Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c0l9r67drg7t

by blackguardx • 5 months ago

1527 1214 5 months ago

Can't say one way or another whether the power of the president was abused in this case but its a sad state for businesses who can't get started because of flip flopping policy. I'm for the tarrifs, its absolutely ridiculous to think only Wall Street matters.

interestpiqued6• 5 months ago

The tariffs have been flip flopping all year due to the admin. That’s why it’s not smart for it to be up to executive discretion

mastax4• 5 months ago

The tariffs have been absolute hell on small businesses and manufacturing businesses of any size.

fullshark• 5 months ago

Just because businesses / wall street doesn't like something doesn't mean it's necessarily good for every day Americans. The tariff vision of on-shoring manufacturing and reliving the glory days of the post WW2 era was rooted in fantasy. The US simply cannot compete given its labor costs and actual manufacturing know-how.

Perhaps this is an overdue wakeup call, and a freak out is in order regarding this reality but unconstitutional tariffs alone were never going to solve this problem.

expedition32• 5 months ago

I was watching the Olympics. They have these really cool drones that follow the skiers down the slope at 80 kph. Chinese drones...

If only you knew how bad things really are.

mastax4• 5 months ago

If the US really wanted to make a durable shift to manufacturing, presidential tariffs by fiat aren’t a good strategy anyway. Tariffs could be a small part of that strategy but they should be targeted, not broad, and enacted by congress so businesses have the kind of decades-long stability required to invest in factories that take years to pay off.

illithid02• 5 months ago

The power to impose tariffs is given to Congress in the Constitution. Exceptions are allowed but in rare and specific situations. The fact that SCOTUS struck it down means the tariffs as imposed were unconstitutional.

You can be for tariffs all you want, I'm not here to argue their efficacy. But you absolutely cannot with any intellectual honesty still be on the fence about whether he abused his power given this ruling.

It is not "flip flopping policy" to break the bounds of your Constitutional power and be shut down by one of the branches meant to check you.

franktankbank2• 5 months ago

It is flip flopping policy as far as it was here one day and struck down the next. That's what matters to people attempting to start something here. I should have stated I was not interested in arguing the actual rule process, you have 6-3 vote from the Supreme Court in your favor.

jopsen4• 5 months ago

I don't think the administration cares about the appearance of impropriety.

blackguardx• 5 months ago

It is almost like the flip-flopping policy was never meant to boost US manufacturing, but to secure kickbacks and deals from big companies and countries to get favored treatment.

pavlov5• 5 months ago

If you don’t think the president did anything wrong, then whose fault is it that those businesses are suffering from flip-flopping policy?

elAhmo3• 5 months ago

Could you elaborate on this:

I'm for the tarrifs

What makes you think they are good?

energy123• 5 months ago

This is the first semblance of policy certainty. The ruling is a good thing for everyone, Republicans and Trump included, even if they're not intelligent enough to understand why.

alephnerd10• 5 months ago

sschueller2• 5 months ago

The global damage has been done. It took too long and it looks like it will only be partially reversed.

Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.

seydor• 5 months ago

I disagree. Despite all the talk and grand announcements of independence, most of the world wants globalization and worked for more of it, but maybe without the US (openings to china/india/LatAm). Now it will most likely be WITH the US. While the US may feel that globalization has been bad for itself (it hasn't - just look at the spectacular US economy) , the rest of the developed world is not in a position to reverse it (due to demographics mostly) and will be happy to jump back in.

jezzamon• 5 months ago

Presumably congress could recreate the same tariffs, if they wanted.

contagiousflow• 5 months ago

I'm guessing you're American?

harimau7772• 5 months ago

I think that a lot of people would disagree that the economy is spectacular. People can't even afford to buy a home in a decent part of the country.

zanderwohl• 5 months ago

The economy is not spectacular by any means. It's about average on paper, and without AI growth (which will surely slow down like the .com crash) and increased healthcare spending, it's been mildly slumping.

jen729w2• 5 months ago

Constitutional changes

Y'all have proven how worthless that piece of paper is.

pavlov5• 5 months ago

There are many countries that have functioning constitutions that are regularly revised.

It’s not impossible for the USA to get there one day.

maxwell3• 5 months ago

What piece of paper is worth more to you?

zeroonetwothree10• 5 months ago

Doesn’t this decision exactly prove the opposite?

mongol• 5 months ago

Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.

For sure. Question is what would be enough to regain trust? I don't really see it happening

ycsux3• 5 months ago

For sure, massive damage has been done to Brand USA. Remember the 'Allegory of Good and Bad Government" in the Siena public palazzo since the 14th Century? Everyone knows USA is just a bunch of grifters

munk-a7• 5 months ago

Genuinely, I think the US is pretty doomed if the Trump family and administration cronies aren't stripped of their wealth, tarred and feathered. If it is known that being president is a great way to make a bunch of money through corruption and there are no consequences then we'll be in the same situation as the Roman Republic in the waning days before Caesar. Caesar himself was funded by Crassus to make sure Crassus wealth making tactics stayed legal and grant him a big payout in the form of a rich governorship. Towards the end of the republic that sort of quid pro quo was standard operating procedure and if it happens and goes unpunished - if those benefiting see any positive RoI - then it'll just happen more and more.

fuzzfactor20• 5 months ago

It's going to take a Constitutional Convention just for the states in North America to be able to regain their trust in Washington any time soon.

States' Rights have been slaughtered by these false patriots.

rjrjrjrj2• 5 months ago

Dunno. More than half the country was either enthusiastically in favor of electing a convicted criminal pathological liar or too apathetic to do anything about it. How do you fix that?

tfehring4• 5 months ago

I don’t see how constitutional changes would help. The constitution already creates separation of powers, limits on executive authority, and procedures for removing an unfit president or one who commits serious crimes. But these only matter to the extent that majorities of elected and appointed officials care, and today’s ruling notwithstanding, there’s no political will to enforce any of them. The plurality of American voters in 2024 asked for this, and unfortunately we are all now getting what they asked for and deserve.

munk-a7• 5 months ago

The majority of American voters can be as dumb as they want - the two big failures here are the legislature and the judiciary. The judiciary let an obviously illegal thing sit for far too long while the legislature is too partisan to actually take actions against the administration (except in the case of the Epstein files which has been surprisingly admirable and a rare ray of light in the last year).

If the majority of American voters elect snoopy the dog snoopy can do all of the things snoopy wants to do within the bounds of the law. Snoopy can use his bully pulpit to fight against dog restrictions in restaurants and grant pardons to previous offenders. Snoopy can ensure efficient spending of money on public water fountains accessible to canines... but if snoopy starts issuing open hand-outs to the red baron (snoopy in a moustache) that's when the other branches of government are supposed to step in - we aren't supposed to need to wait four years for the next election to stop open corruption (especially since corruption is really good at funding more corruption so there's a vicious cycle that can begin if you let it fester @see the recent FBI raid on GA election offices).

tayo422• 5 months ago

Fix some of the ambiguities that allowed power to be concentrated in the executive branch. Automatically start elected officials so things like avoiding swearing in don't happen. Limit the power of these executive orders. Introduce recall votes. Switch to public funding for all elections.

Theres plenty we can do. That's off the top if my head. I'm sure if smart people sat down to think about it there are lots of practical and clever ideas.

