Barney Frank: “I am pleased that we appear to have a very broad consensus in favor of this. My friend from Texas is right. There is no…”

“I am pleased that we appear to have a very broad consensus in favor of this. My friend from Texas is right. There is no one single answer to the problems of poverty. But I am pleased that we have agreement that this is an important part of it. We have some history here that argues for this bill. In the year, I think it was 2000, we in this House passed a bill on the floor over some objection from the administration at the time, the Clinton administration, and from some of the House leadership. But we passed a bill to begin the process known as the HIPC, the heavily indebted poor country debt relief, and it has worked very well. And for those who think that these enterprises are doomed to failure, we can point to many successes in HIPC. And we did this in a way so that countries that had not lived up to what should have been their part of the bargain didn't get the benefit. The time has now come to do this again. And if this is done right, relieving countries of debt--debt that was often incurred by prior undemocratic and repressive regimes, and they will be primarily African but not entirely--relieving these countries of debt does as much to promote education and reduce poverty as anything else we can do.”