Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2014 -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I rise this morning in strong opposition to the legislation which I assume is coming to the floor today which, if passed, would be a disaster for the young people of our country who are looking forward to going to college and for their parents who are helping them pay their bills. Our job is to improve the dismal situation in terms of college affordability and the indebtedness of young people in this country, to improve that situation, to make it better, not to make it worse, and that is exactly what this proposed legislation would do.

I ask for support from my colleagues for an amendment I have filed that would provide a 2-year sunset to this bill, an approach that would prevent student interest rates from soaring and allow us the time, through the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, to deal with this problem through a constructive long-term solution. This issue is too important to be rushed through this body without hearings, without listening to the people who will be affected by this bill--the millions of young people who wish to go to college, who do not want to leave school in deep debt, and their parents as well. We should be listening to them, not rushing this bill through today.

I thank Senators LEAHY, WHITEHOUSE, GILLIBRAND, and SCHATZ for their cosponsorship of this amendment. I look forward to widespread support from my colleagues.

Let's be honest about something we do not talk about enough; that is, in many ways our government is selling out the young people of our country. When we do that, when we ignore the needs of the young people of our country, in many ways we are selling out the future of the United States of America because the young people are the future.

If we do not turn this around, I fear very much that we will continue on the downward spiral we have seen for the last several decades, a spiral in which the rich get richer, Wall Street and the multinational corporations continue to enjoy recordbreaking profits, while the middle class continues to disappear and poverty remains catastrophically high. If we pass the legislation on the floor today without improving it, we will simply be taking one more step in the wrong direction.

Before I get into the gist of what this legislation is about and what my amendment will do, let me say a few words about where we are today with regard to the young people in our country.

At this moment the United States has, by far, the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth--almost 22 percent. In many parts of this country we are seeing a lack of social mobility, where people who are poor, who grow up poor, stay poor. That is not what this country is supposed to be about.

At this moment the childcare situation in this country is beyond disgraceful. Millions of working families are unable to find affordable quality childcare, and many of our young people enter kindergarten and first grade years behind where they should be, both intellectually and emotionally.

At this moment the unemployment rate for high school graduates is close to 20 percent. That is the official rate. The real rate, including those who are working part time and those who have given up looking for work, is actually much higher. If you can believe this--and this is a statistic that should frighten us all; it should make us all ashamed--the official unemployment rate for Black youth age 16 to 19 is 43.6 percent.

I share the concerns many people have recently expressed about the tragic death in Florida of Trayvon Martin. But let's not forget that there are tens of thousands of other young African-American kids all over this country who are worried about where they are going to go with their lives. As the Bureau of Justice Statistics informs us, one out of three African-American men can expect to go to prison during his lifetime. What a horrible waste of human potential.

Our goal must be to see that these young people are ending up in college or in decent jobs--not in jail, not dying from drug overdoses, not involved in petty crime or self-destructive activities. This legislation will simply make it harder for those kids and for all kids to get the higher education they need in order to succeed in life.

Right now, today, hundreds of thousands of young people in this country who have the ability to go to college are looking at the cost of college, the indebtedness they will incur, and they are saying: No, I am not going to go to college.

What does that say about the future of this country?

This legislation, which over a period of years will drive interest rates even higher than they are today, will make it harder for the average kid, the working-class kid to get to college. All of us know we live in a very competitive global economy. If we are going to succeed as a nation in this competitive economy, we need the best educated workforce in the world. Unfortunately, compared to the rest of the world, we are doing virtually nothing to make that happen.

In June the OECD--the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development--released its annual snapshot on the state of education in developed nations. The report showed that the United States is losing ground to other countries that have made sustained commitments in funding higher education opportunities. We are losing ground, and the legislation on the floor today--again, over a period of years raising interest rates extremely high--will make that bad situation even worse.

The United States once led the world in college graduates. As a result, interestingly enough, older Americans--those between age 55 and 64--still lead their peers in other nations around the world in the percentage with college degrees, which is 41 percent. But, according to a very thoughtful report from CNN, this number over the years has flatlined. In 2008--and this is a very sad story indeed--the same percentage of Americans age 25 to 34 and age 55 to 64 were college graduates. In other words, in that 30-year period we made no progress at all. During that period, as we all know, with the explosion of technology, what we have said to our young people is, you desperately need a college education. Yet, in terms of percentage of our people with college degrees, we are exactly where we were 30 years ago. Meanwhile, other countries all over the world have significantly surpassed us in terms of the number of people in those countries who are college graduates. In fact, right now, where once we were first in the world in terms of the percentage of our people who are college graduates, today we are 15th in the world.