The majority didn't ask for this. 49% of voters did.

lapcat• 5 months ago

The majority of American voters in 2024 asked for this

It was 49.8%, which is not quite a majority.

It's also worth noting that Kamala Harris received precisely 0 votes in the 2024 Democratic primaries.

[EDIT:] I see that the parent comment has now changed "majority" to "plurality."

If I could make one Constitutional amendment, it would be this: publicly finance all election campaigns, and make private contributions illegal bribery, punished by imprisonment of both the candidate and briber.

ceejayoz43• 5 months ago

I don’t see how constitutional changes would help.

At the very least, we need a clarification on presidential immunity.

unethical_ban4• 5 months ago

Statutorily reduce the power of a rogue president by reinforcing the right of the administrative state to exist with some independence for the rank and file. Reduce conviction threshold in the Senate to 60. Eliminate the electoral college to guarantee the winner of a popular vote is the winner.

Importantly, prosecute every member of the Trump administration for their blatant respective crimes.

I agree with you that the Republican party has failed the country by allowing this to happen. But I think we can still do better.

More "big picture" ideas would be to fundamentally alter the House and Senate, and implement score/ranked voting to allow a multiparty system.

blackcatsec2• 5 months ago

I think you're misunderstanding at least a little bit here. The Constitution created separation of powers, but what it did not do is explicitly block a particular branch from either abdicating their duty or simply delegating their power back to the executive.

It's certainly an interesting situation that wasn't explicitly spelled out in the law. But as far as everything that's working, it's realistically all within the legal framework of the Constitution. There are procedures to remove an unfit President, sure; but there's no requirement baked into the Constitution that requires those parties to act upon those procedures.

In short, it's a whole lot of short-sightedness of the Constitution combined with willing participants across multiple branches of the government.

The problems unearthed and the damage being done will take decades to fix just our internal issues, and it's very likely we will never resolve our international problems.

I don't know what the future holds for the United States, but we are certainly going to be operating from a severe handicap for quite a while.

simonh3• 5 months ago

The problems are a product of the constitutional system. I think the main problem is the elected king presidential system nonsense. Parliamentary democracy is the way to go.

lhopki0111• 5 months ago

I'm not sure why Americans are so certain that their system of separation of powers is the right one. Most countries don't separate the executive and legislative like that. The executive is whoever can command the support of the legislative. If you think about the US system it makes no sense. An executive can just ignore the rules created by the legislative by just not enforcing it and the only means to stop that is a 2/3 majority in a body that by it's nature is not representative of the population but rather of States.

As far as I can tell the US system is designed for gridlock. Things like filibuster, lower house elections every two years, state elected upper body, electorate system are all designed to create girdlock.

While Americans as a whole are to blame for some of this they are working in a completely broken system. In tech we try not to blame a person when something goes wrong so we look at what process allowed this to happen. I think many of the US problems are explained by their underlying system which is basically a copy of the English one at the time of Independence with a monarch and a parliament. Unlike the English system though it barely evolved since then.

cael4504• 5 months ago

The American constitution is riddled with problems that many later democracies managed to fix. In general, the founding fathers envisioned a system where amendments were far more common and they didn't realize they made the bar too high. And that doesn't even touch on the electoral college, first-past-the-post voting, vague descriptions of the role of the supreme court, and no method for no confidence votes. Of course, it would be next to impossible to fix these in America because it would require a significant rewrite of the constitution.

The only way this will change is if the rest of the world leaves America behind and the quality of life here becomes so bad that radical change becomes possible.

But you are right that Trump won the popular vote in 2024, so you can't blame that on the system. But a functioning democracy would have more constraints on him. Our legislative branch has been dead in the water for 20 years at this point.

mindslight2• 5 months ago

Necessary changes, off the top of my head:

1. Ranked Pairs voting for national elections, including eliminating the electoral college. Break this two-party duopoly of bad-cop worse-cop.

2. Enshrining the concept of independent executive agencies, with scope created by Congress, with agency heads chosen by the same national elections. (repudiation of "Unitary Executive Theory", and a general partitioning of the executive power which is now being autocratically abused)

3. Repudiation of Citizens United and this whole nonsense that natural rights apply to government-created artificial legal entities (also goes to having a US equivalent of the GDPR to reign in the digital surveillance industry's parallel government)

4. State national guards are under sole exclusive authority of state governors while operating on American soil (repudiation of the so-called "Insurrection Act"). This could be done by Congress but at this point it needs to be in large print to avoid being sidestepped by illegal orders.

5. Drastically increase the number of senators. Maybe 6 or 8 from each state? We need to eliminate this dynamic where many states hate their specific moribund senators, yet keep voting them in to avoid losing the "experienced" person.

6. Recall elections by the People, for all executive offices, members of Congress, and Supreme Court justices. (I don't know the best way to square courts carrying out the "rule of law" rather than succumbing to "rule of the fickle mob", but right now we've got the worst of both worlds)

Nition• 5 months ago

I'd like to see a change in voting system to make voting for smaller political parties more viable. My country did this in 1993[1] so I've seen to some extent that it works. A lot of other issues in the US seem downstream from that top-level issue.

But sometimes I think about the fact that you guys don't even have the metric system yet...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_New_Zealand_electoral_ref...

epolanski5• 5 months ago

Have a proper mature parliamentary democracy made of multiple parties, not just two, and a prime minister that is always one vote away from resigning.

Slower democracy, sure, but fits advanced economies that need consistent small refactors and never full rewrites every 4 years.

SilverElfin3• 5 months ago

This is probably true. Even before this ruling Trump and Bessent and Lutnick have spoken about how they would react to such a ruling. And it looks like they’re going to do the same thing Democrats do when they don’t like a SCOTUS ruling, and try to implement the same tariffs in a slightly different way to effectively ignore the ruling. We have to fix this. The Supreme Court’s rulings and the US Constitution have to matter. There must be consequences for ignoring them - like the president or lawmakers going to jail.

Even if part of the tariffs are rolled back, we may see other ones remain. And I bet they will not make it easy for people to get their money back, and force them into courts. Not that it matters. If people get their money back, it will effectively increase the national debt which hurts citizens anyways.

And let’s not forget the long-term damage of hurting all of the relationships America had with other countries. If Trump wanted to use tariffs as a tool for emergency purposes, he should have just taken action against China and made a case around that (pointing to Taiwan, IP theft, cyber attacks, etc). Instead he implemented blanket tariffs on the whole world, including close allies like Canada.

In the end, my guess is China and India gained from this saga. And the Trump administration’s family and friends gained by trading ahead of every tariff announcement. Americans lost.

andsoitis2• 5 months ago

If Trump wanted to use tariffs as a tool for emergency purposes, he should have just taken action against China.

What is the emergency with China?

saghm• 5 months ago

And it looks like they’re going to do the same thing Democrats do when they don’t like a SCOTUS ruling, and try to implement the same tariffs in a slightly different way to effectively ignore the ruling

This is kind of a bizarre whataboutism to throw in there. The current administration (with the full support of Congressional majorities in both houses that have largely abdicated any pretense of having their own policy goals) has been flouting constitutional norms pretty much nonstop for a year now and literally ignoring court orders in a way that probably no administration has ever done before, and yet the playbook they're following for extrajudicial activity apparently is from the Democrats? Just because there's bad behavior on both sides doesn't mean that the magnitude of it is equal, and in terms of respect for the rule of law the behavior of the current administration really has no comparison.

parineum6• 5 months ago

Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.

