Every hospital fee is a junk fee. We shouldn’t be paying for hospital visits except out of taxes.
I could be wrong, but, that feels like a weak position to run on. I’m not sure I want the government worrying about the unexpected fee at the hotel I cannot afford to go to.
Isn’t there a way to spend the money you’re going to spend on that to spend it on like food availability, or affordable housing, or education…?
Idk. Seems like a waste of resources but, I suppose they probably have a massive team figuring out what the country is worried about. Just seems like a weird thing to underline, it feels like a back burner issue.
It isn’t spicy but junk fees are a big deal when it comes to fleecing the American people. Adding a take out fee at a restaurant for example, I have a fee to get my own food?
Yeah, I can definitely see it. Idk, at that point, a lot of places are just going to increase prices I would imagine. Again, could be wrong. But, there is definitely merit behind going after it, especially after your reply and the other I got. I suppose I didn’t think through to the entire scope.
Though, if it is bipartisan, and basically an easy win… why not just do it? I hate politics lol.
It’s not really bipartisan. They call things “bipartisan” now because there’s a handful of Republicans who are willing to come to the negotiating table and extort pork or deregulation for your goals, and it doesn’t cross the filibuster-proof majority in order to pass in a Republican house. The majority of Republicans are going to default to opposing any kind of consumer protection legislation just because their fundamental ideology favors large corporations cheating individuals and families repeatedly.
Why do you think every American gets 15 robocalls per day and the government refuses to do anything about it? Republicans are getting their kickback from the robocallers.
That’s the point. It’s shifting from gotcha pricing to transparent pricing.
Lol go check out mildly infuriating. Someone posted a receipt with the added 18% service fee. The “gotcha” fees are annoying, and if you need to raise the prices on your food, then raise the prices on the food. That’s how you know if your food is worth it if people are willing to pay for the actual price of it.
I work in a business that owns a hundred restaurants or so, we charge a to-go fee of a couple dollars since our restaurants are there to keep you at the property, not really to make money themselves. If this becomes illegal then we’ll just raise prices to make the difference, this won’t make things cheaper, just less sneaky.
The point is that they should not be sneaky. Raise your prices so people know what the actual cost is. That is the point of the law. People want to shop for the best rate but these fees hide a lot of the cost. Once passed all prices will reflect the final cost, taxes included.
I’m confused by what you mean “keep you at the property”.
Obviously the business is there to make money, or it wouldn’t be a business. Servers wages are hardly an overhead concern, I’m saving you the table space for other paying customers, and I’m still paying full price for a product that now cost you less to sell me.
Unless you’re implying that your business sells food at a loss and only makes money on alcohol served on site. Maybe that’s a problem by itself, but it’s not a problem to foist on the customer by charing more for a to go order, that’s absurd.
I work at a casino, we only have restaurants so you eat there and go back to gambling
Why would I ever order take out from a restaurant inside a casino?
We’re getting farther from sense here.
You’re kidding right? Just because we’re a casino doesn’t mean the food sucks, plus you can use your reward points for those take out orders. We get tons of take out and door dash orders out of our restaurants despite the fee
Then why offer takeout? Also, who are these people ordering take out from a casino? Regardless, if the food is really just there so you don’t have to go to another place to get it, and their primary business is gambling, I really don’t understand why they’d have to offer takeout as an option anyway? Especially if it costs them money.
It doesn’t cost more money for us to do takeout, but it’s accepted f&b industry practice to have a fee so why not?
I kinda see where you’re coming from but junk fees are really something that affects everyone, especially those near the bottom of society. Stuff like cell phone fees inflating phone prices, online commerce fees making transactions more expensive, credit card/banking fees, overdraft fees a literal tax on being poor, convenience fees because they can, maintenance fees. It all adds up to tens of billions of dollars annually.
Okay, see, this is a much better list than “concert tickets, hotels, and cellphone bills” lmao. Now you can get me to care and see the merit.
Not sure it still should be an underlined campaign promise, but, as stated, it’s bipartisan, everyone hates them. Then you add your reasoning in there too, and I could get behind it.
What’s going to stop the companies from just rolling that convenience fee into the price of the service though?
The fact that if they’re not baiting and switching people, folks might actually be able to shop around for the best listed price rather than getting swindled by the “cheapest” up front. Particularly for poorer people, surprise fees can really hurt your ability to treat yourself once in a while and still meet your financial goals.
There’s nothing wrong with that, because it’s the advertised price. It’s unethical to say that something costs $1 and then charge them $2.
Thats part of the point, It makes the upfront pricing more visible. Clear, easy to understand information means better purchasing decisions are made by consumers.
It’s a lot harder to sell a $1500 phone than it is to sell a $1000 phone with $500 in extra fees tacked on at the time of purchase.