Many people do not understand that today the U.S. Government is making huge profits off of higher education and the loans we are providing to our young people and to their parents. In fact, the estimate is that we will make about $184 billion in profits over the next 10 years. To my mind, making huge profits off of young people and their families who want nothing more than to fulfill the American dream of being able to go to college or graduate school and get out and earn a decent wage and make it into the middle class is obscene. We should not be profiteering off working families who are trying to send their kids to college. Yet, with the current legislation that will be on the floor, over a 10-year period we will be making $184 billion in profit.

Some people say: We have a deficit. We need to go forward with deficit reduction. This will help us to the tune of $184 billion in a 10-year period.

I say: If you want to do deficit reduction, don't take it out on working families, low-income families who are struggling to send their kids to college when one out of four major corporations in this country--many of which make billions of dollars a year in profit--is paying zero in taxes. If you want to do deficit reduction, ask those multinational corporations to start paying their fair share of taxes, not working families who are struggling.

Let's be clear about what this legislation that I expect will be on the floor shortly will do. It provides a variable interest rate. Let's look at what the CBO is telling us about where we may be going with interest rates in the coming years. What the CBO tells us is that in 2013 a 10-year Treasury note, on which this formula is based, is 1.81 percent; in 2014 it will be 2.57 percent; 2015, 3.35 percent; 2016, 4.24 percent; 2017, 4.95 percent. Those are CBO projections.

Based on the formula in this bill, here is what Americans will be paying for student loans. The good news is that because interest rates are low now, in 2013 it will be 3.86 percent for subsidized Stafford undergraduate loans; in 2014, 4.62 percent; 2015, 5.40 percent; 2016, 6.29 percent; 2017, 7 percent, according to CBO.

Under the graduate Stafford Loan Program, we are going to go from 5.4 percent to 6.1 percent, to 6.9 percent. In 2016, we will be at 7.8 percent and in 2017 we will be at 8.55 percent. By the way, all of those figures are below the cap in the bill.

What about the parents who are helping their students through the PLUS Loan Program? In 2013 it starts at 6.3 percent; 2014, 7 percent; 2015, 7.8 percent; 2016, 8.7 percent; 2017, 9.4 percent. In other words, people will get up here and say that initially interest rates will be low--because interest rates are low--but they are not telling us that in years to come interest rates are going to go up to unsustainable levels.

My amendment says: OK. Interest rates are low today. Let's take advantage of that fact, and let's sunset this bill in 2 years, where we can then have interest rates that are reasonably low--not as low as I would like them--and will not be prohibitive. Then, through the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, we can sit down and deal with two issues: No. 1, how are we, on a long-term basis, going to provide affordable loans, scholarships, and grants to the people of this country who need to advance their education? No. 2, how are we going to deal with the entire issue of college affordability? College in the United States costs much more than it does in virtually every other country on Earth.

We have over $1 trillion in debt in terms of college loans. College loans have tripled since 2004. Young people are graduating from college with $27,000 in debt. That is average. Some students have more debt. I have talked to dentists who went to dental school and are now over $200,000 in debt from their dental school bills.

We have a crisis right now, and it is a crisis which not only impacts the lives of millions of people and families in our country, it impacts our whole Nation economically in terms of whether we are going to have a well-educated workforce to compete in the global economy.

The legislation that is on the floor only makes a bad situation worse. The result of it will be more student debt than we currently have. The result of that legislation will be more young people who say: I don't want to get out of college and have a $50,000 debt, so I am not going to go to college. I guess I will never make it to the middle class and never be able to contribute to the country I love in a way that I thought was possible. We have to do better than this legislation.

The last point I wish to make is a political point: elections matter. The Presiding Officer recently ran for office. I ran for office in November. President Obama ran for office. When we run for office, we tell the American people what we believe and what we are going to fight for. The end result of those elections is that Barack Obama won a decisive victory. He is the President of the United States. What he campaigned on is: I am going stand up for the middle-class. The other guys aren't going to do it, so I am going to do it. What I ran on--as well as many of my colleagues--was: We are going to stand up for the middle class.

The results came in, and you know what. Barack Obama won. We have a Democratic President. As of today, the Senate has 54 Democrats. My question is: Why, with a Democratic President and a strong Democratic majority in the Senate, are we looking at legislation which is virtually the same as the legislation passed by an extremely conservative Republican House of Representatives? How does that happen?

What are we telling our constituents who voted for us? We said we were going to stand for the middle class. If we are going to stand for the middle class, we are standing for the affordability of college. We need to stand up for working-class kids so they can have the opportunity to be the first in their family--as I was in my family--to be able to go to college. We are talking to African-American kids and saying: You know what. There are alternatives to crime and jail. You too can go to college. Those are the people we are supposed to be talking to. I fear very much that the legislation that is coming to the floor will not do that. In fact, it will make people say: What is the difference? What is the difference between the House and the Senate?

I ask that my colleagues support my amendment. It will give us the time to come up with a long-term solution to a very serious problem.

I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

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