I don't know about trust but the constitution isn't what enabled this type of behavior, it's the legislature. They've been abdicating their duties to executive controlled bodies (FCC, FDA, FTC, EPA, etc.) and allowing the president to rule through executive action unchallenged. They could have stopped these tariffs on day one. SCOTUS isn't supposed to be reactionary, congress is.

The constitution has all the mechanisms in place to control the president, they just aren't being used by the legislature.

It's a tricky problem that has a number of proposed solutions. I'm not going to act like it's a silver bullet but I think open primaries in federal elections would go a _long_ way towards normalizing (in the scientific meaning) the legislature and allowing people who want to do the job, rather than grandstand, into the offices.

Ajedi325• 5 months ago

I think the root of the problem is our two party system and the polarization of our culture. Congress and the president often act as a single partisan unit, not a collection of independent thinkers with their own ideas about how the country should be run. That makes it very hard for congress to serve as an effective check on presidential powers.

jajuuka3• 5 months ago

That's really the achilles heel of a checks and balances system. Should an ideology gain control of all of them then the system doesn't work and it immediately sinks into authoritarianism. The Supreme Court acting on this just unfortunately gives the illusion of things working when it's a game of blitzkrieg. Make an obvious illegal action and get as much done as possible then when you are eventually checked, move on to the next thing. Just keep pushing in different directions until you cover the board.

buzzerbetrayed• 5 months ago

I love how it’s “global damage” when the US tariffs counties that are already tariffing them. But no, unfortunately the rest of the world knows the US’s value.

sschueller2• 5 months ago

Like Switzerland that basically has zero tariffs on export to the US but was initially slapped with 39% because trump can't stand women in power? What about Brasil where trump stated the 50% tariff is punishment for putting Bolsonaro in prison?

flipgimble• 5 months ago

the "global damage" is largely because these tariffs were arbitrary, lacking strategic planning, and highly inflationary creating a turbulence tax. The frequent reversals and selective granting of exemptions showed that its another tool to enrich the Trump family, cabinet and their business associates. In other worlds the rest of the world stopped trusting the US and started making trade deals on their own.

root_axis• 5 months ago

Good luck ratifying any constitutional amendments that are in any way a response to MAGA.

151552• 5 months ago

Good luck convening a Constitutional Convention in the current (or future) political climate.

raincole2• 5 months ago

It feels like the US-Iran war is inevitable now.

alephnerd10• 5 months ago

A US-Iran conflict has been inevitable for decades.

A nuclear Iran would lead to a nuclear KSA, Turkiye, UAE, Egypt, Qatar, etc and would make the Middle East more unstable.

We don't need to put boots on the ground though. The reason why we had boots in Afghanistan and Iraq which led to it's unpopularity was due to our moral commitment to nation-building in the 1990s-2000s (especially after Yugoslavia). Americans no longer feel that moral compulsion.

If Iran shatters like Libya, the problem is solved and KSA, UAE, Qatar, Turkiye, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Russia, China, and India can fight over the carcass just like how ASEAN, China, Russia, and India are doing in now collapsed Myanmar (which had similar ambitions in the 2000s); how the Gulf, Med states, and Russia are meddling in Libya; and how the Gulf, Turkiye, Russia, China, and India are meddling in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia).

This is why North Korea prioritized nuclear weapons - in order to gain strategic autonomy from the US and China [0], especially because China has constantly offered to forcibly denuclearize North Korea as a token to SK and Japan for a China-SK-Japan FTA [1]

Edit: can't reply

How many more years will it remain inevitable, do you think?

As long as Iranian leadership remain committed to building a nuclear program.

Thus Iran either completely hands off it's nuclear program to the US or the EU, or it shatters.

The former is not happening because the key veto players in Iran (the clerics, the Bonyads, the IRGC, the Army, and regime-aligned oligarchs) are profiting from sanctions and substituting US/EU relations with Russia and China, and have an incentive to have a nuclear weapon in order to solidify their perpetual control in the same manner that North Korea did.

That only leaves the latter. The same thing happened to Libya and Myanmar.

The only reason the Obama administration went with the JCPOA was because the EU, Russia, and China lobbied the Obama admin that they could prevent Iran from nuclearizing. China+Russia are now indifferent to Iranian nuclear ambitions due to ONG (China) and technology (Russia) dependencies, and the EU does not have the power projection capacity nor the economic linkages to stop Iran.

[0] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/six-party-talks-north-kore...

[1] https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/47844?device=smartp...

BoredPositron• 5 months ago

Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.

axus3• 5 months ago

How many more years will it remain inevitable, do you think?

not_a_bot_4sho2• 5 months ago

10 days to go

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c86yjnw4x49o

alephnerd10• 5 months ago

Most likely this weekend.

csense2• 5 months ago

Trump said "Don't shoot the protestors or else." Iran shot the protestors. US military assets were out of position dealing with Venezuela. Now the assets are in position, the administration now feels obligated to impose "or else."

I doubt Trump's seriously seeking a nuclear deal as he (in)famously withdrew from the deal established by the Obama administration [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_...

ycsux3• 5 months ago

Wag the dog, to distract us while pedo, grifting Trump family at work

potatium• 5 months ago

It is, but not because of this decision.

bigyabai3• 5 months ago

Correct, because of the Epstein files.

drunner• 5 months ago

Is it all speculation still at this point for what happens next? Like are they immediately void, does the govt have to repay importers the now illegal loss?

Or is this just another "trump did illegal thing but nothing will happen" kind of scenario?

raincole2• 5 months ago

Trump govt will find another way to circumvent this and keep the tariff.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/cnbc-daily-open-trump-admini...

1970-01-01• 5 months ago

You can't get around the Supreme Court. Full stop. They can try, fail, and declare victory but they cannot find another way. They would literally be right back in the courts fighting their own consequences and punishment.

petcat2• 5 months ago

Any further action to end-around the Supreme Court decision and re-impose the tariffs will almost certainly require broad Congressional approval. And this is a very bad time to try to do that since nearly half of those seats are up for re-election this year.

I think this issue is effectively dead at least until we see how the new majority shakes out in November.

lokar4• 5 months ago

I have not read the ruling, but….

A typical pattern is the appeals court (of which scotus is one) clarifies the legal issues and send the case back to the trial court to clean up and issue specific orders.

micromacrofoot2• 5 months ago

they'll get buried in lawsuits for refunds if they don't obey the order

nerdsniper• 5 months ago

Unfortunately, I suspect that many platforms/outlets which were paying tariffs for us will continue their high prices. I’d love to see my startups cost of hardware go down but I can’t plan on it happening in my CapEx projections.

edot4• 5 months ago

Yep. Same exact trick that happened during COVID. Prices ratchet up but never down.

ajross3• 5 months ago

Prices drop all the time. But no, they don't drop "automatically" as some kind of rules thing when regulations change. Prices drop when someone has extra inventory and needs to liquidate, or run a sale, or whatever.

Anthropomorphizing markets as evil cartels is 100% just as bad as the efficient market fetishization you see in libertarian circles. Markets are what markets do, and what they do is compete trying to sell you junk.

mothballed8• 5 months ago

Mouser (electronics parts distributor) just charges you an itemized tariff rate. They should go down immediately for those electronics parts.

techdmn• 5 months ago

To me this suggests that the problem is not cost, but lack of competition, either in production or in pricing. My understanding is that there are sufficient laws to ensure competition, but they are not widely enforced.

zadikian• 5 months ago

Plenty of supply-driven inflated prices did go back down after covid, or after the post-covid inflation shock. Gasoline is one example.

