Elizabeth Warren responds after angry dad confronts her on student loans
After being confronted by a man questioning her student loan forgiveness plan, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren dismissed his argument. "We don't build an America by saddling our kids with debt," she said on "CBS This Morning" Friday.
In the exchange, which was caught on video and posted to Twitter Tuesday, the father tells Warren that he saved all his money for his daughter's college education. "Am I going to get my money back?" he asked her, to which she said "of course not."
"So you're going to pay for people who didn't save any money and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?" he said.
Asked how she responds to him and others with the same opinion, Warren said, "Look, we build a future going forward by making it better. By that same logic what would we have done? Not started Social Security because we didn't start it last week for you or last month for you."
When asked if she was "saying tough luck" to those people, she said "No," but went into a story about how she was given a shot to go to college even though her family "had no money."
"There was $50 a semester option for me. I was able to go to college and become a public school teacher because America had invested in a $50 a semester option for me," she said. "Today that's not available."
Warren said to save the next generation from trillions of dollars of debt, the country has to invest again.
"We don't build an America by saddling our kids with debt. We build an America by saying we're going to open up those opportunities for kids to be able to get an education without getting crushed by student loan debt," she said.
The senator was also asked whether she and fellow Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders had worked out their differences and if she was surprised the public got to hear their conversation after the last debate when she confronted him, saying "I think you called me a liar on national TV," but, she refused to comment.
"I've said all I'm going to say about this," she said.
Asked specifically about Hillary Clinton's claim about Sanders in a new documentary that "nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him," Warren said, "I'm not going there."
Warren, along with Sanders and two other Democratic senators running for president, had to leave the campaign trial to be at the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The Iowa caucus is on February 3.