Political Quotes

“I rise this evening in support of Keep Student Loans Affordable, the bill that has been introduced by Senators Reed and Hagan. We have been talking a lot in the last few hours about student loans, about the cost of student loans, and we have talked particularly about subsidized loans. I just want to start this by pointing out that ``subsidized loans'' is not the right term. No one is subsidizing any of our students. The lowest cost loans the U.S. Government issues today produce a profit for the government. In other words, who is doing the subsidizing? Our students are doing the subsidizing. They are the ones who are creating the profits for the U.S. Government. Let's talk about those profits. This year those profits, as the Presiding Officer rightly pointed out, will be more than $50 billion. Those are profits made on the student loans that are already outstanding and the profits we are going to start making off the new loans when the interest rate doubles at 6.8 percent. Under this bill, Keep Student Loans Affordable Act, we are talking about how to prevent making even more profits off our students--a short-term patch to hold interest rates steady for all of our students while we try to attack the core problems. The problem we have as we deal with this, and the problem with the Republican proposal, is right now the new loans are scheduled to produce $184 billion in profits for the U.S. Government over the next 10 years. Let me say that again.…”