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

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721–730 of 843 posts

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

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately, it has been ruled that the president is immune to legal prosecution on this matter, regardless of whether it is legal or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States > the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their core constitutional purview It turns out that "checks and balances" meant "the president is unchec…

Predidency is an Institution which needs to be protected at all costs. The checks and balances wasn’t meant to setup a system where Presidents can be sent to prison but to prevent “crimes” (for the lack of a better word) to happen to begin with. Of course our current “party over Country” system has practically killed any semblance of checks and balances…

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

#722
Trump should sign an executive order to appropriate the money for himself. Then all the other rich folks will learn what it feels like to be on be on the losing end of government wealth redistribution. I think Trump would deserve the money as tuition fee!

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

#723
post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6-7 percent interest.

SOFR is only around 3.7%. And it's, you know, an annualized rate. The earliest liberation day tariffs are only around 11 months old at this point.

My source was:

``` The government has collected perhaps $180bn in IEEPA tariffs. Over the past year 1,800 companies—including Goodyear, a tyre-maker, and Costco, a retailer—have filed lawsuits to protect their right to a refund should the Supreme Court overturn them. They are now owed this money, equivalent to roughly 5% of the profits companies generated in America last year, or 0.6% of GDP—plus interest, compounded daily at an annual rate of 6-7%. ```

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/02/26/a...

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

#724

“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…

> All they would have to do to support this is add a checkout field "VAT number" that shows up on a pdf invoice.

If only it would be that simple :)

In EU you have different procedures for B2C and B2B transactions. For B2B you need to verify the VAT number in VIES system and it’s not responsive like 50% of the time. I swear Germans literally turn off their servers when they go to sleep. If a customer provides a VAT number the flow might take even 12h+ to verify it. If you can do that verification you can use 0% VAT rate but if not you need to use a different VAT rate.

For B2C you need to support several scenarios: if company is outside of EU it needs to register for IOSS, if it’s a EU company that sells to other EU countries it needs to register for OSS or in each EU country for VAT separately but also a mix of both is possible. You can decide to no register to OSS special procedure but then there’s a sales limit before you have to register and you need to track it. Otherwise, you need to maintain special OSS registry with sales records and three pieces of proof that customer is based in the member country. Some EU countries have XML invoices (Italy, Romania, Germany soon) or mandatory invoice APIs (Poland), of course there’s actually no common EU standard so it depends on where the company is based.

Finally you need to choose a VAT rate for that country and they also change occasionally, e.g. Slovakia, Romania and Estonia all changed their highest rate just last year.

This is the bare minimum you need to support. There’s a lot of edge cases, e.g. it matters what country you actually ship from, and if you use e.g. fulfillment there are special procedures for that as well, or if you resell in B2B there are chain transactions which have their own set of spaghetti rules.

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

#725
post #724

“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…

> All they would have to do to support this is add a checkout field "VAT number" that shows up on a pdf invoice. If only it would be that simple :) In EU you have different procedures for B2C and B2B transactions. For B2B you need to verify the VAT number in VIES system and it’s not responsive like 50% of the time. I swear Germans literally turn off their servers when they go to sleep. If a customer provides a VAT nu…

Much of that is at least for my company handled by our accounting company. We just print the correct VAT on the invoice, and report the same VAT to the accountant and they take care of the rest. The shop/payment processor etc doesn't need to be integrated to any of it. Though I have to post-process Stripe's reports, as they refuse to include the used VAT rate in there, despite them knowing it. Stripe does try to sell the tax service to us, but I refuse.

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

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it has been ruled that the president is immune to legal prosecution on this matter, regardless of whether it is legal or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States > the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their core constitutional purview It turns out that "checks and balances" meant "the president is unchec…

Predidency is an Institution which needs to be protected at all costs. The checks and balances wasn’t meant to setup a system where Presidents can be sent to prison but to prevent “crimes” (for the lack of a better word) to happen to begin with. Of course our current “party over Country” system has practically killed any semblance of checks and balances…

> Predidency is an Institution which needs to be protected at all costs.

That sounds a lot like a king.

Last I checked, our founders were pretty against the whole king thing.

I would be shocked if a single one of them said that a President should be immune to prosecution for crimes they commit.

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

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DOGE was about funding Golden Dome back when Elon thought he was getting the contract

DOGE was about breaking things as much as you can. Especially those that were working and not under Trumps control.

it's about justifying tax cuts for the rich

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

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately, it has been ruled that the president is immune to legal prosecution on this matter, regardless of whether it is legal or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States > the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their core constitutional purview It turns out that "checks and balances" meant "the president is unchec…

Does Trump want to be Mussolinied? It should always be legal to jail and hang the head of state, otherwise the head of state risks going by a much funnier way. Its not about politics, it's simple game theory.

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

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the supreme court is to blame for all of this because they decided to invalidate lower court injunctions, reasoning that there was no chance for "irreparable harm"... Yeah, right.

No. The people are to blame. Both the people who voted for the criminal to be president. And the people who supported such a horrible Democratic candidate that she couldn't even win against Trump.

If you really want to get to the root cause, on the Democratic side it’s the people who promoted/supported/covered up for Biden when it would have been obvious to anyone close that he wasn’t fit for the purpose any more. And Biden himself, for his hubris.

That was why things were rushed and there wasn’t a proper primary. Yes, they could have held a very late/quick convention and would likely not have picked Kamala, but anyone getting the nomination at that late stage would still have been hugely in the back foot.

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

#730
post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All they would have to do to support this is add a checkout field "VAT number" that shows up on a pdf invoice. If only it would be that simple :) In EU you have different procedures for B2C and B2B transactions. For B2B you need to verify the VAT number in VIES system and it’s not responsive like 50% of the time. I swear Germans literally turn off their servers when they go to sleep. If a customer provides a VAT nu…

Much of that is at least for my company handled by our accounting company. We just print the correct VAT on the invoice, and report the same VAT to the accountant and they take care of the rest. The shop/payment processor etc doesn't need to be integrated to any of it. Though I have to post-process Stripe's reports, as they refuse to include the used VAT rate in there, despite them knowing it. Stripe does try to sell…

You can simplify for your use case (only B2C or you refund VAT afterwards for B2B, you only ship from one location, custom invoicing), but that’s what it takes to implement it correctly on platform level.
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