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

wsj.com

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

#21

Post by afavour »

just-working wrote: post #12
hypeatei wrote: post #7

[flagged]

It's really more complicated than this. Onshoring manufacturing is something that has to be incentivized and that has positive externalities outside of dollars and cents. But some tariffs were really dumb, like on bananas. We can't grow bananas here...

It should be more complicated but the way the Trump admin did this isn't complicated. Tariffs were used to punish countries that didn't bend the knee. When they did, the tariffs were removed. So no-one was ever going to build a factory in the US because of tariffs, everyone knew they might go away tomorrow.

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

#24

Post by hypeatei »

dcveloper wrote: post #18
hypeatei wrote: post #7

[flagged]

It's a smart play for a flat tax. Baseline at 15-20% on imports (proxy for flat tax on income). Then push to eliminate income tax. It's very much aligned with conservative view points on income tax and it's progressive nature.

I don't necessarily disagree, a federal sales tax / VAT could make sense. But so far all it's been is conflicting objectives for tariffs: eliminating income tax, trade deal negotiations, and bringing jobs back. I don't think you can have all three of those simultaneously.

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

#25

Post by adampunk »

just-working wrote: post #12
hypeatei wrote: post #7

[flagged]

It's really more complicated than this. Onshoring manufacturing is something that has to be incentivized and that has positive externalities outside of dollars and cents. But some tariffs were really dumb, like on bananas. We can't grow bananas here...

It’s not that complicated. People got mad that gay people existed and they had to press “2” for English and here we are.

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

#28

Post by mhb »

mothballed wrote: post #4

... refunded to the importer of record. Not the people the costs were passed to. Essentially turning it retroactively into a tax to private businesses. This is the worst case of all scenarios for the consumer.

Since the cost was probably split between reduced profit and additional customer cost, it seems pretty impractical to determine who is due a refund - end users or businesses. Or the logistics of refunds to customers.

One possibility would be for businesses to return the fraction of the tariff paid by customers to future customers by offering the items affected with a negative tax until the refund is used up.

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

#29

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

hypeatei wrote: post #7

[flagged]

It's such an old and standard and basic playbook. They cultivated fear among the poor about immigrants or some bit of social progress like pronouns. To win power and take whatever actions they believed would enrich themselves. There's never anything more to it than that.

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

#30

Post by satvikpendem »

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 isn't insider trading (by the literal Commerce Secretary), I don't know what is.

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