Discussion

hypeatei: I'll always find it amazing how Trump got right wingers to get on board with a national sales tax. Mind boggling.

just-working: It's really more complicated than this.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...

HumblyTossed: > But some tariffs were really dumb, like on bananas. We can't grow bananas here...Trump and his cabinet don't understand this.

WarmWash: Populist energy

saurik: I don't see why this would be even slightly surprising: that is a common right-wing position and has been for a while? They even made a big run of it in 2023.https://pettersen.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Documen...

chuckadams: You could point out the inconsistency, but I really think the cognitive dissonance of constant and pervasive hypocrisy is the point. Truth is whatever the party tells you today, and we have always been at war with EastAsia.

jokoon: What if this was the plan, so those importers can make money?

SyneRyder: Here's a gift link to access it if you don't have a subscription:https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/judge-orders-government-...

dcveloper: It's a smart play for a flat tax. Baseline at 15-20% on imports (proxy for flat tax on income). Then push to eliminate income tax. It's very much aligned with conservative view points on income tax and it's progressive nature.

llm_nerd: There is absolutely nothing "smart" about anything being done by this incompetent administration of criminals, rapists and self-dealing grifters. They're just flailing around after everything is turning to shit, going from distraction to distraction.>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.

estearum: Smart if you ignore mathematics

mothballed: ... refunded to the importer of record. Not the people the costs were passed to. Essentially turning it retroactively into a tax to private businesses. This is the worst case of all scenarios for the consumer.

adampunk: The next time you see someone complaining about Democrats on the Internet, you should thank them for this.

ceejayoz: Their skirts were too short and they didn’t scream hard enough, eh?

bdangubic: that was the plan all along

davidw: These people are evil, but also bumbling idiots, so sometimes there is no evil plan, just incompetence.

candiddevmike: There are direct ties from the administration to companies offering hedges against tariffs. There was absolutely an evil plan, IMO.

Herring: 28% of US adults scored at or below Level 1 literacy, indicating significant difficulty with everyday reading tasks. https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-fac...You guys are surrounded by other college-educated SWE, you have no idea how bad it is out there.

general_reveal: This was a coordinated ploy by the security apparatus of the US. Corporations were probably told of this. This was a dry run to signal to whoever we needed to signal to that we have economic weapons. It’s too large of a national security issue (can cause wars) to have been concocted by a populist president. Hallmarks of intelligence (sounds crazy, I know) all over this one.My general sense is that the Cold War never ended. We were not told of the Cuban Missile crisis as it happened. Iran is too close to Russia, always probably was an us vs Russian proxy situation (Syria is a dead giveaway away) for decades now in the Middle East/China.We’ve probably had nukes pointed at each other all day every day, very little is told to the public lest panic ensue.Of course, we can always keep believing what we’re told …

estearum: ...?No, this is the consequence of having an actual stupid person in the Oval Office and the majority party being half coerced and half committed in cultlike devotion to POTUS.Obviously the US has economic weapons. It's the largest economy in the world.If anything this signals that POTUS himself cannot wield those weapons though, and the American public, political, and business apparatuses have little appetite for this use of those weapons.

mothballed: Tariffs (or something like land value tax) are one of the less intrusive forms of taxes since imported goods are already scrutinized and tabulated at the border anyway under the border 4A exception. In theory tariffs are a lot less dystopic in their financial surveillance than stuff like income tax, but you were supposed to drop the income tax when you pick up tariffs, not just use it to make the Swamp larger.

satvikpendem: Cantor Fitzgerald, formerly led by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and is now run by his son, went to various companies that were affected by tariffs and bought the rights to their potential tariff refunds for 20% of the value on the expectation that it'd be struck down by the courts.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.

add-sub-mul-div: It's such an old and standard and basic playbook. They cultivated fear among the poor about immigrants or some bit of social progress like pronouns. To win power and take whatever actions they believed would enrich themselves. There's never anything more to it than that.

sillysaurusx: That’s smart though. If you don’t want to lose your rights to tariff refunds, don’t sell them. Would the alternative be to forbid companies from selling those rights in this case?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.

bhouston: > That’s smart though. If you don’t want to lose your rights to tariff refunds, don’t sell them. Would the alternative be to forbid companies from selling those rights in this case?Definitely smart, but also sure looks like an insider play / corruption / self-dealing.

Ajedi32: The commerce secretary has no control over what the Supreme Court does. Anyone could have read the law and decided whether they thought the tariffs were legal or not.

hermanzegerman: The commerce secretary has in this case a huge conflict of interest in pushing for these illegal policies in the first place

snowwrestler: Could you go into detail about what you think happened? The tariffs were public knowledge, and the suits to invalidate them were public knowledge. Are you saying you think the Supreme Court justices secretly communicated to the Commerce Secretary how they intended to rule on the case, far in advance of publishing their ruling?

simmerup: But he does know that Trump had no plan to contest the supreme court or make new laws

jerf: None of this matters; this is guaranteed to go to the Supreme Court. Too much money, too much precedent. The only thing being established now is the battleground as the procedure of getting up to the Supreme Court. The actual rulings on the way up to the Supreme Court are of minimal consequence.

WarmWash: I have a few thousand dollars that I paid to a Chinese manufacturer who then used that money to pay an importer so that I could get my materials hassle free.Looks like the hassle will now be on the backend...

JKCalhoun: Yeah, I got the receipts even—with tariffs itemized.I'll never see that money.

energy123: For it to be insider trading, he would have had to have access to private information from the Supreme Court, which seems unlikely.

jacquesm: Why is that unlikely? It would seem to be a very easy thing to accomplish. For instance, he could just ask.

hermanzegerman: It's enriching himself on the taxpayers expense.Or would you trust someone on advising you, that has a pretty huge financial interest in proposing you policy's that will fail because they are illegal?

magicalhippo: > refunded to the importer of record. Not the people the costs were passed toI 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.

AdamN: Ironically I was mildly in favor of tariffs from the left pov. Reduced consumption and getting more taxes to help pay down the debt.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.

coldpie: > It’s a matter of implementation though. How would you refund so many people?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.

jacquesm: It's not smart, it's extortion by someone connected to the state and self dealing.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.

vincnetas: i guess there would be much more initiative for Lutnik not to refund (ignore courts order, or drag them out like in other cases) if no one would have sold their rights to refund.

NickC25: You forgot to mention that Mr. Lutnik is also a close personal friend of a pedophile-turned-Mossad-agent-turned-pedophile named Jeffrey Epstein and visited his island. Mr. Lutnik deliberately and purposefully lied to congress about it, and faced no charges for lying to congress.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.

ModernMech: > we have always been at war with EastAsiaIsn’t the new line that we’ve been at war with Iran for 47 years?

mattas: I wonder if brands will have a "tariff refund" sale. Make everything 20% off until all of the brand's tariff refund is passed on to customers. Of course, this wouldn't help the customers that already paid the tariff but it could be a good marketing ploy.

libertine: Tariffs aren't incentives, the whole thing is upsidedown.

gruez: >Now they stand to make huge returns of 3 to 5x for being correct on that bet...assuming they held those rights on their books, rather than selling it off to other hedge funds.

petcat: Is it insider trading to bet on a Supreme Court verdict? It's not like it was a slam dunk. The decision was 6-3.

dcveloper: You're ranting.Most governments are bankrupt.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.

mhb: Since the cost was probably split between reduced profit and additional customer cost, it seems pretty impractical to determine who is due a refund - end users or businesses. Or the logistics of refunds to customers.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.

Larrikin: Making people spend more money to "save" money is just a sale to increase profits even more.

onlyrealcuzzo: How is it mind boggling? It's a regressive tax. That's literally their MO.They've been pushing the national sales tax to replace income tax since the 2000s (and probably longer).

tt24: National sales tax would be significantly better than income tax. Per head would be even better Unfortunately replacement doesn’t seem to be on the table for anyone.

rayiner: [delayed]

gruez: >It's not smart, it's extortion by someone connected to the state and self dealing.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).

jacquesm: You think businesses as a rule can all survive a 15 to 100% surcharge on their products without running into liquidity issues?

bryant: Much more interesting would be if the tariffs were refunded equally to each person nationwide (interesting in that it very clearly then becomes an income redistribution scheme, even if on a limited basis).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 in a way that's beneficial to people. But it won't happen.

selimthegrim: Maybe this will finally be the impetus for the US to go for a VAT? Hell if we get a carbon based border adjustment tax out of this like people were talking about in Trump’s first term this might be a case of broken clocks.

shin_lao: Unclear if the SC ruling is retro active. But of course, lawyers will try to make money out of this...

rbanffy: I believe, with huge disappointment, that this level of corruption has been normalised in this administration and that nothing will come out of this.

rootusrootus: Look how many comments in this discussion are scrambling to support the corruption. It’s very normalized, to the point where we don’t call it corruption any more, we call it good business.

quickthrowman: > Since the cost was probably split between reduced profit and additional customerAs 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.

JKCalhoun: "Since the cost was probably split between reduced profit and additional customer cost…"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).

pwg: If the amounts are under the limit you might sue the company who cut those invoices in small claims court for the amounts of the tariff line items on the invoices.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.

andyfilms1: I understand the frustration but I don't understand the logic. The businesses who paid the tariffs (who were literally sent an invoice that they paid) should be the ones refunded.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?

coldpie: Yes, you're almost there, just go one step further. Now you've got a big pile of money and no clear rules on where it should go. Who gets to decide where it will go? Given how this administration operates, where do you think it will go?

duxup: Absolutely absurd that we’re at this point. The courts / SCOTUS let the government roll out a massive and obviously illegal tax on citizens for a long time. They should have stepped in earlier.Now we the people probably don’t get our money back….

throwaway667555: I'm gonna have a stroke. The Congressional Budget Office found that consumers paid 70-80% of the tariffs, totaling more than $1000 per household. Where is my refund?

magicalhippo: > 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.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.

jonlucc: In practice, the entities who gave money directly to the US government are the ones who paid the tariff. Those entities should be pressured to refund the consumers, but in practice, that's unlikely.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.

tegiddrone: Yeah, it is an interesting bubble to be in. I worked with a company that could not keep up with the rising SWE salaries and thus attracted a different kind of SWE. I definitely felt the difference in education with the new hires. Reading comprehension/attention was weak. AI will easily replace them, I guess.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.

GaryBluto: > Now if this isn't insider trading [...], I don't know what is.Correct.

SpicyLemonZest: [delayed]

benrutter: Lots of comments along the lines that tarrifs were mostly passed down indirectly to consumers, who aren't entitled to refunds.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?

downrightmike: Most everything was probably bought with credit/debit cards. The individual records exist. Just using your Amazon etc order history should be dead simple

NickC25: Private businesses get refunded and a payday, prices for the consumer stay high (because consumers have proven that they can bear them), and inflation goes up.Clearly, this makes America great again. /s

ranger_danger: What if lowering prices actually resulted in enough extra sales that it provided more profit?

danielmarkbruce: This is wrong. It's not insider trading. Lutnick didn't have inside information. His son just had a brain. Anyone who read the case knew which way the court was going, it was the least surprising decision ever. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that the court ever heard it.

seydor: is it not a conflict of interest if you facilitate the legislation of tarrifs that you knew are illegal?

danielmarkbruce: No, it's not a conflict of interest. It's perhaps dumb, or morally bad, or several other things.

JKCalhoun: Such a regressive tax to get behind.Now if tariffs had only been applied to, I don't know, yachts, private jets…

AdamN: I'd go for a more progressive tax if it was on offer. But there is so much debt that I'm pretty worried that taxes are simply unsustainably low.

bluGill: Those are a sunk cost at this point though. The business likely is better off having sold and got the money now - vs risking they will never get a refund.

jtbayly: The Supreme Court already invalidated the tariffs. That’s the context of this order (and the subtitle of the article).

jerf: As sibling says, the Court very definitely did not order them to refund anything. They could have, and they didn't. The Court knew from the beginning that this was coming back to them.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.

SV_BubbleTime: What was the tax rate if you bought things made in the US with US materials?

mindslight: [delayed]

barelysapient: This assumes companies would have refunded consumers.Obviously if a company did this, refunding consumers was the last thing on their mind.

HarHarVeryFunny: Best case consumers may be refunded for tariffs directly charged to them by shipping companies like FedEx and DHL (USPS too, but can you really see them having the competence to do this?!).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.

