Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. It's always interesting to listen to the debate here on the floor. No matter how hard we try to use the word ``bipartisan,'' we get into these partisan squabbles: the Republican bill was bad and this bill is good, and that bill is--look, we needed to change the status quo, and that's always hard to do. We had some pretty simple goals here that we were trying to reach. We wanted to get out of the partisan political squabble that was occurring in this city every year as we tried to figure out, through some alchemy, what the student loan interest rate ought to be. The answer has been in front of us for a long time: the market is the best determiner of that. So we wanted to put together legislation that would get us out of this political squabble, let the market do this in a way that was fair to students and fair to taxpayers. Let the market do it based on the 10-year Treasury, which is the best indicator of what it costs the Federal Government to borrow money; do it so that it was as close to budget neutral as we could get it. The President of the United States had a proposal that did those things. At the end of 10 years, I think the President's budget saved the taxpayer about $3 billion. The House bill that we've been discussing saved the taxpayers about $3.5 billion, And this bipartisan Senate bill, just under $1 billion saved. That's budget neutral in this city, in a 10-year window, from the Congressional Budget Office.…”