Posted on 03/07/2026 4:55:48 AM PST by MtnClimber
A new study by “progressive” think tank Groundwork Collaborative shows that junk fees and annoyance costs add up to $166 billion per year; here’s a rough breakdown, from USA Today:
Here’s how much the ‘annoyance economy’ costs consumers
[snip]
Junk fees: $90 billion a year
Phone scams: $25.4 billion
Calls with health insurance administrators: $21.6 billion
Waiting for medical services: $19.4 billion
Robocalls: $8 billion
Waiting for government services: $1.6 billion
I get ticked off at this stuff too, but this is a junk report.
Some of these things are just made up numbers, such as calls with health insurance administrators, waiting for medical services, robocalls, and waiting for government services. How the heck would you quantify that cost?
You will never see a leftist think tank calculate the full cost of government, and how it affects consumers, because these people love big government.
Where is the study showing how much government regulations, taxes, and fees cost consumers each year?
The best estimate of federal regulations shows 185,000 to 190,000 pages.
Obamacare has between 10,000 and 20,000 pages of regulations. What is the cost of compliance and administration for it?
The federal tax code has between 2,500 and 4,000 pages, with over 70,000 pages of legal interpretation. How much does that compliance cost? How much do individuals and companies have to pay to file their returns?
According to this article, there are 97 federal taxes. Here are just twenty of them:
Air Transportation Taxes
Biodiesel Fuel Taxes
Building Permit Taxes
Business Registration Fees
Capital Gains Taxes
Cigarette Taxes
Court Fines
Disposal Fees
Dog License Taxes
Drivers License Fees
Employer Health Insurance Mandate Tax
Employer Medicare Taxes
Employer Social Security Taxes
Environmental Fees
Estate Taxes
Excise Taxes On Comprehensive Health Insurance Plans
Federal Corporate Taxes
Federal Income Taxes
Federal Unemployment Taxes
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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The government’s annoyance economy is just waste.
Many bureaucratic jobs in the private sector are just BS jobs. David Graeber wrote a whole book about it.
AI and Automation will take over some percentage of real jobs.
We are going to have to redefine our whole economic model if we get rid of the waste and BS and if we take advantage of new technology. I think a very small percentage of humans will have to contribute to the national labor force.
“Big government sucks.”- Charlie Kirk
pong
$166B ??
Why, that’s the same amount as the tariffs Trump has collected, to date.
What a coinky-dink.
We're in the midst of some work, and the local government's "nickels and dimes" of additional paperwork is an annoyance, as well as an additional expense each time the bureaucrats "need" another piece of paper.
I used to run bank call centers. Every month we calculated the cost to answer customer calls with a human. The cost was incredible, about $4.50-8.00 per call depending on the agent and complexity of the contact.
When we launched internet banking (this was a long time ago) our call volume dropped about 35% in a month. The cost to handle an internet banking inquiry was about $0.35. We were able to close call centers and consolidate our operations quickly and our satisfaction ratings soared.
I can imagine that the cost to handle a healthcare insurance call today is probably pushing $15-$20. Those agents are on the call for 20-30 minutes at a time. So, $21 Billion wasted on those calls seems reasonable.
Now…consider that medical coding is half assed most of the time. If you clean up the input, the costs on the recovery side drop like a rock.
When my wife was undergoing cancer treatment we had to pick apart every bill because the coding errors were so egregious. Over 18 months we NEVER got a bill that did not need correction.
In the past couple of years the hospital system integrated a better billing system where everything is scanned into the chart. The result is much better billing and payments. It’s saved us a ton of time and everything gets approved and paid faster.
“System” related waste is a huge thing. In government it has to be incredibly bad because their systems and people are calcified.
A massive bloated bureaucracy was one of the things (one of several) which brought down the Roman Empire.
The federal govt imposes a wide variety of taxes on income, transactions, and
property, categorized into major types that drive the vast majority of govt revenue.
Individual Income Taxes: This is the largest source of federal revenue. For the 2025 and 2026 tax years, there are seven progressive income tax brackets/rates: 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35%, and 37%.
