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).

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.”

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?

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.

That's what the CHIPS act did. Indeed, everyone talking about TSMC, Intel, etc -- that's all because of the CHIPS act.

Toddler tantrum tariffs, which in reality are a vehicle for massive level corruption (see how Vietnam got a "deal" by approving a Trump resort. Or how every business leader is stuck to Trump's anus lest they be targeted by his tyrant tantrums), are not an incentive. It has had the opposite effect, and new builds have basically dried up.

Isn’t the new line that we’ve been at war with Iran for 47 years?

>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?

I suppose that sounds pretty good if you're rich.

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.

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.

One made more promises to the poor and working class. It seems baked into your comment that the distribution should be 50-50 which seems crazy. A swing of ~5 points isn't that much.

This math would work on any demographic.

Now if tariffs had only been applied to, I don't know, yachts, private jets…

The ironic part is not that you were mildly in favor from the left, the ironic part is that they came from the right.

Pre-Trump, the right was very anti-tariff and only a portion of the left was pro tariff, the Bernie Sanders type.

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.

Whether or not these schemes would work is debatable, but to claim that they show an MO of regressive taxes is just false.

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.

Definitely smart, but also sure looks like an insider play / corruption / self-dealing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This was a very complex decision that ideologically divided the courts.

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!).

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".

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).

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.

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.

> ‘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...

The importers pay the tariffs, and they might get a refund, but it's unlikely they can distribute the money back to the people who they passed the price increase onto.

Imagine I imported 1 ton of rice and paid the tariff. Then I split that ton of rice into 2000 one pound bags and sold them to two super markets, with a higher price accounting for the tariff. Then one super market decided to absorb the price from their margins and sell it at the same price as before to avoid price shocks. Can I track down the other 1000 purchasers who paid a higher price? Is it even worth it?

You’re getting mighty close to socialism there citizen.