Mamdani Targets Junk Fees and Hidden Charges in Two Executive Orders (opens in new tab)

There are dozens of low-hanging fruit to appease the citizenry that have been explained away as nonviable by talking heads and PR departments for decades. I'm excited to see just how much corporate hand-wringing is exposed as the selfish money-grubbing anti-social behavior that it is.

>has to pay you interest at the benchmark rate (or BM - 0.25%, something small).

Deposit accounts at most banks pay you less than that, so it's unclear why you'd want gift cards to pay that much. Not to mention that turning gift cards into essentially bank accounts is going to create even more issues. Remember how we have to remind people how paypal isn't a bank? Or how would you calculate income taxes from the interest?

This sounds simple but in reality creates a huge regulatory burden so that people can have an extra 10 cents a year. In chicago we passed a law that says landlords have to pay interest on security deposits. Guess what happened? Every single landlord moved to move in fees instead. Now instead of getting your deposit back renters just have to pay thousands of dollars to move. This law without a doubt made life worse for basically every renter in the city

I'm not sure what's the problem here. There are two things that could be impacted by your proposal:

1. Gift cards. Users want gift cards so it doesn't make sense to penalize companies for that (by forcing them to complexify their codebase and finances)

2. Top-up cards. I haven't really seen dark patterns here. You're usually not forced to use these as far as I've seen, and are usually rewarded if you do (accumulate points, get free stuff)

the vast majority of gift card schemes allow you to get money into those systems at much less then the face value of the cards. This would kill that. the only gift cards that sell for basically face value are walmart and amazon. Almost every other card type I've regularly seen significant discounts for.

And if the gift card expires, the funds get returned to the original purchaser or it goes into escheat.

The amount of government effort wasted in implementing this will be more than what users will get out of it in current savings interest rates.

Can you expand on what happened?

You're right, but I see these types of orders as an effective way to build public support (assuming they're successful and popular) and make codified changes later on more likely.

They’re not de facto laws like some of the presidential orders. He created a task force to research the issue and directed the municipal consumer and worker protection division to prioritize enforcement of existing laws.

I’d assume the goal of the task force is to propose new laws which should be pretty easy to get passed.

Maybe there are existing laws already in the books that can be leveraged as part of this EO. I know Lina Khan with FTC was focusing on this. And this is being taken up by the NYC administration where Lina was part of the transition team. Lina was in charge of seeing how to fulfill Mamdani's vision using the existing law system.

I can't speak for executive orders for a mayor, but I can say that executive orders of the president are anything but symbolic. Their scope was expanded significantly under Bush and Cheney, and they are binding for federal agencies. For example, they used executive order 13440 to circumvent a supreme court ruling that stated the Geneva convention applied to the people they illegally kidnapped and held at CIA black sites. This EO functioned by essentially weakening the definition of torture, so they could go on and torture the folks they captured.

So, while the next president can just undo executive orders made by any previous one, making them a bit ephemeral, they do have direct and real consequences going as far as torture.

To give you a real answer, yes, the Overton window has shifted. Anything at all that is perceived as limiting what a business can charge or negotiate is considered leftist now. Banning junk fees is a limit on what businesses can charge/negotiate.

"Political agenda" does indeed stick out like a sore thumb there. "Policy" is the word they should have used.

Agendas are all how you frame them and a lot of time statements at a high-level can be misconstrued.

The left and right actually agree on a lot at a high-level but do not agree on how to tackle the problem.

> Has the overton window just shifted so much that not wanting to get screwed by greedy con artists is communist now?

I've seen this dude described as an "islamo-communist" more than once in different countries' medias (not fringe medias). I presume "islamist" because muslim, and "communist" because he's left of the center-right. You can't really talk with these people anyways, they're too far gone

It is leftist compared to the baseline of American politics, which is center-right compared to the opinions of the American people.

The ideology of Democratic Socialism has always been focused on helping low income and working poor people live better lives, and that manifests in action to put more money in their pocket. I suppose you more often hear about more indirect ways to do this (eg. trying to lower rent, create more subsidized low cost housing) but lowering fees puts more money in people's pocket and that is directly in the wheel house of Democratic Socialism.

So if this seems like Mamdani is doing something weird here, I think it's more that the twisted media framing of the left has pushed people to have a vision of it that is dissonant from its real ideology and goals.

> Protecting consumers, including renters, appears be a large part of Mr. Mamdani’s early agenda as mayor. The actions of Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, appear so far to indicate a willingness to govern based on a leftist political agenda.

Using the term "leftist" to describe something Nixon would do is absolutely a sign the Overton Window has shifted.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-11...

> Has the overton window just shifted so much that not wanting to get screwed by greedy con artists is communist now?

In the context of US politics, progressive politics have been often labelled "communist" for around 100 years.

> According to this same article, the efforts seem to be a continuation of existing work that was happening before he got elected

Mamdani is not the first progressive politician in NYC

Yes it can be done on the state level. California passes consumer protection laws all the time. Some of the recent ones are listed here. The problems is people are waiting for Congress or the President to do something when it could be enacted at the state level first and when there are enough support and consensus could be passed by Congress.

https://www.kcra.com/article/new-california-laws-in-2026-jan...

Reasonable people have been disagreeing on that since at least the late 18th century.

In a practical sense the right place is wherever it gets passed. If the United States is an experiment every legal jurisdiction is a laboratory.