Securing American Jobs Through Exports Act of 2012--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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STUDENT LOANS

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, in just 2 weeks, similar to many proud parents, I will be watching as my youngest daughter walks across the graduation stage. For some students, this important milestone marks the end of their college days and the beginning of a professional career. This achievement should be filled with hope for a great future, but for many it will be a story saddled with student loan debt and uncertainty about the economy, their job prospects, and their future.

As I have listened to many of my Democratic colleagues discussing the extension of a special interest rate for the subsidized Stafford loans, I continue to hear false statements that would lead one to believe Republicans don't support extending this interest rate for students. This is simply not true.

In my State of South Dakota, nearly 30,000 students received subsidized Stafford loans during the 2010 2011 school year. While I support alleviating financial pressure on students, I did not support the partisan legislation brought forward by Majority Leader Reid that would extend subsidized Stafford loans while raising taxes on some employers, not because the goal of the legislation is misguided but because the way the majority leader proposed to pay for the legislation is misguided.

Majority Leader Reid's legislation, similar to its Republican counterpart, would extend the special rate of 3.4 percent for subsidized Stafford loans that existed for the 2011 2012 school year to the 2012 and 2013 school year. I agree with the extension of this special rate and would simply ask the majority leader to allow a vote on the Republican alternative, which I might add, passed the House of Representatives by a bipartisan vote on April 27. I voted against moving to the majority leader's bill because I disagree on two grounds with the way my Democratic colleagues proposed to pay for the temporary 1-year extension.

First, I fundamentally disagree with the idea of a permanent tax increase on certain job creators to pay for a temporary 1-year extension. We are talking about permanent tax changes to pay for temporary spending. That is bad policy. I furthermore believe any discussion about raising taxes should be addressed in a comprehensive tax reform discussion, not in a student loan bill.

Second, I disagree with diverting the payroll tax revenue away from the Medicare and Social Security trust funds, where it would ordinarily be directed. We saw this done during the health care bill a couple years ago, where Medicare reductions and revenue increases that were supposed to go to extend the lifespan of Medicare were, in fact, used to pay for new spending. We cannot continue to try to fool the American people that we are somehow extending the lifespan of Medicare when we are spending that money on new programs.

We are essentially double counting revenue and spending the same money twice. We cannot do that. We cannot do that anywhere else in the country, in this economy. Yet in Washington, DC, that has become the practice. What this would do is take changes in the Tax Code that would ordinarily go into the payroll tax fund or Medicare trust fund and now that is going to be used to pay for something else. This is a practice we cannot continue; we cannot sustain. We all know our trust funds are headed toward bankruptcy and continuing to raid them and use them for other purposes is simply a recipe for disaster.

I agree with the 37 business groups that wrote a letter to Leaders Reid and McConnell strongly opposing the $9 billion tax increase on small businesses proposed in the majority leader's legislation. These groups represent millions of employers, and they range from the National Federation of Independent Business to the Independent Community Bankers, to the National Restaurant Association. These 37 business groups all oppose the tax increases that would be included to pay to keep the interest rate at 3.4 percent.

I believe there could be bipartisan support for a proposal that has been put forward by Senators Enzi and Alexander, who are both leaders on education policy in the Senate. They proposed an alternative that pays for a temporary 1-year extension of a 3.4-percent interest rate by taking money from a slush fund created by ObamaCare in 2010. The President and Democrats have supported taking money from the slush fund in the past, so it seems odd that now they are suddenly up in arms in support of a slush fund that is supposedly aimed at prevention.

The President's own fiscal year 2013 budget proposal recommends using the prevention slush fund for other Federal priorities. My Democratic colleagues in the Senate supported taking $5 billion from the fund merely 11 weeks ago. So there is broad support for the idea of prevention, but the recent record of the use of prevention dollars shows these dollars are not being spent wisely. Funds in the prevention slush fund can be used on almost anything in the name of prevention and wellness. For example, jungle gyms, bike paths, farmers' markets, those are the types of things this so-called prevention slush fund is being used for. Keep in mind that in 2010, my Democratic colleagues used the $9 billion in savings in Federal student program aid to pay for part of ObamaCare instead of using that money to address the looming issue of the scheduled return to these higher interest rates on student loans.

It only seems rational and fitting to use the money that came from the student loan industry to address the interest rates for subsidized Stafford loans. At least it strikes me as very logical that since these funds were diverted from the student aid fund in the first place to pay for ObamaCare, we ought to recapture some of those funds to help keep student loan interest rates at the lower 3.4 percent level.

It is particularly interesting that the President suddenly has taken such a deep interest in this issue, when in 2007 he didn't even show up in the Senate to vote for the original legislation that created the temporary phased-down interest rate for subsidized Stafford loans. So despite the President's rhetoric, the greatest threat to young people looking for a job isn't the loan rates but the Obama economy.

This year's crop of college students looking for jobs is confronting an economy in which unemployment has remained above 8 percent for 39 straight months. A recent Associated Press report found that one out of every two recent graduates is jobless or underemployed within 1 year of finishing school. Graduates who are lucky enough to find a job will earn 9 percent less than if they had graduated just a few years ago.

