The House and Senate are preoccupied with choice in student loan lending. That is, they’re preoccupied with how to restrict your choice in student loan lending. For some reason, they seem to think that choice is bad. Competition among lenders is the best mechanism for generating choice, and for some reason, they don’t want lenders to compete for your business.

Wait a minute? What happened to the whole “free-market” thing? You know, the one where competition is good, and it forces consumer costs down – the one where the consumer wins. Congress wants to get rid of that one, and replace it with a little number of its own.

Don’t think of it as losing your lending options. Think of it like this: the government has helped you narrow down your choices to one or two lenders. You didn’t have time to do all that research into FFELP lenders that could have saved you thousands of dollars over the course of your loan, anyway.

To streamline the process even further, the government has eliminated all of those confusing options that the FFELP lenders offered, like fee waivers, loan consolidations and interest rate reductions that would have lowered your bill even further.

And now, if you can’t find any lenders in your state, the government will do an “easy pick” for you, just like the lottery. I’m absolutely certain that the Lender of Last Resort will make an excellent student loan lender for you. Don’t you? I’m sure that the LLR will find ways to help reduce your bill by providing loan consolidations, interest rate reductions, fee waivers and the like, don’t you?

No matter which approach you look at, Congress isn’t doing you any favors by reducing choice and eliminating lenders from the student loan program. The program that provides the most choice in lending works best for most families. There is no one-size-fits-all that works for everyone. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the Democrats in Congress are trying to do. They want to take away your choice and disable the free-market components that are working to keep your student loan interest rates low.

Congress isn’t interested in helping most families when it comes to student loans. They’re not interested in what’s best for the majority of student borrowers and they really don’t care about what you need. They waive the promise of a 50-percent rate cut to garner support for their bill, then they take that away, and leave a chaotic, incoherent mess in its place that doesn’t help anyone, and hurts most middle-class families.

Tell your Senators and Representatives that you want the program that provides the most number of student loan lending choices and that benefits the most number of American families.

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