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Say Hi to SoFi. It’s Suing to Force You to Repay Student Loans Faster
- Simulacra 4y agohttps://archive.is/4Mpon https://archive.is/4Mpon
- yanderekko 4y ago>“When the government does something good for citizens and you can’t make money, that should not be the basis for the standing to sue,” said Persis Yu, deputy executive director and managing counsel at the Student Borrower Protection Center. “Corporations do not have a right to be profitable.” Sadly, the predictably insufferable editorial bias of this article prevents the interesting questions from being asked/answered. It's unlikely that SoFi's lawsuit is premised on a "right to be profitable", but instead on actual legal arguments concerning the never-ending moratorium on loan repayment. What are these legal arguments? Guess I'll have to Google it. [Edit] Looking to other sources, I guess there are actual legal questions regarding who has standing to sue the government for student loan extension. IANAL but having standing to sue and a "right to be profitable" is pretty different..
- lokar 4y agoNot different if their argument for standing is that they can’t get customers.
- yanderekko 4y agoNo, because proving that they can't get customers doesn't mean that they'll win the case. Just that it won't get tossed on standing grounds.
- lokar 4y agoBut that can’t be a cause for standing. Should oil companies have standing to prevent mass transit?
- yanderekko 4y agoI mean, maybe not "mass transit" in the abstract but a lot of specific mass transit policies that directly impact their business? Absolutely. If the lawsuits are frivolous, then there are targeted rules for this that should be invoked.
- wolverine876 4y agoWhat makes their business special that its status quo somehow must be preserved? The status quo isn't a right.
- yanderekko 4y agoAgain, having standing to sue does not mean they'll win the case. They will not win the case by saying "we have a right to profit and the government's policy is subverting this", and the fact that anyone could read the article and come away acting like this is actually their argument just shows what a disservice its bias is doing.
- wolverine876 4y agoSo I can't just think these things myself and have a valid opinion, you must dismiss my views as invalid and having been manipulated by the article. An ironic claim about bias. Also, do you have evidence of the bias you claim, or are you just biased?
- gaganyaan 4y agoReading this thread is bizarre. You're straight-facedly arguing for an absurd position, people point out how absurd it is, and then you double down and defend the absurdity.
- yanderekko 4y agoAlternatively, I'm right and many others are wrong, largely because they're systematically biased based on loosely-applied tribal sentiments about federal government good, private loans bad, and all specific arguments are ad hoc and downstream from this. If you feel like contributing, please bring some arguments to the table. Do you think that SoFi is grounding its legal arguments in a "right to profit"? Do you think a broadly agreed-upon "right to profit" is necessary to generate legal standing in this case? Why?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wolverine876 4y ago> predictably insufferable editorial bias On the Internet, these are always ironic words.
- exabrial 4y ago> insufferable editorial bias well said.
- nimbius 4y agojust gobsmacked at how the US managed to cobble together a teetering racket of 1.6 trillion dollars of undischargeable student loan debt saddling their youth into the grave and still somehow manage to have the unmitigated gall to try and fight any effort whatsoever to reform it. Joe Biden was the driving force behind student loans being a debtors prison, and i guarantee in a recession this kind of market debt haunts the man nightly. privatizing and profiteering from higher education doesnt somehow enrich or advance your society or its people. it literally discourages the higher education necessary to maintain your position as a driving force of innovation and market leadership. it decays your position as a superpower faster than nearly anything else you could do.
- School-Cotton 4y agoI’m not aware of any serious attempts to reform the US education (and education financing) system. A one-off debt jubilee isn’t that.
- r00fus 4y agoSanders had “college for all” proposal as part of his 2020 campaign [1]. He came pretty close to winning. [1] https://jayapal.house.gov/2021/04/21/college-for-all/ https://jayapal.house.gov/2021/04/21/college-for-all/
- dymk 4y agoI don’t think it’s a good idea to use blindly throw tax dollars at degrees which ultimately aren’t going to produce any economic value. We should be taking this idea and applying it to trades schools, though.
- wolverine876 4y agoYou assume they have no value, which is a popular talking point pushed by those who are anti-liberal (and therefore don't want people educated) or care only for low taxes (I'm not saying that's you, just that you repeating it.) But repetition, as we learn in college, has zero relationship to accuracy. First, a goal of any talking point, which the reactionaries construct at a very sophisticated level (a skill of the humanities, which they want to deny to everyone else), is to frame the question. By making it a question of purely economic value, that would seem to attack liberalism and education at their weakest point - kind of like wanting to take down Tom Brady's reputation and so defining quarterbacks by their running ability. Again, understanding that is a product of humanities education. Life, freedom, the welfare of the nation, depend on far more than economic output. That's just one element of many. And also, we have very strong evidence that college degrees do have great economic value: The people whose economic success depends on it will pay people with college degrees far more. Where is your evidence otherwise? My personal experience, and current experience with someone currently in college, is the education is invaluable. It's transformative. I can't imagine who I would be without what the knowledge and especially the thinking that I learned in college.
- humanlion87 4y agoWow. Let millions of students suffer just so that I can make more money. Capitalism at its finest.
- speakfreely 4y agoThis line of thinking is so alien to me. Yes, I don't enjoy watching anyone suffer while they pay back loans that they were suckered into. But what is a business that has been kneecapped by paused debt relief supposed to do exactly? It's an ugly position to take from a PR perspective but it's the responsible thing to do for their shareholders, and that's who businesses exist to protect. The government created this situation and is now essentially buying votes by stepping in to distort the market with this continued debt pause (which solves nothing, just kicks the can a little further down the road). No one on either side is attempting to do anything remotely rational about the situation and I'm not sure what you'd expect a company who had its business model turned on its head by questionable executive action to do except fight that executive action.