AnimalMuppet: But (IIRC) the Supreme Court did not order that the tariffs be refunded. They left that issue open in their decision. So jerf may well be right.

freetonik: There was an interesting case in Finland. Finnish customs used to apply a 22% tax (ELV) on top of the car tax for imported used cars from other EU countries. On top of that, Finnish law required VAT to be charged on the car tax itself.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.

spamizbad: You don't need a crystal ball to understand a conservative supreme court would require the government to refund what amounts to an illegal tax on American businesses. If you stick your hand into a fire you don't need to speculate as to whether you'll get burned.

whyenot: > We can’t grow bananas here…We can’t? Are south Florida, southern California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, are they not “here”? There is literally a banana variety called California Gold.

pkilgore: Even better "imminent" war with Iran.For 47 years.Imminent.

wutwutwat: That's not how capitalism works. Consumers ate the cost. Have you not bought anything in the last year?

coldpie: UPS is definitely pocketing most of whatever refund they get. And golly gee gosh what a shocker, the company supports Republicans. I'm afraid you got robbed.> ‘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’Brienhttps://joeallen-60224.medium.com/big-brown-and-the-fascists...

Jeremy1026: > probablyHah, we are 100% not getting our money back. And the higher, tariff level, prices aren't going to go back down either.

commandlinefan: Did they actually raise prices, though? I haven't noticed any significant jumps; my understanding was that they were absorbing (for the most part) the tariffs for the time being, but planned to raise prices in the near future.

stevenwoo: It depends on if one thinks 10-20 percent is significant. Do you cook your own food - some food items are imported during USA winter months and those items went up noticeably, also items that are not grown/harvested in significant quantities in USA went up. The only things I did not see a price increase were US sourced oatmeal, rice and flour, stuff where they are selling stuff that could be from before tariff times. Coffee went up due to bad harvests but the tariffs added to that, and now that harvests are back to normal, prices haven't gone back down commensurately.

izacus: Calling outright corruption at the expense of citizens as "smart" is quite a statement of morality O.o

cvoss: You did not pay the tariffs. You bore the cost of the tariffs. Those are not the same thing. The refund is due to the party that got the bill for the tariff and paid it-- the importer. What you paid for was for the business not to go bankrupt while this was occurring. If the business wants to refund you for that, they can choose to do so. But you are not owed a refund.

throwaway667555: Congress can act to pay back the economically harmed party, the consumer. They won't because we live in an oligarchy.

llm_nerd: >You're ranting.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.

rootusrootus: Average family paid 1000 more last year due to tariffs. I definitely noticed things that jumped in price.

thingscoledoes: Source?

philipov: In the business, even the appearance of impropriety is damaging. People who work in finance aren't allowed to trade the same stocks as their company is trading, whether they have any inside info or not. The assumption is that simply by being close to a source of information, you are compromised. The same restrictions should apply to those close to government. By being family, he is compromised by default.

danielmarkbruce: Wrong. People who work in finance (I spent years there) are allowed to trade stocks their company is trading. There is a process to get approval. The equities division at an IB might be trading every single name in the S&P500. If you sit in the investment banking division and that division isn't doing anything related to a name, you are likely to get approval.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.

bickfordb: The latest temporary tariffs are also likely illegal.

badgersnake: Well if it works, they’re gonna keep doing it.

hypeatei: Rich people consume a lot more, so a consumption tax would be ideal if you eased other tax categories like income tax and/or capital gains. It's easy to administer and would boost investment across the economy IMO.

AdamN: I wouldn't ease any taxes - we simply can't afford lower taxes. Debt is nearly $40T (125% of GDP)!

siliconc0w: 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.

myrmidon: Better for whom? Wealthy people?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.

lenerdenator: > In the business, even the appearance of impropriety is damaging.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.

indoordin0saur: Yeah, because he's the son of the commerce secretary, so (supposedly) has access to the internal deliberations within the government.

danielmarkbruce: No, because "the government" isn't one blob. The court system is separate from the administration. And the supreme court justices aren't giving the internal deliberations to someone in the administration, especially when the administration is one of the parties in the case.

mothballed: .... what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs? Even FDR knew the 'separation' was a farce, that's how he magically got the court to go along with progressive programs they prior didn't support, after the 'Switch in time that saved nine.'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.

gruez: >if you facilitate the legislation of tarrifs that you knew are illegal?Did they know it was illegal? Any more than say, the Biden administration "knew" that forgiving student loans were illegal?

nubinetwork: Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47183719

burkaman: He presumably did not have access to the court's opinion before it was released, but he did have access to internal White House legal opinions before the tariffs were announced ("Mr. President this is illegal and very likely to be overturned by the courts"), and he obviously had access to the entire federal legal team during the court cases.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".

gruez: >.... what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs?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?

irishcoffee: > 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump.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.

UltraSane: There is no excuse for how long it took the Supreme court to decide this very obvious case.

bell-cot: > ...bought the rights to their potential tariff refunds for 20% of the value...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.

SunshineTheCat: Tariffs don't work like that.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...

parineum: > .... what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs?Following that logic, it make sense that those 3 voted with the administration.Oh wait...

mothballed: I don't see how a vote against is a vote against the administration. The whole point here is their corruption machine profited more off the justices voting against the tariff and for refunds. The tariffs were a mechanism to feign a tax for public purpose but then 'refund' them turning it into a tax to private business and Lutnick's financial engineering. Funneling the money straight into corrupt private enterprise via 'refund' is even easier for Trump than having to launder it through public coffers.The key is whether they had insider information given their association with these justices.

nebula8804: >I worked with a company that could not keep up with the rising SWE salaries and thus attracted a different kind of SWE.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?

rayiner: [delayed]

semiquaver: > Now if this isn't insider trading (by the literal Commerce Secretary), I don't know what is. I agree that you don’t know what insider trading is.

mgkimsal: One thing I don't see mentioned enough with the whole "the consumers paid these tariffs! we should get refunds!"... We "paid" not just in higher prices, but in many layoffs, reduction in working hours, skipped bonuses and raises. Companies that get 'refunds' will have an opportunity to use that money to rehire and repay workers. I'm cynical enough to think that will happen in large measures across the whole country, but I'm hopeful enough to want to see it happen nonetheless.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.

zoobab: "use that money to rehire and repay workers"or give it to shareholders.

philipallstar: They only do that after tax, so there'll be more tax paid if they do that.

koolba: How is it extortion? They could have gotten a different deal from anybody else or no deal at all. Nobody was twisting there arm or forcing them to deal with this one company to sell their tariff claims.

krsw: This is basically the government doing a protection racket. I swear, the amount of neoliberals in here lauding the move is a recession indicator. Did we all forget what corruption is?

nekusar: And notice that the refunds are TO THE COMPANIES.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.

kowalej: 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.

joshlemer: Prices don’t moronically go up forever, prices come down all the time

SunshineTheCat: I do find it kinda crazy that we had a specific policy surrounding tariffs (Smoot-Hawley) that was in the center of the worst economic collapse in US history.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...

whh: I don't usually like to get involved in US politics as I'm not American, nor do I live in the US. But I will say this: the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.Read from that what you will... as a voter, or the POTUS.

danielmarkbruce: >> 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.You keep changing what you are saying.

insane_dreamer: Technically it might not be "insider trading" since most information (we assume) was public knowledge.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).

Supermancho: This is collusion between the offices of POTUS, SCOTUS, and corporate friends that looks like insider trading, from a zoomed in lens.

dmix: You're saying Trump doesn't want tariffs? And the SCOTUS judges who went on record supporting executive powers to tariff was all just a big insider trading scam? And corporations were willing to risk a hundred of billions in tariffs fees on the odds it might get refunded just because some finance company might get a small cut of refunds?

tt24: That’s not my argument.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.

titzer: The past 20 years have been an endless series of wealth transfers from commoners to the wealthy. This is Oligarchy.

wpm: Look you can write the funny numbers in whatever accounting mumbo jumbo you want, but I paid more to cover the cost to the supplier == I paid the tariffs.

dmix: There was conservative push back in the courts where they supported giving the president powers to tariffs and fearing 'chaos'. It wasn't black and white.

coldpie: > The government knows exactly who paid what in dutiesNo, 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.

magicalhippo: > No, they have a record of who handed the money over to the government. This does not tell you who paid the duties.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.

coldpie: If the government charges the importer $20 and the importer charges me $20, then I am in effect the one who paid the duty. If the refund goes to the importer, and it does not come back to me, then the government and the importer have colluded to rob me of $20. This isn't an accident, the owners of the import companies who will benefit from this theft were almost certainly all Trump supporters.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.

giancarlostoro: > I understand the frustration but I don't understand the logic. The businesses who paid the tariffs (who were literally sent an invoice that they paid) should be the ones refunded.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?

gruez: >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?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?

book_mike: Good. Perhaps the administration should follow the law.

philipallstar: You just refund the people who pay the tariffs. You can't do any more than that.

giancarlostoro: I'm okay with that, though I don't think most of my receipts highlight how much went into a tariff. Maybe for very specific purchases it did, but for most things I've bought over the past year there's no real way to gauge this.

cj: > dumb, or morally badThis 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.

danielmarkbruce: It was non-zero but close to zero.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.

rayiner: It wasn’t “close to zero.” The Supreme Court split 6-3, with two Trump appointees voting against him. And the Federal Circuit, which is the most boring appellate court and not political at all, split 7-4, with two democratic appointees and two republican appointees voting to uphold the tariffs.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.

danielmarkbruce: Did you read the case? Read Clarence Thomas's dissent. It's not clear if he actually thinks what he wrote, or he just voted that way so he could write a dissent and make a strange legal point which probably doesn't carry water but sort of maybe could one day maybe.If it were close, I think he would have voted the other way. The folks on the court appear extremely inclined to take the other side on things just as a mental exercise.It was close to zero.

tegiddrone: Oh, I WISH that was the case but I'd estimate only 10% of SWE would fit your model of minimum competence... and yeah a lot of that 10% are browsing HN. I recall in 2016 asking coworkers why they voted trump. "My 401k" was a frequent answer.Vibe coding existed long before AI, especially in web/startup/enterprise information systems. You don't need to be a critical thinker to make a successful RoR app.

jmward01: 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.

redeeman: every single so called "nation state" is in reality just a regime, they ALL do this. They are no different than the mafia. You can choose between so called "don socialist" and "don fiscally-resonsible", yet they are identical twins with a different haircut.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

ajam1507: "I didn't kill him, officer. It was the bullet."

hammock: Source? I have seen this claim going around but the one actual source supporting the claim was more like “we have the cash to buy them if folks are willing to sell them” and didn’t go any further than that.Via Newsweek, Cantor Fitzgerald has affirmed it “never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs.”https://www.newsweek.com/howard-lutnick-sons-may-make-money-...

podgietaru: Wasn't the whole point of selling your right to refunds that the initial tariff was so onerous to businesses that they needed a cash injection to stay afloat.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.

phil21: Is a 20 cent on the dollar or so payment for the new tariff expense really going to save a company that much on the bubble?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.I'd say it's more likely this was a profit center to more companies than it was a life line. As in they passed the tariff down to their consumers, and also collected the 20% as a cash payment to juice the bottom line.More common though would be simply a way to help defray some costs and provide certainty.

reactordev: [delayed]

hypercube33: Two things is that we won't get money back and price of stuff is still going up. add on to that the companies getting refunds are pocketing the money.

dweinus: There is no probably; we not getting our money back. In fact, any of the money that has been spent in the meantime (say to make up for wealthy tax cuts or to expand military or border funding) we get to pay again!

giancarlostoro: One thing that should happen moving forward, whether we keep tariffs in one way or the other, we need consumer protection laws. I assume companies abused the "oh yeah you owe us for the tariffs" as a way to overcharge consumers. I think additional costs driven by tariffs should be 100% spelled out to the consumer next to where you're shown the tax amount. This should allow for auditing later if companies overcharge. It also would make "refunding" more reasonable, since you could show a receipt if technically you paid for a tariff, otherwise, if the company swallows it, they would show the amount but 'discount' or 'omit' it as something they are choosing to pay for. Without a paper trail I don't see how refunding any of this is feasible.

bwb: I ache for the day we were governed by people who were competent and wanted to govern.

jlarocco: They didn't have to rule on it because there's already precedent that the tariffs have to be repaid.

beeforpork: > while, of course, consumers get nothingThis would have been the case no mattern what.

aw1621107: > As sibling says, the Court very definitely did not order them to refund anything.> You may see other judges rule that the refunds don't have to be paid, for any of several reasons.I think the government might have a bit of an uphill battle given arguments they have previously made to courts. For example, consider this decision from the US Court of International Trade from 2025-12 [0]:> However, as the Government notes in its response to Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction here, it “[has] made very clear—both in this case and in related cases—that [it] will not object to the [c]ourt ordering reliquidation of plaintiffs’ entries subject to the challenged IEEPA duties if such duties are found to be unlawful.”> <snip>> Judicial estoppel would prevent the Government from taking an inconsistent approach after a final result in V.O.S. [] The Government has emphasized this point itself, citing to Sumecht NA, Inc. v. United States, which holds that “the Government would be judicially estopped from taking a contrary position” regarding a prior representation involving the availability of relief in the form of reliquidation. [] Having convinced this court to accept that importers who paid IEEPA tariffs will be able to receive refunds after reliquidation, and having benefited from the court’s subsequent conclusion that importers will not experience irreparable harm as a consequence of liquidation, the Government cannot later “assume a contrary position” to argue that refunds are not available after liquidation.> <snip>> Additionally, the panel in In re Section 301 Cases unanimously agreed—as we do now—that the USCIT has “the explicit power to order reliquidation and refunds where the government has unlawfully exacted duties.” [] The Government acknowledges that “a decision [to the contrary] would be inconsistent with years of [the court’s] precedent.”Obviously all this doesn't prevent the government from appealing anyways, but they'll need to get creative to get around their previous representations.[0]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cit.uscourts.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;cit&#x2F;files&#x2F;25-154.pdf

softwaredoug: Has anyone else noticed this? In our area, it seems in 2025 a lot of local businesses (ie local toy stores, etc) have closed. Presumably tariff pressures hurt (among other affordability issues).The big players can restructure supply chains. Small businesses can't. The mom and pops seem to suffer.I'm hoping there can be an infusion of $ into those companies and maybe stimulate a little growth, or at least survival through the Trump years.

