Tom Harkin: “I spoke on the floor earlier today about the proposal that is before us. I wish to reiterate what I said then: I cannot…”

“I spoke on the floor earlier today about the proposal that is before us. I wish to reiterate what I said then: I cannot stress enough that this bill represents a number of compromises made on both sides to come to a solution on how to keep interest rates low for students in the coming years. The compromise we will be voting on shortly is the closest we have gotten to a deal that represents two core Democratic principles related to student loan interest rates: No. 1, the inclusion of hard, upfront caps for students, so should we experience high interest rates in the future, they will be protected from those high rates. Let me repeat. Under this plan, undergraduates in this country will never pay more than 8.25 percent. That is what we had in the 1990s, and five times we bumped up against that in the 1990s. History could well repeat itself in that regard. We have a hard cap. Graduate students will pay no more than 9.5 percent; parents and graduate students taking out PLUS loans, no more than 10.5 percent--hard cap. Secondly, we wanted this to come as close to deficit neutral as possible, and this is what we have done. To show how we made compromises around here, I will say that the Republicans' initial proposal that we had voted on here--and it went down, as well as the initial Democratic Senate proposal went down--the Senate Republicans' initial proposal raised $15.6 billion in deficit reduction over 10 years. We negotiated down to $715 million over 10 years.…”