Robert Reich: Have you heard about this new economic trend? 

Rohit Chopra: People are increasingly using “buy now, pay later” services to borrow and pay for all kinds of purchases — including basic necessities like groceries.

Robert Reich: Rohit Chopra, former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is here to break down what the “buy now, pay later” trend means, how corporations might be taking advantage of anyone who uses it, and how it could be a warning sign for our economy.

Rohit Chopra: If you’ve bought something online recently, you’ve probably seen an option to “Buy Now, Pay Later.” 

Instead of paying the full price up front, you can pay for your purchase in multiple installments — often with no interest and with instant approval.

This sounds like a sweet deal. But it’s really a troubling sign of the cost of living crisis — and it could put millions of people on a treadmill of unsustainable debt.

In 2025, over 90 million people in America took out a Buy Now, Pay Later loan — from lenders like Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay, and dozens of other companies.

During the holiday shopping season, as consumers dealt with higher prices on nearly everything, Buy Now, Pay Later surged. On Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2025 alone, Americans borrowed nearly $2 billion from these lenders. 

And as more families struggle to pay for basic necessities, that number is expected to keep growing. About a quarter of Buy Now Pay later borrowers say they’ve used it on groceries. Other consumers have used it to pay for gas, healthcare, and even rent. 

58% of borrowers say they used it because it was the only way they could afford their purchases. About a third say they’ve used it as a “bridge” between paychecks.   

So you might be thinking, “But isn’t Buy Now Pay Later better than using a credit card?"

Great question. Buy Now Pay Later lenders tell us that they don't charge interest. But that doesn't mean we aren’t paying a price.

First, there are merchant fees. Buy Now Pay Later lenders charge hefty fees to businesses that sell to you. While retailers pay about 3% of the purchase price to accept your credit card, they often pay 6% or more for Buy Now Pay Later. And guess what, as prices across the economy go up, that means commissions go up too.

For many businesses that operate on a thin margin, these required fees can force them to increase prices even further.

Second, there are borrower fees. For many Buy Now Pay Later companies, they make more money the more that we slip up. 

Some charge late fees as high as 25 percent of the total loan.  This revenue stream is growing for the Buy Now Pay Later industry. And it might incentivize them to push you into borrowing that they know you'll struggle to repay.

And if you’ve got other loans, like most people, this could lock you into a cycle that’s hard to escape.

Third, our data could be used against us. Analysis of Buy Now Pay Later lenders reveals that they use sophisticated tracking and surveillance to monetize our data. 

Some lenders track our precise location, our interactions with apps on our devices, and our browsing history to help advertisers target products to us — and even give retailers the power to charge you a different price than someone else when shopping online. 

Together, these hidden costs underscore the urgent need to protect Buy Now, Pay Later borrowers.

During the Biden administration, I was Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

We made it clear that Buy Now Pay Later products are loans, and those lenders have to play by the same rules as credit card companies. It meant they had to investigate consumer disputes, give refunds for returned products or cancelled services, and provide billing statements – just like credit cards.

But that didn’t last long. Buy Now Pay Later companies lobbied to get it killed, and the Trump Administration quickly complied — along with shutting down all of the work the CFPB was doing to crack down on crime against consumers. 

Each year, the CFPB would return billions of dollars to people cheated by financial companies. But with no enforcement of the law, that’s going to make life more expensive for all of us.  

While regulators in Washington are now doing the bidding of big corporations, individual states are stepping up. State attorneys general are launching inquiries to watch over Buy Now Pay Later companies. States like New York have enacted new laws to beef up oversight and protections for  Buy Now Pay Later. More states are looking to block companies from selling our data and adding on junk fees.

And when Trump is gone, we must enshrine those protections into federal law by passing a Buy Now Pay Later Borrower’s Bill of Rights to block predatory practices — just like Congress did for credit cards in 2009. 

Given the cost of living crisis that is running people ragged, the boom in Buy Now Pay Later debt is going to be another burden for so many Americans.

In many ways, it's become a mirror — reflecting how broken our economy is — and how much work it will take to fix it.

Remember when Donald Trump said he would cut credit card interest rates down to 10%?

No, I'm not talking about what he's said recently. I’m talking about what he said in September 2024 during his presidential campaign.

But after he was elected, we didn’t hear a peep about it.

Instead, his Administration has been showering politically connected companies, like the credit card giants, with all sorts of favors, tax breaks, and industry deregulation. What’s happened since? Credit card company stocks, and their CEO pay packages, have surged.

As the cost of nearly everything goes up, credit card companies are sitting pretty. That’s because when those prices go up, it means more people will rely on credit cards to get by — and credit card companies take a cut of every purchase. 

