President Donald Trump

It's a pretty inevitable consequence of extreme polarisation/division within a democracy. UK is heading down the same path at the moment. I don't think farage will become PM in the UK but he might. That should be inconceivable and worse will follow if we carry on down the same path.

Why in the world would you ever want such a thing? It would be contrary to law and create a moral hazard in the extreme.

I understand the desire to make end consumers whole, but giving the administration a pass because it acted unlawfully and created a huge mess in the process seems like the worst possible outcome.

Maybe they shouldn’t have issued unlawful tariffs in the first place.

I've generally avoided casual tariff conversations because it's absorbed so much of my time and energy over this last year, plus i really need to keep some things to myself. I will say that Americans better make their peace with some seriously declining quality in their goods. People have hyper-focused on tariffs being passed on in terms of price hikes, but way less attention is being given to dire cost-cutting measures in cases where price hikes aren't plausible. In no small part because some of these alternative suppliers are shipping absolute trash-quality components, but also just the general need to find places to cut costs. I'm at least glad not to be dealing with automobiles.

I've generally avoided casual tariff conversations because it's absorbed so much of my time and energy over this last year, plus i really need to keep some things to myself. I will say that Americans better make their peace with some seriously declining quality in their goods. People have hyper-focused on tariffs being passed on in terms of price hikes, but way less attention is being given to dire cost-cutting measures in cases where price hikes aren't plausible. In no small part because some of these alternative suppliers are shipping absolute trash-quality components, but also just the general need to find places to cut costs. I'm at least glad not to be dealing with automobiles.

This is the element I’m most curious about

Logically the tariff refunds go directly to the corporations who paid them but there is not one part of me that believes that once that is completed that that money will go back to the customers who got prices raised on them, so yay! Corporations got free money!

If there’s one thing Donald has been consistently good at (and it’s really only one thing) it’s ****ing Americans out of money and delivering it to the rich and the corporations

Yep, yet another massive wealth transfer to the 1%. The prices aren’t ever coming down, either. A “brilliant” move from a certain point of view.

The “lower taxes” crowd gobbled up the tariff grift in one gulp. Tired of winning yet?

magatards said tariffs weren't inflationary, were they telling fibs?

I don't think a judicial mechanism exists for making consumers whole in this sort of situation.

On an unrelated note, I think it is important to remember that not all corporations are giant companies. A very significant percentage of these tariffs were paid by "corporations" that effectively are small businesses. And a lot of those small business were harmed by the tariffs, regardless of how much they were or were not able to pass tariff costs along to customers. There is a reason why groups that advocate for small businesses hated these tariffs.

Yeah I don't have have expertise in this, but if I had to guess the only way that happens is if whoever arguing for the government says "okay we'll settle and Costco gets this much in tariff rebates but they need to distribute it to customers in this manner". I imagine the Trump administration is going to fight/delay as long as possible and the above scenario only plays out in someone else's administration.

The other option is in the Trump administration they set up a hundred billion dollar tariff rebate fund, perhaps after the election, and start giving out 10+ million dollar rebates to certain companies.
In completely unrelated news these certain companies would have invested/given a million or 2 to Trump controlled entities the week prior to getting their rebates.

Again, I don't think there is a judicial mechanism for making the bolded happen. If a tariff payor pursues its rights and prevails, then the government will be ordered to refund the tariff to that entity. The government won't have the option of making its compliance with a court order contingent on the tariff payor returning money to consumers.

It of course would be possible for the government to reach a consensual resolution in which the government agreed to pay the refund, and in exchange, the tariff payor agreed to pass some of the refund along to customers.

Returning money to the actual customers who bore the increased costs of tariffs would be an incredibly heavy lift in a great many cases. Imagine that I am a wine importer. I pay tariffs. I am able to pass X percentage of the tariffs costs along to the wine retailers who are my customers. The wine retailers are able to pass along Y percentage of the tariff costs that have been passed along to them to their customers. Identifying and returning money to the customers of the wine retailers is likely to be very difficult or impossible.

