401–410 of 843 posts
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I can't blame Ginsurg. She was still capable of performing her duties even at the end. She resisted an overtly political retirement and it wasn't even clear if a compatible replacement would be confirmed even if she did retire early. It's unfortunate how it went, but I respect her decision.
You don’t think her ego got in the way?
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You did not pay the tariffs. You bore the cost of the tariffs. Those are not the same thing. The refund is due to the party that got the bill for the tariff and paid it-- the importer. What you paid for was for the business not to go bankrupt while this was occurring. If the business wants to refund you for that, they can choose to do so. But you are not owed a refund.
Look you can write the funny numbers in whatever accounting mumbo jumbo you want, but I paid more to cover the cost to the supplier == I paid the tariffs.
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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.
Cool! How much money did you yourself make on this (given that it was entirely obvious, and not leveraging knowledge seems silly)?
Just because something isn't obvious to you, it doesn't mean it wasn't obvious to a lot of people.
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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…
White House legal opinions aren't any better than other legal opinions. Opinions are not "information".
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Cool! How much money did you yourself make on this (given that it was entirely obvious, and not leveraging knowledge seems silly)?
Why would you assume the parent would have both a betting addiction and enough side money available to make it worthwhile?
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> No, they have a record of who handed the money over to the government. This does not tell you who paid the duties. The entity that handed over the money to the government is the entity that paid the duties, and is the one the government must refund. If an entity has passed those costs on does not change that, and does not turn the 130B into a slush fund. However I agree that consumers will be likely be royally scre…
If the government charges the importer $20 and the importer charges me $20, then I am in effect the one who paid the duty. If the refund goes to the importer, and it does not come back to me, then the government and the importer have colluded to rob me of $20. This isn't an accident, the owners of the import companies who will benefit from this theft were almost certainly all Trump supporters. In reality, half of the…
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Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ? Maybe that was never the point. You present it as retaliation against 'countries that are out to get us'. Introduce the tariffs, companies pay the tariffs by increasing prices for consumers, get the inevitable loss in court, return the tariff money to the companies. You just transferred $130B of w…
The whole point is “$130B is chump change for the problems caused” and that’s true if companies as well
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Better for whom? Wealthy people? If your argument is that taxation at sale is harder to dogdge than with income, and thus an obviously regressive scheme would still be advantageous for the average American, then I'm not buying it at all. I see no evidence whatsoever that the wealthy would have any more difficulty in dodging sales tax than income/capital gains taxes.
That’s not my argument. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a more regressive tax scheme. Bill Gates and I consume approximately the same amount of resources. I don’t see why he should have to pay a significantly different rate than I do.
But I don't see the primary justification for taxes as "keeping consumption in check" (whatever that would mean for you): In my view, we pay taxes to keep our society functional.
Progressive taxation is required to prevent escalating wealth inequality (and I'd argue that US administrations have done a really poor here over the last decades).
Regressive taxes ruin society by nurturing pseudo-parasitic rent-seekers controlling most of the wealth (=> exaggerated for clarity), and the situation is already bad enough without allowing those to basically skip taxes.
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…