Interest Rate Reduction Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. WALBERG. I thank the gen tle lady.
Mr. Speaker, just a bit of a history lesson. We hear a lot of demagoguery going on right now from the highest office of the land about the unwillingness of Republicans to help our college students receive the education that they need by having the loans that they deserve.
Going back to 2006, as part of the Democrats' Six for '06 campaign agenda, the Democrats promised to cut student loan interest in half. When they took the majority--and I sat on the House Education and Labor Committee at the time--they gained control of Congress, all of a sudden they realized it was too costly to do what they planned to do. So they put in place, against our opposition, saying that the private sector still could foster opportunities for student loans and make it fluctuate and flow in a variable rate with the market, ultimately reducing the overall cost of interest over the course of time for our students. They chose not to do that. They put in place the plan that we have right now, a Democrat plan that said, in fact, we will go to 6.8 percent in July of 2012 after dropping it back because they knew they couldn't afford it. They did it in a short-term process. And ultimately, it has come to fruition now that we are at a cost problem and we are at a problem for students to gain education support. It is their plan that we're dealing with. It is their mess that we're asked to fix at this point in time.
The College Cost Reduction and Access Act incrementally reduced to the 3.4 percent that we have now, ultimately putting a cliff in place of what we're looking at. As the expiration date crept closer, Democrats did nothing in the 111th Congress, despite knowing that this would take place, and now we have a problem.
Mr. Speaker, this morning we see a picture of students in graduation garb. On top of one of the mortarboards it says: ``Hire me.'' That's the issue we're talking about: an economy that doesn't offer jobs. And so what we ought to be looking at here is growing an economy, not an ObamaCare fix that is ending up costing these loan programs.
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Mr. WALBERG. I thank the gen tle lady.
We ought to be looking at ways for growing an economy that gives the opportunity for students to know that they will have a job, that they can pay off loans at whatever rate it will be. There is a much better way than doing what has been done. We ought to be growing an economy for job providers, as opposed to what the Senate sent over to us, their solution: to whack at more job providers and make it more difficult to provide stable and secure jobs for college graduates looking for simply the opportunity to be hired.
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