Johnson, Ron: This hearing of the subcommittee will come to order. I want to thank everybody, first of all, for attending. I was mentioning to Ranking Member and my colleagues here, I was expecting lines around the halls, you know, waiting to get in. But I truly appreciate you coming. I really want to thank the witnesses for all the time and effort you put into your testimony and, you know, time you're putting in here today. I certainly want to thank the Ranking Member of the subcommittee, Senator Smith, and the Chair and Ranking Member of the full committee, Chairman Crapo and Senator Wyden, and their staff for all the help in facilitating this, what I consider a pretty important hearing. When I entered Congress, our nation's total debt was $14.7 trillion and 96% of GDP. Soon it will hit and surpass $39 trillion and 124% of GDP. Within 10 years, it will almost certainly exceed $60 trillion and 134% of GDP. Although both sides claim to be concerned about our dire fiscal situation, neither side, and let me emphasize that, neither side has demonstrated a genuine desire to seriously address it. Democrats insist the solution is simply making the rich pay their fair share. Yet, when they had the power to do so, they didn't. Republicans responded, we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. Yet when we had the power to return spending to a reasonable pre-pandemic level, the One Big Beautiful bill simply did not meet the moment. When I arrived in Congress in 2011, America's debt and deficit was the topic of discussion. Now $24 trillion of added debt later, it's barely mentioned, and most members of Congress, the administration, and the public seem content on continuing to whistle past the graveyard. Again, I want to thank our witnesses for their testimony that describes our growing fiscal situation in all its gory detail. I don't expect to find agreement on solutions at the hearing today, but we still haven't, because we still haven't taken the first step in solving the problem, which is admit we have one. If we are ever willing to collectively take that first step, the next step is properly defining it. A financial problem lends itself to charts and graphs. I love them. And the written testimony is chock full of some really good ones that I highly recommend that people study. I've been developing a few charts and graphs, and I want to quick go through them. Everybody's got a copy in front of them. I'll go through this pretty quickly. This is the depressing debt chart. We passed the $5 trillion debt level in 1996, $10 trillion in 2008, $15 trillion in 2012, $25 trillion in 2020, and we'll probably pass $40 trillion this year. It's a pretty depressing outlook. As a percentage of GDP, we were keeping under 70% from 1980 through 2008. And then we hit basically 100% in 2012, over 120% in 2020. And again, we're on a path to higher levels. I know Treasury Secretary Besson is pretty well, and other economists have laid out deficits as a percentage of GDP, a benchmark level of about 3%. Since our last surplus, which was in 2001, which is $128 billion, we've only been under 3% of GDP with our deficits seven times in those 24 years. Otherwise, we've been over that. And this chart shows CBO's current baseline, which is based on 1.8% growth, which I think people might, hopefully, we do better than that. But at 1.8% growth, we never really go below 6%. Even if you grow 3%, you're still not getting down to a 3% level of GDP. You'd literally have to have 4% growth over the next decade for us to dip below 3% in the last three years of this decade. Deficits composed of two parts, revenue and spending. I've had this chart now ever since I arrived in Congress just to point out, quite honestly, the folly of trying to punish success. Going back 66 years, we've had top marginal tax rates as high as 91%, 70%, 50%, a low of 28%, 39.6%. We're at 37% right now. And no matter how much we try and punish success, on average, we collect about 17.1% of GDP. At some point in time, we ought to realize that reality and start getting spending back in line with that. Next chart is spending outlays. I think the most noteworthy thing here is you can see it grow dramatically from the year 2000 to 2019, the year before the pandemic, where we spent $4.4 trillion. And then the pandemic hit, and spending exploded. But unlike, for example, World War II, where prior to World War II, spending was 11.7% of GDP, went up to, I think, way over 40% during the war. With responsible leadership, we went back to 11.4%, actually lower than what we were. We didn't do that with the pandemic. We went from $4.4 trillion to $6.5 trillion. And never look back. This