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"Majorities of voters across parties want relief from sky-high credit card interest rates,” said Groundwork’s senior adviser for economic policy Emily Divito.
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.
Owens argues skimpflation can be problematic for reasons beyond just a deterioration of quality. "In the case of food, often when we're seeing reformulations and a move to cheaper products, these are also more processed products, and those have real health implications for Americans who are consuming these items," she says.
As a result, there is significant risk that consumers will face higher costs in “nearly every sector of the economy,” said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a research group.
A protracted conflict in Iran that raised gas prices would likely make it worse, said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative and an economic adviser to the Biden White House.
“It’s all the ways that people experience friction in their everyday life,” said Chad Maisel, a policy fellow at Groundwork Collaborative and coauthor of the report. He collaborated with Neale Mahoney, a Stanford University economist.
“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.