Political Quotes

“this would be a good time to say I told you so, if it were not for the fact that probably 100,000 students and former students are dangling in the wind. But I have repeated, since 1991 or earlier, what my predecessor, Chairman Ford, would say over and over again, ``There is no way under the sun that the Department of Education can become the effective largest bank in the world.'' But I learned something. If one wants to get a program named after oneself, make sure it does not work, and then one will succeed. At any rate, we have a problem. Leo created it. He was the lion and he wanted to make very sure that the private sector would be put out of business as far as student loans were concerned, and he did everything under the Sun to make sure that that would happen, that only direct lending would be allowed. And some of the things he did, of course, was say, well, we will give reduced interest rates, we will give subsidized deferments, knowing that the private sector could not do that. And of course that brought all these wonderful applicants to consolidate loans at these good offers that Leo the lion was making. And of course all of a sudden they discovered, well, now we are 84,000 behind, so we will just shut down the operation and let the rest of the students wonder what is going to happen.”