year, we'll spend about $7.4 trillion, which is 67% higher than 2019. There is absolutely no justification for that whatsoever. Another way to look at this is average deficits per four-year presidential term. And you look back to what I only wish were levels we were at today under George Bush. They averaged about $250 billion per year. That's when $100 billion seemed like a lot of money, and we were all crabbing about that. Then President Obama came in, first term, $1.27 trillion average deficits. Tea Party, I sprang from the Tea Party. We came in, and we restrained spending. There was actually public pressure. We concentrated on it. That dropped to $550 billion per year average deficits. Then Trump came in, had to work with the other side, $810 billion average deficits. Then the pandemic hit. And the spending blowout, $3.1 trillion, has been averaging $1.9 trillion basically ever since. And according to the CBO, in the next 10 years, this is the most recent numbers, we'll incur $24.4 trillion of deficits over the next 10 years. That's an average of $2.4 trillion per year. And of course, it grows over those 10 years. Next chart, this shows annual deficits. And the main point of this chart is, when you go back to the CBO projection prior to the pandemic, CBO is projecting the next 10 years, from 2037 to 2035, we have about a $17.4 trillion deficit versus now, the estimate is $24 trillion, $7 trillion higher. Now, quick point, yes, the one big beautiful bill scored at about $4 trillion. Most of that was preventing a massive automatic tax increase, which again, I will point out, when the Democrats had the exact same opportunity to use reconciliation, they could have increased taxes, it could increase taxes on the wealthy. They didn't. So I consider it's a bipartisan agreement. We didn't want to increase taxes. We understand how economically harmful that is. So that's that point. Next couple charts, this shows, again, the four-year average deficits. If you have 3% growth, notice it doesn't bend the deficit curve down. Flattens it out a little bit, doesn't bend it down. Go to the next chart. This is 4% growth. Now, we're finally bending the deficit curve down, but we're not even close to balance by the end of the decade. We're still $1.4 trillion. Here's my solution that I recommended, starting with a column in the Wall Street Journal January 1 of last year. Go back to a pre-pandemic level spending. I chose three different options. Bill Clinton in 1998, Barack Obama 2014, President Trump 2019. You take their actual total outlays, you exempt Social Security, Medicare, and interest. You spend what you need to spend. But all the other outlays, you apply a reasonable control. Increase in inflation and population. If we were to do that, go back to Clinton in 98, we'd be spending $5.9 trillion this year. And that's $1.5 trillion less. That's a $15 trillion savings over 10 years. Go back to Obama 2014. If Clinton's too aggressive for you, go back to Obama. Be $6.6 trillion. That's $800 billion less than we're going to spend this year. That's $8 trillion over 10 years. Just go back to prior to the pandemic under Trump. $6.9 trillion, that saves us a half a trillion in one year, $5 trillion over 10. And that's the solution. I'm not saying you take everyone, but use those as baselines, as an evaluation for getting back to a reasonable pre-pandemic level spending. It's entirely possible. There's no justification to go from $4.4 to $7.4 trillion. So as I said earlier, I don't expect to find agreement on solutions, but let me describe what I believe our two primary initiatives should be. First, return to reasonable pre-pandemic level spending. I've given three different options. We should look seriously at doing that. And by the way, I'm working with OMB. We passed $100 million of funding for a line-by-line, program-by-program review. We've already purchased AI system. We're hiring people to do that kind of forensic analysis. That's underway. That's basically another three-year project. Second thing is we have to simplify and rationalize our tax code. It's simply too complex, costs at least $400 billion to comply with. It's also totally irrational. Instead of treating all income the same, we arbitrarily treat it differently, hoping to create different various economic incentives. In our quest to create economic incentives, I think we probably create at least as many uneconomical, harmful disincentives. So I truly believe reducing spending and deficits combined with creating a simple and rational tax system would be the most growth-inducing solution and action we could take. With that, I turn it over to Ranking member Smith.