At the same time, USD M2 supply increased an unusual 40% from Jan 2020 to Jan 2022. It only fell a little after. So prices that were inflated for that reason, I wouldn't have expected to fall back down.

I do feel like some local businesses just price according to costs but keep that ratched up if costs fall, like you said.

hypeatei2• 5 months ago

That's not clear exactly as a lot of companies were eating the cost in anticipation of a ruling like this. It was blatantly illegal to use the IEEPA to enact tariffs on the whole world so a lot of people called the bluff... and they were right.

dayyan• 5 months ago

This ruling impacts tariffs imposed by way of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which includes the reciprocal tariffs announced on April 2’s so-called “Liberation Day.” Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that roughly $170 billion in tariff revenues have been generated through February 20 via these policies. However, this ruling has no bearing on section 232 tariffs, which have been used to justify levies on the likes of steel and aluminum.

Trump administration officials had indicated that they developed contingency plans to attempt to reinstate levies in the event of this outcome. CNN reported that Trump called this ruling a “disgrace” and said he had a backup plan for tariffs.

megaman821• 5 months ago

It looks like there are several ways to reinstate these tarrifs at the Executive level https://www.cato.org/blog/supreme-court-got-it-right-ieepa-d...

HaloZero• 5 months ago

The important thing is that Trump can't do the tariffs beyond 15% on a whim anymore though. Like imposing tariffs on Canada because of an ad displayed in Toronto.

ajross3• 5 months ago

That's just bluster. The IEEPA nonsense was already the creative trickery deployed in defense of a novel and prima facia unconstitutional policy. If they had a better argument, they would have made it.

And we know in practice that Trump TACOs out rather than pick real fights with established powers. Markets don't like it when regulatory agencies go rogue vs. the rule of law. They'll just shift gears to something else.

chrisweekly• 5 months ago

TACOs?

axus3• 5 months ago

It'd be cool if the backup plan was to get Congressional approval, per the US Constitution

SV_BubbleTime3• 5 months ago

Trump aside. Congress is clearly not interested in setting budgets or tax policy.

Jamesbeam2• 5 months ago

He better dusts off the good old auto pen.

The man has a lot of cheques to write for the 175 billion he stole illegally from foreign countries.

edot4• 5 months ago

What? You mean from American importers and therefore consumers? Foreign countries do not pay tariffs. This lie needs to stop.

carefree-bob2• 5 months ago

You really believe that the incidence of taxation falls 100% on the buyer and never the seller? And you think those who have a more accurate view are "lying"?

Please learn a bit about the incidence of taxation: https://stantcheva.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum... The main models supporting your view is where consumer income is exogenous and all firm profits are redistributed to the representative consumer as a lump sum transfer: https://www.ief.es/docs/destacados/publicaciones/revistas/hp...

Please avoid simplistic beliefs and moral outrage for things as complex as trade policy. The people who say that the incidence of taxation falls heavily on sellers may just be better informed, particularly when listening to wall street earnings calls while simultaneously looking at the consumer price data.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

acedTrex• 5 months ago

"stole from foreign countries" is not how tariffs work.

Jamesbeam2• 5 months ago

You are not wrong. But you’re also not fully right. I think you don’t see the full scale of the economic tail those tariffs had.

He raised tariffs illegally by 10% for most countries immediately, which triggered a bunch of negative economic effects around the globe in those countries directly tied to the illegal raise of those tariffs by who represents the United States of America.

Damages have to be paid to those countries and their companies.

Because those costs occurred from an illegal action. We do agree that if you do something the highest court has deemed illegal, if it caused damages to any party as direct result of that illegal action, the entity who suffered those damages should be entitled to claim damages, right?

A lot of companies had to deal with the same problems.

You can’t really plan exporting into a country that raises different amounts of tariffs basically over night depending on how his majesty, the king of the free world has slept the night before.

Someone needs to plan with the new realities, workers need to put in more hours, external expertise needs to be hired, all costs have to be evaluated, partners in the US might no longer be able to clear their inventory, new business terms need to be negotiated.

Don’t get me started about the Logistics troubles, but all of the above are costs which wouldn’t occur if the president had gotten legal advise from the Supreme Court about his economic plans before he did something illegal. Right?

So do you follow the law?

If yes, your conclusion needs to be that the president needs to write a lot of Cheques and probably needs the autopen. Because it weren’t only us importers and customers suffering from the presidents illegal action.

lokar4• 5 months ago

Americans pay the tariffs

mothballed8• 5 months ago

.gov can write the check back to Americans then, and disband ICE, CBP, the DEA, and the ATF to pay for it.

sowbug6• 5 months ago

s/tariff/import tax/

hypeatei2• 5 months ago

The sad part is that the $175B was already spent because the tariffs didn't generate a budget surplus so we literally just set it on fire and will need to turn on the money printer to give it back to Americans who paid the taxes.

mint5• 5 months ago

“Stole illegally from foreign countries” ????!!!

American citizens and American importers are not foreigner countries.

Don’t propagate or fall for trumps repeated blatant LIE that foreign countries pay tariffs.

They are direct taxes on Americans and American importers, the exporter does not pay it.

uuuuuuurrrrr• 5 months ago

All of that pain for nothing. The Trump administration's signature policy achievements involve the DJT ticker and actual meme coins. I hope no republican sits in the oval office for 50 years, they're all responsible for enabling this madness and self-destruction.

pawelduda2• 5 months ago

Memecoins especially are so funny it's worth putting out some numbers:

- $TRUMP meme coin, down 87% from ATH

- $MELANIA meme coin, down 98% from ATH

- $WLFI, down 50% from ATH, with 4 Trump co-founders

The first two coins were actually hyped up so hard at launch that they drained liquidity from most of the crypto market because of people dumping everything to buy in

sjsdaiuasgdia3• 5 months ago

None of these were intended to be long term investments for anyone.

They exist as a way for money to be given to the Trump family in an legally obfuscated way. Most of that happens/happened right after launch.

macintux• 5 months ago

Trump said without tariffs, "everybody would be bankrupt".

Always useful to have a grasp on reality.

fuoqi4• 5 months ago

Let the fun of returning hundreds of billions of the illegal tariff revenue back to importers through litigation begin!

rapnie2• 5 months ago

Trillions even, according to some sources.

krapp• 5 months ago

Don't worry, DOGE saved us so much money it won't even matter /s.

sowbug6• 5 months ago

Will I get back the $17 DHL charged to collect the $1 tariff on the cat toys I bought from China?

Actual event may not have occurred, but DHL flat fee is real.

fuoqi4• 5 months ago

Sure, if you are ready to sue the US government for that. /s

I dunno if a class-action lawsuit is realistic or not in this case or how likely a court decision stating that all tariff revenue must be refunded.

SV_BubbleTime3• 5 months ago

Were cat toys not made in the US? Especially if you were to factor and $18 delta?

Sorry, but tariffs on aluminum or steel that is only made in China or microchips or components. I think that’s a valid discussion to have. … you’re complaining about disposable cat toys that were likely made in a sweat shop where the workers were not making a livable wage and then putting in a container on a ship burning crude oil and pushed around the world so you can have some junk that was a couple dollars cheaper than a domestic option?