A Gallup poll released this week gives even more bad news for young adults. According to Gallup, underemployment for 18- to 29-year-olds has hovered around 30 percent for most of the past year. Those graduates lucky enough to find employment are more likely to find jobs as waitresses and bartenders than as engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians.

On Tuesday, the President was out touting his to-do list for Congress. That is particularly interesting since the President had 3 1/2 years to put policies in place that would strengthen the economy. Here is what our graduates are getting. Here is what that Obama economy has brought about: Long-term unemployment is up 89 percent; the number of Americans who are on food stamps is up 45 percent; gas prices have doubled; college tuition is up 25 percent; worker health insurance costs are up 23 percent; and the Federal debt we are passing on to future generations is up 47 percent. The only thing that has gone down on his watch is home values, which is down 14 percent.

Our country and our college graduates have had enough of the Obama economy. Instead of the to-do list the President has put forward, we have a to-stop list for you. Stop job-killing regulations that are hurting our small businesses' ability to create jobs, stop trying to raise taxes on small businesses and job creators who are the people who are going to hire our college graduates, stop blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline which would help wean our country from the dependence we have on foreign sources of energy, and stop the divisive use of class warfare that does nothing but divide Americans.

It is time for the President and Congress to come to the realization that we have to shift our focus away from election-year standoffs and come together to focus on changing the course of our lagging economy so we can once again put our young people back to work, which is the real objective that should be our focus. These other issues, which are a lot of campaign gimmicks, a lot of opportunities to politicize this issue or that issue, are counterproductive in the long run. The floor of the Senate is being used, it seems more and more these days, to make campaign points, political points, rather than to address the fundamental issues that are affecting Americans and our economy.

I would hope we can come together to work in a constructive way on policies that will get Americans back to work, and that means doing something about these regulations which are crushing the ability of our small businesses to create jobs. We hear about it every single day.

When I travel my State of South Dakota or elsewhere around the country, I hear from businesses, the people out there trying to create jobs, about regulations, about taxes, about the cost of things, their inputs going up. Those are the issues we ought to be addressing. We ought to figure out how to reform the Tax Code, how to reduce Federal spending and reform the entitlement programs so we can save Social Security and Medicare.

We ought to look at what we can do to put in place a real all-the-above energy strategy that would help keep energy costs affordable for people out there creating jobs. In my view, those are the types of things on which we ought to be focusing.

Frankly, we have seen a lot of action and activity in the other body, in the House of Representatives, many bills they have sent to the Senate that are small business bills that would address these very issues, such as the high cost of regulations, the issue of taxation, the issue of energy independence--all these things that we believe would lead us toward a stronger economy that would get Americans back to work and offer more opportunity to young people, to our college graduates as they emerge from their programs of study this year and in years to come.

Yet we continue to have the rhetoric on the floor of the Senate suggesting that somehow Republicans are not in favor of keeping interest rates low for student loans. Think about that. It is illogical to even suggest that. However, we do have a fundamental difference of finance as to how we ought to pay for that. The other side suggests we could pay for that by raising taxes on people who create jobs.

We believe we ought to go back and take the funds out of the prevention slush fund, which in the first place was created out of dollars that were allegedly saved when the Federal Government took over the student loan program, which happened as a part of ObamaCare. Not a lot of people realize that because it got buried in the whole debate over health care.

The student loan program, which used to be administered out of private lenders where they originated and serviced the loans, has now been taken over by the government. In doing so, savings were counted that were then used to pay for the cost of the health care bill. So all we are simply doing is saying the slush fund that was created by the funds that supposedly were saved by moving the student loan program into the government ought to be used for student loan fund programs to actually keep the funds that ought to be used to fund keeping the interest rate low, down at 3.4 percent for college students today. As I said, it seems very fitting to me, very logical, and very intuitive that would be the way we would fund this.

But to suggest for a minute that somehow Republicans in the Senate are not in favor of keeping interest rates at as low a rate as possible for our college students is completely missing the point. It is massive election-year politics, and I hope we can get away from that and focus on not only a solution in the near term with this issue but also the bigger issue.

The bigger issue is the fact that I just mentioned, that literally one-half of all college students who are coming out are either not finding jobs or are underemployed. Those who are finding jobs are making significantly less than those who graduated just a few years ago. That is an economic problem. That is a problem that needs to be addressed not by simply having a debate about student loans but what we are going to do to get this economy growing again and get American businesses creating jobs.

We need to make it less expensive and less difficult for American businesses to create jobs, not more expensive and more difficult, which is precisely what is happening as a result of the policies coming out of this administration in the form of regulations and many of the legislative initiatives that are coming out of the Congress or at least proposed to come out of the Senate.

I wish to work with my colleagues on solutions that will put Americans back to work and give our college graduates greater opportunity, greater hopes for a higher standard of living and higher quality of life, something many of us have inherited from those who came before us. These opportunities are increasingly at risk and in jeopardy because of the amount of spending and the amount of debt and the policies coming out of Washington that are making it increasingly difficult for us to come out from underneath an economy that has anemic growth and chronic high unemployment.

I yield the floor.

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