On the recordJuly 24, 2013
The Senator from Rhode Island knows I have the highest respect and affection for him. I might say that he makes excellent points. As I said earlier, this amendment looks good, looks pretty, sounds pretty, and might be nice in a perfect world, but that is not where we are. Like my colleagues, like Senator Reed, I want to make sure we are only asking students and families to pay as much interest as needed in order to properly administer the program and no more. Student loans should not be a profit center for the Federal Government. As I said earlier, that is why we put into our underlying bill, the Manchin-Burr bill, a requirement that GAO report back to us in 4 months as to what it actually costs. My good friend from Rhode Island doesn't know what it costs. I don't know what it costs. No one really knows what the cost of this is. As Senator Alexander said earlier, we are going to be looking at all of this in the Higher Education Act, what college affordability is. Let me repeat. Under the bill before us, students pay less interest rates than 6.8 percent until 2017. While the Reed bill may sound good, we are not there. We are not there to move on the Reed bill yet or anything like it. Plus, the offset he has for that, even though he has fully paid for it, is not acceptable to a lot of people here in the Senate Chamber. Stick with the underlying bill and defeat the Reed amendment. The PRESIDING OFFICER.…
