Everyone better vote for Elizabeth Warren in 2016!
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...-student-loans
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) can't catch a break. Senate Republicans voted Wednesday morning to block her latest piece of liberal reform.
The Senate voted 56-38 in favor of Warren's bill to help ease the burden of student loan debt. Despite a majority of senators approving the measure,
it failed to reach the 60 votes needed to overcome Republicans' filibuster of the measure.
Warren's bill is a simple concept. Current students can take out government loans at 3.86 percent interest, a cheaper rate than many of the loans held by past generations of students. The bill would also allow borrowers to refinance their current loans down to that lower rate.
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The main reason Republicans objected to the measure has less to do with the idea of easing student loan debt, and more with the mechanism Warren used to offset the cost of refinancing those loans. It would cost the government $51 billion over the next decade to allow borrowers to refinance. But
Warren's bill would have actually reduced the deficit, bringing in $72 billion in new revenues by implementing the so-called Buffet Rule, an added surcharge tax on millionaires to ensure that they pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes.
"It’s a basic question on our values," Warren told the Boston Globe this week. "Does this country protect millionaires’ and billionaires’ tax loopholes? Or does it try to help young people who are just starting their economic lives?"