Supermancho: To clarify, POTUS being short for the group POTUS in-crowd of the actual POTUS and cabinet, who act in sync.I'm saying the public tide shifted and the legal reality set in that they weren't going to get sympathetic rulings...which they don't care about anyway since it's not their money and the tariff threats already had any desired effects sought.POTUS was floated the idea that they could enrich themselves, so the decision was made, communicated to the Secretary of Commerce and to the SCOTUS judges.

trymas: Side topic, but this number puts into how crazy it was for trump[0] to go on tariff war against enemies and friends alike. All the propaganda and extortionist language about how all countries will pay up to USA.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:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;2025_United_States_federal_bud...

satvikpendem: "Trump brags in Oval Office that his billionaire pals made a killing in stocks after he pulled the plug on tariffs"> “He made $2.5 billion, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and then NASCAR team owner Roger Penske.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sg.news.yahoo.com&#x2F;trump-brags-oval-office-billionair...

petcat: You're saying that he had access to all of the Supreme Court Justices' chambers?

indoordin0saur: You don't need to have access to everything for it to be insider trading, just more than the general public. Lutnick would know what case they are making to the court, perhaps the confidence of the attorneys in winning as well as information on how the case was going.

tacticalturtle: Supreme Court transcripts of arguments are posted to supreme court.gov the same day the arguments are made:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supremecourt.gov&#x2F;oral_arguments&#x2F;argument_transcr...There’s no secret sauce here - their guess as to how the case is going is as good as any outside observer, and based on the questions made by the justices.

superxpro12: A large cap company I totally dont work at paid 4% of revenue in tariffs last year. Our bonuses were cut in half. I dont have visibility into our customer pricing. It is fucking obscene how stupid this tax is. And all for what? So billionaires can get a bit richer? How did this help us, like at all???

mrwh: The executive class are out to get as much as they can as quickly as they can while the music plays, then retire to whatever luxury boltholt they can prepare. It's FIRE with private islands, and without even a figleaf of noblesse oblige any more.

tencentshill: Worse. They tend to stick around due to their inability to stop taking until they die.

snarf21: It is almost as if this was a planned wealth transfer that was immensely succesful.

microtonal: Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ?Maybe that was never the point. You present it as retaliation against 'countries that are out to get us'. Introduce the tariffs, companies pay the tariffs by increasing prices for consumers, get the inevitable loss in court, return the tariff money to the companies.You just transferred $130B of wealth from citizens to companies.Bonus: people are now used to the higher prices, so post-tariffs your profits are also higher.

nyeah: [delayed]

NetMageSCW: Trump doesn’t have those powers.

smm11: So we don't have to pay taxes this year, right?

PaulDavisThe1st: They weren't buying insurance. There's no insurance payout for the companies. They got a small amount of money in hand, and lost the chance to reclaim any of the tariff refund. That isn't insurance.

behringer: Yeah it's not insider trading. It's just that someone on the inside engaged in trade... Cmon guys you know there's a difference!

NetMageSCW: What evidence do you have that those tariffs were proposed by him?

recursivedoubts: in other news:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newrepublic.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;206882&#x2F;trump-commerce-secretary...

happyopossum: Also in other news:"Amid online claims Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, senior executives at Cantor Fitzgerald, could benefit from the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling, a firm spokesperson told Newsweek it has “never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs.""[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;howard-lutnick-sons-may-make-money-...

NetMageSCW: I really hope those companies that passed the tariff to consumers are required to refund the increase to those same consumers, regardless of whether they sold their refund or not.

anon7000: They literally spent a decent chunk of money spinning up a line of business that could only make money if the tariffs were illegal.

hammock: So insurance is bad now

PaulDavisThe1st: 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 no control over Y and generally speaking no involvement in it (think: accidents, floods, storms, fires). By contrast Lutnick is the Secretary of Commerce of the United States of America.

jcranmer: > And the supreme court doesn't hear cases that are 100% obviously illegal.There is an argument in about two months' time as to whether or not the Birthright Citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment actually guarantees birthright citizenship in the US. There is no serious legal argument in favor of the interpretation being advanced by the Trump administration, that it does not. And yet here we are.

yapyap: Wonder if the companies (who have been mostly passing on the tariffs to the end user) will just add the refunds to their profits or give back in some way

CuriouslyC: The word you wanted there was probably monotonically

mustyoshi: Just about everyone on the left has been saying these tariffs were illegal since day one.It's not insider trading that they acted on that consensus.

jcranmer: > what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs?They were nominated in Trump's first term, which had a very qualitatively different cabinet assembled around Trump, one much less focused on sycophancy and pleasing Trump. I don't think anybody in Trump's cabinet 6 years ago was thinking about the potential powers a president had in being able to change tariffs based on how he felt waking up in the morning, much less interrogation of judicial candidates based on how willing they were to go along with that.

burkaman: Yes, because it was produced by the same people that are going to argue the case in court. You can hire the best lawyers in the world but they will still have to speculate on what arguments the government is going to make, and whether there are confidential communications showing evidence that there was some consistent rational justification for the tariffs and not just the president's public posts that leader X was mean to him on the phone so he imposed a tariff.

eitau_1: It's even more to blame given that it stripped the NEA and IEEPA acts of legislative guardrails in 1987.[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivepoints.mattglassman.net&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-court-ieepa-and-th...

Ajakks: What a week argument - your still making excuses for this nonsense. Ridiculous.

aduffy: They need to refund it *with interest*, according to filings cited in the article.

mejutoco: 6-7 percent interest.

vntok: [delayed]

Ajakks: Oh - so the kid went out and he got permission to do this?Where is that? Who approved his request?

tootie: It's unbelievable he's still given any semblance of credence for anything he does. Trump is just palpably stupid. He is bad at absorbing information, he is bad at analytical thinking, he is impatient, vain and rash. Aside from his tenuous legal justification, he never once publicly expressed even a fundamental understanding of the basic mechanics of tariff collection nor what balance of trade actually means. You'd constantly see his proxies on TV just put words in his mouth to bend his foolish policy into some coherent. And we're seeing it again with the attack on Iran. No strategy, no achievable objectives, no comprehension of basic facts on the ground. He's really really really just stupid.

teolandon: Please direct me to the nearest grocery store that sells US bananas made with US materials

hightrix: > tariff war against enemiesThis is an interesting way to frame a tax on Americans, but it aligns with this administrations actions.

evan_: So on Earth 2 in which everything is the same except these tariffs hadn't been enacted, would today's consumer prices be the same or lower?

burkaman: This is contradicted by Cantor Fitzgerald documents obtained by Wired which said "We’ve already put a trade through representing about ~$10 million of IEEPA Rights and anticipate that number will balloon in the coming weeks".- https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;cantor-fitzgerald-trump-tariff-r...So we don't really know, someone is lying. I'd prefer to let the congressional investigation play out, but if I had to guess right now I would believe Wired over Cantor Fitzgerald.

devin: Just delayed is justice denied.

suzdude: courts &#x2F; SCOTUS let the government roll out a massive and obviously illegal tax on citizens for a long time.The don't forget about congress. 216 GOP congressional reps voted to handicap congress's ability to halt tariffs. For much of the current session of congress, their calendar wasn't counting days.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;us&#x2F;house-republicans-block-con...

warkdarrior: Judge actions by their outcomes, not by their stated purpose.

jlarocco: Yeah, most of us absolutely are not getting our money back.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?

xp84: Not only can’t you track down the 1,000 rice buyers, you don’t have any legal obligation to, so you 100% wouldn’t. (Not speaking of “you” just the general case of all importers who get refunds).

danielmarkbruce: White House legal opinions aren't any better than other legal opinions. Opinions are not "information".

burkaman: I understand your position but I disagree. If I were trying to predict whether the government is going to win in court, I think reading what the government's own lawyers think about the case would be valuable. If it were possible to pay for this I think people would, that's why I think it is material. Some random person's opinion is not relevant information, but the opinion of people directly involved in a case is.

danielmarkbruce: That's fine, to each their own on trying to make predictions. I did try to predict it, did it accurately (along with many others, this wasn't the hardest thing ever), and wouldn't have had any interest in any internal memo.It's a public arena on things like this. I don't think even the justices themselves have "material inside information" until a little ways through the hearing, and people are trying to predict the outcome well before that. On the surface that might sound absurd, but it isn't.

happyopossum: You've been sucked in by an online lie and are spreading it as fact:"Amid online claims Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, senior executives at Cantor Fitzgerald, could benefit from the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling, a firm spokesperson told Newsweek it has “never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs.""[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;howard-lutnick-sons-may-make-money-...

p_j_w: They’ve denied being involved in naked corruption, I suppose we have no choice but to take them at their word.

ksherlock: From 1991-1993 there was a luxury tax on yachts, private jets...https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Luxury_tax#United_States

Maxatar: Yes it absolutely is valuable to have access to expert opinions and people do pay money to acquire opinions from experts.But expert advice, even if material, is not the same as insider information.

pests: Not according to the letter obtained by WIRED, as written about up thread.

throw_rust: I fail to see the problem, people voted for this, did they not?

myrmidon: I'd argue that ressource consumption&#x2F;pollution are on the contrary pretty strongly correlated with wealth.But I don't see the primary justification for taxes as "keeping consumption in check" (whatever that would mean for you): In my view, we pay taxes to keep our society functional.Progressive taxation is required to prevent escalating wealth inequality (and I'd argue that US administrations have done a really poor here over the last decades).Regressive taxes ruin society by nurturing pseudo-parasitic rent-seekers controlling most of the wealth (=> exaggerated for clarity), and the situation is already bad enough without allowing those to basically skip taxes.

MattDamonSpace: The whole point is “$130B is chump change for the problems caused” and that’s true if companies as well

functionmouse: Companies will make far more than 130b off this. There's no way they only raised prices just enough to cover the 130b and the labor required for the internal policy changes. This was a justification for price gouging. Which they will not stop doing.

WalterBright: When Biden's student loan forgiveness program was determined to be illegal (twice) by the Supreme Court, nobody ordered that the recipients give it back.

apercu: Oh? You have some sort of insider knowledge here?

hermanzegerman: He bragged about it, and certainly didn't spoke out against themSo I pitch these ideas, and he says, ‘Let’s do it.’ ” Why not replace the I.R.S. with an External Revenue Service, which will collect tariffs and other levies from foreign sources instead of taxing citizens?https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2025&#x2F;07&#x2F;28&#x2F;donald-trumps-...

lokar: Friends? America has no friends, only client states.

lokar: I'm serious. The Trump&#x2F;MAGA view of foreign policy is that the US sits at the top, we owe friendship to no one. We engage with other nations transactionally, zero sum, with the US always getting more.

kubelsmieci: Don't antropomorfize countries. Countries can't have friends. There are only common interests. Or opposite.

usefulcat: I had the same thought, but really I think a lot of it is just spectacle for his more gullible followers.I mean, FFS--we have a nominally Republican candidate who campaigned on raising taxes and was elected anyway!You'd have to be pretty gullible to think that raising taxes on imported goods won't result in price hikes at the checkout counter.

lokar: I said "Trump&#x2F;MAGA", which is the person and controlling faction in US politics

khy: Could this open Cantor Fitzgerald up to class action law suits from consumers who ultimately paid the refunded tariffs?

hedora: I'd imagine it'd open the federal government to such a suit.It stole money from consumers in the form of illegal tariffs, then refunded the money to people with no obvious relationship to the victims.

davedx: How about people?

jonathanlydall: Maybe I don't understand as I'm an outsider, but as per my recent comment on this topic [0], I fail to see the logic of how "other countries" pay the US when the tariffs are paid by the importer and not the other country which is exporting.I do acknowledge that import taxes can in theory help local industries, especially if the other countries are subsidizing exported goods.[0]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47238951

hedora: If there was any justice at all left in this country, a class action lawsuit with the entire US population as the class would arrange for the tariff refunds to go to individuals, not companies.That'd neatly address this particular instance of insider trading, and probably many other similar schemes that didn't make it into the press.

amelius: At least our president made a lot of lawyers happier.

wat10000: Congress needs to step up and take its power back from the executive. There was no good reason for the President to have this power in the first place. Why the hell do we have emergency powers to impose tariffs? Is there going to be a fleet of nuclear-armed bombers headed for the USA and the only way to stop them is to impose tariffs? It's ridiculous.Congress has been gradually handing their power over to the executive for decades. For decades, people have been warning that this was setting up for major abuse if you got a particularly bad president. Well, guess what....

doom2: Just wait until the next Democratic president is elected. The current crop of Republicans will suddenly remember that Congress can exercise this power.

