If you, as a consumer, directly paid one of the illegal tariffs, you can get a refund via the shipper who acted as an agent for you.
For example, here's the form if you shipped something over the border using UPS and paid an illegal tariff to get it released from customs.
I ordered a pair of boots from Mexico, they were shipped with all of the correct paperwork and should not have been tariffed at all. It added ~$60 to the original cost of $170.
When you submit a tariff refund request they warn you multiple times that if your submission is rejected you will be charged $100 per submission. It can be rejected for making a mistake on the paperwork even if they find the tariff was applied incorrectly. I almost didn't submit for it, and a lot of people won't but I decided to risk it. That was a few months ago and I still haven't heard back.
We pay. Then we pay again.
It's as simple as that and just as fucked up. Our so-called government does not work for us.
Fines like this should go to the consumer, but that's impossible, so they should go into the America First Fund (irony intended), which be the seed money to provide the initial funding for all the social programs we need to start - healthcare, college/trade, student loan forgiveness, pre-k, UBI, etc.
As we investigate and prosecute MAGA crimes, any fines and confiscations, which should be harsh (including the confiscation of entire estates of treasonous families like the Trumps or the Ellisons), should be put into the America First Fund. The level of the fund should be mentioned in the evening news every night. Rich people can take note of the Dow, and workers can take note of the America First Fund.
I'm not sure what other system is even conceivably possible in the general case. There's no straightforward universal relationship between tariffs paid by businesses and prices paid by the customers of those businesses.
Let's be honest. The highest estimates I find are around $160 billion in illegal tariffs. If we split that evenly it would work out to around $640 for every person over 18 in the country.
What good would giving 250 million people each $640 do? For 99% of them it would be gone as soon as they got it. They'd waste it on things like rent, bills, food, gas money. Temporary things. Within a month almost no one would have anything to show for it.
But giving a relative handful of large companies hundreds of millions to several billion dollars each? For them it's pure profit. Their bills are already paid. They've already used the profits from that year for stock buybacks to get their wealthy shareholders more money and divided the rest giving their executives huge bonuses. And now suddenly they all have huge amounts more profit almost out of thin air.
It's money to invest in AI to replace human labor so the coming years can be even better, to do even more stock buybacks so that the people who own the most stock in each company see huge increases in their net worth, or do give CEOS a second round of yearly bonus. Months and years from now there will still be amazing homes, yachts, private islands, and new faces that we'll all be able to point to as the lasting good that came from this.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaany moment now....
... it's going to start to trickle down.
Those halftone rosettes bring me back to my printing days.
This is why I can't be angry at regular criminals, they're just mimicking the world they see at the top.
They should go to Free Parking, and if someone happens to land directly on the square, they get the refunds. Life is just a massive game of Monopoly, ain't it?
So we were all robbed. Again.
I kicked a trumper out of my D&D group after I finally got of tolerating his shit. He thought Trump would be better for our economy. No regrets.
The civilised world has always sneered at 'Murica
But now we look upon the disaster with great pity for those who have been unfortunately born there who deserve better
This was so obvious that anyone paying attention could see this coming a mile away. I'm probably the unpopular opinion, but I think the government should have just not issued any refunds. I would rather the government get funds to potentially use for social welfare than to give it back to businesses. The only problem is that would create an incentive for the government to try it again for another quick payday. Some mechanism would have to be put into place to stop this. Take away the power from the president to issue tarrifs on his own. Which we should probably do anyway.
Don't buy anything not entirely necessary until this shit is done. As usual consumers hold the bag.
Just wondering how many more times in my life I'm going to watch dipshit Republicans make dipshit moves that require dipshit bailouts that aren't for the people paying for the dipshit bailouts.
That's wealth redistribution.
They are available to anyone who imported and paid a tariff. If you did that, you can get a refund. Being ‘a business’ or ‘a consumer’ is completely irrelevant.
They really are speedrunning how fast were gonna Bastille their asses
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