Rubio Discusses Student Loans On The Senate Floor Rubio: "The interest rate is a problem. Not having a job is a catastrophe. The interest rate could be zero, but if you don't have a job how are you going to pay it?
not new by the way. This has been the mode of operation for most of the weeks that I’ve been in the United States Senate. It’s a pretty familiar pattern. The campaign for the President decides on an issue they want to use to divide Americans for electoral purposes. The Senate offers up a bill they know Republicans will vote against, and then they spend a week giving speeches on it. The only difference with this one is they’re doubling down on it. We’re going to vote on the exact same thing a second time, just to drive the point home.
Here’s why this bothers me. Number one, because there are real issues this country faces, issues that deserve a sense of urgency, issues that deserve every single person that serves here to solve them. This is one of them by the way. We don’t have time to waste on shows. It bothers me. The second reason why it bothers me is these are real people that are being impacted by this issue. There are real people out there, that because they can’t find a job when they graduate, they’ve got to get a forbearance. Forbearance means they’ve got to call their lender and say, “I can’t pay you.” You know what happens when you get a forbearance on your loan? It compounds. It sits there unpaid. You’re not delinquent. They give you a grace period where you don’t have to pay it, but I compounds. The interest rate is added to the principal. And so by the time you start paying it, your loan is even bigger than the loan you took out of college.
There are other people that can only afford to make X amounts of payments a month because they’re not making as much money. Maybe they didn’t find the job they thought they were going to have, so all they can do is pay the interest on the loan. You know what that means? That means that by the time they finish off paying off these loans their kids will be in college. And let me tell you in the real life of someone that has a loan because I’ve had these loans and I still have one. What it means in the real life of a person who has a loan like this is the following: You can’t save for your own kids’ college. Which means that not only will you have student loan debt, but your children will be stuck with student loan debt as well.
What bothers me about this issue is that instead of solving it, we have spent a week playing a game with it while real people are out there scared to death. Real students, real parents, real families who are facing the threat not just of this increase in this interest rate, but of an economy that doesn’t have a job for them. You think the interest rate is the biggest risk that these people are running? It
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