AZ Daily Sun: Kirkpatrick presses for loan action

U.S. Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick held a rally Friday morning at NAU to call on others to help her press her colleagues in Congress to keep interest rates for college students from doubling.

"If Congress doesn't do anything by July first, student interest rates will double to 6.8 percent ... Here in Arizona 450,000 students who have subsidized Stafford loans will see their interest rates double," the Flagstaff Democrat told an audience of about 60.

She's voted against a measure to increase rates (the U.S. House approved it on a mostly party-line vote) and signed onto two bills to keep rates flat until 2015 or for four years.

Popular, subsidized Stafford loans currently have a 3.4 percent interest rate, but are set to increase to 6.8 percent if no action is taken. One proposal now being debated would increase those to 3.8 percent, and set higher rates of 5.3 percent for graduate loans and 6.3 percent for additional loans.

NAU Junior Tyler Dowden has $3,000 in subsidized loans, $3,000 in unsubsidized loans, scholarships, two jobs and expects to graduate more than $25,000 in debt.

He wants to work at a nonprofit, he told the audience, but he might have to take a job in an industry that generally offers bigger paychecks, on account of his loans.

"Money will be tight and I might be priced out of my career," he said.

Kirkpatrick returns to Washington on Tuesday.

She answered some questions on other current topics:

Q: Meaningful gun control bills have failed. What do you think? Should there be more efforts or does it end here?

A: "We should continue to work on it. People are not giving up. I just had people from Newtown (Conn.) in my office about a week ago and they are not giving up.

Q: Do you plan to introduce something?

A: "I'm not going to introduce something. I will vote for something that's meaningful and that makes common sense."

Q: The Gang of Eight immigration plan: Support, oppose?

A: "Very much support their efforts and what they're doing. Hoping that legislation will ... be voted out of the Senate very soon. The House is going to be doing it piecemeal. I just hope they do something because then we can reconcile the two versions in conference. We've gotta get this done."

Q: Sequestration ... what should be done to deal with it?

A: "We need to sit down in a bipartisan way and make strategic cuts. This meat-ax approach of just cutting everything is what's hurting us. There are cuts we can make, obviously, and we need to do that strategically and in a bipartisan way."

Q: The broad electronic surveillance recently revealed under the Patriot Act: What do you think about it? Is it OK? Not OK?

A: "The American people need to know how they're being surveilled. We need to be having a national conversation now. The Patriot Act has been in existence long enough that people really need to take a hard look at it. Is this what we want? Is this how we want to be treated? Is this the kind of invasion of privacy that we'll allow in our lives for security?"