff supported activity. but california is illustrative -- some people in california have said they want to make the entire country look like california. god help us. >> we would not have any houses. >> one pathway out of this that would be less painful potentially is if ai and other advances generate productivity gains. at ibm, you are a resident technologist on this panel. how plausible is that? >> look, ai is going to have a dramatic impact on the way we work, the way we run our

businesses, the way we run our country. we are on the verge of having digital workers today so we are going to have machines that do a lot of the work that is being done by humans today. the vast majority of that works, before anyone gets all excited, is work that has, you know, higher rate -- high turnover, high dissatisfaction. it is work that people don't like doing right now so the digital workers will replace a lot of those people and they will do the work. efficiently, very high job satisfaction and low turnover rate. what we have seen historically and if you look back at the history of this country when we have gone through one of these major technological evolutions, revolution shift, and you go on the way back to the combustion engine, the cotton gin, the internet, the cell phone, what happens is we end up having to retool some people. people earlier in their career are obviously easier to retool.

people later in the career, you have to spend some time in figuring out how to reintegrate them into the workforce but what history will tell us is as companies get more efficient, they just grow and they grow bigger and substantially bigger. the history of us bringing in disruptive technology into american businesses is that the companies get bigger, more efficient, more profitable and higher substantially more people. >> there is a situation where ai, at least right now, where it is best that is moving around words and numbers and coding and things and that, not treating -- caring for an elderly person with dementia or clearing a bedpan. is there a mismatch become -- between the kinds of things ai will make more productive and the needs of an aging society? >> look, the ai evolution to robots which is what you started talking about, are we going to go from digital workers which are basically machines that can do work to robotic workers that

can do some of those menial tasks or tasks people don't want to do, though job satisfaction jobs? there will be a natural evolution that we will have robotic workers in some of these areas that will create inefficiencies. i don't believe -- i don't believe we will see a digital doctor and if we are headed that way, this is one of them we are things that will come out of my mouth. the medical community is a regulated industry. >> are you allowed to say that in reagan library? >> if the task is regulated today and it's being done by a machine, it is going to -- it should be a regulated task even in a digital world so my view is, you know, if young ones to go all the way down the edge of ai replacing higher value added tasks, we are going to have to treat those tasks as if they were done by human beings. this ai revolution evolution is

leading to something even more interesting which is quantum computing which we are less than five years away. when we get to quantum computing with ai, it is a whole other leg up in technology. >> i don't know, gary. you may be closer than i am but i saw a statistic that said that by 2030, up to 30% of the hours worked could be automated, could be. and if that is close, the tax system is something that will be looked at but there are different ways to approach it. i for one would not say that you could tax automation more. i don't think that it's a good thing. automation will improve productivity, profitability, growth, but there are other things. we could shift the payroll tax to some extent.

you could fund your social programs out of automation. there are ways to look at it but the tax system will be part of the discussion as automation takes over that kind of percentage. >> yes. >> sorry. >> just sitting here and hearing this conversation, it just resonated with us in the reagan library. a big quote of president reagan, when he -- he viewed how the government viewed the economy, he said, if it is moving, tax it. if it continues to move, regulate it. if it stops moving, subsidize it. whenever you think about that, that is what we could do with innovation in ai, is if the government gets too involved, they are going to destroy it and we need to have a fair balance in anything and that was what reagan said decades ago and i think it just really hits point right here.

quick look, on this whole issue of the tax code, the tax code will evolve that if we get more and more into a digital economy, it is not like all of our workers are disappearing. people are going to be buying a lot more hardware, a lot more storage, a lot more technology. there are people who are going to be employed by this world. you can go back on how everyone of you run your business in 1990 when you had someone on your floor printed memos and put them in your mailbox to tell you to go to a meeting an hour from now. it sounds funny when you hear that but we had that in my work life, every floor of every office building had mail delivery service. email comes and you know -- you no longer need somebody to tell you where to go but that person who was delivering that mail, you know, they became a higher value-added person. i think in this digital revolution, we are going to create just as many jobs and more jobs and they will be higher paying job because the technical skill level you are going to need, whether it is

