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.
Ha ha, that's a good one. I have yet to hear about reduced profits anywhere. Instead, as I said in another comment, I have actual physical receipts with the additional tariff cost (itemized!) in a pile on my workshop (which I'll never see refunded).
The invoices give you slam dunk evidence that you paid that amount in tariffs, and the supreme court decision says the payment was illegally collected, so seems like an easy win for you.
You could ask for a tariff refund from those suppliers.
As someone who prices and sells labor and material for a living, nobody ate increased tariffs. They were passed along to the ultimate consumer of the tariffed product. Everyone was facing the same tariffs so they’re all incentivized to pass the cost along, line iteming the tariffs on the invoice would make it abundantly clear. I passed along all increased costs with a note on my proposal that said “Any and all additional tariffs will be paid for by the customer.”
I mean the importers were the ones who paid the duties. It's not a given they passed it on, and if it was then in many cases it was spread out. That is importer paid for one container of items, which in turn got sold to individuals which the government has no record of.
If you ordered delivery by say FedEx and they paid the duty and passed it on to you, you should have a reasonable case to get it refunded from FedEx when they get the money back. Ideally they handle it automatically since they have all the necessary details.
For manufacturing companies it's less clear, as some might have swallowed all or some of the duties, and multiple components might have been affected by different rates etc.
Will be interesting to see how companies who passed it on will handle this, given it's a massive PITA to do anything but screw over their customers.
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 eating the expense? Or what about a nefarious company who manufacturers their stuff in Canada but used "tariffs" as an excuse to increase prices? What would they be refunded from?
So if I'm the owner of Uncle Billy Bobs Autoparts and I ship from Madeupcountry. I billed you $500 extra for some new car part. The US government refunds me on the tariffs they charged me to import my product to you, and now your taxes is going into my refund. Who wins in this scenario? They're effectively giving every country a free bonus. I wouldn't be surprised if some people got scammed by the tariffs by being overcharged.
There's no serious paper trail to any of this to meaningfully return lost revenue to the American consumer, I would rather not waste tax dollars on refunds.
I guess the only "winners" are maybe businesses that didn't pass on the revenue loss on to the consumer? But how do you even correctly refund those businesses?
Onshoring manufacturing is something that has to be incentivized and that has positive externalities outside of dollars and cents.
But some tariffs were really dumb, like on bananas. We can't grow bananas here...
Trump and his cabinet don't understand this.
We can’t? Are south Florida, southern California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, are they not “here”? There is literally a banana variety called California Gold.
Isn’t the new line that we’ve been at war with Iran for 47 years?
For 47 years.
Imminent.
https://pettersen.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Documen...
>Baseline at 15-20% on imports (proxy for flat tax on income). Then push to eliminate income tax.
The US government generates $2.5 trillion dollars on just individual income taxes.
The US has about $3.4 trillion dollars worth of imports.
Explain how this makes makes any sense? It's laughable mathematical fantasy to imagine tariffs even denting the deficit, much less eliminating other revenue sources.
The US is a massive economic basket case -- it is basically an economically (aside from being morally) bankrupt country -- and I honestly don't even see a way out of it at this point. I guess just start some wars and try to steal some countries?
Many governments, at least the ones that matter, are bankrupt. Quick google shows all G8 countries run a deficit.
My "smart play" wasn't on the merits of idea, largely the game theory aspect of moving forward to their policy goals after decades of having no traction. It's a unique idea, policy wise. Don't know if it will be effective. Neither do you.
Sadly I'm not. I'm objectively stating facts. This criminal cabal of spectacularly incompetent clowns is absolutely ransacking the final days of an empire. It is astonishing how Americans are unaware of this.
>Many governments, at least the ones that matter, are bankrupt. Quick google shows all G8 countries run a deficit.
The US ran a $2.3 trillion dollar deficit over the last 12 months, and spending has gone absolutely wild. At the same time it's handing out massive tax cuts to corporations, and has absolutely no path to get back on track. Quite the opposite, the Trump cabal is basically making it impossible to get back on track. Which is why they're looting everything they can as quickly as they can.
