It’s not uncommon to hear baby boomers regale their kids and grandkids with tales of the good old days when flipping burgers and a little bit of help from your parents was all it took to afford a college education.

Now one lawmaker is drawing on that experience as inspiration to help today’s student loan borrowers pay back their debts.

Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) is introducing a bill Thursday that would allow federal student loan borrowers to receive a lower interest rate on their loans without having to turn to a private company. If the bill, which has 19 co-sponsors, becomes law, borrowers with relatively high interest rates can consolidate their loans into a new federal student loan with a rate of 4%. If a borrower has multiple student loans with an average interest rate that’s lower than 4% she can consolidate into a new loan that uses that average rate.

“We have to reduce the drag of student loan debt on the economy as a whole, which means lowering monthly payments and also lowering the debt overall,” Peters told MarketWatch.

Peters, 58, said he’s particularly concerned about the toll rising college costs and growing student debt is taking on today’s young people because he credits his success in part to the access he had to a relatively cheap college degree that could easily be covered by a little bit of low-interest debt, a work-study job cleaning out the bird cages in the psychology department and some help from his parents.

“After I got out of college, I had some debt, but it was entirely manageable,” said Peters, who graduated in 1980. “It never really affected my ability to buy a house at the right time, get married or buy a car. That’s very different from what we see today.”

Indeed, research indicates that today’s college graduates are delaying home buying, marriage and other financial milestones in part because of their student loans. And that’s different from what their parents and grandparents experienced. At more than $1.3 trillion, student debt now makes up more than 10% of household balance sheets, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, compared with just 3.3% in 2003.

But critics have questioned whether allowing borrowers to refinance their federal student loans is the best way to cope with those challenges. For one, borrowers struggling with their debts already access to programs, such as income-based repayment, which allow them to better manage their loans, said Jason Delisle, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. A high interest rate is relatively irrelevant to borrowers who use these programs and qualify for some sort of forgiveness because it just adds to the amount they’ll have forgiven, he said.

What’s more, the people who stand to gain the most from proposals to refinance student loan interest rates are likely borrowers with relatively high incomes, Delisle said. That’s because borrowers with the highest debt loads will benefit the most from the opportunity to refinance and a high debt load is typically a sign that a borrower went to graduate school and got a degree that will benefit them in the labor market. It’s borrowers with less than $10,000 in student debt who typically struggle the most.

“The biggest benefits are going to go to people who have the highest income and that’s expensive,” Delisle said.

Still, proposals to refinance student loans are politically popular on both sides of the aisle, despite (or perhaps because) high-income borrowers stand to benefit the most. Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump criticized high student loan interest rates on the campaign trail. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton embraced the idea of allowing student borrowers to refinance their loans at lower rates. And Peters’s proposal isn’t the only student loan refinance bill winding its way through congress.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Ct.) re-introduced bills in the Senate and House earlier this month that would allow borrowers to refinance their debts at the rates offered to new borrowers during the 2016-2017 school year. Peters chose to introduce a different version that commits to the maximum 4% interest rate and doesn’t specifically target raising taxes on wealthy Americans to pay for the cost of refinancing student loans, which is politically controversial. Instead Peters is hoping to get a cost estimate for the bill and build consensus around the proposal as well as how to pay for it.

Despite the highly partisan nature of Congress and a recent budget plan from the Department of Education that proposes cutting $143 billion from the student loan program over the next 10 years, Peters said he’s optimistic that when lawmakers get through this volatile phase, they’ll be ready to work and embrace proposals like his.

“People want an opportunity to compete and they want to be empowered to compete,” he said. “We’re not talking about anything other than continuing the federal role in supporting people who qualify for college.”