If you’re purchasing a phone ABC phone company and XYZ phone company might both offer the latest iDroid model for $1000+tax and fees, but you have no idea what the specifics of those taxes and fees are until you actually get to the point of sale.
Then at least you could compare the true cost of things up front
It is possible to work on multiple issues of varying importance at the same time
I didn’t say it wasn’t. I said it’s a weird issue to underline and run a campaign on.
“Small” inconveniences like this (among other things) are how asshole capitalists win. They nickle and dime us in ways that aren’t “worth” pushing back against. We tell ourselves “It’s just a little bit extra. Not worth pushing back just for that.”, but there are countless little bit extras and they drain us without resistance. And it’s not like individuals are going to be able to change any of that, so it’s entirely up to our governments to address those issues. Of course there are big things to work on too, but fixing some things doesn’t mean we can’t work on the big things too.
How many resources do you think it takes to ban junk fees?
Because it’s nowhere comparable to the cost of any of your alternatives
I get where you’re coming from but, if it’s such an easy win, why not just do it? Why campaign on it. He’s already in office lol. I hate politics.
I see you’ve bought into the Republican myth that the reason Americans have a shoddy social support infrastructure is due to budgetary tradeoffs. It’s not. It’s a failure of will of the American people to do what’s necessary to stop preventable innocent casualties.
Care to elaborate? I probably have, I was raised in that environment, though, I wouldn’t call myself right leaning on most things.
Isn’t there a way to spend the money you’re going to spend on that to spend it on like food availability, or affordable housing, or education…?
I think this sentence is what I was trying to point out. Basically, it’s not a question of “pay for X or Y” but a question of “do we have the votes for X, will Americans reelect us for Y”. Let me detail:
Americans don’t care about or understand the deficit
There has never been a true austerity party in the US. Bush Sr. ran on cutting taxes. Bush Jr. ran on massive tax cuts. Trump’s taxation policy was a massive billionaire tax cut. Every single time a Republican has been in office for the past three decades they’ve exploded the deficit by cutting revenue without substantial enough spending cuts. They still win reelection.
Americans “concerned about the deficit” typically fall into two camps: those who erroneously compare it to a household budget, and those who engage in vague pronouncements about its “impact on our children”. So one who seems to have a concrete idea of what will happen but is wrong, and one who seems not to know what the consequences will be but are worried sick about them.
The reality is that the immediate and long-term impacts of the deficit are small, and the immediate and long-term impacts of failing to invest in infrastructure and social spending are very high
What Americans should be concerned about vis. the future of our children is producing a new generation that is healthy, educated, productive, housed affordably, expanding in size, and comfortable in illness and old age. We should care about being able to get around the country fast without boiling the oceans. We should care about being able to survive natural disasters, global pandemics, terrorism, war, and resource shortages. These are all things worth creating deficit for. The adage “you have to spend money to make money” makes sense here.
In summary
I agree that we should be spending money on social support- but the failure to do both isn’t because there’s a limited amount of money we have to spend on one or the other, it’s a lack of control of the levers of power and a failure of will.
Okay, I see where you’re coming from. I agree with it too. Thank you for typing this out! (So beautifully too. I’m on mobile so expect abysmal editing and a wall of text. Sorry not sorry.) I will say that I was definitely coming from it from the perspective of “you’re allocated x number of $ to do your work.” Which, as you’re getting at, really isn’t the true issue. It’s a systemic one.
Interestingly, a lot of my “politically charged conversations” basically end up going down this path. But, how does one fix a systemic problem? Every time I try to come up with any sort of solution it basically turns to “damn I hope someone smarter than me has ideas cause mine are ‘burn it down’”.
You’re not totally wrong with “burn it down” in the sense of bureaucracy. The sociologist Weber felt they were actually efficient systems up to a point, and even necessary for democracy, but then became the worst nightmares that we could never undo. And as we see much more recently, Graber argued that any time you asked the government to streamline, it would just increase regulations, paperwork, bureaucrats needed for the aforementioned, etc.
So we have this necessary evil to start the kind of system we wanted in place, it’s only getting worse, and any candidate with smart ideas who wants a chance gets sucked right into it. “Reform” only reproduces the problem in a slightly different direction. Like Akira or a T-1000 I guess.
Interesting. Okay, so let’s say, we do “burn it down”. Is it just the human condition? Are we doomed to repeat everything even if we could start anew tomorrow?
I guess what I struggle with is, while I hate current status quo, I don’t see a situation where things are better if we did burn it down. In fact, they’re exponentially worse after all structure is hypothetically burned.
You’ve hit the nail on the head here: we’ve been conditioned to believe there is no alternative. And frankly, reimagining an entire way of life is really intimidating. But the current way of living is not sustainable either.