>Neither do you.
Yes, I know that it was harebrained and literally zero economists with a functioning brain have called it a "smart" play. Only absolute cultists or the most profoundly gullible ever found the arguments by the criminals convincing.
Further, as is classic with Trump's lies (that only spectacularly gullible and/or stupid people fall for), he sells every angle of the same play simultaneously. Not only will tariffs eliminate income tax -- a notion that is so mathematically stupid it is instantly dismissible -- simultaneously all of those jobs are going to be repatriated and there will be no imports. These two notions are absolutely at odds -- and both are just utter fantasy nonsense -- but stupid people believe what stupid people do.
And yeah, bro, tariffs are not a unique idea. There is no novelty here.
I suppose that sounds pretty good if you're rich.
You guys are surrounded by other college-educated SWE, you have no idea how bad it is out there.
People without a college degree went Trump 56-43. People with a college degree went for Harris 56-42. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
Finding the data on this would be convenient but its still unclear to me. I'm not a fan of how that article from NU cites its sources loosely, including lazily citing Wikipedia.
Maybe im misunderstanding you but I would think that any level of SWE skill would be a minimum amount of competence such that they wouldn't fall for Trumps tricks? SWE is rearranging bits accordance to logic...so you need to know logic no?
I guess there is no free lunch, each person who realizes the importance of education has to start taking it seriously right now and spend their lives getting their community to start taking it seriously and maybe hopefully the next generation can emerge much better off. We let this mess fester for decades and now we are paying for it for the rest of our lives because there is no free lunch.
Consumption was likely mildly reduced (and still is with the 15% tax) but now we have more inflation coming our way when those billions start flowing and our debt just keeps going up.
Now if tariffs had only been applied to, I don't know, yachts, private jets…
Even if there was a US version, you'd still pay more regardless. This goes against one of the main grievances in the 2024 cycle: prices are too high.
Our domestic manufacturing industry is so far gone, it's doubtful whether even skillfully-applied tariffs could encourage any of it to come back on their own. Never mind this clown show, which apparently didn't even do the basic political work to make sure the tariffs would stay in place more than a year, despite having both houses of Congress.
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.
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.
They've been pushing the national sales tax to replace income tax since the 2000s (and probably longer).
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/judge-orders-government-...
Looks like the hassle will now be on the backend...
I'll never see that money.
Also contractually you didn't pay the duties so you wouldn't get refunds.
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 isn't insider trading (by the literal Commerce Secretary), I don't know what is.
Obviously if a company did this, refunding consumers was the last thing on their mind.
What consumers will presumably never be refunded for are the increased prices they've been paying for imports of any kind (from Walmart, Amazon, grocery store) where someone else was the importer.
As for whether consumers should get anything, I’m sympathetic. It’s a matter of implementation though. How would you refund so many people? You’d have to quantify how much overhead they’ve paid in tariffs, and that seems like an IRS-scale job. Dealing with it at the scale of individual companies is at least tractable.
Definitely smart, but also sure looks like an insider play / corruption / self-dealing.
I mean, look, there's plenty of conflicts of interest, and stuff that sure looks like graft, and claims of people making insane amounts of money off of stuff. But in this case, the commerce secretary's options were 1) do the tariffs or 2) get fired. Minion? Sure. Minion without the self-respect or ethics to quit when they were being told to do unconstitutional stuff? Also sure. Pushing these policies, as though they had agency in the matter? No.
Don't sell your right to your tariff refund is one of those things that sounds good in principle, but falls apart when you apply some sense to it.
No? You also do it for certainly. "One bird in hand beats two in the bush" and all that. You see this occurring outside of tariff refunds, with businesses selling debts to debt collectors for pennies on the dollar, or bond holders selling high risk bonds (eg. Argentina) for steep discounts.
I'm sure there are a few exceptional cases, but that doesn't seem to me like it would be the typical cases. A company needing to pay $100 in tariffs but then the $20 of cash infusion being the thing that saves the day seems rather unlikely.
If you think this is smart then you may as well go around clubbing old ladies over their heads, as long as you don't get caught it's like free money right?