WesleyJohnson: And then Trump can sign the checks again....Sarcasm aside, I agree the refunds should go back to consumers, not the importers. I don't have a source, but I have to imagine the lion's share of companies that were hit with tariffs increased their prices, and the consumer paid the bill.

rayiner: You’re piling speculation on speculation. First of all, there was no such memo saying the tariffs were “very likely to be overturned.” The Supreme Court decision was 7-3, with two Bush appointees voting to uphold the tariffs. The appellate court decision was 7-4, with two Obama appointees and two Bush appointees dissenting. Second of all, there is no evidence that this legal analysis was leaked to Cantor.

Ajakks: Who cares? The Treasury Secretary shouldn't have family profiting off fixing illegal policy the Treasury Secretary enacted. That should never happen. It is wrong, it doesn't explicitly spelled out.

vel0city: Commerce* Secretary. Lutnick is the Secretary of Commerce which implements tariff policy. Bessent is the Treasury Secretary.

LPisGood: The non-publicly known strategy they intend to use in court is “information”

0cf8612b2e1e: It was also used to frame why the new tax cuts were justified, even though the optimistic math never worked out either.

WesleyJohnson: What businesses were legitimately going to go bankrupt by the increased tariffs? I'm not defending the tariffs, mind you, but I don't buy that every company had to increase prices to offset the additional taxes. Many could've taken the hit and been fine, except profits would be down and shareholders would be angry.

dude250711: > All the propaganda and extortionist language about how all countries will pay up to USA.Sounds a bit like Brexit.

ex-aws-dude: You're thinking way to much like a programmerIt doesn't need to be a perfect solution, you could just calculate some average cost of goods increase and give everyone a flat refund from the total amount.

johanyc: I like this idea. It's a good pr move for the business too

epolanski: > Absolutely absurd that we’re at this point.It's not really, this is the result of having a flawed democratic system.What do Turkey, Philippines, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Nicaragua, etc and now US have all in common?They are ALL presidential or semi-presidential republics where a single person "rules" without needing to face opposition in a parliament nor even requiring support from its own party.Winner-takes-all democracies, aren't democracies if only part of the electors is represented in the executive.Presidential republics are super dangerous, they combine the perils of dictatorships with a cherry on the cake of being able to claim popular mandate.Seriously, it's not a coincidence that the last parliamentary republic to turn into an authocracy has been Sri Lanka 50+ years ago.

marcosdumay: > Companies that get 'refunds' will have an opportunity to use that money to rehire and repay workers.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?

mgkimsal: Unsure where you got that from? If a company that has had to lay off staff and reduce hours because of increase in expenses because of tariffs, then they get a chunk of money back, trying to 'get back' to where you were before - headcount, wages, etc - might be on your mind, and might be possible with a one-time refund of ideally a sizeable portion of your tax. However... we still have extremely high tariffs in place so the effects of higher input prices are still ongoing (and ramped up in some cases).If our tariff structure went back to, say, October 2024, and companies who'd paid some inordinate tax - forcing layoffs and reductions - got a chunk of that back - and the taxes went back to what they were - there'd likely be some return to hiring and raises as before. But we can't get back to that any time soon with an administration hellbent on extracting as much from us via tariffs as possible.

marcosdumay: The reason companies invest is not because they have money.

scoofy: Any sensible administration implementing such an obviously suspect tariff regime could have easily put the tariffs in a kind of escrow instead of just pretending it's novel policy was trivially constitutional.Blaming SCOTUS here is not out of the question, but they should not be "entirely" to blame, unless you think it's totally fine to run the Executive branch like you're trying to get away with something. It's not.

epolanski: This isn't the Trump&#x2F;MAGA foreign policy, american exceptionalism is a century old and only gotten stronger. If anything MAGA is the full blown expression of this phenomenon.The difference was that in the past US understood that you "rule" better when you surround yourself with enemies.Now the policy is to dictate conditions left and right.

lokar: From the 2nd half of the 20th century until Trump there was the view that the US lead a large group of "western" democracies (in the sense that Japan is "western") in a loose coalition that was NOT zero sum. The US provided a lot of benefits to others, this collaboration produced an overall surplus[1], which the US got a large share of.The new view seems to be based on a zero sum, transactional view of international affairs. In this mode every interaction must clearly benefit the US more than any other participant. We have to clearly "win" every time.[1] and this is not even counting 2nd order "surplus" from things like no longer having to fight world wars.

ok_dad: Similar to how Noem gave a contract for 143 million to an 8 day old company with an address at her former political operative’s home.The admin is just here to literally steal tax dollars.

seanmcdirmid: They could have used inside government legal analysis that other people didnt have. You could have predicted this with higher certainty if you knew the justices well enough.

NetMageSCW: Coulda woulda shoulda.They could have just been smarter than average and found an angle others didn’t see that paid off for them.

seanmcdirmid: Ya, that's why this will be impossible to show off as insider trading.

abustamam: The CF rabbit hole is wild. Somehow he manages to make a lot of money during tragedies and economic downturns.I don't buy into the conspiracies, but it is quite odd how he always manages to come up on top.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;911archive&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1r5rkk3&#x2F;howard_...

levzettelin: > Astronomical tariffs [...] and from all of this they got only $130B ?Which is it? A number can't be small and large at the same time.

throwaway667555: Economically it is a direct redistribution of wealth. In crisis times, Congress acts swiftly to cure wrongs against corporations. What about this wrong against every single household?

I-M-S: "The West, so afraid of strong government, now has no government, only financial power."

gorbachev: They will never pay this without a fight.Good time to specialize in "tariff litigation", if you're a law firm.

arrosenberg: The point is to bankrupt the country so the robber barons can buy up all the assets for pennies on the dollar.

b112: Well it's not, but that aside, how would consumers ever get a refund?Show up with a banana peel at a grocery, and say you want a tariff refund for the banana you paid cash for, 6 months ago?There's no tracking for almost all of tariff affected purchases.

HWR_14: Consumers wouldn't. Importers will.

seizethecheese: Prediction markets already had it as more likely than not that the court would rule against the tariffs

californical: To steel-man their sentence, it’s a large number to extract from US citizens, nearly $500&#x2F;person. But it’s a small number in terms of government deficit and current spending

hedora: The people selling the debt thought there was a ~ 20% chance the money would be collected.Is there any proof he didn't have insider information? With this administration + court, it's rare when some sort of fraud, bribes, or protection money payments aren't at play.

seizethecheese: Prediction markets were at something like 60% that the court would rule against the tariffs

yunohn: Almost all companies issuing stock to employees also ban them and their family members and fellow house residents from trading in the same stock to avoid insider style improprieties and the SEC has frequently prosecuted such cases. Wild that congress and WH staff have zero such restrictions even in 2026!

shevy-java: Hmm. The "active request" is quite common though. I agree that this is unfair, since it is theft, IMO, but Finland is not the only one forcing active engagement to get your money back. Even when the government stole that money from the people.> we can and should trust the authorities.Well, Finland has a fairly competent government usually for the most part. That mantra will not work in many other countries though - such as Germany. Just look at what Merz is doing; his left hand does not know what the right hand should do ...

rootusrootus: Yeah that’s never going to happen. Nobody in this administration will ever be under oath on the topic. Now they suddenly think Slick Willie is trustworthy because he said he had know knowledge of Trump doing anything wrong. What a world.

NickC25: Sadly, you're right on the money here, nobody will ever spill the beans.Problem is Willie knows everything (he was the president for fuck's sake) and is just lawyer-speaking his way out of admitting that he along with multiple former presidents (including the current one) were&#x2F;are compromised by a hostile nuclear-armed foreign actor's (read: "ally's") intelligence agency. He can't sing, or the whole charade comes apart.The contagion fallout is massive. This involves several of the wealthiest people on the planet, tech leaders, business leaders, politicians in powerful countries...and involves several major geopolitical actors...and involves some unspeakably disgusting actions to children.

muwtyhg: Here is a source for you to use in the future:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;who-is...The number the New York Fed came up with is 90% was passed onto the consumer.

danielmarkbruce: Nope, wrong. Most companies have black out dates around earnings releases. Otherwise, good to go.(and&#x2F;or have an explicit approval workflow that effectively does the above).

netfortius: Ha, ha, ha. Someone, somewhere, ordering government to do something. Thank you for the best laugh today.

bluegatty: 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 collectingThey def knew they were lying about who is payingThey 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-deals-in-90 days, knowing the case would take time to draw out.But - they have no plan.Trump does not think 9 months ahead - he has grudges, grievances, and he pursues whatever grievance he wants to that day.He doesn't forget and will push his staff to go against old enemiesThe point is not to improve the economy, bring back jobs - the point is to 'Look Tough' and 'Stick it to the Libs and Foreigners' and to get elected again, failing that, rig the elections.Remember that the 'high visiblity' of ICE is not a bad thing - it is mostly very much in purpose to show MAGA world that he's cracking liberal, immigrant and brown people heads.Jamming those Somalis on the concrete is exactly the optics he wants for his base.It was only until people started dying would be people start to question it.Same thing here: he will play grievance, the 'Liberal Courts' are against him blah blah and MAGA will go for it.The problem is that Core MAGA is maybe really only 20% and Soft MAGA another 15% and that's not enough to win anything.But it's almost.Narrative, performance, grievance, populism, social media, information sphere - that's it.It's Post Truth.People keep talking about this stuff through the lens of the 'issues', it's completely wrong headed - policies don't matter, only perception etc.Reality does have a way of sneaking through though, and 'hardball reality' can change minds. People do understand Epstein, tariffs when they pay attention, unemployment, prices, 'war mostly bad' etc. etc..

raincole: It's not insider trading, but surely it's a conflict of interesting? If you ignore all the specific name calling, isn't it still quite wrong that one minister can financially bet against the administration?

andsoitis: > isn't it still quite wrong that one minister can financially bet against the administration?Why?

chrisXOXO: Because it encourages him to work against the administration.

Calavar: > 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.That's not the idea, and it almost seems like a straw man to be honest. The actual idea is that the current head of Cantor can't do something because he's a direct relative of a high ranking government official whose powers and job duties present a conflict of interest for this specific set of transactions.

danielmarkbruce: Cantor Fitzgerald is an investment bank. Rather than claim a straw man, think about what they do and how it interacts with the administration. Everything they do is heavily regulated. If they couldn't do anything that gave an appearance of a conflict, they literally couldn't do a single thing that makes up their business and would be hobbled.

jstummbillig: Cool! How much money did you yourself make on this (given that it was entirely obvious, and not leveraging knowledge seems silly)?

danielmarkbruce: A lot. If you remember all the tariff announcements in the first months of 2025, the stock market tanked and it was an easy buy. The market then reasonably quickly realized many of these tariffs weren't going to persist. The payoff was fast, and the reason you didn't see a massive uptick in the market when the ruling came out was because it was already priced in at that point.Just because something isn't obvious to you, it doesn't mean it wasn't obvious to a lot of people.

jstummbillig: To buy after a market dip requires roughly zero specific conviction or insight regarding this supreme court ruling and its consequences.

nkrisc: Tariffs are a cost a country incurs upon itself to protect industries that are critical, not for their profits, but for the capabilities they offer.It's paying more for something just to keep it domestically available for purposes of national security.

mandevil: Because this hypothetical memo was paid for by our tax dollars, not your own private money! That means it belongs to the American people, not individuals for their private gain. Using it for your own gain would be theft from the American public.In this hypothetical case, of course. There is no evidence that such a memo exists. But if it did...

jMyles: > That means it belongs to the American people, not individuals for their private gain.This is a strong case that there ought not to be any such thing as a secret opinion or confidential advice from the White House OLC - and I agree with that opinion if that's what you're saying.But it doesn't transform the information contained therein to nonpublic.I'm not saying this whole thing wasn't a total scumbag move - it was - but it's not quite the same crime as insider trading.

hnfong: Not saying you're wrong, but note that in general attorney-client privilege is kind of important as well.

