Sen. Rick Scott suggested that a move to forgive or cancel student loan debt would disadvantage people who “paid their way through school” as he did.
Scott made the remarks during an interview Wednesday on “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.”
“I know I got the help of the GI Bill because I was in the U.S. Navy,” Scott said.
“But they went and worked full time. Or their parents worked full time, or their grandparents worked full time to pay their way through school so they had no debt.”
Scott, the richest member of the U.S. Senate, was adamant.
“If they’re going to run up debt, they need to have a plan to pay it back.”
Scott continued to press against forgiveness proposals during an interview Wednesday evening on Newsmax during an interview with Sean Spicer.
“With regard to saying for this small group of people that they get their debt forgiven when other people did what I did,” Scott said, talking again about the GI Bill.
“There’s people like us who did that around the country,” Scott advised. “They shouldn’t be treated worse than the people who went out and got these debts.”
Currently, payment deadlines for federal student loans are paused, with a moratorium in effect through August 2022. But pressure has mounted from Democrats for Biden to move forward with a plan for debt cancellation. More than $1.6 trillion is owed by 43 million people. As the Associated Press reported earlier this month, seven million Americans are in default.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday policy moves are imminent, and Biden “would make a decision about any cancellation of student debt before the conclusion of that pause on student loans” in August.
This article first appeared at Florida Politics.
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2022.
