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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

#331

Post by pocksuppet »

izacus wrote: post #187
sillysaurusx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s smart though. If you don’t want to lose your rights to tariff refunds, don’t sell them. Would the alternative be to forbid companies from selling those rights in this case? As for whether consumers should get anything, I’m sympathetic. It’s a matter of implementation though. How would you refund so many people? You’d have to quantify how much overhead they’ve paid in tariffs, and that seems like an IRS-scale j…

Calling outright corruption at the expense of citizens as "smart" is quite a statement of morality O.o

In this economy, morality is dead. There is only profit extraction.

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

#332

Post by lawn »

chuckadams wrote: post #14
hypeatei wrote: post #7

[flagged]

You could point out the inconsistency, but I really think the cognitive dissonance of constant and pervasive hypocrisy is the point . Truth is whatever the party tells you today, and we have always been at war with EastAsia.

Yes, that is how cults operate.

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

#333

Post by SilverElfin »

satvikpendem wrote: post #30

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…

It’s not that surprising. The entire tariff saga was one trading opportunity after another for insiders who knew which announcements were going to come out.

Lutnick is a particularly corrupt individual though. He’s in the Epstein files like Trump and Musk and Thiel. But he also took over Cantor by suing the widow of Cantor after his death. And now he hands the company to children and has no shame about openly nepotistical decisions like this.

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

#334

Post by NetMageSCW »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #84
energy123 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For it to be insider trading, he would have had to have access to private information from the Supreme Court, which seems unlikely.

They could have used inside government legal analysis that other people didnt have. You could have predicted this with higher certainty if you knew the justices well enough.

Coulda woulda shoulda.

They could have just been smarter than average and found an angle others didn’t see that paid off for them.

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

#335

Post by wat10000 »

duxup wrote: 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….

Congress needs to step up and take its power back from the executive. There was no good reason for the President to have this power in the first place. Why the hell do we have emergency powers to impose tariffs? Is there going to be a fleet of nuclear-armed bombers headed for the USA and the only way to stop them is to impose tariffs? It's ridiculous.

Congress has been gradually handing their power over to the executive for decades. For decades, people have been warning that this was setting up for major abuse if you got a particularly bad president. Well, guess what....

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

#336

Post by baq »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #122
satvikpendem wrote: post #30

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.

such hopeful naivety was passable early 2025. having seen 1% of the epstein files, you'd have to be acting in bad faith to say there was no collusion.

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

#337

Post by phillipharris »

satvikpendem wrote: post #30

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…

But... who would make a bet with a counterparty like that? Hello, I'm a trump administration insider, here to make a bet with you about the future of one of Trump's policies. You'd have to be pretty stupid.

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

#338

Post by myrmidon »

irishcoffee wrote: post #224
myrmidon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

You mean these policymakers? “ House kills effort to release all congressional sexual misconduct and harassment reports” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-kills-effort...

Yes?

I frankly do not understand your argument: "Some policymakers are sleazy (yes?), so it should be fine for all of them to leverage influence/access into personal gain" (?!)

This does not make sense to me.

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

#339

Post by Herring »

nebula8804 wrote: post #208
Herring wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2023, 28% of U.S. adults scored at or below Level 1 literacy, indicating significant difficulty with everyday reading tasks. https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-fac... You guys are surrounded by other college-educated SWE, you have no idea how bad it is out there. People without a college degree went Trump 56-43. People with a college degree went for Harris 56-42. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

How do we fix this should be the question asked. Is it even possible at this point? I guess there is no free lunch, each person who realizes the importance of education has to start taking it seriously right now and spend their lives getting their community to start taking it seriously and maybe hopefully the next generation can emerge much better off. We let this mess fester for decades and now we are paying for it…

Education is a public good, therefore good education is socialist, and Americans are very hyper-individualist (aka antisocial). History suggests that Americans generally only move toward communal support systems during extreme crises, like the shift during the Great Depression. Even Covid wasn't enough to get people asking for universal healthcare, it has to be much worse.

Overcoming 'American Exceptionalism' to adopt a successful model like the Finnish education system would probably require a massive crisis. The current system will just limp along until then.

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

#340

Post by rayiner »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #279
rayiner wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn’t “close to zero.” The Supreme Court split 6-3, with two Trump appointees voting against him. And the Federal Circuit, which is the most boring appellate court and not political at all, split 7-4, with two democratic appointees and two republican appointees voting to uphold the tariffs. This was a case that split both the liberal and conservative blocs. Obama’s former SG, Neal Katyal, went up there and argued…

Did you read the ruling? Read Clarence Thomas's dissent. It's not clear if he actually thinks what he wrote, or he just voted that way so he could write a dissent and make a strange legal point which probably doesn't carry water but sort of maybe could one day maybe. If it were close, I think he would have voted the other way. The folks on the court appear extremely inclined to take the other side on things just as a…

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