The alternative is not to forbid companies from selling those rights, the alternative is to undo this deal and pay the whole amount back to those that originally forked it over and who needed to sell these 'rights' in order to keep their companies alive.
Where's the extortion? The "it's a nice shop you got there..." racket only works if you can strongly influence whether the damages occur (ie. you tell your goons to attack the shop, or not). So far as I can tell however, that's not the case, because Trump wanted the tariffs to stay, and was sad that they got revoked. Going back to the mob analogy, it would be like if the mob boss asked for protection money, the goons didn't damage the shop, the mob boss was sad that the shop didn't get damaged, and then went to to find some other way to damage the shop (ie. section 122 tariffs).
Anyway, you want figures, well, here are some figures:
https://marketrealist.com/why-did-700-bu/
I'm sure there are other sources, better ones, worse ones but they all tell roughly the same story: willy nilly tarrifs have a negative effect on one's ability to operate a business. Businesses like predictable, stable climates to operate in.
It takes a fair amount of money to take a court case to the Supreme Court. You can pay it all (and still maybe lose), or you can let the law firm have part of what you win. This happens all the time in the US legal system. It's not extortion; it's essentially venture funding by the law firm. (Yes, I'm aware of the pattern in the previous sentence, but I'm in fact a human, and not even LLM-assisted.) If the company doesn't want to play that way, they don't have to. They can pay the full cost of the lawsuit themselves.
https://thehedgefundjournal.com/the-emerging-market-for-liti...
Yes, because tariffs, like all taxes in the USA, are not imposed on individual people or entities. They’re on industries and specific materials.
If a company truly thought the chance of winning was low and needed the money now, they would pick the best offer. Regardless of who is making it.
This was the point of the tariffs, wasn't it? The White House now has a $130B slush fund to distribute more or less however they want, with no accountability because accountability is by-design impossible. Sure maybe half of it will go where it ought to as a fig leaf, but a very large chunk of that cash will be making its way to Trump's loyalty crew.
The government knows exactly who paid what in duties, otherwise they couldn't tell if you were trying to avoid duties.
So they know exactly who to pay back and how much.
No, they have a record of who handed the money over to the government. This does not tell you who paid the duties. There's going to be a whole lot of Trump toadies & business owners in the chain, siphoning cash from refunds before they work their way back to the people who actually paid them. And that's not even getting into the open corruption & fraud that will be happening as part of this as well.
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 screwed by this debacle, that much was obvious from the start.
In reality, half of the funds will go to that. This is the fig leaf to which I referred. The other half will go to Trump toadies in the form of "mistakes," fraud, corruption, skimming, etc. This is the slush fund to which I referred.
In the end, all of it is going to Trump toadies. It's a $130B transfer of wealth to Trump's financial backers.
Or would you trust someone on advising you, that has a pretty huge financial interest in proposing you policies that will fail because they are illegal?
The fact that businesses were put in a position to make this choice is outrageous in the first place.
SCOTUS largely functions as a post-facto legitimization machine for those that appoint them. They do not interpret the constitution so much as serve as god-people in funny costumes that provide the cultural message from god that the actions of their political persuasion were legal (or illegal) even in cases where a historical and literal reading of the constitution would otherwise find you with no way to find them legitimate if not for man in black robe say so.
------ re: "2 of 3" below due to throttling--------
A vote to refund here was not a vote against the admin, it was a vote to simplify the laundering of the tax. It was a vote to put the money straight into the coffers of admin insiders like Lutnick et al financial engineering scheme. Meanhwile it did not invalidate tariffs, as Trump immediately pivoted to a different tariff structure.
As a second note, the profit here was actually not dependent nearly as much on the vote as the insider information. The fact the best any rebuttal can come up with is the vote might have been 'wrong' is basically totally defaulting to the insider trading element which means you are totally yielding the underlying premise.
Following that logic, it make sense that those 3 voted with the administration.
Oh wait...
The key is whether they had insider information given their association with these justices.
You keep changing what you are saying.
You can blame RBG for one of those. It fascinates me that Biden made the same mistake RBG did, I’ll always wonder how different the would would be if she had stepped down and the democratic party had held a real primary.