Americans now owe over $1.2 trillion on their credit cards — the highest level on record. With so many people struggling with higher prices, nearly half of credit card users are now carrying a balance on their card.

This is where the big bonanza is: interest payments. In 2024, people paid about $160 billion in interest on their credit card. That’s over $400 million per day — and a 50% increase from 2022.

Right now, the typical American is paying near-record interest rates on their credit cards — with the average rate over 20%. That’s way higher than the interest rates on other types of loans, making it easier to get trapped on a treadmill of debt.

As Americans are souring on Trump’s economy, and his failure to address the cost of living crisis, he is bringing back his promise to cap credit card interest rates. 

And while he talks a big game about helping people with debt, his cronies are doing the exact opposite.

Take the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency I led until 2025. 

The new regime at the CFPB has effectively shut down all oversight of credit card companies. 

For years, the credit card companies harvested billions of dollars in illegal fees by exploiting a loophole. We worked to close it, and when the credit card industry pushed to get those fees back, the Trump administration quickly took their side.

The agency has also ripped up law enforcement actions against numerous corporations that have broken the law. That includes Citibank, which illegally discriminated against people with Armenian last names on their credit cards.

Trump’s CFPB has even abandoned its enforcement of laws cracking down on predatory lenders who charge excessive interest rates to members of our military. 

But it’s not just the CFPB. 

Trump’s financial regulators rubber-stamped a credit card megamerger between Capital One and Discover that’s expected to push up rates and fees even more. And the administration is siding with companies that are suing to stop states like Colorado from enacting their own laws capping interest rates on credit cards and other loans.

So when you hear Trump claim he wants to help ordinary people with their credit card debt, don’t just listen to his words — look for his actions.

Because what you’ll find is the opposite. 

He’s making a small clique of huge financial companies even more powerful, while leaving everyone else to pay the price.

Is Billie Eilish right about billionaires?

BILLIE: “There’s a few people in here who have a lot more money than me…I’d say if you have money, it would be great to use it for good things and maybe give it to some people that need it.”

Billie is spot on. And she had the courage to say this in front of a crowd of powerful billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg.

Billionaires love to claim that they need to keep their vast fortunes so they can continue donating to good causes. We should be grateful for their charity!

Many of them point to the Giving Pledge as an example — a pledge signed by dozens of American billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg, promising to give away at least half their fortunes. How’s that going? Only nine of the 256 signers have successfully followed through on the promise since signing — and Zuckerberg’s wealth has increased nearly 3,500%. 

In total, America’s billionaires today collectively worth an estimated $7.5 trillion — but they’ve only pledged or donated just a little over 3% of their wealth in the last decade. Meanwhile, billionaire wealth has exploded by 188% in that same time period. 

And when they do donate, it’s not necessarily out of the goodness of their hearts. Billionaires already pay a shockingly little amount in taxes. Thanks to the charitable deduction, they can whittle down their tax burden even further by writing off their multi-million dollar donations. This is effectively a government subsidy for any cause they deem worthy. 

So if a group of billionaires decides to curry favor with Trump by giving “charitable” contributions to his ballroom, their taxable income decreases by that amount — which means you, and I, and every other taxpayer have to fill the gap. So when Trump claimed that his vanity project wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime, it was yet another lie.

Billionaires’ splashy philanthropic announcements can also serve as valuable PR to distract from problems they are creating. I mean, if Jeff Bezos donates over $11 million to address homelessness in the D.C. area, who really cares if nearly half of Amazon warehouse workers struggle to cover housing costs because they’re paid so little?

Now, here’s the part of Billie’s speech that you really need to pay attention to.

BILLIE: “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?”

I’ll tell you why. It’s because they use their vast fortunes not to donate to important causes, but to lobby for policies and bankroll politicians that keep our rigged system in place — all so they can keep amassing wealth and power.

Since the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision in 2010, billionaire political spending on elections has increased 160 times over. In 2024, just 100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion — one out of six dollars spent by all candidates, parties, and committees on that election.

And they got a big return on that investment — in the form of tax cuts for the wealthy and the big corporations they own, regulatory rollbacks, dropped investigations, diminished antitrust enforcement, fewer worker protections, and more corporate subsidies. 

Not surprisingly, the 10 richest billionaires have seen their wealth soar by nearly $700 billion since Trump retook office.

Meanwhile, to pay for the latest round of tax breaks for the wealthy, Trump has made devastating cuts to the social safety net, including Medicaid and food stamps. Don’t for a minute expect charitable contributions from billionaires to fill the gap.

Now, there are some billionaires who are staying true to the Giving Pledge — like Mackenzie Scott, who has donated billions to nonprofits and historically Black colleges and universities. And you could argue that any donation is better than nothing.

