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Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

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Re: Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

#761

Post by beloch »

xnx wrote: post #57

Am I understanding this right? 1) US customer pays huge import tax on imported goods in the form of higher prices. 2) Seller sends the collected tax to the US government 3) US government will refund all/most of that tax back to the seller after this ruling 4) Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit (no refund to customer)

This will be so in some cases, but there are extra steps in others.

e.g. In a different path, 1 and 2 are the same, but things then diverge.

3) To recoup some of those tariff costs, the company sells the rights to any potential future tariff refunds. They recoup a portion of what they paid immediately but hand away the right to a full refund to another party, such as Cantor Fitzgerald. The seller might use this to reduce prices for their customers, but probably won't. They'll set prices according to what the market will support.

4) US government will refund all/most of that tax back to companies, like Cantor Fitzgerald, that bought the rights to tariff refunds.

5) Seller doesn't get any extra money back, so there's no money to refund to consumers.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Cantor Fitzgerald, while just one of the companies doing this, was formerly headed by Howard Lutnick and is currently owned and operated by his sons.

Re: Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

#762

Post by pstuart »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #649
pstuart wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stated intention was to replace income taxes with tariffs; and it came with a bonus feature of handing the President a cudgel with which to grant him personal powers and personal rewards.

There were something like six different stated intentions, most of which were entirely mutually-exclusive. Replacing income taxes was always the least credible of them.

Least viable at least; considering the "tax reforms" it aligns with his goals.

Re: Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

#763

Post by fuzzfactor »

keernan wrote: post #373
apexalpha wrote: post #136

It's odd to me that something as fundamental as 'can the President unilaterally impose tariffs on any country he wants anytime he wants' is apparently so ill defined in law that 9 justices can't agree on it.

>apparently so ill defined in law that 9 justices can't agree on it That is not how the Supreme Court works. SCOTUS is a political body. Justices do one thing: cast votes. For any reason. If they write an opinion it is merely their post hoc justification for their vote. Otherwise they do not have to explain anything. And when they do write an opinion it does not necessarily reflect the real reason for the way they vo…

>downvoting without explaining is ... just ...

Like I've said before, if you can't tell whether it's a bot or a real person voting, it doesn't matter anyway.

Might as well be a bot either way.

corrective upvote made

Re: Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

#764

Post by Tadpole9181 »

Ronje wrote: post #756
shevy-java wrote: post #633

Hmm. This is celebrated as a victory - I don't mind that, who likes the crazy pro-russian orange man anyway. But I think it should be pointed out that he went on to use an old law. So the supreme court basically said that this was an unfit use case. Ok. They could just come up with a new law that is tailor-made and may eventually be approved. It may take some time but they could technically do so, right? So I am not…

You do realize these tariffs aren't going away. They just used a different legal way to use them. Section 232, 301, 201, 122 and 338 will allow him put these right back on

They still have to pay back all the money collected. And those other tariff avenues have different restrictions, like maximum amounts or limited durations.

Re: Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

#765

Post by Tadpole9181 »

agentifysh wrote: post #743

Doesn't seem like the market has priced the implication of this yet? All in all, this seems like a major major blow to Trump. I'm more impressed that United State's laws are capable of gate keeping the president like this and despite people like Dalio dooming it up, it makes me more confident in America ironically.

Have you not seen that Trump already announced he's ignoring this decision and retroactively applying a different justification for the tariffs? He's also imposing a 10% global tariff on top of anything, just for the audacity of trying to stop him.

Re: Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

#766

Post by Jensson »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #445
rjrjrjrj wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno. More than half the country was either enthusiastically in favor of electing a convicted criminal pathological liar or too apathetic to do anything about it. How do you fix that?

You can't change or fix people who have their vote. Mental models are rigid, and people are, broadly speaking, emotional and irrational. They vote vibes, not facts. So, "what do?" as the kids would say. You keep folks who want to come to the US who might be vulnerable once in the US out of the US to protect them (which this administration is assisting with through their anti immigration efforts). The people who want…

> You can't change or fix people who have their vote. Mental models are rigid, and people are, broadly speaking, emotional and irrational. They vote vibes, not facts. So, "what do?" as the kids would say.

So don't present a candidate with shit vibes that people wont vote for? Democrats lost this election, if they got as many votes as they usually do they would have won.

Democrats in power would rather lose the election than break down their own power structure, that is the main reason Trump could get re-elected.

Re: Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

#767

Post by radiator »

sarchertech wrote: post #700
skeletal88 wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is because your congress and political system don't need coalition governments orvaby kind of agreements, winner takes it all. A true multy party system wpuld be mote flexible and less prone to catering to extremes on the left or right

A multiparty systems has some advantages. But it also has flaws and it wasn’t able to stop Brexit. And I don’t think a multiparty system would have been able to stop the rise of Trump all else being equal equal.

It seems you wish for a system which would be able to stop Brexit against the will of the people.

Re: Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

#768

Post by m4rtink »

somenameforme wrote: post #564
linuxhansl wrote: post #301

Finally some sanity. The administration has use laws about "national security" and other so call "emergencies" to impose tariffs. If everything is an emergency then nothing is, and that was clearly not congress' intention with those laws. The power to impose tariffs rests with the legislator, not the executive. Of course our congress is effectively useless - we can thank decades of Mitch McConnell's (and others) "not…

We're currently in the midst of 51 ongoing "national emergencies" [1], dating back to at least Carter. I think something that the next great empire will learn from is to limit emergency powers as well as the ability to create emergency powers, because in spite of their name they inevitably end up becoming normalized and just used as regular powers. The description of some of those emergencies is comedic: "Declared a…

This has been unfortunatelly an issue at least since Caesar times. :P

Re: Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

#769

Post by Animats »

mattas wrote: post #375
sowbug wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the CPAs among us: will the refunded import taxes be treated as extra profit for all the importers who paid them? I could see an argument that they don't have a legal obligation to pass the refunds on to their customers, any more than my local grocery store owes me 5 cents for the gallon of milk I bought last year if the store discovers that their wholesaler had been mistakenly overcharging them.

The idea of getting a refund for mischaracterized tariffs is actually fairly common (it's called a duty drawback and there's a cottage industry around this). It's generally used when an importer incorrectly categorized their import under an HS code that has a higher duty than the correctly categorized HS code. The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger. Will be interesting to see how they (im…

A regular importer who routinely pays customs duties is now owed money by Customs and Border Protection. Can they now set off future duties against the balance owed them? Normally, reciprocal debt cancellation is legal.

The U.S. Treasury has a whole system for this, but in the other direction. If the government owes you money, and you owe the government money, the Treasury will deduct what you owe from whatever they are paying out.[1] But they're not set up for that in the other direction.

[1] https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/TOP/

Re: Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

#770

Post by rsynnott »

freeone3000 wrote: post #742
ragazzina wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you make an example of a tariff from the last 100 years that definitely benefitted the US in a long-lasting way?

Auto tariffs have kept Detroit producing automobiles despite various other entrants, while still being low enough for foreign competition.

_Just about_. After significant government bailouts.

Ultimately, this sort of protectionism tends to be expensive, and yield an inferior product.

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