I don’t like trump, I think he stinks. The democratic party has a few own-goals in this current game.
Given that the 2/3 justices appointed by Trump voted against the tariffs, what's the implication here? That Trump deliberately picked anti-tariff justices just so he can engage in a rube goldberg plan to enact tariffs, buy tariff refunds on the cheap, and then have them revoked?
This was a very complex decision that ideologically divided the courts.
...assuming they held those rights on their books, rather than selling it off to other hedge funds.
Or just pay attention to the oral arguments. The justices seemed very skeptical of the Trump administration, and betting markets reacted accordingly.
In a just world, someone like that would be jailed indefinitely and made to publicly take stand about his activities, and called out to his face during depositions about his lies.
Probably just a good guess. At least it wasn't based on intimate knowledge of things based on being in a position extremely close to everyone involved in all of it. Sheesh.
Because I think not. And I feel pretty strongly about this. The conflict of interest is so glaringly obvious that it should be completely self-evident why every voter should want to prevent, ban and punish any such action.
I feel that anyone involved in this tariff insurance business should be able to prove without a shadow of doubt that they had no political insider knowledge about the whole thing, and I'm extremely skeptical that this is the case (just from the pople involved alone!).
“ House kills effort to release all congressional sexual misconduct and harassment reports”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-kills-effort...
But it’s not “insider trading.” They didn’t have insider information on how the courts were going to rule—especially where it was a 6-3 split with three conservatives siding against the administration. And a split in the appellate court as well, with two republican and two democrat appointees siding for the administration.
And Cantor had nothing to do with imposing these tariffs in the first place. Trump loves tariffs. He has been wanting to do these tariffs since the 1980s. He imposed tariffs in his first term and campaigned on imposing them now.
So you’re taking a story about Cantor Fitzgerald displaying disloyalty to Trump and trying to turn it into a “corruption” story that makes no sense.
This is easy to say in hindsight. There was a non-zero chance the decision could have went the other way. Also, companies aren't stupid. They don't buy insurance against things that are impossible.
And the supreme court doesn't hear cases that are 100% obviously illegal.
Companies don't want to deal with the headache for many things. It's not a given over what time horizon and how much work is involved to get the refund. It's totally sensible to sell the claim for 70 cents on the dollar for example.
The supreme court absolutely hears cases that are obvious. They do it for several reasons - to create clarity, to narrow scope, to set a very clear precedent, and other reasons.
This was a case that split both the liberal and conservative blocs. Obama’s former SG, Neal Katyal, went up there and argued for limiting presidential power over the economy. One of the justices quipped about the irony of Katyal’s major contribution to jurisprudence being revitalization of non-delegation doctrine, which has always been a conservative focus.
Did they know it was illegal? Any more than say, the Biden administration "knew" that forgiving student loans were illegal?
* And not just a borrower that wouldn't be anywhere similar to this level of conflict.
It was damaging.
In 2015.
And then for a bit between 2021 and 2024.
Now it's not again.
You have to enforce these sorts of gentlemen's agreements. Just saying "it's damaging" isn't enough to actually make it damaging.
In this case, the idea that Cantor can't do something because the former head is now in a government job is crazy. No one "in the business" thinks Cantor is suddenly hobbled.
But the supreme court is a separate branch of government from the executive, so the analogy doesn't really hold. To claim otherwise would require Lutnick playing some 4d chess where he's publicly pro tariffs, but secretly anti-tariffs and was sandbagging the government's legal defense (can he even do that?), all the while not tipping Trump or the MAGA base off for being disloyal.
The deal stinks because Cantor bet against the administration that its former head is a part of, and against the signature policy of the president its former head serves.
I can't prove that there was any White House advisory memo before the tariffs were announced, but hypothetically, would this not be considered material nonpublic information? It seems the same as a corporate insider dumping stock because a company lawyer privately told them "we're definitely going to lose this case".
Was the hypothetical "White House advisory memo" produced using any proprietary information? If not, why should it be any different than if I hired a bunch of top lawyers to produce a private report for me?
