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Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

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Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#121
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...? No, this is the consequence of having an actual stupid person in the Oval Office and the majority party being half coerced and half committed in cultlike devotion to POTUS. Obviously the US has economic weapons. It's the largest economy in the world. If anything this signals that POTUS himself cannot wield those weapons though, and the American public, political, and business apparatuses have little appetite for…

[flagged]

Okay: the previous administration elected and elder-abused a clearly mentally handicapped one and lied about it in the press for nearly 4 years.

Happy?

Can we get back to the topic at hand now that I scratched that little itch for ya?

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#122

Cantor Fitzgerald, formerly led by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and is now run by his son, went to various companies that were affected by tariffs and bought the rights to their potential tariff refunds for 20% of the value on the expectation that it'd be struck down by the courts. Now they stand to make huge returns of 3 to 5x for being correct on that bet, while, of course, consumers get nothing. Now if this i…

This is wrong. It's not insider trading. Lutnick didn't have inside information. His son just had a brain. Anyone who read the case knew which way the court was going, it was the least surprising decision ever. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that the court ever heard it.

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Okay, I'll entertain it. How would you distinguish between the brilliant move of using illegal tariffs to disclose limited power and appetite for tariffs, versus someone displaying a 3rd grader level of economic understanding and saying "well of course we should charge people to sell stuff in 'my store' and I am now the manager of 'the store', so I get to set the rate"? What specific pieces of evidence do you believe…

Why would China immediately retaliate with a Rare Earth threat to tariffs? Why would we threaten Greenland, another rare earth hotbed? We , the general public , similar to the Cuban Missile crisis, are not being told shit.

There is a global cold/hot war where real pieces have moved. NATO is basically at war and we can’t know. There’s millions dying in Ukraine, and it’s basically Eurasia to us (virtualized, reported , broadcasted ).

Warships are being torpedoed. Nuclear subs from either side can’t be tracked, it is always a leveraged threat that one has to negotiate around.

Few are ready to live under 24 hour nuclear watch, but it’s possible that’s what many cities have been under and can never be told. Maybe I should just go ahead and write my great American novel?

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#125

I'm gonna have a stroke. The Congressional Budget Office found that consumers paid 70-80% of the tariffs, totaling more than $1000 per household. Where is my refund?

same place where your refund is for congress rolling out 10%+ inflation for years and now your dollar is worth less. its theft actually

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#126
post #96

Absolutely absurd that we’re at this point. The courts / SCOTUS let the government roll out a massive and obviously illegal tax on citizens for a long time. They should have stepped in earlier. Now we the people probably don’t get our money back….

Still waiting on getting those freedoms back that we temporarily gave up after 9/11 via the patriot act so we could get the baddies.

Don't hold your breath for either to be given back.

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#127
post #96

Absolutely absurd that we’re at this point. The courts / SCOTUS let the government roll out a massive and obviously illegal tax on citizens for a long time. They should have stepped in earlier. Now we the people probably don’t get our money back….

> probably Hah, we are 100% not getting our money back. And the higher, tariff level, prices aren't going to go back down either.

Did they actually raise prices, though? I haven't noticed any significant jumps; my understanding was that they were absorbing (for the most part) the tariffs for the time being, but planned to raise prices in the near future.

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#129

Cantor Fitzgerald, formerly led by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and is now run by his son, went to various companies that were affected by tariffs and bought the rights to their potential tariff refunds for 20% of the value on the expectation that it'd be struck down by the courts. Now they stand to make huge returns of 3 to 5x for being correct on that bet, while, of course, consumers get nothing. Now if this i…

Could you go into detail about what you think happened? The tariffs were public knowledge, and the suits to invalidate them were public knowledge. Are you saying you think the Supreme Court justices secretly communicated to the Commerce Secretary how they intended to rule on the case, far in advance of publishing their ruling?

I'll turn this around: Do you think it is acceptable for policymakers, lawmakers or people involved in such a process to reap profits more or less directly with (partially non-public) knowledge they've acquired?

Because I think not. And I feel pretty strongly about this. The conflict of interest is so glaringly obvious that it should be completely self-evident why every voter should want to prevent, ban and punish any such action.

I feel that anyone involved in this tariff insurance business should be able to prove without a shadow of doubt that they had no political insider knowledge about the whole thing, and I'm extremely skeptical that this is the case (just from the pople involved alone!).

Re: Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

#130
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s a matter of implementation though. How would you refund so many people? This was the point of the tariffs, wasn't it? The White House now has a $130B slush fund to distribute more or less however they want, with no accountability because accountability is by-design impossible. Sure maybe half of it will go where it ought to as a fig leaf, but a very large chunk of that cash will be making its way to Trump's lo…

> The White House now has a $130B slush fund to distribute more or less however they want, with no accountability because accountability is by-design impossible. The government knows exactly who paid what in duties, otherwise they couldn't tell if you were trying to avoid duties. So they know exactly who to pay back and how much.

> The government knows exactly who paid what in duties

No, they have a record of who handed the money over to the government. This does not tell you who paid the duties. There's going to be a whole lot of Trump toadies & business owners in the chain, siphoning cash from refunds before they work their way back to the people who actually paid them. And that's not even getting into the open corruption & fraud that will be happening as part of this as well.

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