I think of this as akin to Moses wandering the desert for 40 years (the ins and outs are contested among scholars, of course) — the purpose of wandering was to shed the lived memory of Egypt and allowing a new generation to start over with the knowledge of what happened before, but not the suffering of it.
Ultimately I’m against retreating into nihilism, nor do I think rationalizing cosmetic changes to the status quo as truly progressive is a solution either. We are forced to work and live in the “wrong state of things” so to speak, and we can either try to drag this out for generations or have some kind of “snap” that allows for a significant do-over with the fresh wounds of The Now very much on our minds.
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Junk fees are tied to inflation. Businesses are hiding price increases as additional fees.
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I’m pretty sure zoning laws are outside of the Fed reach. They can carrot and stick via funding requirements, but mediated expansion has shown that states can be very petty if they don’t want to comply. I wouldn’t want the feds to set the tempo for zoning anyway. They just can’t be aware of every area’s needs. It’s not a one size fits all situation. I’ve seen housing go up fast and the result is just a shitshow because the infrastructure doesn’t keep up with the growth. I’ve seen dead cities where nothing wad built and only the people who got there first could afford a place to live, so effectively you had to leave town for everything because no retail workers could afford to live nearby. There’s a middle ground between the two and no way will the feds know how to rate limit how housing gets built anywhere. Housing to me is a local election problem because people don’t vote in local elections and then when the problem gets too bad, only nimbys cam live and vote there. Those places always collapse eventually (unless the population is very well off, see: SF), but when people get a chance to move back in they gotta remember to vote for local people who align their values.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
That’s fine, but protecting abortion has proven to be a far greater motivator in the Democrats’ favor
Protecting individual rights, including family planning, is a huge motivator. Americans deserve the right to life, liberty, and the presuit of happiness. The GOP runs counter to that ideal.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional Democrats are teaming up with the Biden administration and a progressive advocacy group to turn policy efforts to curb “ junk fees ” into a political rallying cry, betting that a small but potentially potent kitchen table issue will resonate with voters.
President Joe Biden promised in this year’s State of the Union address to target unexpected fees tacked on to things like plane and concert tickets, hotel rooms, hospital and cellphone bills and housing transactions.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin a swing-district Michigan Democrat who is now running for the Senate, is planning an event in a few weeks and said “the administration’s initiative to eliminate junk fees will put money back in peoples’ pockets.”
But it may also help Biden bridge the gap between an economy that many metrics show is strong — with low unemployment rates and wages rising — and polling suggesting that many Americans don’t view that as a positive for Democrats.
“Fighting surprise junk fees is super popular and bipartisan with the public because everyone hates these abusive extra costs,” said Adam Green, the Progressive Change Institute co-founder.
“Dumpster fires polled better with the American people than Bidenomics, so extreme Democrats threw it in the garbage to talk about ‘junk fees’ because they know Biden’s economy is trash,” quipped Will Reinert, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the GOP’s House campaign arm.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Jesus Fucking Christ.
What a fucking mail-in rebate one-time limited-application opt-in sign-up discount coupon-ass “goal.”
How about single-payer healthcare, or fucking forgive medical or student debt fully even if the Rs removed about it, or corporate tax penalties for companies caught price gouging, or maybe fucking nationwide the oil companies who refuse to meet some federal standard for green energy and pay dividends directly to the public like the Nordic countries do?
It sounds like it may just be an easy win. Single payer health care is not. In this case, if they can get this done with minimal fuss, I’m all for it.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don’t stop striving for perfect, though.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I’ve got a better one for ya. How about :
Don’t let someone literally “striving” for compromised bare minimums tell you they’re “doing good” and that you “should be thankful” and then get pissy saying “voters should be excited for the crumbs they are given” while their health insurance provider puts them on hold for 2 hours on the phone only to legally be able to pay someone far below minimum wage in the Phillipines to finally pick up the phone and tell you “sorry” after denying coverage for your loved one’s critically-necessary medication.
Because I don’t give a shit how hard it is. I want him shouting about it. I want him using Machiavellian tactics to scare the ever-loving shit out of politicians and companies making Americans’ lives worse for no reason except to further widen their absurdly massive existing profit margins and add another yacht to their fleet docked on their 7th vacation home on their private island in the Bahamas.
I want him saying to Joe Manchin to support his legislative agenda completely or that otherwise “it would be a shame if the FDA decided to rescind your daughter’s Epipen patent or start an investigation into corruption on her part by the FBI.” I want him saying to McConnell “confirm my nominees, or I’ll be sending the National Guard down to enforce even the slightest whiff of any tiny federal violation we merely just suspect members of your state government are committing every day.” I want him fucking doing mob boss shit to them all. Game of Thrones, The Wire, Breaking Bad shit… but all for good things like universal healthcare, high speed trains, and protection of marginalized groups’ rights.