But members of the government being able to trade on matters of government policy is exactly how government corruption works. Previous administrations understood this was important to prevent (Carter putting his peanut farm in a blind trust, the Bush's did the same) but now Trump has made clear corruption is just totally fine (why else become president or a government official).
Turns out most (if not all) of it went to the senior executive team, wtih himself being the primary beneficiary [2].
This is also the same Howard Lutnick who the DoJ accidentally released a photo of with Jeffrey Epstein [3]. People noticed and they removed it. People noticed that too so they restored it.
Just so we're all clear who Howard Lutnick is.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/busine.ss/judge-approves-ame...
[2]: https://x.com/FinanceLancelot/status/2022877480516813077
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/27/howard-lutni...
Correct.
This is just hollow populist anti-elite rhetoric. Who do you think sold them the tariff refunds? They're not buying them from granny who didn't know any better. They bought it from other executives who knew, or at least ought to know what was at stake.
Everyone wins except granny.
To be fair, I think some companies didn't raise prices because they thought they would be overturned.
> Now if this isn't insider trading (by the literal Commerce Secretary), I don't know what is.
So - with umpteen $billion on the line, and all the big-shot lobbyists and Washington insiders and experts that all those huge companies had on payroll to advise them - they decided to sell at 20 cents on the dollar.
Theory: When the far-smarter-than-us money bets big, they might know the actual odds.
Clearly, this makes America great again. /s
Possibly a refund of about $500 per social security number. Doesn't even have to be in cash, could just directly go towards the social security fund if legislated that way.
Tons of ways to fix this quagmire in a way that's beneficial to people. But it won't happen.
That's what the GP likely meant.
The circus must go on.
You may see other judges rule that the refunds don't have to be paid, for any of several reasons. Whatever your desired outcome is, none of it matters until this gets to the Supreme Court. Given the nature of money, it doesn't even matter if some higher court refuses to give an injunction against the refunds being issued until after the appeal is considered and some set of refunds goes all the way through... no company that gets any money from a pre-SC refund can really use it until the entire matter is resolved at the SC level.
Instead of ruling narrowly that named plaintiffs would get a refund
Eaton expressly said:
"all importers of record" which is all who were subject to the IEEPA duties.
It is unclear if this is lawful.
He didn't have to do this at all. He could stuck with tradition here. He specifies why he did it in this case, but this opens the door.
Also note that he did not open the door to "final liquidations" getting refunds (it is unclear how many tariffs more than 180 days ago were not officially protested).
I (unknowingly) ordered something on Etsy from another country. UPS delivered the items, then sent me a letter requiring I pay the tariff and an extra tariff handling fee. UPS paid the government, so UPS should get their money back from the government, then refund me. I'm not holding my breath.
> ‘Corporate and industry group political action committees have donated more than $44 million directly to the campaigns and leadership PACs of the 147 members of the Sedition Caucus. Companies and trade associations that pledged to suspend donations have given more than $12 million to the campaign and leadership PACs of the Sedition Caucus.
> Koch Industries ($626,500), American Crystal Sugar ($530,000), Home Depot ($525,000), Boeing ($488,000), and UPS ($479,500) have contributed the most money to members of the Sedition Caucus through their corporate PACs.’
> Tomé’s reconciliation with representatives who legitimized Trump’s attempted presidential coup — and who may control Congress after the November midterm elections — shouldn’t surprise us. Trump lavished huge gifts on UPS and Corporate America that have made them richer.”
> The second Trump presidency has the potential to be even more lucrative for UPS, given that the bulk of UPS’s unionized workers are Teamsters and led by prominent Trump ally Sean O’Brien
https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/big-brown-and-the-fascists...
Looks like they've given a pretty similar amount to both parties[1]. UPS charging a specific "Tariff Fee" is bound to have angered Trump.
[1]https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/united-parcel-service/summa...
Now we the people probably don’t get our money back….
Hah, we are 100% not getting our money back. And the higher, tariff level, prices aren't going to go back down either.
Or Tax Foundation? https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs...
