Political Quotes

“I'm going to put up another chart here that speaks to what you just said. This chart talks about our colleagues' proposal. That was one that we passed here. We like to say that this is really about making education more expensive. Here's how it works. Our proposal is to keep the interest rate--and this is a person that's maxed out. They've borrowed the maximum amount from the Stafford loan; this is the subsidized portion of it. This is the total interest that they pay over 5 years of a subsidized loan. The proposal that we put forward would be $4,174 of interest. What's going to happen, unless we pass a law, is that that number will go to $8,808. That's the doubling of the interest rate from 3.4 to 6.8 percent. Now, the thing that I'll never understand--and this bill passed the House of Representatives a couple of months ago--was the proposal by our Republican colleagues that would actually force the students to pay more than just the doubling. You go, What's that all about? Why would they do that? So under the proposal that we say actually makes education more expensive, the Republican proposal would go to $10,109, as opposed to our proposal, which would keep it at $4,174. Or even allowing the rate to double, the Republican proposal is actually more expensive. It doesn't make sense. I would say nonsense is probably a better way of describing it--no sense. But it just creates a serious problem.…”