[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 10410]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      STUDENT LOAN INTEREST RATES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from New 
York (Mr. Israel) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. ISRAEL. Mr. Speaker, in 5 days, the student loan interest rate 
will double. It will go from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. That is a 
$4,500 increase for many college students. At a time when they're 
struggling to make ends meet, struggling to pay their tuition and their 
housing expenses to prepare to join the workforce and build careers and 
at a time when they're struggling to pay their debts, we're going to 
increase their debt.
  I want to commend to my colleagues a report that just came out from 
the Joint Economic Committee staff that talks about how student loan 
debt has skyrocketed over the past several years. Here's how the study 
concludes:

       The increasing debt burden presents challenges for recent 
     graduates just beginning their careers and poses a potential 
     risk to the economy, since individuals who shoulder heavier 
     debt balances may delay purchasing a home, buying a car, 
     starting a family, and saving for retirement. On average, 
     recent graduates left college with student loan debt of 60 
     percent of their annual income.

  Mr. Speaker, 60 percent of their annual income will be spent paying 
back their debts from college. And if we don't compromise, it's going 
to be even more than that.
  I've always believed, and I know many of my colleagues have always 
believed, that you build an economy by building the middle class. And 
you expand the middle class by making sure that middle class families 
can afford college and that college is accessible. I do not understand 
an economic strategy that says that you make it harder and more 
expensive for the middle class to go to college; nor do I understand an 
argument that we cannot afford to keep the interest rate low, but we 
can spend $40 billion subsidizing the five richest oil companies in 
America who do not need those subsidies.
  The middle class deserves those subsidies. Middle class students 
trying to get into college deserve subsidies. But to say that they 
cannot have those subsidies and that we're going to double the interest 
rate on them while preserving a $40 billion subsidy to the richest oil 
companies on Earth is not only bad policy; it's ruinous economic 
strategy.
  Mr. Speaker, I do not know why anybody in this body would want to 
make it harder and more difficult for students to go to college at a 
time when we are competing with China and South Korea and other 
countries around the world to continue our strength and power over the 
next several decades.
  It is essential that we find a compromise, Mr. Speaker. There is an 
unquenchable thirst by Americans for compromise in this body. I, for 
one, as well as members of the House Democratic Caucus, am ready, 
willing, and able to compromise over the next 5 days. We just need 
somebody to compromise with. We need a compromise that is fair to the 
middle class, puts middle class families first, puts college students 
first, puts college affordability first, and puts partisan politics 
aside.

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