Senate Votes Down Elizabeth Warren's Student Loan Bill
If you like your exorbitantly high student loan interest rate, you can keep it. The Senate voted 56 to 38 against Sen. Elizabeth Warren's bill to allow federal and private student loan borrowers to refinance their loans at today's lower rates, Bloomberg reports. The good news is rich people won't be getting a tax hike.
"With this vote, we show the American people who we work for in the United States Senate: billionaires or students," Warren said. Republicans, however, faulted Democrats for playing politics with the vote. “Senate Democrats don’t actually want a solution for their students,” Sen. Mitch McConnell said prior to the vote. “They want an issue to campaign on.”
If the bill had gone forward, it could have lowered payments for a lot of students. As we explained on Monday, the bill would have allowed borrowers with higher rates to refinance at 3.84 percent, the rate current borrowers get. And unlike President Obama's executive action to expand income-based repayment plans to older loans, this would have benefitted private loan borrowers (at least, the ones who were current on their payments), who usually face higher interest rates.
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This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/06/senate-votes-down-elizabeth-warrens-student-loan-bill/372579/
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