your robots or your ai or whether it is quantum computer, computing, the skill level is going to be higher and the pay level is going to be higher and is going to be plenty of income and corporate tax -- corporate profits to tax. >> i think there would be a big push for job retraining and we can be committed to job retraining as part of our program. >> back on the long-term demographics and entitlements outlook. the other thing that would shift this down would be higher fertility rates, more babies. it takes 20 years for a baby to become part of the workforce that is there anything policy can and should be doing question work the trump administration talked a little bit about this can what can or should congress be doing? >> this is a part of the conversation but i would just revert back to a lot of those issues. we have various provisions make it easier for families, for

people to work and have a family. we increased the child tax credit in this bill another $500 to $2500. we also address paid family new that we put within this legislation. so there's numerous things you can do. of course, the baby bump's initiative is something that is put in here to help the trajectory of future kids. but there's a few things. i also believe that when you look at the no tax on overtime the -- that really helps a declining workforce because it incentivizes more productivity of the current workforce so that they can work and not have to pay taxes on that over time.

whenever you are all already having difficulty in having enough employees. >> let's go to a question from the audience. state and local tax policy often duplicates federal efforts, particularly in labor mobility, climate investments. what role should policy play in erecting subnational fiscal behavior? what can be done to coordinate the federal and state level policy environment better? >> i just think that it's got to be a closer coordination between what is happening at the state level, the budgeting process to go through. if there is a common problem relating to the personal income tax, which there is, that should be addressed by both the state and the federal government. right now, it is almost as if

the state is operating in a different country and there's no reason for that. >> another question back on the bond market, looking at the largest purchaser of u.s. treasuries will be diminishing their investments. quantitative tightening. china, japan, regulated u.s. banks will expand dramatically. what are the balancing point? >> historically, it has been rate. markets clear it. basic supply and demand. we are beholden to foreign direct investment into the bond market. i don't think that we are never going to be able -- never is a long time. i don't think you're going to be a country that can support our own debt market. we are going to need foreigners to come in and buy a percentage of our debt market. we are going to want them to come in and buy.

historically, buying dollars, buying u.s. assets, buying u.s. debt has been the best investment performance have been able to make for a long period of time and i don't think that it's a bad place to be. we would want foreigners coming in and lending money to the u.s. government so we can continue to deliver and i just think that is a reality that we are going to need foreign direct investment both within our corporate world but also in our government spending as well. >> i think we have to be careful. i think we need to be careful on how trade policy fits into this equation and what are we doing in terms of undermining or potentially undermining attracting foreigners, if you will, to do exactly what you were recommending. >> chairman, do you think of there being a tipping point on interest rates where the debt service costs get so high that it requires radical arm?

is that thing on your radar? >> i think people should be very concerned. before i was chairman of ways and means 2.5 years ago, i was a republican leader of the house budget committee so looking at debt, deficits was my main focus and i remember the interest expense we paid just three years to go to service our debt. now, it's over $1.1 trillion to service our debt so if members of congress are not focused on that expense whenever it is more than the defense budget, then they probably should not be in congress. >> this is a way in which we were low by the 2010 when interest rates were near zero for much of the decade and much higher debt burden seems plausible and manageable compared to right now. >> wada questions on social security. what now? is anything happen

between now and 2032, 20 33, when there is the risk of imminent custom social security benefits? is there a pathway to having some of this stuff worked out before the last minute, kicking the can until there is no other choice? >> we have to be on the verge of a crisis. we used to say in washington, a crisis brings about change and you got to be right on the virgin order for, unfortunately, in order for bipartisanship to play. >> you would hope that we could start attacking some of the unbelievably low hanging fruit? a child born in 2026, i don't think they are going to vote next year. their retirement age could be 72. any actuarial tables might tell you that. i understand it's really hard to change a retirement date on some

of them. they are not going to vote for another 18 years. i think we can take some shots. you are laughing. we have to start at the basics. so look, if that is not a bipartisan move, because you know, we know that since the last time we changed social security eligibility, left expectancy is out 4.5 years so why don't we raise the retirement eligibility age up until 70, 72 right now for people born here and beyond? maybe put in some escalator. maybe it goes up a month a year for the next 20 years. >> just ch and cost-of-living calculation. those two things could address a major part of the social security issue. >> coming to a 2028 presidential debate near you. we are out of time. thank you so much. [applause]