The Annoyance Economy Is Booming. Let's End It.

The typical American family loses more than $1,200 a year to junk fees and hours spent being jerked around. It's time we did something about it.

Project 2029 is putting forward big, credible ideas to solve the most pressing challenges we face — because a governing vision that delivers for Americans in 2029 can’t wait until 2029. To be sure, there’s no shortage of big challenges. Last week, we offered a sweeping proposal to guarantee child care in America – perhaps the biggest affordability challenge for young families. The week before it was a bold plan to stop the social media addiction epidemic in our kids. And in the coming months we’ll roll out new ideas on housing, artificial intelligence, taxes, health care, corruption, and much more. These are problems that demand fresh thinking.

But Project 2029 also exists to elevate the problems that rarely make it into our political debate. The next president should have a plan for the ones Americans face in their everyday lives — big and small.

Some of the most maddening problems in American life share a single feature: they are everyday hassles that waste our time and money. Today, Project 2029 is introducing a plan to take them on:

Hidden fees. Hours on hold. Headaches and runarounds. These may seem like unfortunate byproducts of navigating daily life, but they’re not. Companies engineer it that way, piling on fees and friction until we just give up. We call it the Annoyance Economy, and it’s costing the typical American family more than $1,200 each year. The next President should stand on the side of American consumers and stand up to the scammers, spammers, and big corporations that steal our time and money.

In exclusive coverage of our proposal, NPR’s Planet Money sums it up:

“The Annoyance Economy is a catch-all term referring to a slew of frustrating business practices that waste our time and money. Think hidden fees that appear only at checkout. Jumping through hoops to cancel a subscription. Mind-numbing insurance paperwork to get your health insurer to pay a claim. Waiting on hold for an hour. Robocalls. Spam texts. Feckless AI phone agents who make you miss even the rudest human support agents.”

Our proposal takes on four of the worst offenders:

• Start with spam calls and texts: Americans field more than four billion scam and marketing calls a month — to say nothing of the texts. We’d close the loopholes that let companies, fraudsters, and campaigns flood your phone and require real consent to reach you.

• Health care is next: We’d ensure people can file insurance claims online instead of having to print and mail forms, replace self-serving “prior authorization” with independent clinical review, and establish a “Health Care Sludge Unit” to root out needless friction like the “ghost” provider directories listing doctors who don’t actually take your insurance.

• Customer service gets the same treatment: Mandatory “click-to-cancel” so leaving is as easy as signing up, and bringing back “press zero for a human” or call-back options to get help.

• And junk fees? All-in, up-front pricing, and an end to the nickel-and-diming, like the $10 meal that doubles at checkout, the $50 rental-application fee, or the $15-a-day charge just to add a driver to your rental car.

Spam calls and insurance paperwork may not sound like the stuff of presidential campaigns, but we think that should change. Every candidate should speak to the frustrations people actually live with; not only the big line items on the family budget, but also the small, grinding hassles that add up to lost money and wasted time.

And fixing these pain points is wildly popular. As we write in Newsweek:

“Americans have had enough. A 2024 YouGov poll tested every policy idea under the sun. The most popular? More restrictions on robocalls. A separate survey found that 77 percent of likely voters, including 72 percent of Republicans, supported bans on hidden fees. What’s more, polling found that two-thirds of Americans want Congress to address these frustrations—and half believe it should be a priority. It doesn’t take fancy focus groups to tell us these issues are popular; our elected leaders can chat up five strangers and get a list of targets by lunchtime.”

Why does the Annoyance Economy persist? Because companies make it easy to do what they want – and quietly difficult to do what you want. One study found that making a subscription harder to cancel can lift revenue by as much as 200 percent. And they fight to keep it that way: the airline industry spent millions opposing a rule that would have guaranteed cash refunds for long delays, and telecom groups sued to block the FTC’s “click-to-cancel” requirement.

Big problems need big ideas, and Project 2029 has plenty of them. But a government also earns back trust in smaller ways: by making an ordinary Tuesday a little less aggravating, and trading death by a thousand cuts for a thousand small wins. No eligibility forms, no five-year phase-in. Just daily life working a little better the next time you book a flight, open a hospital bill, or try to quit a service you never wanted to begin with.

It adds up. As we say in our plan:

“The consequences of the government standing by and enabling the Annoyance Economy extend beyond wasted time and money. When money and influence lead Washington to turn a blind eye while corporations grind simple interactions into fraught ordeals, it breeds cynicism and disengagement. If government can remove even a few of those obstacles, make it easier to fix a billing error, secure a refund, or cancel a subscription, it can show Americans that someone is paying attention and begin the long process of rebuilding public trust.”