Political Quotes

“Mr. President, July 1 is less than 1 week away. We need to reassure students who will be taking out loans for school this fall that their interest rates will not double. It is safe to say most of us on both sides of the aisle would want to see a long-term approach to setting student loan interest rates rather than a temporary extension of the current rate. We have been working, Senator Harkin, Senator King, Senator Manchin, Senator Burr, Senator Coburn, Senator Warren, and many others about finding a way forward. Unfortunately, all of the proposals that are on the table today would leave students worse off in the future, frankly, worse off than simply allowing the interest rate to double. There is a year or two, perhaps, where interest rates would stay below the rate of 6.8 percent. Then looking at rate trends, it looks quite convincing that these rates would surpass the current fixed rate and go higher. We can not enact a long-term solution that is going to be bad for students. In fact, student groups and advocates have urged us to reject the so-called deals that are circling around with variable rates that are not capped that could lead to very high interest rates for students in a very short period of time. One thing we have all been aware of for the last week or two is the dramatic movement of rates based on comments by the Federal Reserve with respect to their elimination of the quantitative easing program. The future looks as though we are going to see increased rates.…”