ElijahLynn: Love this:The judge said the repayment process should be straightforward and grew impatient when a Justice Department lawyer said the government hadn’t yet formalized its position on refunding the tariffs, which President Trump imposed by citing a decades-old law. “Your position is clear,” the judge said. “The Supreme Court told you what your position is.”

gruez: >The executive class are out to get as much as they can [...]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.

wiseowise: Jesus Christ, how pathetic you are. I severely doubt you’re just a bored billionaire, which leaves only the option of a bootlicker. Why do you simp for them? Do you expect a bread crump to fall off the table? Or are you a temporarily embarrassed millionaire thinking you belong to them?

danielmarkbruce: If the market dip is directly caused by X, and you think X is going away or misunderstood, it's specific conviction.In this case X was the tariffs. You are out of your depth.

mothballed: (1) they likely to have insider information.(2) Is that SCOTUS functions as a legitimization process(3) Is that de-legitimizing this particular tariff regime, while trump immediately pivots to a new tariff, is a best case scenario for the admin insiders as it lets them profit immensely from refund corruption while still pivoting immediately to a new tariff.(4) It is hilarious that the best counter your argument et al includes is just glossing over the insider aspect, which means you're just yielding the entire underpinning to this thread to me, which is more than enough to satisfy the premise on its own even if you reject this particular vote as being in the service of the admin insiders.

JoblessWonder: One of our vendors started charging a 10% tariff fee for parts ordered from Switzerland... we passed that fee directly on to our customers as a line item. I can't imagine the headache when (not if) they come to us expecting a refund for that.

alwa: I wonder if there’s such notion as trading on insider absence-of-information? Kind of in the spirit of “warrant canaries” (which I’ve heard more engineers than lawyers defend, and more lawyers than engineers dismiss as a legally-flimsy gimmick)…Here, the top-tier law firm has plenty of internal legal talent to conclude that the tariffs didn’t meet the plain-language requirements of the law. And that it would, on its surface, be a real stretch to set aside the laws as unconstitutional.The only real “inside” question would be why the administration, so confidently and for so long, peed on our collective leg and told us it was raining. “Surely there’s method to the madness,” you might say to yourself (and hedge against).Would it be insidery to say “hey Dad, this seems like such an obvious slam dunk-is there something I’m missing? Some back-channel assurances from the court, …” And for Dad to say “if there is, I don’t know about it”?Does it change if Dad’s the one to say “you know son, it’s kind of a clown show over here, these tariffs are all bark and no bite”? Or if he follows that up with “They’re collecting them but they know they’ll probably have to give them back, good opportunity there”—something anyone could conclude, from the same facts, even without Treasury Secretaryship?

empath75: I hate the tariffs, but giving the money back to the corporations would be absolutely _grotesque_.Every company that collected a tariff fee needs to refund it as they collect their own refunds.

vuln: scouts got paid off by big corps

teeray: Justice delayed is justice denied. There should be an express lane for litigation similar actions like this.

vuln: we can’t even do that with violent criminal let alone white color criminals. lol

NetMageSCW: I thought those were on very solid ground commonly used by past administrations?

bickfordb: Section 122 has rarely been used. State AGs announced lawsuits today: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;03&#x2F;05&#x2F;trump-tariffs-state-ags-sue-...

candiddevmike: Yea, I'm done hearing "the wheels of justice turn slowly..." bullshit. People have had their lives ruined, far quicker, for far less.

coldpie: Life in prison for every single person working under this administration is the moderate position.

GaryBluto: I'm sure plenty of wrathful extremists thought they held a moderate position too.

mhb: Well that would seem like a potentially huge mess depending on the size of the purchases. Not to mention that the purchasers are not all easily tracked down. I wasn't suggesting it because it was perfect; I was suggesting it because it might be viable.

benrutter: I think the tricky bit is less proving you bought something, and more proving that the thing you bought cost more than it otherwise would.As I understand it (which isn't a lot), if you paid a tariff on an overseas order you're theoretically due it back, although that might require taking the government to court, which is gonna cost more than the settlement for most people.

anang: I think a lot of people feel like people who have one foot in a heavy regulated industry shouldn't have their other foot in the regulatory body that regulates that industry.

qingcharles: FedEx, I believe, have stated they will refund all consumers who paid them the tariffs, which they then paid to the gov. Nothing yet about the fees also incurred by consumers to pay the tariffs, but there are at least two class actions filed already on this subject, IIRC.

mempko: Did the people pay for the majority of the tariffs, like 80% percent? But the companies are getting this money? How is this now just a transfer of what I paid to these companies? They just get free money at my expense?

bryanrasmussen: >but he did have access to internal White House legal opinions before the tariffs were announcedyes but the opinion that it was illegal was the received wisdom by everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject. It would have been completely insane if the white house staff didn't believe the same. So I guess I'm actually surprised at the white house staff believing what everybody else did?

solid_fuel: Unfortunately, this is what republicans voted for, as approved by their congressional representatives who declined to assert congressional power over taxation. Sadly, we all have to live with it until they wise up or quit voting.

platevoltage: This one needs a bit more time in the oven.

Detrytus: Well, I think context matters here a lot:If you go to a random lawyer in Wyoming and ask them to write "expert opinion" then what you'll get would probably be something standard, written by a junior associate, or maybe even produced by ChatGPT.If the White House orders "expert opinion" on potential Supreme Court ruling then the chances are that the expert asked to prepare it is someone who plays golf with some of the SCOTUS judges.So those two "expert opinions" might not bear the same weight.

solid_fuel: There are three co-equal branches of government. SCOTUS is to blame for the chaos, but so is Congress. The Republican members of Congress could have joined the Democrats at any point to reassert Congressional power over tariffs and taxation. They chose not to.They also chose to appoint the conservative majority on the Supreme Court which made these choices.

solid_fuel: Putting aside the discussions of who will actually see any money returned, I will note that this haul covers about 100 days of war with Iran. ($1 Billion per day is the initial assessment from the Pentagon.) [0]For anyone who was still under the illusion that the tariffs would make any impact on the government debt, hopefully this illustrates that both the tariffs and the ridiculous DOGE effort were never really about the budget.[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iran-cost-ticker.com&#x2F;

syllogism: The corruptions of this administration are legion, but this isn't one of them. Unless you can point to something Lutnick did to create this outcome, I don't see how he had a better view of the whole thing than anyone else.

mrguyorama: Who cares who came up with the illegal tariff implementation, the point is that a member of the government profited off of their own administration's incompetence.It's obscene. I don't care whether a law was broken or not.You want to profit from government incompetence? Stop being part of the government then.

timmmmmmay: Grocery stores track their customers very extensively and cash purchases are fairly rare. I'm very confident that Costco, for example, knows everything that every member has bought from them since the tariffs started.

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

PaulDavisThe1st: Presumably you don't consider a House panel to be under oath (since Lutnick, a part of this administration, will be appearing before one) ?

rootusrootus: I will be happy to be wrong, assuming that happens.I want everyone who associated with Epstein to be under oath at some point, and I think we should prioritize based on how many pieces of evidence their name appears on.You think Trump will ever let himself be questioned under oath? Any rational person knows that his refusal is tantamount to an admission, but I bet he does not see it that way.

Calavar: > If they couldn't do anything that gave an appearance of a conflictThis time I won't say maybe - that's a straw man.I never said Cantor shouldn't be able to do anything that even gives the appearance of a conflict. Or anything even close to that really.As you said yourself further up the thread, investments of investment bank employees are highly regulated. And not only employees themselves, but also their direct family members.Yet that same level of legal regulation doesn't apply to direct relatives of government officials. We've seen frequently with spouses and children of congressmen, and now we're seeing it with the son of a cabinet member. Yes, this may technically be legal, but legal does not equate to just and desirable. This reads to me like a serious loophole in the law that needs to be closed.

khat: US imposes tariffs, companies increase cost to offset price, consumers front the bill. Companies sue government, judge orders refunds, companies pocket money and keep prices at current rate. The people get screwed over twice.

tzs: > Now they stand to make huge returns of 3 to 5x for being correct on that bet, while, of course, consumers get nothing.Even if they hadn't made that bet were consumers going to get anything? The refunds would go to whoever directly paid the tariffs, which will generally be businesses.I doubt that many businesses will go the effort of figuring out how much of any price increases they did while those tariffs were in effect raised the price for each individual customer, and issue refunds for that amount.

tzs: Wait...how do we know there was no such memo?We have no reason to believe that if such a memo exists it was used improperly, but I don't see how we could know there is no such memo.BTW you've got an extra Justice on the Supreme Court. Should be 6-3, not 7-3.

quickthrowman: > It's not a given they passed it on,Actually, it is a given. Nobody ate tariffs, everyone passed them on.That’s how capitalism works, you sum up the costs of production and add margin, unless you’re a VC backed company trying to take over a market by selling dollars for a quarter.Nobody was trying to corner a market by eating tariffs and blowing their margins away, everyone passed them down to the ultimate consumer of the tariffed product. Take a look at the record profits that publicly traded companies are putting up, they’re the only ones that could potentially eat the tariffs and they obviously did not do so, which means smaller businesses definitely didn’t eat the tariffs either.> and if it was then in many cases it was spread outI can virtually guarantee that the final consumer of a tariffed product paid for the entire tariff. Like I said, nobody gains anything from absorbing tariffs. It’s bad business.

caconym_: Isn't Lutnick literally the chief architect of Trump's tariff policy? I can hardly imagine anybody more responsible for creating this outcome besides Trump himself, who would presumably have appointed somebody else if Lutnick hadn't been available.> I don't see how he had a better view of the whole thing than anyone else.Given the above, you really don't think Lutnick had a "better view" of the likely outcomes and timelines, including the Trump admin's planned and gamed out responses to certain outcomes, than the average Joe on the street? I think that's extremely, uh, naive.

pauldelany: Yes, he is:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irishtimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;economy&#x2F;2026&#x2F;01&#x2F;30&#x2F;how-a...https:&#x2F;&#x2F;businessplus.ie&#x2F;news&#x2F;howard-lutnick-donald-trumps-tr...https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;news&#x2F;world&#x2F;howard-lutnick-trump-tariffs-s...

pauldelany: Howard Lutnick was an architect and promoter of Trump's tariff strategy. He was involved in setting it up. 'Set up' being the operative verbiage.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.firstpost.com&#x2F;explainers&#x2F;howard-lutnick-criticis...https:&#x2F;&#x2F;businessplus.ie&#x2F;news&#x2F;howard-lutnick-donald-trumps-tr...https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irishtimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;economy&#x2F;2026&#x2F;01&#x2F;30&#x2F;how-a...

tsoukase: As coming from a semi-corrupt country I can assure you that the Commerce Secretary can have massive access to classified information from any part of the public sector, including any Court. For him all this is one to two telephone calls away. The question is if he has influence in the decisions, which elevates the corruption to the next level.For the nonbelievers: why did only a company led by close relatives of a government member and no other bet on a game that is based on a Court decision?

toast0: > 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.I didn't have to deal with it, but from other comments, most of the international shippers also charged a hefty fee to broker the tarrifs. Expect not to get that refunded.

tzs: The importer pays directly. There are three ways the importer can deal with the burden of that. In most cases it will be a combination of all three of them.1. Raise the price they sell the imported item for.2. Eat it.3. Lower the price they are willing to pay the exporter.For the Trump tariffs it has been overall it has been about 90-96% #1 and #2 and 4-10% #3. I haven't seen a breakdown of how #1 and #2 is split.

tzs: If you wanted to pass the refund on wouldn't the most sensible way be to pass it on to the two supermarkets since they were the actual buyers from you?If the supermarket that raised prices wants to pass that on to their 1000 buyers that would be for them to deal with, not you.

loudmax: The mental gymnastics people are performing in order to convince themselves that this isn't the most corrupt administration the US has seen in modern history is staggering.If a fraction of the level of skepticism these people applied to Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton were applied to Trump and his cronies, they'd be demanding impeachment.