But if we actually had a tax system that properly taxed billionaire wealth, we wouldn’t need their charitable giving to begin with. We should not have to rely on their charitable whims to fund services or causes that address our nation’s biggest problems — especially when billionaires are responsible for many of those problems in the first place. That’s why we pay taxes.

No matter how big the donation, billionaire charity is not a substitute for a robust social safety net, a living wage, and a just economy.

The solution here is not more generous billionaires. The solution here is for no individual to amass so much wealth and power in the first place.

What would a typical worker earn now if their wages had grown as much as the pay of CEO’s at big corporations, over the past 50 years?

$25 an hour? $100 an hour? Let’s take a look at this chart.

This first bar shows us what the salary of the typical American worker was in 1968, including benefits. Back then, they earned a little over $25 an hour, in today’s dollars. 

But what did the typical worker actually earn in 2024? Take a look. 

The typical worker’s earnings went up to $36.49 an hour. That’s good news, right? Who wants to celebrate? 

Not so fast. Back to my original question: If worker pay had climbed as much as CEO pay since the late 1960s, what would the typical worker earn today?

Ready for this?

432 dollars. Per hour. 

Of course corporations aren’t paying their workers anywhere close to that. Instead, they’re paying their CEOs 280 TIMES MORE than the typical worker. 

Why is that? Not because CEOs have become so much more valuable than their workers over the past fifty years. No, the system is rigged. 

Big corporations chronically underpay workers compared to their worker’s productivity on the job. Productivity — that is, the value of their output —   has soared and resulted in record corporate profits.

But instead of sharing these profits with their workers, corporations and their CEOs are instead siphoning them off into stock buybacks, which have also hit record levels in recent years.

Stock buybacks reduce the number of shares available for investors to purchase, which drives up the value of the remaining shares. Just simple supply and demand.

These rising share prices bump up CEO pay, because increasingly, part of their compensation is in shares of stock.

Stock buybacks used to be considered illegal stock manipulation until Ronald Reagan came along.

Shocking, I know.

CEOs can now effectively give themselves a raise, while workers get the shaft. That’s how you end up with a chart like this. 

But what can we do about it? 

We can raise the federal minimum wage, which hasn’t been increased since 2009. We can support and strengthen labor unions, which fight for better wages. We can use antitrust laws to break up big corporations that dominate their industries, raising prices for consumers and reducing job opportunities for workers. We can raise taxes on corporations whose CEOs are paid hundreds of times more than their workers. And we can ban stock buybacks. 

But first we have to realize that the reason CEOs are getting paid insane amounts of money is not because the “free market” dictates that they’re worth it. It’s because we’re letting them get away with it.

You’ve been hearing a lot about immigrants and undocumented workers lately — and all of it is a pack of lies. A great champion of immigrant worker rights throughout her entire career, former Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, is here to correct the record.

JULIE: Immigrant workers are nothing like the villains Trump is making them out to be.

The exploitation they face on the job is sadly nothing new. 

In 1995, I was the lead attorney in a landmark case brought by over 70 Thai garment workers who’d been trafficked to the U.S. and forced to work behind barbed wire and under armed guard. These workers, the majority of them women, were lured from Thailand with the promise of a good job, but were forced to sew clothing in a sweatshop for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, for pennies. They worked under the constant threat that if discovered, they would be the ones who would be punished — not their captors. 

But instead of further punishing the workers, we punished the companies. By supporting the workers’ own power to exercise their rights, we sued those who profited from their labor and won millions of dollars in unpaid wages. We fought against their deportation. We sent a message that immigrant workers could demand corporate accountability.

These garment workers wanted to escape poverty, support their families, and contribute to a new country they called home — just  like so many others who come to the United States seeking opportunity today.

Do these people sound like the “worst of the worst” to you?

Immigrant workers help raise our children, care for our sick and elderly, wash our cars, serve food in restaurants, harvest our produce, and sort and deliver our packages. They are indispensable to their communities and the economies that depend on their labor.

But instead of being valued, some greedy corporations use these workers’ immigration status — both undocumented and documented — to terrorize them into keeping silent about workplace abuses.

“If you report me, I’ll report you,” is one of the most common threats that immigrant workers hear from employers who abuse and exploit them. As a result, they face more abuse and difficulty getting justice.

One of the most common abuses workers face is bosses stealing their pay. More money is stolen from low-wage workers in wage theft a year than the total cost of all other property crimes combined — and the problem is more prevalent in U.S. industries with more immigrant workers.

