Ron Kind: “I am proud as a 10-year member of the House Education and Labor Committee to stand here in support of H.R. 5. The fact…”

“I am proud as a 10-year member of the House Education and Labor Committee to stand here in support of H.R. 5. The fact of the matter is, if we implement this law, if we get the President to support this cut in interest rate burden in half, over 750,000 undergraduates in my home State of Wisconsin will realize cost savings, over half of them in my home congressional district alone. They are looking at, on average, about a $14,000 debt burden by the time they finish school; and with this bill, they will realize close to $4,400 in savings with this interest rate reduction, which almost covers a full year of tuition at a public university in my home State of Wisconsin. So, yes, facts can be a stubborn thing. What we are doing here is real. But let us also recall why we are today, because we are following in the wake of the largest raid on student aid in our Nation's history when the Republican Congress last year, in their budget reconciliation, cut over $12 billion from the student aid program, that the President went along with.”