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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

#541

Post by coldpie »

phil21 wrote: post #534
coldpie wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s not how commerce works. You agreed with your supplier on a price. You paid it. Doesn’t matter that part of the price was tariffs or component costs or labor. Doesn’t matter if your supplier gets a tax rebate or a kickback from an upstream supplier after the fact. These things are entirely immaterial to the meeting of the minds when you execute the contract for sale. The only moderately fuzzy case is going to b…

> Doesn’t matter if your supplier gets a tax rebate or a kickback from an upstream supplier after the fact.

It does matter if the tax that was gathered was illegal, as it is here. The illegally gathered funds should go back to the entity that paid the tax, not the middleman who ferried it from here to there. The unclear method for how to accomplish this is where the grift will be coming in.

> not even close to all companies that were charged tariffs are “trump toadies”

I did not claim this. I claimed most of the money that will be refunded will go to Trump toadies.

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

#542

Post by vuln »

UltraSane wrote: post #217
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….

There is no excuse for how long it took the Supreme court to decide this very obvious case.

they waited until the robes slowed down.

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

#543

Post by vuln »

teeray wrote: post #292
bickfordb wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latest temporary tariffs are also likely illegal.

Justice delayed is justice denied. There should be an express lane for litigation similar actions like this.

we can’t even do that with violent criminal let alone white color criminals. lol

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

#544

Post by vuln »

empath75 wrote: post #291
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….

I hate the tariffs, but giving the money back to the corporations would be absolutely _grotesque_. Every company that collected a tariff fee needs to refund it as they collect their own refunds.

scouts got paid off by big corps

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

#545

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#546

Post by mhb »

wutwutwat wrote: post #142
mhb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not how capitalism works. Consumers ate the cost. Have you not bought anything in the last year?

Yeah. You're confusing capitalism and how businesses generally work with this particular tariff. Which, based on these comments, was often/always just passed through to customers.

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

#547

Post by phil21 »

empath75 wrote: post #304
joshlemer wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I just love this idea that corporations just discovered greed during the pandemic and before that had been selflessly dedicated to selling goods for the benefit of mankind at the lowest price they possibly could. Companies always try to maximize prices, and they do that by trying to optimize the price they sell things at to sell as much as they possibly can at the highest price they can get away with. Sometimes you c…

I think there actually was a lot of surprise from executives coming out of COVID that they could raise prices so high without it impacting consumer demand in the ways they had previously predicted.

The Chipotle earnings calls were pretty much the prime example of this. CEO more or less expressing amazement at how elastic consumers were on pricing, and that due to the increases not impacting sales volume they planned to continue ramping until it did.

I think plenty of companies were operating off the idea that price competition was far more important than it turned out to be. I note the baskets of those shopping next to me in the grocery store and this rings true. Due to a myriad of reasons - consumer behavior being a large one of those - buying behavior based on price just isn’t as much of a thing as it was 30 years ago. Almost no one is shopping multiple supermarkets, buying cheaper alternatives, buying in-season veggies and fruit when it’s cheap, waiting for sales to stock up, buying in bulk and freezing, using coupons, meal planning based on the latest supermarket Sunday circular, etc. only a tiny minority of people have been doing so.

Couple that learned helplessness with the monopoly situation for many (most?) markets in the US and it’s no surprise to me that once the dam broke there is no going back. The price discovery moving forward is going to be much more aggressive. It will take a generation or three to get back to thrifty consumer behavior unless we see something actually painful to the average person on a scale of the Great Depression.

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

#548

Post by mhb »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #472
mhb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're thinking way too much like a programmer It doesn't need to be a perfect solution, you could just give everyone a flat refund similar to class action payouts.

Well that would seem like a potentially huge mess depending on the size of the purchases. Not to mention that the purchasers are not all easily tracked down. I wasn't suggesting it because it was perfect; I was suggesting it because it might be viable.

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

#549

Post by GaryBluto »

coldpie wrote: post #80
candiddevmike wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I'm done hearing "the wheels of justice turn slowly..." bullshit. People have had their lives ruined, far quicker, for far less.

Life in prison for every single person working under this administration is the moderate position.

I'm sure plenty of wrathful extremists thought they held a moderate position too.

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

#550

Post by bickfordb »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #362
bickfordb wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latest temporary tariffs are also likely illegal.

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

Section 122 has rarely been used. State AGs announced lawsuits today: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/05/trump-tariffs-state-ags-sue-...
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