Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I am here to say to my colleagues that although we are going to go through a very expedited process of voting on two options on student loans, I want to urge my colleagues to take this seriously. This has a huge financial impact on families across this country, and I say ``families'' because we are focused on the students, and in many cases it is the parents taking out loans, and the truth is that under one option today parents are left out. You see, the debate on this floor today is over two bills--one offered by my friends in the majority, which would extend the 3.4- percent interest rate on subsidized Stafford loans. That is 39 percent of all the student loans taken out. It does not speak to the 61 percent that is still under the 6.8 percent rate. It is parents, it is students who take out unsubsidized Stafford loans. They are still at 6.8 percent. But more importantly, you need to look at the financial sustainability of the program. When this was originally enacted in 2006, the campaign rhetoric was, we are going to drastically cut student loans for everybody--until they realized how much it was going to cost. Then they limited it to subsidized Stafford loans. When the authorization for that runs out, we have this debate about whether we are going to extend the 3.4-percent student loan rate. We just forget to tell everybody it is for a subsection of everybody who is taking out student loans.…”