dashundchen: Seriously. These monarchists in this thread contort themselves in every which way to make sure their dear leader is always in the clear.Shall we forget the shitcoin rugpull Trump has used to launder billions from foreign leaders?The transparent bribes he's taken to his political org that have resulted in pardons for smuggler, drug lords and murderers?The $200 million dollar contract Kristi Noem funneled to a company an operative of her for "marketing", formed days before the contract was awarded?The secretary of labor using funds to throw herself a lavish birthday party and travel around the country?Kash Patel flying himself and his girlfriend around on an FBI jet with an expensive security detail so they can party?The fact that insiders are openly insider trading in crypto, the stock market, and these betting markets (both the illegal Venezuela and Iran invasions had huge extremely suspicious bets right before actions were taken).This barely scratched the surface of this term alone. These fascists are so transparently corrupt.

outside2344: The dude is a moron: to think there was any thought behind this is to be insane.

hunterpayne: Countries don't have friends, they have interests. Welcome to geopolitics, first day huh...

hunterpayne: Agreed, this is the real take away most people will be left with. Not only did we all pay higher prices, instead of using that money to pay off the debt we give it away to business managers who were never out that money in the first place. Politically, that doesn't accomplish what some think it does. Midterms are coming up in 8 months...and the results of the house are going to be drastic no matter which side wins. Either Trump can do what he wants or the government will be deadlocked and nothing will happen for 2 years. Neither seem like good outcomes.

indigodaddy: Do consumers get a refund too re: inflated prices for the items they bought?

robotresearcher: Similarly, the importers voluntarily paid the tariffs. They could choose to go out of business, go to jail, be sued into bankruptcy, or pay. Totally at their discretion.

ianburrell: Hungary is a parliamentary republic, Orban is the Prime Minister. Turkey was parliamentary system until was changed in 2017 to presidential system with more power for Erdogan.I agree about parliamentary systems being better, but they are still vulnerable. It doesn't matter if the electorate is in favor of strongman.

buzzerbetrayed: Sure. The right answer is to jail the president. Lol. That sounds super constitutional.

loeg: 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.

b00ty4breakfast: If we're optimistic and those refunds actually go out it's going to be us, the taxpayers, paying for them...again.Like the saying goes, they get you coming and going.

unethical_ban: Of course not, you're right. I think the parent comment implies the responsibility of the Trump administration, the same way criticizing a botched police response implies blaming a mass shooter for a crime.A sensible administration would not have used emergency powers to implement worldwide tariffs because they don't like how the world economy is shaping.

loeg: Section 122 is only supposed to be applied to address balance of payments deficits, which are essentially zero with floating currency exchange rates (since the 70s). They're also limited to 15% and 150 days. (Judges will not look favorably on Trump trying to just restart the same tariff for another 150 days after the first expire.)

intrasight: The "Importer of Record" gets the refund. I read that a large fraction of those importer of record are Chinese companies.

adriand: According to Ryan Peterson, the CEO of Flexport, there was a large increase in the number of foreign companies registered as the "importer of record" in the US as a result of the tariffs. On the Odd Lots podcast, he stated this was due to fraud: companies set up subsidiary corps in the US, which then imported goods from their parent&#x2F;sibling&#x2F;related companies at much lower prices than market value. Because tariffs are a percentage of the value, this made them lower. Then the subsidiary could turn around and sell it in the US at market rates.

Saline9515: France has arguably the most presidential regime of the OECD, while it's not without faults it's not horrible either. Parliamentary regimes optimize for coalition stability which weakens them and forces to always take the path of least resistance, which isn't usually the best one.

booleanbetrayal: This is what sophisticated corporate welfare and wealth transfer looks like I guess.

Dylan16807: The percents were huge. The income was comparatively useless.

arunabha: It's clear that there was no reasoned thought behind the tariff push. Tariffs can work if implemented in a principled way and coupled with a complementary industrial policy to develop critical sectors of the economy.Instead, we had a completely chaotic implementation of tariffs which seemed to be completely at the whim of Trump with zero supportive industrial policy. So much so that the term 'Taco' https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Trump_Always_Chickens_Out was coined to describe Trump's approach.The charitable explanation is that Trump had no plan and was making it up as he went along. The less charitable explanation is that the chaos was an intentional feature to enable a quid pro quo of favourable policy in exchange for under the table payments via crypto or 'investments' in his family's various businesses.When you couple completely illegal application of a supposed 'emergency' to invoke tariffs with a chaotic, whim based implementation, is there any wonder that they failed?

everforward: The studies I’ve seen seem to indicate that tariffs can work but are like running with scissors.The artificially reduced competition will spur buying domestic products, but can also make domestic producers complacent. They don’t develop new features because they have an almost captive audience, until foreign producers advance enough that people will pay the tariff premium for better foreign products.Then it’s a catch-22. Domestic producers are behind on technology so killing the tariffs will bankrupt them, but raising the tariffs only leans into their complacency.

Saline9515: There are better ways than tariffs. For instance, you can increase VAT and use the proceeds to decrease taxes on work, or cut taxes for specific sectors. This way your economy is more competitive internationally, while avoiding the distorsions of tariffs.Tariffs can also be footguns as they increase costs on imports for upstream supplies, making downstream local producers less competitive. VAT is much better for this as it is refunded when you export.

rayiner: [delayed]

pwg: > I fail to see the logic of how "other countries" pay the US when the tariffs are paid by the importer and not the other country which is exporting.The "logic" is&#x2F;was that this was a lie directed at his "low information supporters" who tend to simply "believe" whatever he tells them without question. Those same supporters would have been very much against having a "tax increase" levied upon them, but so long as he lied to them and told them "the other country pays the tariffs" then they were fooled into not understanding the tariffs were just a tax increase and so were "in support" of the tariffs.That was the sole logic -- although there have been times when I've seen news blurbs that have made me wonder whether Trump himself actually believes his own lie about "other countries pay us" in regards to tariffs.

rayiner: That’s always been the U.S. view of foreign policy. MAGA is just honest about it.

rayiner: The point of tariffs is to discourage foreign goods from entering the U.S. market. Has anyone ever read a book?

Saline9515: Parliamentary systems have a very hard time strategizing in especially larger countries.

unyttigfjelltol: No, Trump manufactured negotiating leverage out of thin air— nothing, really. He extracted concessions on something like a bluff. Plus, didn’t he also extract a budget that in retrospect wasn’t appropriate had the tariff revenue been removed?

rayiner: [delayed]

its-kostya: Do I understand correctly, that these companies applying for refunds, likely passed the costs onto consumers who paid a higher price for goods. Now the companies will claw back their refunds from the gov AND keep the markup they charged consumers?

myko: I'm not really sure he's capable of reading

lotsofpulp: > Either Trump can do what he wants or the government will be deadlocked and nothing will happen for 2 years.That isn’t drastic, that is already how it is.

maxlin: -They only got 130B -They planned to fix all this with 100B?I see what you did there. 70B eh? They only got 50B. A paltry 20B?The real number though, was gotten in a relatively short time. And now replacement tariffs are on the way. And many companies have re-thought of manufacturing outside US with the higher tariffs always being the possibility in the future too.

cyberax: The US is special. It's a true federative nation, with a fairly weak federal government and strong individual states. So the president actually does not have a lot of power inside the country. He can't just fire the governor of Minnesota or unilaterally cut funds to a state that he doesn't like.But the foreign policy is where the president's authority is outsized. So that's why Trump is so focused on it, it's one of the few areas that he can directly control.

epolanski: Tariffs almost never make sense, unless it's an industry that's super important for your own survival.Capitalism is about efficiency, and eventually there are going countries where producing certain items will always be more efficient. East asian countries have spent decades innovating and investing in their manufacturing capabilities.Also, one thing that grinds my nerves are the narratives of trade balances that only focus on physical goods but conveniently ignore services.US exports trillions in software, ai, music, videogames, financial services, cloud, and that's conveniently ignored.Eventually tariffs come back biting those who issue them, because the moment your local industries don't need to compete anymore to survive, they have no incentives to innovate.

fc417fc802: It's not that it's conveniently ignored. It's that a services economy, while lucrative in the good times, leaves you lacking self sufficiency and resilience. We should never have let manufacturing leave to the extent that we did, all in the name of efficiency over all else.Of course it goes without saying that launching an absurdist comedy interpretation of a global trade war is not the way to fix the problem.

fc417fc802: > where a single person "rules" without needing to face opposition in a parliament nor even requiring support from its own partyBut that doesn't describe the US right now. The problem is that the GOP is providing at least enough support to enable the behavior that we currently see. If congress as a whole wanted to stop things they could.I actually quite like the US system but the combination of first past the post voting and party politics appear increasingly likely to strangle us.

abruzzi: I'd curious specifically about FedEx (and other parcel shippers like UPS if they filed suit as well.) They operated as a broker--they collected many of those fees from individuals who bought something overseas and when it was shipped in, FedEx paid the tariff then then billed the receiver. If FedEx wins a refund will I get paid back for the fee I paid them? I don't expect I'll see the "brokerage fee" because the labor was expended whether the tariff was legal or not and is not part of the refund they'd get, but I'd appreciate if I see the $79 I paid them to cover the tariffs for some Arca Swiss camera parts. I honestly haven't heard anything specific on that matter.

ncallaway: Most of them have promised to issue refunds to customers if and when they get refunded the money.FedEx:> Our intent is straightforward: if refunds are issued to FedEx, we will issue refunds to the shippers and consumers who originally bore those charges. When that will happen and the exact process for requesting and issuing refunds will depend in part on future guidance from the government and the court.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fedex.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;shipping&#x2F;international&#x2F;us-tariff...

SlightlyLeftPad: That $130B will pay for 4 months of the Iran war with a current run rate of <checks clipboard> $1B per day.We’re definitely not going to get even a reduction in healthcare costs any time soon.

hcknwscommenter: The budget wasn't appropriate regardless of tariffs. And OP's point is that 130B is a tiny number that no where near makes up for the loss in tax revenue from the very very stupid "OBBB".

danielmarkbruce: Nope, you are just out of your depth in this area. You don't understand what Cantor has done here, you don't understand what Howard can or cannot do in his role.Howard Lutnick's positions have been directly opposite of what Cantor has bet will happen. Howard has no power over the supreme court. There is no conflict. There is only the appearance of one.

hcknwscommenter: You may be right, but the honesty has destroyed an insane amount of good will and privilege that the US previously enjoyed (deservedly or not). To throw that all away for literally no benefit is . . . not good.

hcknwscommenter: If the OP had (incorrectly) rounded 130B to 200B, OP's point would have still been perfectly understandable and correct. Your odd quibble about rounding completely misses the point. Whooosh.

gmd63: 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.

thrance: [delayed]

collinmcnulty: I don’t have a source for this handy, but I believe that in terms of goods produced, manufacturing is actually still alive and well in the US. It’s just that this is done by a much smaller and more automated workforce.

kevin_thibedeau: Hedging in case Argentina might need another bailout.

bigmadshoe: The purpose of the tariffs was to strong-arm countries into unfair trade deals, not to collect revenue

sriram_malhar: Wouldn't it be simpler to implement a 'spend-forward scheme' rather than returning? For example, spend that money on research grants and health care. It is returning the money to the people. A man can dream, no?

padjo: Sounds like communism to me.

sriram_malhar: Socialism, you mean, not communism.This is a way of spending taxes on the public, the kind Denmark does. It isn't "no private property; everything belongs to the govt".Also, if we are redistributing taxes to fund endless wars and subsidizing almond&#x2F;avocado farmers, and propping up public money to ensure banks don't collapse, we are already in the socialist territory. Have always been. But God forbid we spend the money on healthcare ... that'd be like taking us back to Mao.

dragonwriter: The purpose of the tariffs was to appeal to the part of the domestic constituency that has belief in protectionist policies as a good in and of themselves rather than a means to an ends, not to achieve some direct material policy outcome outside of the scope of political enthusiasm.

2snakes: It is a different kind of intelligence: System 1 instead of System 2. I guess you could call it startup style.

Sparkle-san: That approach may need to be reexamined as it didn't appear to work.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;seekingalpha.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;4872657-us-goods-trade-defi...

undeveloper: yeah that's the trade off of having a state. the alternative is getting mugged and having to pay ExxonMobil Police Task Force sponsored by Verizon to get your shit back (or deciding it's not worth the cash).

svat: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vLfghLQE3F4

sowbug: Maybe triple. (1) paid higher prices, (2) the government will issue debt to refund the tariffs to importers who we already reimbursed through higher prices, and then (3) Congress will use the extra debt from the refunds as justification for higher individual taxes to pay for the 2025 tax cuts for businesses.

wombatpm: SCOTUS was told no injunction was warranted because IF the tariffs were found to be improper, the money could be returned-no harm.Now the government says they can’t refund because the amount of money is too big and they already spent it.

dragonwriter: > I thought those were on very solid ground commonly used by past administrationsNo, Section 122 tariffs have never been used prior to Trump turning to them after the Supreme Court decision striking down the IEEPA tariffs, and, the states suing the Administration argue, the explicit sole statutory purpose for which they were allowed in the 1974 law creating the power can only possible to exist under a fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, which the US has not had since 1976.

laweijfmvo: i personally paid, to UPS and DHL iirc, tariffs. so maybe i wasn’t actually directly billed the tariff as the importer, but i 100% paid it.