I don’t care how feasible you think it is. Just the act of trying or even just passionately calling for big sweeping tangible change from the bully pulpit is enough to get people supporting you.
Instead we get proverbial “5% off coupons” that Biden swears he ran by the Republicans first who totally are on board with and definitely are his friends and won’t stab him in the back yet again… to win exactly ZERO Republicans to his side with and only serves to piss the rest of us off thinking nothing is going to ever get noticeably better.
Sleepy Joe is too tired for all that 😴
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“please remit your payment online” then they charge an online payment fee.
That comment will be $3.99, and thanks!
Remember back when you could solve issues without it needing to be an election year? Me either.
Fun Fact. Every year is an election year. Also Fun Fact. He hasn’t been sitting on his ass for the last three years, he’s been pushing legislation all the time. How you or the news wants to phrase things doesn’t change that.
In those three years of pushing legislation why didn’t they tackle this “winning” issue? If I were elected I would assume I only have four years and do all I can in that time and not hold an issue hostage for re-election, but I’m not a politician.
When you’re actually doing your job, you can’t change everything overnight. He has a ton on his plate, and hasn’t had a legislative mandate to pass whatever the party wants. They never had a liberal majority in the Senate, they have to deal with two senators who don’t agree with everything they want.
Wouldn’t the correct response be to hold a press conference or post something on social media to communicate something vital like that to the people? “Here’s what’s going on, here’s what we propose, and here’s what we we think should happen next. Make up your mind and reach out to your senator, we’ve provided a list of contact information here.” Seems reasonable right? Yet almost no politician does this and instead we hyperfocus on controversial issues, kinda seems intended almost as if there’s an agenda being followed to me. So yes, I criticize and expect better from elected officials, if someone offers evidence to the contrary I’ll change my mind but I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary that the man’s really representing me and I’d appreciate a ranked choice voting so we aren’t limited to two parties with a single option.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/
Every weekday they cover various topics. There’s a lot to do.
And almost all of these election issues seem to get dropped right after it’s over.
Want to know what’s a winning issue? legalization of Marijuana. Need joe to get away from his old ways of thinking on this and to push forward this issue with overwhelming bipartisan support.
He could also overturn Qualified Immunity with an executive order that can’t be overturned, simply by stating that we will be following the full text of section 1983 as was voted into law in 1871 by Congress, not as was illegally modified by a single southern revisionist in 1874.
Going down in history as the most anti-corruption president would also win him the election.
Getting rid of student loans also comes to mind
I wish the US Government had their shit together enough where this should be their top concern.
As I said to someone else, this isn’t the biggest deal in the world. It is likely just an easy win. It would be fantastic to look at a restaurant menu and know what I’m spending, look through air bnbs and be able to actually compare based on price, or know how much a concert ticket will cost before getting excited for the concert.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good but don’t stop striving for perfect either.
the dnc is a party of fucking idiots if they think that’s what people are clambering for.
Good, you should be able to see the true cost of things up front. You shouldn’t have to run through a whole checkout process to see the true cost either (looking at you Ticketbastard). Colleges should have to roll “mandatory fees” into their tuition costs too.
While it’s great they are taking this issue on, it’s on the bottom of my fucken totem pole when it comes to issues that need addressing. What about more action on climate change? No? Ok, then what about steps to stop institutional racism? No? Fine then! Let’s crack down on the housing crisis! Again no? The democrat lidership is so fucking disconnected to reality it’s no surprise we lost the house and congress.
Current Top Political Issues in the United States for 2024
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Inflation
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Affordability of Health Care
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Bipartisonship in Government
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Drug Addiction
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Gun Violence
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Federal Budget Deficit
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State of Moral Values
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Immigration
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K-12 Education
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Climate Change
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Racism
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Infrastructure
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Domestic Terrorism
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International Terrorism
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Unemployment
While you are focused on the tenth-ranked topic, the Biden Administration is focused on the first.
Politicians are the servants of the people, you need to convince the people to get your issue higher up.
Do you work for the Biden Administration? Nothing you write seems organic at all.
I must be a robot taking over the Fediverse. Take me to your leader. Beep Bop! 🤣
Seriously though, I follow politics quite closely and knowing the research polling is essential to knowing what to expect in the debates.
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The problem with doing this as the incumbent is that if it’s broadly popular, it’ll just pass, and if it is only popular on your side of the aisle, it won’t help you much.
The swing voters will say “yes it is a problem, why haven’t you fixed it?”
The answer has to be the other party. Are Republicans against this? What is the argument against?
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They both rhyme, so curbing junk fees is practically the same thing, right? /s
