Elizabeth Warren

You've made something a national issue again that needs to be a national issue.

That's why I've introduced the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour in three steps and then to index the minimum wage to inflation.

We have raised our minimum wage. We have stayed above the national minimum wage, and we have done better on employment.

I think we have heard from our witnesses today that homeownership may be undermined, that there is data suggesting that homeownership is undermined by the growing amount of student loan debt.

Does it make any sense for a Fortune 500 company that makes high-profit student loans to be able to borrow money for less than one-third of 1 percent from a program that has Federal backing for homeownership?

So we call these 'subsidized' loans even though today the program has been completely changed and, in fact, is making a profit for the U.S. Government.

Private student loans carry high interest rates, they are difficult to restructure, and in many cases, they have created a barrier for people trying to buy their first homes.

The Government will profit $51 billion from the student loan program. The new loans will make a profit of $184 billion over the next 10 years.

It seems that they are undermining that goal by helping finance more student loan debt.

I am not sure I find that reassuring.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Ranking Member Burr, for holding this meeting today.

For every dollar spent on the Meals on Wheels program, we save $50 in Medicare costs.

If instead of spending $800 million on the congregate meals programs, we doubled that to $1.6 million, can you just speak very briefly to the question of both how many people would be helped and how much money we would save doing that?

This is not a subsidy. This is money people earned, and it's just trying to help them get the money they earned.

This is also a profound moral question, a question about helping people retain their independence.

Social Security provides a safety net to keep people out of poverty, but it's a very modest safety net.

I just want to express my concerns about that.

Did the U.S. Government agree to provide some kind of minimum float here?

So these were additional requirements, $30 million worth of additional requirements?

I cannot understand--I understand they are handling more cards, but they are also getting more revenues in the way that they design the revenues.

So, if we could, I would like to go back to the Comerica contract for Direct Express, Secretary Gregg, that the Chairman raised earlier.

If we can reduce fraud by getting some increased percentage of people to say, no, this is not accurate, then we have not only saved a lot of money, we may shut down some criminal activity, but we have also saved a lot of heartache.

And that is how they bid for this and said they wanted to do it on that basis, not charge the government.

I totally understand this, because that is the best possible check, is if the individual receives a letter, a phone call, some notification, and says, wait a minute and raises a hand immediately that there is a problem here.

My suggestion, when I said the letter, that it does not have the Social Security number.