Student loans get no credit from GOP

Senate Republicans this week blocked a measure that would have let students refinance their debt just like homeowners and businesses do every day.
The GOP leadership, in the person of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, complained that Sen. Elizabeth Warren's legislation did nothing to address student debt and in fact was nothing but an election-year ploy to make a campaign issue.
Of course, the Republicans didn't offer any legislative alternatives to address the crushing $1.2 trillion student loan debt that economists, real estate agents and bankers fear is hampering economic growth. The average student borrower now carries $25,000 in debt, a figure that increased 70 percent between 2004 and 2012.
Recent graduates struggling to pay their college loans likely aren't out buying cars or houses.


Sen. Elizabeth Warren               

Warren's bill would have let people with federal and private loans issued before 2010 refinance at 3.85 percent. That's the rate Congress set for federal student loans a year ago.
The proposal actually won a majority of Senate votes, 56. And three Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted with Democrats. But under the Senate's arcane rules, a majority isn't a majority. Warren needed 60 votes to advance the legislation.
Republicans simply weren't going to back a bill that called for a new tax on millionaires to offset the cost of lowering interest rates on students. Fine. Warren said she's willing to find other ways to pay for it. But from across the aisle her offer was met with silence.
Student debt is among the few things that can't be dismissed by bankruptcy, the theory being a lender can't repossess an education. That's fine too.
What's not fine is subsidizing businesses with tax dollars or loaning money to banks at virtually zero or allowing companies to avoid U.S. taxes by off-shoring their operations solely for the dodge. And it's not fine to do that while refusing to make low-cost loans available to the next generation of doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, academics and, ironically, business leaders.