Smarter Solutions for Students Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MEEKS. Mr. Speaker, I'm puzzled. This is not the America that I know. It can't be.

When we were growing to make ourselves a great Nation, we were talking about trying to make sure that our young people had a free education. I can't figure out what's going on here. So many Americans that are doing well now, when I talk to them about when they were going to school back in the forties and the fifties and the sixties, it was a free education. Now we want to ask our young people, the ones that are going to be the middle class, the ones that are going to strengthen this country, to be more in debt than ever.

How could we say to our students--when we're talking about financial literacy everyplace and trying to teach them how to be financially able--that you've got to take a bait-and-switch loan? Didn't we learn anything from this last financial crisis?

What are homeowners doing now? All who had these adjustable-rate mortgages, all of them are running to make the adjustable-rate mortgages fixed-rate mortgages. And yet we take what we say are our precious resources--our children--to say that you've got to pay these resources is ridiculous. Some are wealthy, some are not.

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