Rolling Stone: The Student Loan Crusader: How Elizabeth Warren Wants to Reduce Debt
AUG 20, 2014
As a first-term senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren is advancing her fight for middle-class families with a legislative agenda focused on college affordability and student debt. "Rising student-loan debt is an economic emergency," she says. "Forty million people are dealing with $1.2 trillion in outstanding student debt. It's stopping young people from buying homes, from buying cars and from starting small businesses. We need to take action."
Warren's bills range from pie-in-the-sky progressive - she called for college loans to be issued at the same, nearly free, interest rates that Wall Street banks receive from the Fed - to soberly bipartisan. Her proposal to refinance outstanding student-loan debt at less than four percent interest (financed by a new minimum tax on America's top earners) nearly cleared the Senate in June, and will return to the Senate floor for a new vote this fall. "This country invests in tax loopholes for billionaires," she says. "And forces college students to pay for them through higher interest rates on their loans. That makes no sense at all."
Read the Q&A at the Rolling Stone website here.
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