This abuse can be a matter of life and death. Immigrants are more likely to work in dangerous industries like construction and agriculture. In 2023, Latino immigrant workers were twice as likely to die on the job than U.S.-born workers.

Immigrant women workers in particular face high rates of sexual harassment and violence. One study found that a staggering 80 percent of Mexican and Mexican-American female farmworkers in the U.S. have experienced sexual harassment at work — and many are threatened with deportation if they report the abuse.

And under Trump, immigrant workers have endured relentless racial targeting. Trump’s deportation machine has abducted thousands of workers of color on the way to work or at their job site. They’ve been thrown into detention centers and some have been illegally deported to countries they have never even been to. 

This is not just about vilifying immigrants. Trump has also used lies about immigrants to fuel attacks on all communities of color — including on many U.S. citizens.  

No worker is safe when anyone can be targeted.

So what can we do to protect immigrant workers?

First, stop the raids. 

They are making workplaces less safe and tearing workers, families, and communities apart.

Second, hold corporations responsible for labor law violations

Workers deserve real protections. Breaking labor laws can’t just be a cost of doing business. Government is supposed to enforce the law, not aid and abet corporations in breaking them.

Third, immigrant workers must be protected from retaliation and deportation when they speak up. 

When I was Acting Labor Secretary in the Biden administration, we expanded Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement, or DALE. This protected immigrant workers involved in labor investigations by granting them a work permit and temporary protection from deportation when they came forward to report abuse. Programs like DALE should be expanded, not eliminated, so bad actors can be held accountable.

Fourth, workers need real power on the job.

That’s what unions and worker centers do. It’s still too hard to form a union in this country, and now Trump’s corporate-backed war on workers has made it even more difficult. Immigrants have powered the labor movement for over a century, and we need to remove the barriers that keep workers from successfully organizing.

Fifth, enforce anti-monopoly laws.

Part of making sure workers have real power is curbing corporate power. When corporations have too much power, they can suppress wages and impose harsh working conditions across entire industries.  

Enforcing anti-monopoly laws gives all workers — immigrant and American-born alike — a fairer shot. 

Sixth, and finally, we need a clear, attainable pathway to citizenship. 

Undocumented immigrants are forced into the shadows and called freeloaders. But they pay billions in taxes every year while being ineligible for benefits like Medicaid, Social Security, and unemployment insurance. They deserve to reap the benefits of the backbreaking labor they pour into our communities.

Let me be clear: attacking immigrant workers doesn’t help American-born workers. Corporations pit these workers against each other so they can drive down wages for both groups and make the workplace less safe for all workers. Protecting vulnerable workers improves standards and safety for everyone — no matter where they were born.

So don’t believe the lies you hear about immigrant and undocumented workers. The real villains are the greedy corporations that want workers fighting one another while they rake in record profits at workers’ expense.

We must not succumb to this administration’s scapegoating immigrant workers for the problems caused by powerful corporations.

We are always strongest when we stand together.

“Take me out to the ballgame…” 

…If you can afford it.

Sporting events bring us together. But nowadays, a trip to the big game is out of reach for many Americans.

That’s because sports are a big business — and most teams are owned by billionaires or investment groups that want to squeeze as much profit out of fans as possible. 

Ticket prices alone have skyrocketed in recent years. But the price gouging doesn’t end there.

When you’re at the game to watch your favorite team, you’re a captive customer who can’t leave the stadium or bring in outside food. So teams know they can charge you an arm and a leg on concessions — sometimes double or triple what you’d spend across the street at a restaurant or grocery store for the same item.

When you add everything up — it costs the average family of four a fortune to attend a single game. Who can afford that?

But here’s the kicker, you’ve already paid most of these billionaire team owners with your tax dollars. 

In the last few decades, professional sports teams have raked in over $30 billion dollars in public funds to help build major league arenas. Sports teams and their billionaire owners have taken advantage of all sorts of sweetheart land deals, property tax breaks, and other public funding. I’ve got a whole video about the sports stadium scam you can watch later. 

It’s bad enough that we’re subsidizing extremely profitable sports teams with our tax dollars, but we’re letting them charge us $17 for a beer and $11 for a damn hotdog? 

There’s a way to tackle this. 

States and cities should pass what are known as “street pricing” laws for any stadium or venue that receives public funding from taxpayers.

This would require that stadium food and drink be sold at prices comparable to nearby bars or restaurants outside the stadiums. Street pricing is already being used effectively at some airports across the country.

Look, sports teams that are getting big taxpayer subsidies for their stadiums shouldn’t be allowed to just rip off the public. 

Not at the concession stand.

And not at the box office either. 

If sports teams are getting public money, they have a public responsibility to make tickets affordable. 

That way you can actually…TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME.