Political Quotes

“At the very time, Mr. Altmire, where our country is most in need of a skilled workforce. I mean you know it, because you do the same tours that I do to manufacturing facilities and worksites, that every company in our district is screaming to us, Do something about the workforce. I can hire people if you make sure that they are trained and educated and ready to work on day one. And so as we're sort of seeing a massive slowdown in this economy, potentially on the way to a recession, this is the very worst time to be cutting back our commitment to higher education programs, to worker and job training programs. And it runs totally counter to what we have been doing here in this Congress. I mean, we need to remind the President that he signed into law the biggest expansion in college aid since the GI bill, increasing the maximum allowable Pell grant, the direct grant to students by $500, providing for loan forgiveness to potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of students who go into public service professions; and, most importantly, cutting the interest rate for student loans in half from 6.8 to 3.4 percent, which is going to save the average college student in Connecticut about $4,000 over the lifetime of the repayment of their loan. That's real dollars when you couple it together with the other benefits that that package had. And that was a bipartisan success. That was conceived by Democrats. It took Democrats taking control of Congress to put that on the agenda.”