DANmode: Now,was it a tariff you paid,or a carrier fee related to the tariff?

dragonwriter: Delivery companies act as tariff agents and collect tariffs for Customs and Border Protection, so, yes, if you were the importer of record on a delivery, it is quite likely that you paid the tariff via the delivery company.These are likely to be refunded, because even if you were the purchaser of the product, you were the importer of record and paid the tariff, not a downstream buyer who paid an increased price because of the tariffs.

DANmode: I’m one of the importers of record.This should be interesting!

NewJazz: [delayed]

mullingitover: I keep hearing this logic, but is not like the companies asked for it.The politicians did this. They could pass a law tomorrow forcing the companies to refund windfalls from the illegally levied taxes.

zuminator: All this fuckery makes it hard to keep track of financial inflows and outflows, which in turn makes it easy to commit graft and corruption. Especially coupled with the forced retirement of those principled people formerly in bureaucratic positions, and the lack of consequences for lying and scheming on behalf of the kleptocracy.

userbinator: and from all of this they got only $130B ?I wonder if your thoughts would be any different if they managed to get enough to actually pay off the deficit?

bluegatty: 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.

donkeybeer: 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&#x2F;tos. Likewise if the president has done crimes, he should pay the time.

tgsovlerkhgsel: "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.

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

pstuart: 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.

cpt1138: 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.

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

joveian: [delayed]

nikanj: Judge orders the government. The government does not obey. Now what?

jurschreuder: “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.

empath75: I just love this idea that corporations just discovered greed during the pandemic and before that had been selflessly dedicated to selling goods for the benefit of mankind at the lowest price they possibly could. Companies always try to maximize prices, and they do that by trying to optimize the price they sell things at to sell as much as they possibly can at the highest price they can get away with. Sometimes you can get more profits by lowering prices and selling more stuff, sometimes by raising prices and selling less stuff. It's a trade off. Prices went up because of a series of demand and supply shocks enabled companies to raise prices. If they had not raised prices, there would have been shortages everywhere.

phil21: I think there actually was a lot of surprise from executives coming out of COVID that they could raise prices so high without it impacting consumer demand in the ways they had previously predicted.The Chipotle earnings calls were pretty much the prime example of this. CEO more or less expressing amazement at how elastic consumers were on pricing, and that due to the increases not impacting sales volume they planned to continue ramping until it did.I think plenty of companies were operating off the idea that price competition was far more important than it turned out to be. I note the baskets of those shopping next to me in the grocery store and this rings true. Due to a myriad of reasons - consumer behavior being a large one of those - buying behavior based on price just isn’t as much of a thing as it was 30 years ago. Almost no one is shopping multiple supermarkets, buying cheaper alternatives, buying in-season veggies and fruit when it’s cheap, waiting for sales to stock up, buying in bulk and freezing, using coupons, meal planning based on the latest supermarket Sunday circular, etc. only a tiny minority of people have been doing so.Couple that learned helplessness with the monopoly situation for many (most?) markets in the US and it’s no surprise to me that once the dam broke there is no going back. The price discovery moving forward is going to be much more aggressive. It will take a generation or three to get back to thrifty consumer behavior unless we see something actually painful to the average person on a scale of the Great Depression.

fzeindl: > Almost no one is shopping multiple supermarkets, buying cheaper alternatives, buying in-season veggies and fruit when it’s cheap, waiting for sales to stock up, buying in bulk and freezing, using coupons, meal planning based on the latest supermarket Sunday circular, etc. only a tiny minority of people have been doing so.I don‘t know where this observation comes from, but here in Austria a majority of people in lower income sectors than IT do all of this?

worik: YesThe system is capital.Unavoidable

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

tzs: (in progress...check back in a few minutes)

0x1ceb00da: That's going to lockheed martin.

aurareturn: Country breaks down further since rule of law does not matter anymore.Protests are next, mid term elections will be furious.

ChoGGi: So corporations get refunds, I'm sure they'll issue refunds to consumers any day now.

aurareturn: It's difficult because some companies ate all the tariffs, some passed the costs to consumers, and some split the costs between suppliers, themselves, and consumers.I think they should split it by giving a portion to companies and the rest to consumers.

stefan_: I don't know about that, somehow Macron is still around. Who knows what he will come up with to extend his time while having zero support.

padjo: I was joking

stefan_: There is an express lane, it's reserved for the government appealing cases, in which any and all injunctions are halted because the court has unilaterally decided to interpret "not being able to do illegal shit" as "great harm" while there is no harm in sending people to torture prisons abroad on the flimsiest of evidence.They sure took their time with this one.

ckw: Seems like China avoids it.

dabinat: The government raised taxes, consumers paid the costs, and companies will take the spoils. I don’t think this is what people voting MAGA intended, but will they realize that they got screwed?

misja111: Most likely they will put the blame on the 'disloyal' supreme court and not on Trump.

freetonik: That may have been the case for some time, but the current government in Finland is... well, perhaps I personally wouldn't describe them as fairly competent.

nothrabannosir: If the lesson by now isn’t “be careful wishing for powers you don’t want the other side to use against you” then I don’t know what will drive that home…

motbus3: For friends there, be strong. It seems it has not being an easy period. But also remember, no one wants a conflict. Good luck there!

WalterBright: Thanks for the correction.

light_hue_1: 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.

pomian: This sounds familiar. Months after not receiving an order, UPS sent a letter from a pseudo(?) collection agency for a charge added to the order. But there was no way to pay for it - as there was a statement that only the shipper could pay, but still, the order didn't arrive - it was very confusing, the shipment disappeared in paperwork - and no one could figure it out. Customer was out the original purchase fee, producer never could reviver shipment. Complete mess.

refurb: You want to put politicians I. Jail when the courts find their action violated laws?Thats pretty much every President in the last century.They all lose court cases.

pnt12: This is a tactic I'm seeing more in politics. When it's in the interests of a group for something to pass, but they don't want the blame, they can abstain or defer. It still goes through and if it goes wrong they can argue it's not their fault. Win&#x2F;win for them.

Frieren: > does not have native VAT supportIf citizens do not have access to high quality tools that allow them to exercise their rights that rights are "de facto" invalidated.If corporations are allowed to implement regulations in faulty ways the economic system stops working and fraud is easier than ever.Part of the problem is governments trying to look "pro businesses" have become just "anti regulation". Organized crime is rising in Europe as it is increasingly easy to move money around in uncontrolled ways thru big platforms. But asking big platforms to adhere to standards and If citizens do not have access to high quality tools that allow them to exercise their rights that rights are "de facto" invalidated.Part of the problem is governments trying to look "pro businesses" have become just "pro fraud". Organized crime is rising in Europe as it is increasingly easy to move money around in uncontrolled ways thru big platforms. But asking big platforms to adhere to standards and regulations is something that corruption does not allow for.

mejutoco: 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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;finance-and-economics&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;26&#x2F;a...

jongjong: 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!

deno: > 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 need to maintain special OSS registry. Some EU countries have XML invoices or invoice APIs, of course there’s actually no common EU standard so it depends where the company is registered. Finally you need to choose a VAT rate for that country.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.Selling anything to EU requires also registering in each country for the recycling regulations at least once, but up to twice or thrice if you sell electronics or anything with battery.

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

skinpop: it's about justifying tax cuts for the rich

tikotus: 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&#x2F;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.

mft_: If you really want to get to the root cause, on the Democratic side it’s the people who promoted&#x2F;supported&#x2F;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&#x2F;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.

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

AngryData: Ehh, they do a little better, but they are very much run by capital now. Most of their politicians are capitalist investors. And while individuals may get smacked down on occasion, as a whole they still follow the desires of capital holders above all else.

SideQuark: Tons of goods companies paid tariffs for were inputs for those industries.Instead of being mad at companies that were forced to pay illegal tariffs, who now want to recoup some of that, be mad at the cause of illegal tariffs. Letting the govt keep the money by fighting over who is a victim, hold the govt feet to the fire so they learn not to do this to begin with.

nkrisc: It’s the electoral college. It needs to be abolished.

tgsovlerkhgsel: 20% off the tariff-inflated price, so customers only pay the original price (until the tariff refund is used up, then it's back to the inflated price again).

wombatpm: The founders never imagined a coequal branch of government voluntarily giving up its power.

Nevermark: Actually, they were aware of the threat.Several framers of the constitution expressed deep concerns about the potential for coordinated "factions" taking over government from the outside.Unfortunately, despite going to great efforts to limit power centralization internally, concerns of external centralization were not heeded and there are no limits on the coordination of the US government via non-governmental organizations such as parties.> Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.> It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public administration. It agitates the Community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.> There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government and serve to keep alive the spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true, and in Governments of a Monarchical cast Patriotism may look with endulgence, if not with layout, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest41 instead of warming it should consume.-- George Washington [0]States used to operate independently enough that the same party in different states might have varied views. But today, both parties are themselves highly centralized. So very effective centralizers of government.And given it has become relatively easy to do so, the incentives are now there for parties to treat elections as war, and party control of government as the highest priority policy at all times. Incentives don't mean it happens, but they often do.[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loc.gov&#x2F;resource&#x2F;mgw2.024&#x2F;?sp=241&st=text

Spivak: I mean honestly that's about right. As soon as it falls out of living memory people forget why the fence was there and tear it down.Expect rhymes from the 1930's—an economic depression, tension leading to another world war. Fun stuff ahead.

righthand: There are more conflicts happening right now than in World War 2. Meaning, World War 3 is already here. I don't know why everyone is pretending it's not happening, the people doing it are calling themselves the Department of War.

tremon: There is no single root cause in a complex system of checks and balances. Many parts need to fail for things to get as bad as they are now. Trying to reduce everything to a single fault is either stupid populism or blatant propaganda.

abruzzi: Thanks for that reference. I can only hope. Unfortunately, I just paid a UPS bill for the new tariffs.

ByThyGrace: > Organized crime is rising in Europe as it is increasingly easy to move money around in uncontrolled ways thru big platforms.Even though it's a sensible claim, and since you're implying causal relationship, can you provide a source for this? I'm not European so I wouldn't know.

aarnii: I think it's practically impossible, and like you said, even worse prices are not going back down. Companies tested elasticity and most of them will increase revenue since the pricing is generalized, all competitors did it at once.

samus: They probably should have been. But the presidential system putting de-facto unchecked power into the president is just asking for such abuses to happen. Almost by design one might think.

refurb: It's not unchecked power. The very fact the courts overturned it proof the power is checked.

mhb: Yeah. You're confusing capitalism and how businesses generally work with this particular tariff. Which, based on these comments, was often&#x2F;always just passed through to customers.

wutwutwat: That's what I just said

mhb: I know you're being cute, but businesses generally don't pass all the costs of increased COGS on to customers.

amenhotep: This is a silly point. Courts aren't sitting around umming and ahhing about whether they should issue an arrest warrant to get x violent criminal off the streets, the system wastes minimal time in apprehending them and putting them in jail. At THAT point things slow to a crawl - because there's no longer the urgent incentive to act to prevent further harm.Whereas in these cases the government is potentially harming the entire public every single day that the courts don't act.

orbisvicis: What is it like purchasing consumer goods from the EU under the new 10% section 122 rates? Previously I could have expected 25% tariffs + UPS&#x2F;govt fees equivalent to another 40%. But hearing the horrors of shippers (UPS, FedEx, DHL) charging import fees equivalent to 1000% with no recourse to refuse the shipment and recoup costs, I never pulled the trigger. Has anything changed with the section 122 rates, especially considering the $800 de minimus exception won't be reinstated?

braincat31415: Depends which people. The question is why people voted for Trump en masse.

watwut: People who voted for Trump were pretty clear about what they issue were. They wanted to bully trans and they wanted to stick it to the libs. They were looking forward liberals suffering. Some of them would never vote for a woman or black person. They were appealed by masculinity Trump projects - aggressive insulting fraudster.There is no mystery about that.

watwut: The law applying to powerful high level people is a good thing. The state where law binds only weak people and can be safely broken by rich and powerful is the bad one.As of now, the law applies to me. I am on that "other side". It officially does not apply to Trump at all. And billionaires and administration can safely ignore it, although there is at least pretension of the law technically maybe applying to them.

bthallplz: > 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.I'd pretty much grown up believing that that's how the US worked post-slavery (aside from occasional deviances from the rule). Since the start of the pandemic, I've had quite the awakening.

nothrabannosir: Which actual law should send them to jail?The law is constantly applied to Trump and his administration. The judicial branch keeps reining him in: National guard, ice, tariffs—-literally TFA for Pete’s sake.Parent post isn’t about any specific law, it’s about wanting to see a result and working backwards from there: my political opponents should go to jail.Guess what will happen? The administration after that will send your politicians to jail. And the bananificiation of the US will be complete.If you genuinely want Trump to go to jail , get Congress to create actual laws that he’d be breaking, with actual clear unmistakable language about its consequences. Trammel up the votes in the midterms. SCOTUS will enforce it: they have done so, every time, when Congress is clear and decisive. They have indicated as much!The judicial branch is the only one left doing its job. The law applies. You don’t like how it looks, and you’re not alone, but it applies.

epolanski: > Parliamentary regimes optimize for coalition stability which weakens them and forces to always take the path of least resistance, which isn't usually the best one.This is good: we live in objectively good times and safe&#x2F;wealthy countries where problems are relatively minor and we should focus on debating and compromising, not having know-it-all unbounded captains.Our first focus is risk management: not having systems that make it easy for the Putin&#x2F;Erdogan and Trump-like individual to ruin everything.

loeg: Interesting! Seems generous.

