Ron Kind: “I thank my friend from Illinois for yielding me this time. I want to thank my partner in crafting this legislation…”

“I thank my friend from Illinois for yielding me this time. I want to thank my partner in crafting this legislation, Representative Jenkins. This has been the product of a few years of hard work, of listening to various outside groups and trying to understand the difficulty of saving for higher education that many working families are experiencing today. The legislation before us, H.R. 529, as the chairman of the committee just pointed out, is a commonsense proposal with some reasonable technical corrections to the 529 savings plans that already exist in all 50 States, allowing for the qualification expense for computers and software, which is a new learning tool that sometimes is required in the classroom for higher education. It allows for the refund of tuition and expenses if you had to withdraw from college for some reason, and it also reduces and minimizes the unnecessary bureaucratic and administrative paperwork. In that respect, there are some commonsense steps that we can do to modernize the 529 program and make sure that it is working for more families. I do agree with my colleague from Illinois that we have a challenge of trying to democratize these programs a lot more. We have roughly 3 percent participation rate in 529s throughout the entire Nation.…”