Payroll Taxes (Social Insurance Taxes): These are deducted from employee paychecks to fund Social Security and Medicare.
Corporate Income Taxes: A flat rate of 21% is applied to the taxable income of C corporations.
Excise Taxes: Special taxes on specific goods or services, such as fuel, tobacco, alcohol, and air travel.
Estate and Gift Taxes: Taxes on the transfer of large, high-value estates or large monetary gifts.
Customs Duties (Tariffs): Taxes on imported goods. (Tax Policy Center)
Progressive Structure: The federal income tax system uses seven different rates that rise with income.
Payroll Dominance: For most low- and middle-income taxpayers, payroll taxes (Social Security/Medicare) often exceed federal income tax liability.
Capital Gains: A separate, lower tax rate (0%, 15%, or 20%) applies to long-term capital gains and dividends.
Total Revenue: In FY 2024, approximately $5 trillion in revenue was collected through these combined mechanisms. (Tax Policy Center)
I heard it reported that the government does not know the “overhead” costs of running Social Security, Medicare, etc because they don’t track it. How can they work to make bureaucracies more efficient if they don’t track the costs?
We do not know the total tariffs collected from American importers and passed on to consumers.
Tariffs are not regressive and get paid by all consumers, even those on food stamps
If it can't, it is a waste to money to be de-funded.
Some other branch(es) have the ability to destroy the robo call centers and everyone in them.
Why isn't this happening?
When DOGE was going full blast, they were using the techniques we would use when we would buy a bank to incorporate them into our system. And those techniques were based on post WWII quality control processes used to rebuild manufacturing in Japan. My point is they are nothing “new.”
The stuff that I saw coming out of DOGE screamed, “These people do not have basic supervisory skills” because the errors had to do with managing the controls (making sure stuff was done the ‘right’ way.)
I see the signs of the same lack of supervisory skills at just about every organization I see these days. I don’t know why front line supervisors aren’t trained any more…but the nickel these organizations save from not training properly come back dressed up a quarters when you look at handling errors.
When management accepts horrible failure rates, service suffers and becomes more expensive.
Note all those fees. Many are called that ‘cause to pass a state tax requires the state legislature to pass a bill . This is scary as it threatens re-election.
So, they tell the bureaucracy to implement a fee.
Obama’s Admin commissioned a study on total tax rate vs gov’mt revenue. What occurred was the Laffer curve. Looks like IQ curve. At 0% tax, no gov’mt revenue (well, d’oh). At 100% also zero since everyone quits working. Or, at least quits reporting income and becomes a criminal.
So, there is a sweet spot in the middle where total tax rate maximizes revenue. It is ~37%. A smidgen higher or lower and revenue drops.
That total tax rate includes all those fees. Add ‘em all up to see if your local gov’mt is ignoring Obama’s finding and taxing you just for the ‘Ell of it. If so, your gov’mt officials are more stupid than you imagined.
And the same thing will happen to America. We are no longer in the "Republic" stage.
How the heck would you quantify that cost?
Time is money. I guess they plug in a average salary for a typical job that people who find themselves stuck dealing with the lord high poobahs of our benevolent betters.
Now…consider that medical coding is half assed most of the time. If you clean up the input, the costs on the recovery side drop like a rock
Yep, Gawd forbid you enter the code in for a head injury caused by walking into a metal lightpole instead of a concrete based one. Even worse if the diagnosis was supposed to be concussion with nerve damage and the wrong entry changed it to
congestion.
Not to hijack the thread, but much of the stuff coming out of DOGE was complete garbage. I can tell you with 100% certainty that they frequently didn't understand what they were actually looking at, and then made exaggerated claims in the media about stuff they didn't understand. I really had hoped they would help, but they were too undisciplined to do any real good.
I never really bought into the dollar amounts they were tossing around. However, “dirty databases” cause lots of problems. I understand why a lot of those records were the way they were…but it seems there was a lot of clean up that should have been routine…that was not done routinely.
People often bitch about the systems. But it’s folks not working them the way they were designed that can cause issues.
Without clean information you can hardly make good decisions. And it seems no one was taking responsibility.
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