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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

#361

Post by dboreham »

khy wrote: post #294
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could this open Cantor Fitzgerald up to class action law suits from consumers who ultimately paid the refunded tariffs?

Doubtful since any sane person knew the tariffs were not legal and would eventually be overturned.

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

#362

Post by NetMageSCW »

bickfordb wrote: post #165
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….

The latest temporary tariffs are also likely illegal.

I thought those were on very solid ground commonly used by past administrations?

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

#363

Post by Forgeties79 »

afavour wrote: post #21
just-working wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This back and forth is the entire issue if you ask me. Whoever you ask in the administration on any given day is going to say the tariffs exist for different reasons. It’s on purpose though - it’s so whoever is arguing for the admin can curate the answer.

Don’t like the cost? It’s a negotiation tactic. Want manufacturing back? That’s what it’s doing actually, it’s definitely a longterm play to bring it back. Worried about the debt? The tariffs are going to be a huge, permanent revenue generator that gets back at countries that “cheated” us. It can't be all these as multiple elements contradict each other.

I’ll take my Fox News slot now please and thank you.

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

#364

Post by Ajakks »

gruez wrote: post #236
burkaman wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He presumably did not have access to the court's opinion before it was released, but he did have access to internal White House legal opinions before the tariffs were announced ("Mr. President this is illegal and very likely to be overturned by the courts"), and he obviously had access to the entire federal legal team during the court cases. I can't prove that there was any White House advisory memo before the tariff…

>I can't prove that there was any White House advisory memo before the tariffs were announced, but hypothetically, would this not be considered material nonpublic information? Was the hypothetical "White House advisory memo" produced using any proprietary information? If not, why should it be any different than if I hired a bunch of top lawyers to produce a private report for me?

What a week argument - your still making excuses for this nonsense. Ridiculous.

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

#365

Post by eitau_1 »

siliconc0w wrote: post #180

SCOTUS is entirely to blame for the chaos here, the courts quickly found the tariffs illegal but they used the shadow docket to stay the ruling causing the illegal behavior to continue for a year.

It's even more to blame given that it stripped the NEA and IEEPA acts of legislative guardrails in 1987.

[0] https://fivepoints.mattglassman.net/p/the-court-ieepa-and-th...

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

#366

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#367

Post by burkaman »

gruez wrote: post #236
burkaman wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He presumably did not have access to the court's opinion before it was released, but he did have access to internal White House legal opinions before the tariffs were announced ("Mr. President this is illegal and very likely to be overturned by the courts"), and he obviously had access to the entire federal legal team during the court cases. I can't prove that there was any White House advisory memo before the tariff…

>I can't prove that there was any White House advisory memo before the tariffs were announced, but hypothetically, would this not be considered material nonpublic information? Was the hypothetical "White House advisory memo" produced using any proprietary information? If not, why should it be any different than if I hired a bunch of top lawyers to produce a private report for me?

Yes, because it was produced by the same people that are going to argue the case in court. You can hire the best lawyers in the world but they will still have to speculate on what arguments the government is going to make, and whether there are confidential communications showing evidence that there was some consistent rational justification for the tariffs and not just the president's public posts that leader X was mean to him on the phone so he imposed a tariff.

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

#368

Post by jcranmer »

mothballed wrote: post #177
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because "the government" isn't one blob. The court system is separate from the administration. And the supreme court justices aren't giving the internal deliberations to someone in the administration, especially when the administration is one of the parties in the case.

.... what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs? Even FDR knew the 'separation' was a farce, that's how he magically got the court to go along with progressive programs they prior didn't support, after the 'Switch in time that saved nine.' SCOTUS largely…

> what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs?

They were nominated in Trump's first term, which had a very qualitatively different cabinet assembled around Trump, one much less focused on sycophancy and pleasing Trump. I don't think anybody in Trump's cabinet 6 years ago was thinking about the potential powers a president had in being able to change tariffs based on how he felt waking up in the morning, much less interrogation of judicial candidates based on how willing they were to go along with that.

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

#369

Post by mustyoshi »

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…

Just about everyone on the left has been saying these tariffs were illegal since day one.

It's not insider trading that they acted on that consensus.

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

#370

Post by CuriouslyC »

joshlemer wrote: post #248
kowalej wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, the companies used the tariff excuse to raise prices which will not come back down even if tariffs are fully off the table. Just like the price inflation during COVID.

Prices don’t monotonically go up forever, prices come down all the time Edit: Sorry autocorrect thought I said moronically,

The word you wanted there was probably monotonically
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