- grork 4y agoWhat is a company supposed to do when a market is no longer available to it? Make new products. There is nothing — nothing — saying that SoFi must offer student loans. It’s just looking at that money, and saying ‘this is easy money’. They _could_ create new financial products in an area that isn’t impacted by the repayment pause, and seek to grow that.
- lukeschlather 4y agoWhat SoFi is doing here is more like a bail bondsman suing because the government stopped having people pay bail. The government isn't stopping people from repaying SoFi, SoFi is not a party to the actual transaction.
- ProAm 4y ago> loans that they were suckered into What does this mean? No one forced them to take these loans out. A fool and his money are soon parted.
- reset-password 4y ago> "Suing could force the government to start the repayment machinery again, which might not be a terrible thing. Given the low unemployment rate and the existence of income-driven repayment plans for people who are struggling, few people would be ruined by restoring the February 2020 status quo." This particularly perturbed me with the implication that "ruining" a few people is fine as long as a few other people are made wealthier. Greatest country etc.
- reocha 4y agoThis is pretty normal and how certain economic policies have worked, for example, deregulation of the banks allowed banking companies and their employees to get insanely rich while eventually causing the 2007 recession.
- yeahwhatever10 4y agoI’ll never understand this attitude. “America sucks because you have to repay loans.”
- xigoi 4y agoNo, America sucks because you have to take a huge loan in the first place in order to study.
- baggy_trough 4y agoNo, certain people decided to do that, but they didn't have to.
- lukeschlather 4y agoNo one said they had to, they said they had to in order to study. Which is not the case in more prosperous nations.
- stametseater 4y ago
- ozarker 4y agoIf the terms of the loan required they be paid back in full why is it morally acceptable to forgive them partially/fully? And why would it be okay to use tax funds to do that? These are genuine questions I’m trying to understand the thinking I see on here and Reddit about this issue
- hamandcheese 4y agoWhy is it not?
- willcipriano 4y agoWhat sort of discount will the people who had their loans paid off offer for their services? As a taxpayer who didn't attend college I don't expect to pay full price for someone with a degree that I paid for.
- hamandcheese 4y agoBy that logic, you should be asking the Air Force for your own piece of an F35. Let me know how that goes.
- willcipriano 4y agoThe F35 is to be used to defend me, so yeah I do.
- ModernMech 4y agoAnd college-educated people funded by student loans engineered it.
- willcipriano 4y agoWe paid those engineers a salary. Some of that salary is due to the cost of self funding their education. Now that is publicly funded, I would expect a more european salary as opposed to a american one. To do otherwise feels like socializing the losses and privatizing the profits for a entire class of people who are generally better off than average.
- lvl102 4y agoNoto has to be one of the biggest real life villains of the past decade.
- breck 4y ago> SoFi exists because of a quirk in the federal student loan program. While the government charges different interest rates depending on the loan type, within those loan types there is no differentiation. So many businesses in this country arise because of these "quirks", which are really big f*cking mistakes, and then entrench themselves and the problems fester. The U.S. government treating a $100,000 loan for an English lit degree and a civil engineering degree the same is silly. Student loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy so market forces can act to keep things sane.
- wolverine876 4y ago> The U.S. government treating a $100,000 loan for an English lit degree and a civil engineering degree the same is silly. Personally, I believe that, generally, the former is more valuable - the problems in our society are not from a lack of engineering, but a lack of understanding the world and basic humanities. But regardless, should your or my opinions be imposed on the free choice of the students? I believe in freedom, in free choice, and that they should decide.
- yanderekko 4y agoI believe in freedom, free choice, and actuarially-fair risk assessments. If an English lit major is more likely to fall behind on their loan payments, then that should be taken into account when determining the interest rates on those loans.
- wolverine876 4y ago> the interest rates on those loans Why are these important? > actuarially-fair risk assessments This seems to show that it's not about freedom, but greed. Utter selfishness is not freedom, though people are free to be utterly selfish (to a point). Any freedom that's meaningful is freedom for others; everyone wants 'freedom' for themselves. Hospitals, feeding the unfed, housing the unhoused, freedom for the oppressed - all probably have poor actuarial risk assessments relative to other investments, on purely financial terms used by Wall Street. Yet they offer tremendous return on investment in welfare of individuals, which is the purpose of an economy and society. Money itself is not value, and it's a poor metric of value to the world. English literature (and other humanities) study provides the most value to our society, IMHO, however they are paid. I don't want the arbiters of money to be the arbiters of education and free choice of people. Not only does it stagnate our society and economy, it's not a free society if we can only do what wealthy entities allow.
- noelsusman 4y agoGood. Pausing student loans was a perfectly sensible policy in 2020. We needed stimulus ASAP and that was an easy button to press for instant stimulus. It's insanity that we've kept this policy through the worst inflationary period we've seen in 50 years and record low unemployment. As a side note, I'm not a fan of this new trend where papers publish articles that are clearly op-eds without labeling them as such.
- alex_young 4y agoIs this an op-ed? It looks like the author is a columnist and this is a story in that column…
- rahimnathwani 4y agoI think GP is pointing out that the article is one-sided (as is typical for an op-ed) but is instead being labeled as regular journalism.
- DueDilligence 4y ago[dead]