Wine, you say? How long has this been going on? I might be owed a house or two.

It's not the government's option and it's not a court order. The company has the option of either agreeing to terms of that nature as a settlement to get money back or keep fighting through delays and motions. If a democrat wins in 2028 something like that is a win for both sides, at least for a high profile company like Costco. All the court has to do is agree it's a valid settlement.

Or they can just give the tariff refunds to food banks and homeless shelters.
Like that will ever happen

Did you actually read what I wrote? I specifically said that the government and the party seeking a tariff refund can agree to whatever they want. (And if they did, a court wouldn't need to "approve" anything.)

If the party seeking a refund had to enforce its legal rights in court through to conclusion, then the government would have to either comply the court's ruling or defy a court order. It wouldn't have the option of makings its compliance dependent on the party seeking a refund doing X, Y, or Z.

Thread needs more Trump being a freak and very weird dude.

I stopped reading after the section I quoted because you didn't seem to be following. And courts have to approve settlements between government entities and publicly traded or even private companies all the time. Rejecting them was a fairly regular occurrence in the wake of the financial crisis when the SEC was seen as too willing to accept slap on the wrist fines with no admission of guilt.

Which is again irrelevant to the scenario I was talking about which is before a court has issued a ruling on any tariff rebates. Nobody doubts that the government has to pay them if the case has been decided and the court says the government has to pay them.

Completely different fact patterns.

For starters, courts are not going to block the corporations, who are the plaintiffs and injured parties in this case, from recovery. This is in contrast to the corporations being the wrongdoers getting away with a slap on the wrist.

The wrongdoer here is the federal government and it is the defendant if consumers want tariffs recovery. It’s not that complicated to understand why it’s fantasy to think consumers will be made whole by suits by corporations.

Guys! My boss, who is also my friend and who I got hired from a referral, is the third cousin once removed of Trump's accountant's regular golf partner's caddy. He said that Trump will only give compensation to corporations.

Are you sure you are remembering the government settling a civil litigation? Because if it’s a plea agreement on criminal charges, the court has to accept those and can choose to reject if they find the punishment too lenient. Since we’re talking about the SEC we might be talking about criminal and not civil proceedings.

If there is some kind of out of court arbitration/mediation that both parties agree to, not sure why a court would have to agree to it as well. The party that brought the civil suit can simply withdraw it at any time.

It appears the reason why those settlements were being rejected is due to the issue of how the law was written. It’s an allegation of a violation of the law, so the settlement is adjacent to criminal proceedings. And there may be statutory requirements that the judge needs to sign off on it. Doesn’t seem to be the same sort of thing that we are talking about here.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/n-y-judge-rejects-sec-s-285m-deal-with-citigroup-as-unfair-unreasonable

PBS News

N.Y. Judge Rejects SEC's $285M Deal With CitiGroup as 'Unfair, Unreasonable'

I may have some details wrong, but it was definitely not criminal, since I'm friends with the owner of the fund the SEC was going after. He reached a deal with regulators, a judge rejected it and they reached another deal and it got accepted.

But the point of the aside of saying "All the court has to do is agree it's a valid settlement" was just to point out the court isn't really doing anything but agreeing the case has been resolved after both parties say it's been resolved.

This is just a trivially true statement, if the case were criminal (plea agreement technically) or at least tied to a criminal one, and it is irrelevant to the question of whether the courts will make consumers whole when none of the parties in the litigation asked for it.

The plaintiffs could always withdraw and agree to a settlement out of court. This isn’t a criminal enforcement case where the “people” (aka public interest) is a plaintiff.

I am sorry, but you’re just wrong. There is a tiny sliver of precedents where courts stepped in (by denying the motion) to protect the plaintiffs due to unequal bargaining power but that doesn’t apply here.

That question is not even being discussed.