Support the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act

Senator Elizabeth Warren earned her chops as a strong advocate of consumer rights against the machinations of credit card lenders and major banks.  It was largely her advocacy as a Harvard Professor that led to the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in President Obama's first term.  These credentials then helped her win election to Ted Kennedy's old senate seat in Massachusetts last November.  Warren is a true champion of average Americans and a thorn in the side of Washington special interest business as usual.  Her basic premise, that it's wrong to give preferential treatment to the high and mighty and the shaft to average citizens, is at the heart of her first stand-alone piece of Senate legislation: to give student borrowers the same interest rate the Federal Reserve gives big banks when they come looking for short-term cash.  It deserves your support. 

Warren's proposal the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act would peg Stafford loans to students at the same 0.75% rate banks pay at the Fed's "discount window."  With the next increase scheduled for Stafford loans, they are about to go up to 6.8%.  As Warren said Wednesday on the Senate floor, "In other words, the federal government is going to charge students interest rates that are nine times higher than the rates for the biggest banks — the same banks that destroyed millions of jobs and nearly broke this economy," she said. "That isn’t right."  See her entire Senate presentation here.  It runs six and a half minutes. 

Student debt currently stands at over $1 trillion, and the federal government makes about $34 billion a year in profit from these loans.  The fact that such terms are pricing many out of college and depressing the spending capacity of college graduates acts as a brake on economic growth and the recovery.  In order to compete internationally we need more college graduates, not fewer.  And in order to jump start our own economy we need more people moving into the middle class, not more stuck in dead end jobs due to a lack of access and opportunity. 

As Senator Warren says, "We shouldn’t be profiting from our students who are drowning in debt while we’re giving great deals to big banks,"  If you agree. let your own senators know.  Here's how.
Click on this link to urge your senator to support Warren's legislation.