There's a tax you pay every year that never appeared on any ballot. The White House Council of Economic Advisers put it at roughly $90 billion a year nationally — about $650 per household — and it's collected in $4.95 increments at the bottom of receipts: the "convenience" fee, the "service" charge, the resort fee for a hotel with no resort, the processing fee for a ticket you printed yourself.
I've spent nearly twenty years as a consumer-protection attorney, so let me tell you what I've learned about that tax: it is not an accident, it is a business model. And it's only the entry fee. Here's the fuller bill, straight from the government's own data.
The everyday economics of getting taken
Your credit report is probably wrong. The FTC's landmark accuracy study found one in five consumers had an error on at least one of their three credit reports, and about 5 percent had errors serious enough to change the terms of a loan — that's roughly ten million Americans quietly paying more for cars and mortgages because a database is sloppy. Complaints about credit reporting have exploded: the CFPB logged about 5.8 million of them in 2025 — 88 percent of everything the agency heard — with "incorrect information on your report" the most common problem.
Debt collectors chase debts people say they don't owe. Of roughly 207,800 debt-collection complaints to the CFPB in 2024 — nearly double the prior year — 45 percent were about a debt the consumer said wasn't theirs. Small wonder: the FTC found debt buyers pay about four cents on the dollar for old debt. When you buy a spreadsheet of alleged debts for pennies, accuracy is somebody else's problem.
And outright fraud keeps growing. Americans reported $12.5 billion in fraud losses in 2024, up 25 percent in a year. Minnesotans filed over 31,000 fraud reports totaling about $145 million — and reported losses are a floor, not a ceiling, because most victims never report. The one piece of good news: Minnesota ranks near the bottom of the states in fraud reports per capita, 39th. We are not an easy mark. Let's keep it that way.
2025: the federal floor gave way
Whatever your politics, these are simply the dates and the documents. In 2024 federal regulators finalized two rules with real money attached: an $8 cap on most credit-card late fees (issuers were collecting about $12 billion a year) and a $5 cap on big-bank overdraft fees (a fee stream that ran $12.6 billion in 2019). In 2025, both died — the late-fee rule vacated by a federal court in Texas on April 15 with the CFPB's own consent, and the overdraft rule repealed by Congress and signed away on May 9. The same year, the CFPB dismissed at least 21 pending enforcement actions. The one survivor: an FTC rule requiring all-in pricing — but only for event tickets and hotels.
You can cheer those decisions or boo them. Either way, one fact follows: the consumer-protection floor in this country now gets built in the states or it doesn't get built at all.
Minnesota built its own floor
Here's what too few Minnesotans know: our state already answered.
- Junk fees are illegal here — across the whole economy. Since January 1, 2025, Minn. Stat. § 325D.44, subd. 1a makes it a deceptive trade practice to advertise any price that doesn't include all mandatory fees. Not just tickets and hotels — essentially every consumer good and service sold in this state. The price on the tag has to be the price.
- Medical debt can't wreck your credit. The 2024 Debt Fairness Act banned reporting medical debt to credit bureaus, banned charging interest on charged-off medical debt, banned transferring it automatically to your spouse, and banned denying you care over an unpaid bill (effective October 1, 2024).
- Garnishment now respects a paycheck. Since April 1, 2025, wage garnishment is income-based: workers earning under 40 times the hourly minimum wage per week are fully exempt, with graduated tiers above that, replacing the old flat 25 percent grab.
These are good laws. I'll say so even where credit goes to people I ran against — our standard here is receipts, not tribalism. But a law on the books protects no one by itself. Ask anyone whose credit report still carries a hospital bill it legally shouldn't.
Enforcement pays — literally
The tired argument says consumer enforcement is red tape that costs money. The receipts say otherwise. The Minnesota Attorney General's consumer division returned $7.8 million directly to Minnesotans in a single recent fiscal year — up nearly 40 percent. The state's new Consumer Fraud Restitution Fund, first of its kind in the nation, took in $4.6 million for scam victims in year one. One multistate case alone — TurboTax charging people for tax filing that was supposed to be free — sent $1.8 million back to about 60,000 Minnesotans. And over its lifetime the CFPB returned about $21 billion to more than 205 million consumers before its 2025 retreat.
That's the quiet math of this work: a funded, motivated enforcer is one of the only parts of government that mails checks to the public.
What we can do
First, use the rights you already have. Pull your free credit reports and dispute errors in writing — a fifth of you will find something. If a collector calls about a debt you don't recognize, demand validation before you pay a nickel; forty-five percent of complaints are about debts people say they don't owe. If a Minnesota business quotes you one price and charges another, that's now against the law — report it.
Second, demand that the laws Minnesota passed get enforced like they mean it — junk-fee cases brought, medical-debt violations penalized, the consumer division funded like the profit center it literally is. When Washington stands down, the People's Lawyer in St. Paul is the whole line of defense. I do this work for Minnesotans one case at a time; the Attorney General's office exists to do it for five million of us at once. That's the standard — and every one of us should hold every officeholder, of every party, to it.
The fine print has an army of lawyers. Minnesotans deserve one too.
Sources
White House CEA junk-fee estimate (Mar. 2023) and White House fact sheet (Oct. 11, 2023); CFPB overdraft/NSF data spotlight (Jan. 2024) and late-fee rule (Mar. 5, 2024); N.D. Tex. consent judgment vacating the late-fee rule (Apr. 15, 2025, per Holland & Knight and Ballard Spahr summaries); Congressional Review Act repeal of the overdraft rule (signed May 9, 2025; CRS IN12513); FTC Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, 16 C.F.R. Part 464 (effective May 12, 2025); FTC credit-report accuracy study (Feb. 2013) and follow-up (Jan. 2015); CFPB Consumer Response Annual Reports for 2024 (May 2025) and 2025 (Mar. 2026); CFPB FDCPA Annual Report 2025 (Nov. 2025); FTC Structure and Practices of the Debt Buying Industry (Jan. 2013); FTC Consumer Sentinel Data Book 2024 and press release (Mar. 10, 2025); KTTC (May 29, 2025) and FOX 9 on Minnesota's per-capita fraud rank; Minn. Stat. § 325D.44, subd. 1a (2024 Minn. Laws ch. 111, § 1) and Minn. Stat. § 571.922, both verified at revisor.mn.gov; Minnesota Debt Fairness Act, 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 114; MN AG press releases (Oct. 21, 2024; Mar. 14, 2025; May 1, 2026; Aug. 7, 2026; Aug. 13, 2026); MN Management & Budget, Attorney General agency summary (FY 2026–27); MN House Session Daily on the Consumer Fraud Restitution Fund (2026); MN AG TurboTax release (May 5, 2022); CFPB lifetime-relief figures (consumerfinance.gov); Student Borrower Protection Center and Consumer Federation of America memos on dismissed CFPB actions (2025).
Attributed throughout; figures not verifiable against a primary source were omitted. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.