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A bill that would have let millions of people refinance their student loans at a lower interest rate has failed in the Senate, after Republicans objected that it included a tax on the wealthy to pay for it. The measure would have allowed people with older loans to benefit from today's low interest rates.

The bill from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., didn't get past a procedural vote, falling by a 56-38 vote. Called the Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act, it was shot down days after President Obama urged Congress to help ease the burden of student debt.

Noting that her bill had bipartisan support, Warren said today that she would continue the effort to help "40 million Americans out there who are trying to deal with $1.2 trillion in student loan debt."

Warren said people with student loans should be on the same footing as homeowners and small businesses that are allowed to refinance their loan obligations.

"Republicans objected to the so-called Buffett Rule, which would increase income tax raise rates on the rich who make most of their money off investments, so that they would pay the same rate as those earning wages," NPR's S.V. Date reports for our Newscast unit.

"Only three Republicans voted with Democrats to proceed with the bill," Date says, "not enough to clear the Senate's 60-vote threshold."

After the vote, Warren asked a pointed question of her colleagues:

"Today is a really good day for billionaires. For the 40 million people dealing with student loan debt, it wasn't such a good day. This raises the fundamental question: Who does Washington work for? Does it work for those who can hire armies of lobbyists to make sure that every single loophole in the tax code is protected for them? Or does it work for young people who are trying to get started in life?"

On Monday, President Obama unveiled a plan to ease the burden on those paying student loans, signing an executive order that caps borrowers' payments at 10 percent of their monthly income.

As NPR's Anya Kamenetz noted, the president's plan expands the Pay As You Earn program, which is hobbled by a serious flaw: "few people have actually signed up for it."

The car industry is required to raise the average fuel efficiency of its vehicles to 54.5 miles a gallon by 2025. But consumers have been reluctant to adopt hybrid technology that'll get the industry there quicker.

That means the car companies have to find other ways to get fuel savings.

If you were to guess, how important would you say fuel economy is to the car business? How much of the research and development is going into making cars more efficient?

Margaret Wooldridge a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Michigan has a pretty good educated guess: "I think all the churn is on fuel economy and the rest is window dressing to make sure [automakers] maintain or expand market share."

That's what car manufactures say: Fuel economy is right up there with safety.

So, how hard is it to make cars more fuel efficient? A Honda Civic from 1984 got 47 miles a gallon. Achieving a few more miles per gallon can't be that hard, right?

"If your only condition was build me a vehicle for 55 miles a gallon ... two snaps we could have it done," Wooldridge says.

"But, now design me that vehicle that's attractive, that has all the safety features, that [has] all the creature comforts that we've come to love and expect — my navigation systems, plug in my phone, power heating ... of my steering wheel," Wooldridge says. "So all of those comforts add more and more constraints and more and more burdens that make this harder and harder."

Business

Ford's New F-150 May Pave The Way For More Aluminum Cars

Skip Stiles stands on the edge of a small inlet known as the Hague, near downtown Norfolk, Virginia. The Chrysler Museum of Art is nearby, as are dozens of stately homes, all threatened by the water.

"We've got...[a] lot of old buildings around here: this apartment building, that church over there, been around since the turn of the last century," says Stiles, the executive director of Wetlands Watch, a Virginia-based environmental group. "You can sort of mark where the storms have come over the years and you can see the progress of these storms as they come farther and farther up onto these buildings."

Climate change may be an abstract concept to many people but in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, it's very real: Sea levels are rising, and the area is increasingly subject to flooding. At the same time, Virginia is a coal-producing state, and the nation's largest coal shipping port is in the region.

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It's been a little more than a year since San Jose, Calif., increased the city's minimum wage by $2 per hour, with adjustments for inflation. Now at $10.15 an hour, it's one of the state's highest.

Back in 2012, as voters were debating the wage hike, some in the restaurant and hospitality industry warned that an increase would be bad for the sector. It would deter new businesses from opening, they said, and would cause existing businesses to slash hours for employees.

So how are San Jose's businesses faring today? The answer is, it depends.

The vast majority of the 17,000 minimum wage jobs in the city are in the food service and hospitality sectors. After the wage increase, the Pizza My Heart restaurant raised its prices by about 5 percent.

Just a block from San Jose State University, Pizza My Heart gets heavy foot traffic that adds to a line out the door on most days. The restaurant does a brisk business; about 50 pizzas come out of its brick oven every hour.

Like many business owners in downtown, Chuck Hammers fought the ballot initiative and braced for the worst when the law took effect last March.

"There's that little bit of a panic from a business owner, you know, 'Is the sky going to fall?' " Hammers says. "And you're nervous. It's a 20 percent increase in what's really one of your biggest costs" — labor.

"After looking at it, I kind of stepped back and realized, well, it's gonna happen to everyone," Hammers says. "It's going to be a fair playing field. We just need to increase prices a little bit."

So he did. Slices went up by 25 cents, pies by $1. Sales held steady and Hammers says customers didn't seem to notice.

Hammers owns 24 Pizza My Heart shops, a franchise. Only four shops are in San Jose, but he decided to raise everyone's wages at all his stores. Otherwise, he says, he was worried he'd lose workers at his franchises outside the city, where the minimum wage is lower.

"The employees like it, they're sticking around longer," Hammers says. "We're getting very little turnover now in employees, which is really good."

In fact, Hammers is opening more Pizza My Hearts. He still bristles at the suggestion that he's a booster of raising the minimum wage. But at the same time, Hammers says he understands that it's almost impossible to live on $8 an hour in a city where the average two-bedroom apartment goes for more than $2,000 a month.

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