471–480 of 843 posts
I wonder if brands will have a "tariff refund" sale. Make everything 20% off until all of the brand's tariff refund is passed on to customers. Of course, this wouldn't help the customers that already paid the tariff but it could be a good marketing ploy.
... 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.
It doesn't need to be a perfect solution, you could just give everyone a flat refund similar to class action payouts.
Side topic, but this number puts into how crazy it was for trump[0] to go on tariff war against enemies and friends alike. All the propaganda and extortionist language about how all countries will pay up to USA. Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ? $7T of spending, $1.77T in deficit[1] and they planned to fix this hole with $100B?! M…
Sounds a bit like Brexit.
... 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.
I understand the frustration but I don't understand the logic. The businesses who paid the tariffs (who were literally sent an invoice that they paid) should be the ones refunded. How would the government even be able to determine if a business increased product prices due to tariffs vs other factors, or even if the business increased prices at all? What if the product is a loss leader and the company was fine just e…
Gee, I don't know, receipts ?
Also simply revenue on the business end
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prices don’t monotonically go up forever, prices come down all the time Edit: Sorry autocorrect thought I said moronically,
Did you mean "moronically" or "monotonically"? I'd accept either, just wondering which one you meant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm serious. The Trump/MAGA view of foreign policy is that the US sits at the top, we owe friendship to no one. We engage with other nations transactionally, zero sum, with the US always getting more.
This isn't the Trump/MAGA foreign policy, american exceptionalism is a century old and only gotten stronger. If anything MAGA is the full blown expression of this phenomenon. The difference was that in the past US understood that you "rule" better when you surround yourself with enemies. Now the policy is to dictate conditions left and right.
The new view seems to be based on a zero sum, transactional view of international affairs. In this mode every interaction must clearly benefit the US more than any other participant. We have to clearly "win" every time.
[1] and this is not even counting 2nd order "surplus" from things like no longer having to fight world wars.
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.
Blaming SCOTUS here is not out of the question, but they should not be "entirely" to blame, unless you think it's totally fine to run the Executive branch like you're trying to get away with something. It's not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Companies that get 'refunds' will have an opportunity to use that money to rehire and repay workers. Why on Earth do you expect a single-time payment with no strings attached to make companies think some market is profitable so they should invest in it?
Unsure where you got that from? If a company that has had to lay off staff and reduce hours because of increase in expenses because of tariffs, then they get a chunk of money back, trying to 'get back' to where you were before - headcount, wages, etc - might be on your mind, and might be possible with a one-time refund of ideally a sizeable portion of your tax. However... we still have extremely high tariffs in place…
And edit because I explained it badly:
That means that yes, getting the tariffs back can make them hire, because there may be more people wanting to buy things. Sending them the tariffs money will do absolutely nothing.
But even the first part isn't guaranteed, because you can't rollback the economy, things don't return to where they were, they go into some other place.