On Monday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” CNBC Contributor and former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) stated that the government has used student loans to make taxpayers finance exorbitant increases in college tuition and Congress has to work on that issue.
Heitkamp said, “I didn’t support a forgiveness of principal. I think there needs to be some interest rate relief. I think those people who have literally paid over and over again for their student loans, but the interest keeps compounding on them, I think we ought to take a look at how that works. … Now, it becomes really, I think, incumbent on the Department of Education to go back, take a look at some — especially some of these older loans where people have been paying for 20 years and not getting ahead, try and figure out how you can give relief. But, right now, if you wanted to find consensus, I think bipartisan consensus is [in] looking at the cost of higher education and how you get that under control. For a long time, it was simply the costs went up and the government funded it through student loans. And that — we’ve got the mess now because we didn’t control it back then.”
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