Not the same thing.

cmurf3• 5 months ago

Send a letter requesting a full refund.

If they refuse, sue them in small claims court.

TiredOfLife• 5 months ago

$17 DHL charged

You can't do that yourself? In my EU country if I get a package with tax and customs fee I can pay myself and not pay DHL.

Is it like the gas pump thing? Where you can't do it yourself.

leopoldj2• 5 months ago

"The ruling was silent on whether tariffs that have been paid under the higher rates will need to be refunded." - from CNBC

fuoqi4• 5 months ago

This is why I mentioned "litigation" in my comment, i.e. you probably would need to separately sue the government if you want to refund the tariffs.

keernan7• 5 months ago

The tariffs were paid by the ultimate consumer. Importers that sue will have a difficult time proving actual damages.

cjbenedikt4• 5 months ago

Now let's see what will happen.After all J.D.Vance (US VP)famously said:" The judiciary has decided. Now let them enforce it".

CWuestefeld• 5 months ago

Ahem. The line is widely attributed to President Andrew Jackson, usually quoted as: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

He probably didn't say it either, its first appearance is in an 1860s book by Horace Greeley.

tracker121• 5 months ago

From the guy that invaded Florida... I wouldn't be surprised if it was Andrew Jackson though.

cjbenedikt4• 5 months ago

You are probably right. Only noticed the comment as he made it recently. Still not exactly reassuring. Mirrors his mindset.

cjbenedikt4• 5 months ago

Why the downvote? After all I don't seem to be wrong: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8z48xwqn3o

edot4• 5 months ago

Howard Lutnick and his sons are surely happy about this. It’s almost like Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, knew this would happen. His sons, at their firm Cantor Fitzgerald, have been offering a tariff refund product wherein they pay companies who are struggling with paying tariffs 20-30% of a potential refund, and if (as they did today) they get struck down, they pocket the 100% refund.

https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-wa...

SilverElfin3• 5 months ago

That’s an insane conflict of interest. His sons took over the firm? It was already bad that Lutnick took over in the first place. As I recall he sued the widow of Cantor to steal control of the company after Cantor died.

But I guess this is not very surprising. I am sure every friend and family member of Trump administration people made trades leading all those tariff announcements over the last year, while the rest of us got rocked by the chaos in the stock market.

tills13• 5 months ago

This admin? Conflict of interest? Add it to the list.

edot4• 5 months ago

Lutnick is not a good man. There’s also this, from https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA012492...

“LUTNICK was a neighbor of JEFFREY EPSTEIN (EPSTEIN) in the adjoining property at 11 E 71st Street, New York, New York. LUTNICK bought the property for $10 through a trust. LES WEXNER (WEXNER) and EPSTEIN owned the building. LUTNICK bought it in a very roundabout way from EPSTEIN.”

mywittyname• 5 months ago

That’s an insane conflict of interest.

Welcome to America.

This isn't even in the top 10 of corrupt activities our government officials undertaken in the past year.

WillPostForFood• 5 months ago

Serious question - what do you think the kids should do when their parents get political positions, not work?

mothballed8• 5 months ago

I've wondered from the beginning if the whole tariff thing wasn't basically an insider operation for import/export insiders to profit off of rate arbitrage, if not outright black market operations.

That's more sadistic than I had guessed.

------ re: below due to throttling ----------

Lutnicks profit requires some 2nd order thinking. How Trump et al might profit off of import/export insider operations also requires some 2nd order thinking. My apologies for not spelling it out, although it should not take much imagination.

bdangubic5• 5 months ago

Not import/export insiders, the Trump family... always just follow the money, maybe along the way some "import/export" people get some crumbs but most of it ends up a Mar a Largo :-)

vlovich123• 5 months ago

It’s a tax on the US economy. A tax levied by individuals rather than the government itself. An ingenious scheme. Evil, but ingenious.

fuzzfactor20• 5 months ago

It's not a legitimate tax.

That's why it taxed the economy much worse than a legitimate President would do.

anjel2• 5 months ago

Refunds to business, but unless they have to refund to consumers it's free capital to importers

pstuart2• 5 months ago

The stated intention was to replace income taxes with tariffs; and it came with a bonus feature of handing the President a cudgel with which to grant him personal powers and personal rewards.

sc68cal3• 5 months ago

The Lutnick sons were also probably betting on the outcome of the case on Kalshi

tfehring4• 5 months ago

I wouldn’t put anything past them, but my impression is that they were just acting as a middleman for this transaction and taking a fee, rather than making a directional bet one way or another. Hedge funds have certainly been buying a lot of tariff claims, giving businesses guaranteed money upfront and betting on this outcome. But for an investment bank like Cantor Fitzgerald that would be atypical.

lordnacho4• 5 months ago

they were just acting as a middleman

This is no excuse. If they knew this would be a business, being a broker of such deals would be sure to make them money.

bregma4• 5 months ago

That's what a bookie does. Middleman.

Veserv• 5 months ago

Ah yes, instead of applying the normal legal standard of “not even having the appearance of impropriety” we instead apply the monkey’s paw standard of waiting until they “no longer even have the appearance of propriety”.

nielsbot• 5 months ago

my impression is

not sure why you'd give them any benefit of the doubt. they haven't earned it.

uncletomscourt• 5 months ago

You think at some point america would get sick of having a billionaire gang of thieves in charge.

Trump just gave himself a $10 billion dollar slush fund from taxpayers. Who stopped him? No one. This amount of money will buy you one great den.

Noem wants luxury jets from the taxpayer.

So. Much. Winning.

dylan6044• 5 months ago

So. Much. Winning.

Like the man said, I'm definitely tired of all the winning. Emoluments clause be damned.

throwawaysleep• 5 months ago

Trump has a long record of stealing from Joe Average and had been doing it since between 2016. Joe Average thinks he’s clever for doing it.

giarc• 5 months ago

The irony is that Trump won on a message of "drain the swamp" which was supposed to address this issue. Instead it seems like it's more of just "replace the swamp" with his own guys.

BurningFrog3• 5 months ago

America is pretty sick of both parties.

Had the Democrats ran a half decent candidate, they could easily have won. But they're just not capable of doing that.

UncleMeat3• 5 months ago

I swear, if the dems aren't running on "here is all of the shit that Trump and his cronies stole from you" every single day for the next two years they are the dumbest political strategists alive.

thewebguyd• 5 months ago

We are sick of it, but despite being somewhat of a democracy, we have no real power in this two party, first past the post system when both parties always run establishment candidates, aka, billionaire thieves gang members.

duderific2• 5 months ago

For the Fox News crowd, which is most of his supporters, they are likely not even aware of these transgressions, as they are not reported there. Or, if they are aware, they are happy to see Trump enriching himself, because, own the libs or something?

mrbombastic• 5 months ago

A witness also reported to the FBI that Lutnick and CF are engaged in massive fraud: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA012492... Oh and he bought his house from Epstein for $10. Nothing to see here just a criminal admin fleecing you without even shame enough to try to hide it well.

sjsdaiuasgdia3• 5 months ago

And took his wife, kids, and their nannies to have lunch with Epstein. Years after he'd said he wouldn't associate with Epstein anymore, and years after Epstein's conviction.

