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In an incredibly one-sided article favorable to Chris Shays in today's Greenwich Citizen, reporter David Hennessey records Shays as defending his casting the deciding vote for the 2006 Republican budget by saying:
Shays denounced the claim that he supported $13 billion in cuts from the Student Loan Program. He pointed to his vote for the Deficit Reduction Act in 2005, which included student loan reforms that will save the government $14.3 billion over five years, and the program was not cut at all. "What happened was we said to the bank, if we are going to guarantee you that you don't lose money from student loans, then you don't get to make an excess profit," Shays said. "And anything above a certain amount goes back into the general fund Instead of it being 13 billion of federal dollars, it's $13 billion of the banks."
In fact, it was precisely because Shays and his Republican buddies actually did stick it to students and parents that incoming Congressional Democrats made cutting the interest rate on federal student loans in half over five years one of their "six for '06" priorities in the new congress. Here's an article I wrote in 2005 that tells the truth about Shays' deciding vote and how education advocates condemned what he did. Shays is always attempting to fool the voters about his real record. Let's make sure the public knows the truth: |
| In an interview last month with Greenwich Time, Congressman Chris Shays contended that criticism of his vote for the draconian 2006 Republican budget stemmed from "critics who have spread partisan misinformation about how the bill will hurt college students."
Was one of those critics to whom Mr. Shays referred David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, an umbrella group representing 1,800 degree-granting colleges and universities, including Yale, Wesleyan, and the Connecticut State University System? In a letter to the Senate, Ward stated unequivocally, "This is the biggest cut in the history of the federal student loan program." Further, "The (Republican budget) creates a new source of competition for scarce Pell Grant and campus-based aid grants, while simultaneously destabilizing the delivery of the federal student loan funds. It is shortsighted to ask college students and their families to bear so much of the burden of deficit reduction."
Perhaps Mr. Shays meant to single out Luke Swarthout, Higher Education Associate for the non-partisan State Public Interest Research Groups. Swarthout wrote that Congress had voted for "the largest cut in the history of the loan programs," and he characterized the cuts as "the largest raid on student aid in history. " Swarthout continued, "At a time when college costs continue to rise and students are going deeper into a financial hole, Congress has decided to use students and families to pay for other priorities. Rather than cutting lender subsidies, the bill derives most of its savings by continuing the practice of forcing student and parent borrowers to pay excessive interest rates on their loans and by increasing interest rates for parent borrowers." He noted that "nearly 70% of the bill's total student loan cuts come from students and families."
Maybe Mr. Shays meant to accuse Lauren Asher of spreading "partisan misinformation." Asher, Associate Director of the Institute for College Access and Success, estimated that, "when the new 6.8% interest rate goes into effect this July, borrower payments will be 20% higher than last year, more than doubling the amount of interest borrowers end up paying over the life of a loan." She pointed out that "two-thirds of recent graduates now carry student loans, and their average debt grew more than 50% over the past decade- after accounting for inflation."
If "partisan misinformation" is indeed being spread about Republican cuts to education, the real source would appear to be Mr. Shays himself. |
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