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Spam and robocalls cost Americans over $32 billion annually, junk fees cost consumers $90 billion annually, and health care headaches cost $41 billion.
Even if Trump did manage to deliver on a credit card interest rate cap, 80% of voters say he would need to do more to show he’s serious about lowering costs.
“As Trump predicted in 2024, we have not seen declines,” said Liz Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy with the Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning economic thinktank.
That’s alongside pricing games (detailed in this extraordinary Groundwork Collaborative paper on the annoyance economy) that are only growing more sophisticated in the age of AI. But to Trump, affordability is a solved problem, so these challenges are unseen.
"Since then, I think you've just slowly seen a degradation of app quality and match potential, but also this rise of monetization," Emily DiVito, a senior advisor for economic policy at the Groundwork Collaborative and the coauthor of a new report on dating app paywalls, said.
Dating has never been more difficult or expensive, with subscription apps charging as much as $600 per month for matches.
Trump’s State of the Union address marked by soaring costs, a sputtering economy, and a president’s broken promises.
“When you look at the president’s first term, the economy was his super power,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank. “That has just completely reversed in this second Trump administration.”
“It doesn’t appear that the Trump administration is going to expedite that process,” said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the progressive Groundwork Collaborative. “The mechanics of getting that money back to consumers is even more complicated.”
Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collective, a progressive economic think tank, said that businesses have filed more than 1,000 claims for tariff refunds with the Court of International Trade. He expects that number to soar following Friday's high court ruling.