If that was me, I would have used my substantial wealth to have lunch literally anywhere else in the world, with anyone else in the world.

munificent• 5 months ago

without even shame enough to try to hide it well.

Why would they bother hiding it when the populace is apparently powerless to do anything about it?

taeric• 5 months ago

Holy crap, you couldn't make a story that is a more direct echo of the plot point in Wonderful Life if you tried.

coldpie6• 5 months ago

If whoever runs in 2028 does not have a concrete plan for investigating & prosecuting every single person who worked under this admin from top to bottom, they are wasting everyone's time. We need to see hundreds of life-in-prison sentences by the end of 2029.

FrustratedMonky• 5 months ago

Remember when a conflict of interest was so important that Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm, because heaven forbid, he accidentally made some money while president.

Like his peanut farm would unduly sway government peanut policy.

somenameforme5• 5 months ago

An even more interesting one is that Ford was the first president to go on paid speaking tours after office. It's not like the 37 other presidents couldn't have also cashed in on the office in a similar fashion, but it was felt that such a thing would impugn the integrity of the office and also undermine the perception of somebody working as a genuine servant of the state.

There has most certainly been a major decline in values over time that corresponds quite strongly with the rise in the perceived importance of wealth.

fuzzfactor20• 5 months ago

Remember when the late President Carter was being laid to rest?

There was a tremendous outpouring of grief and honor, and so much heartfelt condolences. From all over America and the whole world. Deep respect as fitting as can be for such a great human being, for the type of honest & compassionate leadership you could only get in the USA, and only from the cream that rises to the top.

Every single minute it invoked the feeling that Trump deserves nothing like this ever.

singpolyma3• 5 months ago

Is a refund even likely?

Seems more likely the administration orders everyone to ignore the court.

grosswait3• 5 months ago

Why does that seem more likely? They haven't done that yet.

sjm-lbm3• 5 months ago

If you read the opinions, it's even less clear. The majority does not make it at all clear whether or not refunds are due, and Kavanaugh's dissent specifically calls out this weakness in the majority opinion.

Even if the executive branch's actions stop here, there's still a lot of arguing in court to do over refunds.

conartist6• 5 months ago

The executive branch couldn't so much as order me drink a cup of tea unless it first drafted me into the army or declared martial law.

sophacles• 5 months ago

Yeah, he's gotta finance the payments to whoever the kiddie peddler du jour is somehow. Especially now that he can't just walk next door or steer his yacht towards a conveniently located island.

JKCalhoun5• 5 months ago

You don't think there's already a replacement island?

zeroonetwothree10• 5 months ago

Most people knew this would happen, it was widely predicted.

helterskelter• 5 months ago

Wait you don't mean the same Howard Lutnick who was sold a mansion for the sum of ten dollars by none other than Jeffrey Epstein himself? I'm shocked.

JumpCrisscross2• 5 months ago

a tariff refund product wherein they pay companies who are struggling with paying tariffs 20-30% of a potential refund

For what it’s worth, I’ve personally been doing this. Not in meaningful dollar amounts. And largely to help regional businesses stay afloat. But I paid their tariffs and bought, in return, a limited power of attorney and claim to any refunds.

kccoder• 5 months ago

Presumably you're not a admin cabinet member or related to one or have inside info from those in the cabinet, which is the key differentiator.

thr0waway_abcd• 5 months ago

There's no scam too big or too small, from Trumpcoin's open bribery, to Secret Service paying 5x the GSA per diem rate to stay at Trump properties on duty.

simonw• 5 months ago

Meanwhile Pam Bondi's brother is a lawyer who's firm represents clients with cases against the justice department, and those cases keep getting dropped.

- https://www.newsweek.com/trump-doj-handling-pam-bondi-brothe...

- https://abcnews.com/US/doj-drops-charges-client-ag-pam-bondi...

FireBeyond• 5 months ago

Ahh, Brad Bondi, who it is widely rumored to be attempting to join the Bar in DC for the convenient benefit of being able to wield influence in the event of anyone trying to push for disbarrment against Pam...

mothballed8• 5 months ago

Yeah this is basically a thing everywhere. I was criminally charged in a certain mid-sized town, all I did was search through the court records to find the lawyer who always gets the charges dropped, hired them, and they went away for me too. Unfortunately that's the way the just us system works.

danesparza• 5 months ago

Basically a bookie, eh? And the house never loses...

sixQuarks• 5 months ago

That Lutnik is always sooooo lucky. He didn’t go to the twin towers on 9/11 cause he finally took his kid to kindergarten.

Always seems to be in the right place and the right time

b0sk• 5 months ago

Witkoffs profited off the UAE Spy Sheikh chips deal! Why can't Lutnicks make millions?! Come on guys. Unfair.

https://archive.is/W6Gqy

nprz• 5 months ago

And this is the same Howard Lutnick who was just last week was caught blatantly lying about his relationship with Epstein?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/30/new-epstein-...

pear01• 5 months ago

He is also surely happy the Trump administration no longer sees fit to investigate or pursue anyone with connections to Epstein. Previously Lutnick had lied about the extent of their relationship, yet even after the recent relevations he can simply wave them off.

What a profitable time for the Lutnicks, who are of course already fabulously wealthy. Our system really does reward the best people.

wnc31412• 5 months ago

If the court establishes that this was a tax, how would they administer the refund considering it's impossible to disentangle absorbed tariffs by firms and those passed along to consumers?

Matticus_Rex2• 5 months ago

SCOTUS left it unspecified, but the refund would go to the payer, legally.

chinathrow• 5 months ago

What is this shit? 4D grifting?

JumpinJack_Cash• 5 months ago

First victory in more than a year for 'Team Checks and Balances'

Now let's wait for the retaliation of 'Team Orange Dictatorship'

xnx7• 5 months ago

Am I understanding this right?

1) US customer pays huge import tax on imported goods in the form of higher prices.

2) Seller sends the collected tax to the US government

3) US government will refund all/most of that tax back to the seller after this ruling

4) Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit (no refund to customer)

not_a_bot_4sho2• 5 months ago

There have been no decisions about refunds. The court avoided addressing that.

That topic will surely go back to the courts, kicking and screaming

conductr7• 5 months ago

Personally think it should not get refunded. There’s no sane way to get it back to its source. And no one group should be making profit from it. Best if it stays with the government like a federal forfeiture so in theory we all benefit from it as citizens , maybe it goes against the national debt or lessens our deficit next year.

jleyank2• 5 months ago

Seller wasn’t involved in the tariffs. Rather the importer paid them, etc.

xnx7• 5 months ago

Who pays the importer?

croes• 5 months ago

I guess by seller parent means the US company who sold the product to the US customer not the seller who sold it to that company.

magicalhippo• 5 months ago

Seller wasn’t involved in the tariffs. Rather the importer paid them

Strictly speaking it depends on the Incoterms agreed upon by the seller and buyer[1]. If the Incoterms are DDP, then the seller should pay import duties and taxes and as such is involved.

Of course sellers are typically trying to run a business, so they'll bake the taxes and import duties into the sales price. So effectively the buyer ends up paying for it, just indirectly.

This was relevant when the tariffs were introduced, as sellers with DDP goods in transit had committed to a sales price which included any tariffs and would have to swallow the extra costs when they got the bill from the freight forwarder.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterms#Allocations_of_risks...

sc68cal3• 5 months ago

The importer pays the tax and passes it on as higher prices to the consumer. So the importers are the one that had the tax collected from them and would be getting the refund.

