Inconvenience fee: how Biden is taking on companies’ sneaky charges
They are one of the banes of modern life: “junk fees”. And they are paid for a vast list of things from terminating cellphone contracts early, to checking baggage on an airplane and getting an overdraft on a bank account. What’s worse, is many of these fees are hard to find, or hidden until it’s time to pay, and they impact poor people the most.
But Joe Biden – in a little publicized initiative – is seeking to tackle these hidden costs and has made eliminating, or at least drastically reducing them, one of the key planks of his economic plans.
At a recent meeting of the White House competition council meeting, the third of its kind since its creation in 2021, these added fees across all industries were top of the agenda.
“What we’re talking about today is something that’s weighing down family budgets: unnecessary hidden fees, known in the parlance as ‘junk fees’, are hitting families at a time when they can’t afford it. They shouldn’t be paying it anyway, in my view – but at a time when they can’t afford it,” the US president said.
Present at the meeting was Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), a US government agency responsible for consumer protection in the financial sector.
In an interview with the Guardian, the Biden appointee said his organization has already taken steps to eliminate these so-called “junk fees”.
“Junk fees are creeping across the entire economy. And one major place that Americans experience it is in their financial life when dealing with their bank accounts and other loans. We’ve all already started to hear from the public on all the types of financial fees that they’ve been hit with – and many people don’t even know if they’re getting any service at all. They don’t
Read more on theguardian.com
