As a result, Nintendo's legal team is far more likely to ensure they get refunded, and quickly. They could provide a template for others to follow.

Say, they get pissed off too much… they could run campaigns just days before the election if they wanted.

Taxpayers already paid for it, companies raised their prices to compensate.

The money that has passed various deadlines may be more difficult to return, however it is still money that is due to Nintendo. That may be more difficult to obtain, but it isn't the government's money in the first place.

US tax payers aren't paying money to Nintendo - they're paying for the government's lawyers to try to argue against not paying back illegally collected tariffs.

https://realeconomy.rsmus.com/ieepa-tariffs-struck-down-what...

Take my upvote.

Every shipment from overseas would essentially have a line item for tariffs due. Just add them up.

Whether some downstream consumer of those imported goods paid a price that would have been lower if not for the tariff is a commercial question between them and whoever they paid. Maybe they would have, maybe they wouldn't have. There isn't any objective way to calculate what the price of suchandsuch Nintendo product would have been in the counterfactual.

This is no different from any other cost. Their cost of goods is lower in retrospect than they thought it was, so it will show up as a gain on their income statement.

What's the economic effect, though? One way to model a tariff that's later refunded is that it's sort of like if a cartel colluded to temporarily keep prices higher. Competition between firms often keeps prices close to costs, but this wouldn't be true for a monopoly or a cartel.