Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs • Hacker News Board

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

#681

Post by donkeybeer » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:20 AM UTC

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #613

jmward01 wrote: post #277

The people harmed here were the US public and they are just going to continue to be harmed. The right answer is people go to jail. Until people start going to jail, being disbarred, etc, this will keep happening. This isn't a remedy. This is continuing the cycle.

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Why not? I have no idea why people were thinking corporations are overpowered when twitter banned trump. I thought it was great and showed nobody is above the law/tos. Likewise if the president has done crimes, he should pay the time.

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

#682

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:25 AM UTC

gmd63 wrote: post #656

This is just the citizenry paying double tariffs. First, we bought the higher priced goods. Now, the companies are trying to take our tariff payments again, this time from the government, to "make up" for the tariff money that we had already paid them in the first place. What should happen is that $X of the budget should be put into escrow for the next administration to use after these criminals make their way out.

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

#683

Post by bluegatty » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:26 AM UTC

kgwxd wrote: post #586

bluegatty wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are not that smart. Even if the tariffs are not a lot, they are potent negotiating leverage. They def knew they were lying about much they were collecting They def knew they were lying about who is paying They lied to the public about that and got a bit of extra creme in the bag but the effect was mostly leverage, which 'kind of worked'. They could have very effectively used illegal tariffs to actually do 90…

You really think Trump is orchestrating any of this? He reads the script he's given.

He's easily gulled but he's also still very much in charge.

There is no script. They get him to believe and think certain things, also, looking for money on the backside. Deals, freebies.

I see Trump Plazas all over the Gulf after this is over if he does not have a hard landing, which is also very possible.

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

#684

Post by LostInTheWoods » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:30 AM UTC

gmd63 wrote: post #656

This is just the citizenry paying double tariffs. First, we bought the higher priced goods. Now, the companies are trying to take our tariff payments again, this time from the government, to "make up" for the tariff money that we had already paid them in the first place. What should happen is that $X of the budget should be put into escrow for the next administration to use after these criminals make their way out.

Some companies ate the cost of the tariffs. The whole thing is a mess.

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

#685

Post by cpt1138 » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:33 AM UTC

I ordered something from a Chinese company and they quoted me 5USD per unit and 35USD shipping. I accepted and the units were shipped and delivered and of excellent quality.

Sometime later FedEx sends me a weird bill for some random seeming amount of money I owed. They had a link or email or something to basically refuse to pay. I did refuse to pay. The shipper ended up communicating with me to determine I was going to refuse to pay and I found where Fedex had on the website that indicated the shipper was responsible for all fees. I assume the randomness of it was related to tariffs but I wasn't going to pay anything like what they sent me.

I do hope that some repercussions come of these terrible economic policies and the shipper gets their money back from Fedex, but as a company or as an individual I don't think a company's policy to send random bills after delivery is valid either.

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

#686

Post by pstuart » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:33 AM UTC

loeg wrote: post #626

jmward01 wrote: post #277

The people harmed here were the US public and they are just going to continue to be harmed. The right answer is people go to jail. Until people start going to jail, being disbarred, etc, this will keep happening. This isn't a remedy. This is continuing the cycle.

People? Trump is the only actor here who deserves punishment for these illegal tariffs, but there is no grounds to jail a sitting president.

Ultimately yes. But every one of his enablers is complicit and should be tried if we are ever able to extricate ourselves from this mess.

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

#687

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:35 AM UTC

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,

"Prices take the elevator up and the stairs down" - yes, over time the market pushes no-longer-justified prices back down, but this is much slower than the price increase happens.

You won't get the money back that you overpaid in the meantime.

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

#688

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:44 AM UTC

hammock wrote: post #628

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance company deal: if you pay us $X now, and then Y happens, we will make you whole, even though that cost may very well exceed $X. Lutnick deal: we pay you $X' now, and if Y' happens, we collect everything which will substantively exceed $X'. This is not insurance, its closer to shorting stocks. Oh, one other thing: the insurance company has essentially nothing to do with Y at all, in the sense that they have n…

Lutnick deal: if we pay you $X now, and then Y happens, you will make us the whole refund, even though that windfall may very well exceed $X. Insurance company deal: you pay us $X' now, and if Y' happens, we pay for everything which may substantively exceed $X'.

I have no idea what the point of this is, since it just restates what I wrote, and reinforces the point that the Lutnick deal is nothing like "insurance".

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

#689

Post by joveian » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 5:47 AM UTC

eitau_1 wrote: post #365

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...

Thanks, very interesting article! Also these two linked from that one:

National emergencies: Chadha wasn't the problem

https://prototypingpolitics.substack.com/p/national-emergenc...

Elizabeth Goiten (Brennan Center) testimony to a senate committee on May 22, 2024 (a nice summary of the general issue of executive use of emergencies)

[PDF] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Go...

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

#690

Post by jurschreuder » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

“We live in the age of computers,” Eaton said. “It must be possible for Customs Service to program its computers so it doesn’t need a manual review.”

In DHL the link to get tax documents is already broken for a year or so, so I cannot get VAT back on DHL shipments.

With FedEx I can but it's a manual process of screenshotting a bank transaction and emailing a specific email address with a shipping number.

When tariffs started all the servers of the shipping companies went down.

So I highly doubt they will just do some computer magic.

From experience I assume they will "accidentally" run into all kinds of technical difficulties making it a 274 step process to get the money back.

For scale: Shopify, a software company by heart, with 170bn market cap and 3500 engineers employed, does not have native VAT support, required in the Europe which accounts for 15-20% of their revenue. All they would have to do to support this is add a checkout field "VAT number" that shows up on a pdf invoice.

So to assume a shipping company will just work some computer magic is really far fetched. The FedEx page only lets you login after you refresh the page exactly once already for more than a year.