The importer CAN be the seller, but other times the importer is a middleman in the supply chain.

sowbug6• 5 months ago

To the CPAs among us: will the refunded import taxes be treated as extra profit for all the importers who paid them?

I could see an argument that they don't have a legal obligation to pass the refunds on to their customers, any more than my local grocery store owes me 5 cents for the gallon of milk I bought last year if the store discovers that their wholesaler had been mistakenly overcharging them.

aucisson_masque2• 5 months ago

at the end of the day, it's average joe who bought his things more expensive, and he won't get back his money.

That's what matters, don't care if it's the seller or a middleman that gets this money.

That's really a shame for american citizens, i'd be furious if i was american.

latexr• 5 months ago

The importer pays the tax and passes it on as higher prices to the consumer.

So it matters how we’re interpreting “paying”. One way to look at it is that if the cost was passed on to the consumer, the consumer paid it. The importer simply handed over the money.

jamincan• 5 months ago

It depends on the terms of the transaction. Most business-to-business transactions would have the importer responsible for duties, but many, maybe the majority of business-to-consumer transactions have taxes & duties covered by the exporter and included in the final price which would typically reflect the additional taxes & duties in the prices. In those case, the exporter would be the one refunded.

DivingForGold2• 5 months ago

and if so, do you really believe any importers who paid the tariff will further refund back to the consumer ? It's eventually a net win for the importer.

sowbug6• 5 months ago

Or maybe this is used to justify a new emergency federal law that all purchases must be reported on your tax return, just in case the government ever needs to refund any illegally collected import taxes.

I think I'm kidding, but I'm not really sure anymore.

seanmcdirmid• 5 months ago

A federal law has to be approved by Congress, that isn’t happening. An executive order maybe?

Broken_Hippo2• 5 months ago

Indiana has sometimes required that for decades, though I think they finally adjusted the law a little after online purchases became popular.

Indiana charges sales tax like a lot of states, but only on things sold in the state or from a company located in the state. If you ordered something from California or overseas, no sales tax was charged. The law required you to track these purchases and report it on your tax return so you can pay the required sales tax.

That said, enforcement wasn't good and I don't know a single person that actually did so. A common tax fraud for the average person, I guess.

And honestly, I think any emergency federal law would be similar: It wouldn't be for refunds for the masses, but for surveillance and extortion.

lokar4• 5 months ago

Most of the total tax collected seems to have been absorbed by the importers, lowering margins.

dawnerd• 5 months ago

The price of googs this last year bed to differ. Maybe for some bigger companies on certain products but what stores like Walmart did was spread the price increase across all products so it wasn’t as obvious. And that’s now where it’s going to suck the most, prices are not going to come down. Ends up being a free handout to them.

xnx7• 5 months ago

Where did you hear that? It is conclusively the opposite: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tariffs-consumers-busines...

apexalpha3• 5 months ago

There are usually a few companies between the importer and the consumer. So the importers could only refund the business they sold it to and likely won't if nothing was specified in the purchase contract.

Though this is obviously a first so expect a billion lawsuits about this.

furyofantares3• 5 months ago

Why do we repeatedly say that tarrifs are passed off in full to the consumer in the form of higher prices? Isn't that as obviously wrong as the argument for them, that they're paid entirely by the other countries?

Is there a reason to believe, or evidence, that it's not a mixture of the two?

edit: I want to highlight esseph's reply has a link to evidence that last year's tarrifs were passed off 90% to consumers, which is exactly the type of info I was looking for.

JDEW• 5 months ago

by the other countries

That makes zero sense. You mean “by lowering the profit margin on the goods sold to the US by that specific company”.

Countries don’t pay tarrifs (bar state intervention), companies do.

But yes, it’s probably a mix of the two: raising prices and lowering profit margins.

AnimalMuppet3• 5 months ago

Well, the analysis by the Federal Reserve said that domestic entities (consumers and companies) paid 90% of it. So, yes, saying that consumers pay it all is wrong, but it's less wrong than saying that foreign countries pay it all.

I don't recall seeing a split between domestic consumers and domestic companies, but I'm fairly sure that consumers are paying more than the 10% that foreign entities are.

NoLinkToMe• 5 months ago

It is a mixture of the two. But my reading of various studies indicates that in this mixture, the majority was passed to consumers in the form of higher prices.

Hikikomori• 5 months ago

It's much more true than saying that the foreign company pays it. Depends on how much slack there is in profit margins for both the exporter and importer, but the consumer does pay most of it, like 90%.

esseph• 5 months ago

"American consumers bore 90% of last year's nearly six-fold tariff increase, adding $1,000-$2,400 to average household budgets, despite overall inflation dropping to 2.4% in January 2026."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2026/02/15/consumers...

tombert5• 5 months ago

What an odd thing to say.

The businesses in the other countries are, you know, businesses. Even if it were Chinese companies that were paying the tariffs, that will be baked into the cost of the good.

This is literally first-day economics. No such thing as a free lunch. The cost of the item that the end user pays should reflect all costs associated with production and distribution to that end user.

I have no idea how the fuck the rumor that these tariffs will be “paid by other countries” started. If there are suspicions that the tariffs are temporary then they might be willing to eat the cost temporarily so it’s not passed onto the consumer immediately, but that’s inherently temporary and not sustainable especially if it would make it so these companies are losing money.

layer82• 5 months ago

For goods for which no domestic equivalent alternatives exist, why would the foreign suppliers lower their prices to compensate for the tariffs (which are paid by the importers to the government)? More generally, the cost of the tariffs will be split between foreign suppliers and local importers/consumers according to the competitiveness and availability of domestic suppliers, and according to market elasticity for the respective goods.

sdenton42• 5 months ago

Here's evidence : https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/news/americas-own-g...

"Importers and consumers in the US bear 96 percent of the tariff burden."

fastasucan• 5 months ago

Does anyone have a good explanation on how supposedly other countries were paying the tariffs? If so, nothing would deter the american consumer from buying foreign?

jrmg• 5 months ago

Can I get compensation from UPS or FedEx for making me pay illegal tariffs - and making me pay a fee to them for processing it too?

(I know the answer is practically ’no’, but it does still seem to me that the bureaucracy and companies that went along with this obviously illegal operation bear some culpability...)

xnx7• 5 months ago

That's be nice, but I place more blame on the half of Congress that was OK with this.

teeray• 5 months ago

If everyone sued them in small claims over it, there probably would be a whole lot of default judgments.

fn-mote• 5 months ago

Can I get compensation from UPS or FedEx for making me pay illegal tariffs - and making me pay a fee to them for processing it too?

I can see why you are mad, but it seems like the were fulfilling their legal obligation (at the time).

The good news is that having directly paid UPS and not a middleman makes it much more likely that you will receive the money back. If anybody does.

balls187• 5 months ago

Unclear.

