Earlier this week on Univision, the Spanish-language network’s Maria Elena Salinas interviewed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at River Valley Community College in Claremont, NH. During that interview, Clinton expressed her confidence she could get a Republican-led Congress to pass her $350-billion public college plan with large tax increases on the wealthy.
Salinas asked, “Well, you just rolled out your new education program, and what it includes is helping kids pay for tuition, particularly the public colleges. And this will cost $350 billion in 10 years. Well, as you can expect, the Republican opponents are criticizing you because to pay for it, you’d have to raise taxes. Do you think that this would be approved by a Republican-led Congress?”
Clinton replied, “I do, because I think what I would do is to have rich people pay more to make sure that hard working young people can go to college. And what I would do is to say, we’re going to back to the level of deductions that were permitted when Ronald Reagan was president. And I think this will be an important issue to a lot of students and their families around the country. And I think we can build a big movement that demands more help. Because right now it’s gotten so expensive that so many young people—they try to start college, they can’t afford to finish. If they do finish, they have so much debt they can’t afford to get on with their lives. And I think that’s wrong. And that would be particularly important for Hispanic students because Hispanic students are now going to college at a much higher rate. But they still face a lot of financial burdens. And I want to make it possible to afford college and then to refinance to a lower rate of payback the debt that you have.”
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