MetroWind: Oh cool. US people paid for the tariffs. Now they are going to pay for the refund

kakacik: Well US population voted, hence the results. Maybe there are some subtle lessons to be learned?

braincat31415: That's exactly the kind of simplistic thinking that I was talking about. People had legitimate concerns about cost of living, food inflation (look at the charts of food prices 2020-2024), ballooning national debt, military adventures, crime, fraud, expensive housing and rent. I could go on. Trump's government is unlikely to offer any solutions to the above, but that's a different story. Voting because they wanted libs to suffer... sheesh. Most people are not that dumb and have objective reasons to vote a certain way. Any party that wants to stay in power longer will have to address these issues. Do you really think an average family is more concerned about trans issues than their inability to afford a house?

kakacik: Unfortunately you are pretty much out of touch with reality. What parent wrote is true for large swaths of voters (sticking it to libs - any regular US forum I ever opened was full of 'libtards' and other worse insults even on completely unrelated topics... or just go to bible south, even completely ignoring racism and bigotry topic).Sure, thats not all, then there are folks believing that a criminal, notorious liar, populist and suspected pedophile is going to do magic unheard of in reality. Very smart, what could go wrong...Solution of the issues you write would move US to highly regulated country maybe like France, which is unpassable in US and would cause massive issues down the line. Also, the issues you list are valid for basically whole world, has many reasons and US republicans are the very last group of people in a long line of people who would tackle specifically those effectively, they usually go into opposite direction.

tootie: Being impulsive doesn't mean you have a good system 1 intelligence. Quite the opposite. His system 1 sucks and is driven entirely by superficial biases and ego. His system 2 appears to be moribund as he rarely comes up solutions beyond the same facile reasoning his system 1 comes up with. He has neither intellect nor good instincts.

sgc: I love how the root cause is always the opposition, never the perpetrator.Focusing on the Democrats (who are hot garbage) is such a wonderful way to keep attention focused anywhere but on the almost half the country still supporting a murderous cabal filled with people covering for a bunch of (other??) people who raped children to get pleasure from the sexual torture (yes, it's pretty clear from the Epstein files that they did everything they could to destroy those young children's minds and hearts for sport, and that was the real 'game' they were playing).But by all means, carry on about bad tactics in the election, surely that is the 'root cause' here.

mft_: Woah.1) You seem to think I'm some sort of GOP-pedo-billionaire sympathiser; nothing could be further from the truth. I'll help you slam the prison door and throw away the key.2) No-one mentioned Epstein in this part of the discussion until you did - I thoughts we were discussing tariffs. I was responding to someone saying that, in the context of the tariff mess, they blame the people who voted for Trump, and "the people who supported such a horrible Democratic candidate that she couldn't even win against Trump". My point was simply on this specific issue, the root cause was the hubris and chain of events that led to Kamala being chosen, almost at the last minute, rather than that people "supported" her in that situation.(And if you need someone to explicitly state that, yes, they also blame the people who voted for Trump or you get triggered, then consider it confirmed.)

NewJazz: IMHO the highest court, which is tasked with delivering timely justice, ought to make their decisions in a reasonable amount of time, and not allow legally questionable executive actions to continue while the legal question is unanswered.You may consider that populist, but my opinion is that SCOTUS has derelicted their constitutional duty in these trying times.

NewJazz: 1. Nobody supported Kamala as the democratic nominee.2. The US senate is horribly malapportioned and gates scotus nominations.

simonh: Well, the Democrat apparatchiks that supported her.And the person, and his henchmen and enablers, that implemented these tariffs in the first place.Plenty of blame to go around, but to be fair there's a significant difference between ordering or enabling this debacle and ineffectively opposing it.

simonh: That's fair, and I understand these sentiments, but there is a pretty big difference between mistakes and deliberate illegal activity, or just not caring if something is illegal or not.

the_real_cher: DHL is massive scam company.I ordered a tent from overseas and they classified it as both a food product and an aluminum product and charged me 600 bucks in tariffs.I'm fighting to get it back but they keep ignoring me with polite "were really busy" replys.

mafuy: A product can be both, according to the current US administration. DHL is not necessarily at fault here.

witrak: >A product can be bothLOL... A tent is a single product. What about a car? Do you expect to pay separately for the aluminum in the motor and gearbox, as well as for the entire car?

rayiner: [delayed]

buffington: If you'd kept reading the sentence, you wouldn't be asking the questions you're asking.> A product can be both, according to the current US administrationThe person you're responding to isn't trying to convince you that a tent is two things, they're telling you that the US government wants you to believe a tent is two things.

peebee67: You must be young.

samus: [delayed]

watwut: 1.) Supreme court literally decided that Trump can not commit crime while in the office. Full stop.2.) Trump was convinced of felony. That does not apply to him, because he is a president.3.) This administration ignores the courts.> If you genuinely want Trump to go to jail , get Congress to create actual laws that he’d be breaking,They actually did made those laws. Supreme court decided to either rewrite those law or that they simply dont matter.> The judicial branch is the only one left doing its job. The law applies.Not the supreme court.

nothrabannosir: > 2.) Trump was convinced of felony. That does not apply to him, because he is a president.There are cases for which Trump should have been tried, but the NY one about mislabeling funds was not one of them. It was a massive reach, and I bet you <10% of the people clamoring about how he's now a "felon" know what he actually did wrong.Meanwhile he pressured georgia secretary of state to "find votes", in a recorded call; he should have been tried for this but it didn't get brought to the courts. This was a failing of the executive: you cannot expect courts to rule on a matter which is never brought to them.Half the country voted for this. At some point this is democracy in action. If you commit election fraud and somehow nobody charges you, i guess the same will apply to you. :(The NY case had poor facts but was well fought. The Georgia case had good facts but was poorly fought.

simmerup: Trump doesn't have a lot of powers he's using regardlessLike starting wars and creating tarrifs. He could have just broke the law again

refurb: It’s a ton of work to put together a case and bring it to court - we’re talking months of research and writing for complex cases.It’s not realistic to assume the courts can strike down something days after it happens if it takes months to put an argument together.But I’ve been rather impressed by how fast the Supreme Court makes decisions when cases are brought quickly (likely much less complex).

sgc: You made a choice to focus on one (less important) half of the equation, and that choice comes with consequences - including obfuscation of the actual perpetrators, who commit crimes against humanity. We have had years of this which enabled our current situation. I don't think it is the right choice to make.I was not going to pretend to understand your motives via text - not enough information. So I was responding to the concrete effects of your comment whether intended or not, and not to your personal opinions. I was pointing out the other (more important) half that you failed to acknowledge. It's so horrible that just stating it makes it seem like I am 'triggered', when I was just just stating facts.The conversation is not strictly about tariffs, that was just the starting point. Once it was expanded to Trump and Kamala and the election, the context was far larger and naturally everybody reading would reasonably understand this. You contributed to expanding the conversation, it is normal that discourse would follow from that.In brief, I think we need to be quite careful to explicitly mention specific evils at this time, particularly because a major tactic of those perpetrating them is making a lot of noise to drown out focus on their crimes.

mft_: I focused on the part of the comment that I was replying to that I disagreed with.Without wanting to be overly reductive, this is the point of discussion: to focus on the points of disagreement, for the purposes of understanding, alignment, or persuasion.I would have thought that this was obvious, and how people expected discussions to work. I would have said that needing to be thorough and explicitly state each point of agreement, alongside addressing the points of disagreement, was frustrating and unnecessary. But maybe I'm wrong on this, so thank you (genuinely) for giving me this to reflect on.(RE: "triggered" - maybe re-read what you wrote. Responding to an ostensibly benign comment about the background cause of Kamala being chosen as the candidate, with "such a wonderful way to keep attention focused anywhere but on the almost half the country still supporting a murderous cabal filled with people covering for a bunch of (other??) people who raped children to get pleasure from the sexual torture" certainty comes over as disproportionately and inappropriately emotional and angry in word and tone, to this observer.)

wutwutwat: Not being cute, being a realist who exists in this world, so take your condescending nickname and go read up on tariffs, will ya, babe.The Bottom Line: While the goal of a tariff is often to protect domestic industry, the immediate effect is almost always a "consumption tax" paid by the person at the end of the line: you.

tremon: I don't disagree, but derelicition of duty by SCOTUS during this regime does not explain why a 34-times convicted felon and insurrectionist was even allowed to run for office again. Nor does it explain why the entire Senate keeps rolling over for every wet fart coming from the office of the Pedophile Of The United States.You can find many other valid issues with the US system listed in this thread. Most of them are valid criticisms, and many of them identify a different cause. Pointing them out or even focusing on a single one is not populist -- but insisting that there is a singular root cause is.

bdangubic: > If you genuinely want Trump to go to jail , get Congress to create actual laws that he’d be breaking, with actual clear unmistakable language about its consequences. Trammel up the votes in the midterms. SCOTUS will enforce it: they have done so, every time, when Congress is clear and decisive. They have indicated as much! The judicial branch is the only one left doing its job. The law applies. You don’t like how it looks, and you’re not alone, but it applies.So much good will here but oh so misguided. First of all, the judicial branch is not doing its job and hasn't done so in quite some time. The SCOTUS in particular is just an extension of a political party now and not judicial branch in any way. You give me a case and 99% of Americans will tell you exactly how each judge on SCOTUS will rule, 99% of the time. This is not "judicial branch is the only one left doing its job" - they are currently (not a recent thing though but now it has become comical) just an extension of a political party, nothing more and are absolutely not doing any job at all other then rubber-stamping shit based on their political dogma.The "get Congress to create actual laws he'd be breaking" is even more comical. You think they can write laws that clearly state where the power of the Presidency stops in some sense and then legal ramifications of going over that power? C'mon mate...

nothrabannosir: I wish you made some concrete points rather than condescendingly rephrasing your opinion different ways a few times.SCOTUS has actively thwarted the current administration’s efforts :- tariffs- national guard deployment- foreign aid- deportation of man to SalvadorThese cases , as well as the cases they’ve ruled in favor of the administration , have been couched in reasoning based on the actual laws passed by congress so far. Read the majority opinions and the concurrences and it is clear that this is not some arbitrary “hey he got us here so let’s do what he wants” (In particular Gorsuch), but they’re actually basing their rulings on the written text.Meanwhile there is a body whose literal job it is to arrange those texts. And you can elect them come fall. I don’t know how to answer your last , ostensibly rhetorical?, question , other than: yes how do you think any of the current laws got here? That’s what congress does.Go vote in the midterms for the love of god.

watwut: Occasional rare result like that does not prove or show or even imply supreme court is not ideologically driven or heavily biased.And suprene court justices themselves literally say so in their dissents.

watwut: > Half the country voted for this.Actually, not half the country.> At some point this is democracy in action.Actually, no, winning election in democracy does not mean you get to be a tyrant to whome laws dont apply.Also, seems like my point about law not applying to Trump stands entirely. None of your arguments actualy disagree with that claim.

donkeybeer: Ask Brazilians, they will write a nice book for you on tariffs.

samus: [delayed]

tim-tday: People are really good at using computers when it comes to taking your money. Really bad at using computers when it comes to giving you money. You can’t explain that.

dweinus: Spoiler alert: they spent it all.According to the federal report yesterday:> CBO estimates spending totaled $621 billion, or $18 billion more than February 2025. Revenue totaled $314 billion, which is up $17 billion from the same time last year due to an increase in collections of customs duties from tariff policies and increased income and payroll tax receipts.

mhb: So you're backtracking and now are saying that that's how tariffs work; not how capitalism works? Got it.

wutwutwat: Pretty sure we are talking about the effect of tariffs in our capitalist economy. Glad you got it.