3/9/25 - 45 items - $178.98
3/15/25 - 40 items - $187.13
3/22/25 - 59 items - $315.29
3/29/25 - 45 items - $131.36
...
2/14/25 - 48 items - $238.15
2/21/25 - 17 items - $117.49 (used $45 in coupons from store loyalty points, actual cost $162.49)
2/28/25 - 27 items - $165.27
My grocery bill definitely is feeling it, now is it 100% tariffs, probably not. But research points to it being some what related to tariffs [1,2,3] You'll notice in the most recent shops, I have been trying to skip the non-essentials when possible to keep my bill lower.
I don't have any other regular purchases with history to look back on. It's not like I replace all my consumer electronics every 6 months-1 year. Closest thing that I have to consistent historical data is 3D printer filament, which has gone from $15.99 to $16.99 on Amazon for my brand of choice from April 2025 to my most recent order last week.
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/blog/trump-tariffs-food-prices/
[2] https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-june-17...
[3] https://www.edelmanfinancialengines.com/education/life-event...
These are taxes that businesses have to pay and as a result, they pass on to the consumer.
Larger companies have some room (in some cases) to absorb some of these costs. While smaller companies do not. These can literally put people out of business overnight.
Here is a specific example: https://nypost.com/2025/04/08/us-news/idaho-business-owner-c...
Don't hold your breath for either to be given back.
And now they get it all back! If they can figure out the paperwork. Which I expect most will, because if you import things and pay tariffs, you have to be good at govt paperwork.
Wow. I don’t know what this means. But it’s a huge windfall to a very specific horizontal slice of the economy - cutting across industries and supply chains. Just whoever happened to be doing the importing gets a giant present. So bizarre. Economists will write about this case study for decades.
What do you mean unclear? The ruling says that certain of the tariffs were always illegal.
I definitely agree on principle, it sounds pretty tricky to see how proving "I paid $x more for groceries because of tarrifs" would work in practice.
Does anyone know of policy suggestions for how that could work?
* Direct Cash (using some equation for impoverished households)
* Infrastructure
* Better life conditions
No other uses for this money. The returns and the uses of this money must be public.
You’re getting mighty close to socialism there citizen.
There were multiple court cases and this practice was found unlawful (and actually against EU law). But the government did not issue automatic refunds, and instead requested that people "actively appeal" with some time limits. They also refused to pay interest on the money withheld.
AFAIK, only about 50M Euro was paid back. A lot of funds gathered between 2002–2005 was never returned.
I've been living in Finland for 10+ years, and this whole story was super surprising for me to learn because the prevailing notion among people here is that Finland is the land of law, and everything is done correctly and legally, always, and we can and should trust the authorities.
No organisations or regime has ever considered itself illegitimate. The big guys consider smaller guys legitimate or illegitimate, but its just ink on a page.
Finland (and _ALL_ other countries) is an illegitimate regime, collecting its protection money, telling you to pray it does not alter the deal any further
Delayed refunds won't even start to repair the damage done by bankruptcies triggered by high tariffs, the snowballed cost of tariffs impacting multiple steps in the supply chain, the emotional toll on families and communities having to deal with less money and rising prices. But rehiring and getting some regions and communities back to work might be a step in the right direction.
EXCEPT WE NOW HAVE A 15% GLOBAL TARIFF ONGOING. And a lunatic administration that will fight tooth and nail for years to keep this going as long as possible.
Trump "loves" this country so much it hurts me.
or give it to shareholders.
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?
Read from that what you will... as a voter, or the POTUS.
And now, less than 100 years later we're like "hey let's try that again!"
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-average-u-s-tariff-rate...
This was the plan from the get-go:
1. Illegal tariffs made
2. Companies pay tariffs
3. Companies sell goods with tariff passed on
4. tariffs deemed illegal
5. companies get refunds on tariffs
6. COMPANIES KEEP TARIFFS
7. The customers get fucked.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?!
Masterminds!
…and now they need to refund it.
NB: also puts into perspective how numb I became about reading AI and AI related sums of money, and how crazy actually those numbers are.
[0] off course many knew that it’s crazy way before it happened.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_bud...
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