This is the Katori Daily Podcast for Monday, July 15, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The White House has strong opinions about so-called junk fees.

Leaving aside the simple fact that many of those fees mean delivering benefits that people are willing

to pay to have.

What about all the fees that governments charge people that don't serve any clear purpose

except to give the government money?

Cato's Nick Anthony has a rather lengthy list of them. Nick, the President of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden, likes to talk about junk fees or what he characterizes as junk fees.

Now I've spoken with Ryan Bourne about what constitutes a junk fee in the view of the president and what it technically is within their

within their framework and there are some differences there.

But you made recently wrote about the notion that, you know, the government kind of charges a lot of

junk fees as well. The one that sticks with me, which I don't believe was included in your

extensive list is the fact that when you are late paying taxes

to the federal government there is an interest rate charged.

There is no such commensurate interest rate applied to money that you pay to the government

incorrectly when it comes time for you to recover those funds from the government.

So that one's always stuck with me as problematic, but in terms of evaluating what would constitute a

junk fee from the feds how did you approach the question as you, Ryan Bourne has done a lot of great work on this to point out that what the feds are saying is just so inconsistent.

It really has boiled down to what we don't like in the moment.

And I started looking at that and I was listening to hearings with the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, and again they kept talking about

credit card late fees. And they kept saying that late fees are junk fees. You should not be charged a fee for coming in late.

And the more I heard that, the more it rattled around in my head, I couldn't help but think about all the fees, the ones that you just

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