Political Quotes

“I wish to speak for a few minutes about the loan program and concerns I have about it, particularly the scoring conventions used by the Congressional Budget Office in its cost analysis of these student loans. It is something I have looked at for some time as the ranking member of the Budget Committee. We have asked CBO to analyze these issues and have offered the honest Budget Act, which deals with all kinds of loans, and the improper way CBO scores them--not that they do it on their own, but because we require them to score it that way. In sum, I would say the loans that have been referred to today do not make money for the government. They just do not. They are going to cost money. It is simply--and that would be a subsidy to the borrower. We are talking about 2.05 percent above the 10-year Treasury note, and that is a good way to figure what the interest rates are. When they rise, the cost of money rises. It rises for the U.S. Treasury as well as for the people who borrow from the U.S. Treasury. But the Federal Credit Reform Act, or FCRA, requires CBO to score these loans in a way that gives the impression that they do, in fact, make money. In a recent report on student loans, the CBO wrote to us that FCRA--this is the law that tells them how they analyze the cost: FCRA accounting does not consider some costs borne by the government.…”