I am certainly planning on seeking reimbursement from DHL and FedEx for the difference between the Trump rates, and the previous MFN rates. And if not, request charge backs via my credit card issuers.

rtkwe7• 5 months ago

Sometimes the consumer (more) directly pays when buying from overseas, most of the time you're right it gets rolled into the price at checkout if the company is large enough or just in larger prices buying in the US. I've had a few packages I had to pay extra import duties on with the UPS/FedEx agent fees tacked on top mostly kickstarters.

xnx7• 5 months ago

Understandable. With the intentional chaos since last year, tariffs were changing mid-shipment without any prior notice.

pclmulqdq• 5 months ago

When I have bought things internationally, I have always been the one doing the importing. This means I paid some Trump taxes and I will get my money back.

xnx7• 5 months ago

I hope so!

webXL• 5 months ago

In October, I bought a $250 product from a Canadian company + about $30 shipping & taxes and thought I was good. A few weeks later, FedEx sends me an $92 bill for the duty that they had to pay. I just ignored it since I was never given that notice up front. If they really wanted it, they could have had the vendor contact me. But at least they're not getting that bit of profit now.

bakies2• 5 months ago

I'm also ignoring a bill, from UPS, that is a few bucks of duty and a much larger $14 fee. Presumably the large fee is because UPS isn't meant to collect taxes, but they can suck it.

testing22321• 5 months ago

For what it’s worth, FedEx paid the tariff on your behalf .

You owe them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they withhold future packages to your address until you settle up.

If they’re smart, they set it up so you owe the government.

ngc2482• 5 months ago

they may start rcharging you warehouse storage fees and demurrage fees. chec out what happens if you dont take the delivery

dgellow2• 5 months ago

Or the government will not refund, and add more illegal tariffs. That wouldn’t be surprising, unfortunately

vkou6• 5 months ago

Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit (no refund to customer)

Elections have consequences.

SmirkingRevenge4• 5 months ago

I think people are getting ahead of themselves on the refund business. Refunds might be on the table, they also may not be. It may be a years long battle. Trump and co might put up enough resistance that many firms find it too costly to fight.

beloch• 5 months ago

This will be so in some cases, but there are extra steps in others.

e.g. In a different path, 1 and 2 are the same, but things then diverge.

3) To recoup some of those tariff costs, the company sells the rights to any potential future tariff refunds. They recoup a portion of what they paid immediately but hand away the right to a full refund to another party, such as Cantor Fitzgerald. The seller might use this to reduce prices for their customers, but probably won't. They'll set prices according to what the market will support.

4) US government will refund all/most of that tax back to companies, like Cantor Fitzgerald, that bought the rights to tariff refunds.

5) Seller doesn't get any extra money back, so there's no money to refund to consumers.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Cantor Fitzgerald, while just one of the companies doing this, was formerly headed by Howard Lutnick and is currently owned and operated by his sons.

madaxe_again3• 5 months ago

How is this not reverse Byzantine tax farming?

LeifCarrotson2• 5 months ago

Some additional context to your note: Howard Lutnick is Trump's Secretary of the Treasury. And also was Epstein's literal next-door neighbor.

JimmyBiscuit• 5 months ago

Umm this doesnt seem to be true: https://www.semafor.com/article/02/20/2026/cantor-fitzgerald...

Or is there another source for this claim?

gcanyon2• 5 months ago

To the extent this is true, the entire thing could literally be a grift (I'm not saying Trump is smart enough to come up with this, just that people around him are, and he's grifty enough to go along with it):

   1. Trump enacts the tariff, despite knowing it will be struck down.
   2. The tariff extracts hundreds of billions from the economy.
   3. Finance firms buy the potential refund for pennies on the dollar, knowing that Trump has no plan to defend the tariff.
   4. The Supreme Court strikes down the tariff, as planned.
   5. The finance firms profit on the refunds.
   6. We are all poorer, Trump's cronies are richer.

kjshsh123• 5 months ago

The seller might use this to reduce prices for their customers, but probably won't. They'll set prices according to what the market will support.

The price the market supports depends on things like taxes and tariffs.

Why removing taxes lowers prices:

https://open.substack.com/pub/shonczinner/p/why-removing-tax...

mandeepj2• 5 months ago

4) Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit

Seller may not reduce the price as well. Thus, continues to keep the raised price due to tariffs as free profit.

chii2• 5 months ago

Unless there's only one seller, why won't one of them just lower their price slightly to gain a market share edge and increase their total profit (even if margins slightly drop)?

kopirgan• 5 months ago

Refunds are very complicated. How does the co even know who bought? As it goes thru several layers of distribution chain. Assuming they want to refund of course. I suppose they will claim they reduced prices (or more likely deferred price increases, how nice!)

And then not all tariff was absorbed by importer - some suppliers would have cut prices to compensate wholly or partly. We would never know as it is likely buried in various other discounts and contract terms not a line item that says "for tariff". Down the chain, others with margins could have done the same. That's probably why the inflation impact was less than scary scenarios painted by some economists.

phil213• 5 months ago

What I think is interesting is if there is going to be a legal distinction between a seller raising their prices 10% for the item itself vs. a seller charging a separate line item for tariffs/customs/duties.

I can see a situation where the courts find that a general price increase is simply they - an offer to sell at a price the buyer accepted regardless of the seller's motivation to increase pricing. However a line item that very clearly states that a charge is for duties paid might be treated differently?

Very curious to see what the legal minds have to say in this scenario. In a way it may punish companies for doing what many to most consumers feel was the "right" thing to do - add a surcharge that can easily be removed if the situation changed in the future vs. using a general increase as a new price anchor.

aiauthoritydev3• 5 months ago

You are right but the current admin arm twisted folks from showing that kind of line item.

aiauthoritydev3• 5 months ago

It is more complicated than that.

Seller sold forward contracts to recoup tariffs at a lower price and passed on the benefits to the consumers already. E.g. For every $1 seller paid as tariffs, seller sold a contract to someone for $0.25 saying if government ever refunds the buyer of the contract can keep it. The $0.25 already passed to consumers as benefits.

Seller gets to keep the returned tax money as pure profit (no refund to customer)

Not to the specific customer but this benefits will now get passed to future customers as prices will be lowered than usual (lower than pre-tariff prices) due to competition.

Note that consumers who paid more were not necessarily paying the tariffs. Stores like Costco, Walmart increased prices across the board and socialized the impact of tariffs. Even if there was some mechanism to return tariff money to consumer, there is no way you could return it to someone who paid higher due to this socialized nature of price increase.

zaik• 5 months ago

Guess who took the other side of those forward contracts: https://www.wired.com/story/cantor-fitzgerald-trump-tariff-r...

yalogin• 5 months ago

It’s worse. Sellers raised prices citing tariffs. Not only does the seller get a one time bonus, the prices are now permanently raised as we all know prices are never coming down

xnx7• 5 months ago

The willingness of the customer to buy from competitors is the only thing that ever effects prices.

aaronrobinson• 5 months ago

5) US Gov uses a different law 6) Go to step 1

Betelbuddy2• 5 months ago

> 1) US customer pays huge import tax on imported goods in the form of higher prices.

Not according to the current administration: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CODFD3j623E

According to them, China and others are paying the tariffs, so any refunds clearly have to go to China...

Betelbuddy2• 5 months ago

You are downvoting the messenger. In a way...its an IQ test...

"Trump says China is paying for his tariffs" - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-check-tru...

"Trump Incorrectly Has Insisted ‘China’s Paying the Tariffs’" - https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000006661985/tr...

"Fact check: Trump and Vance keep falsely describing how tariffs work" - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/fact-check-trump...

DivingForGold2• 5 months ago

Trump responds that it will be litigated, like 5 years worth . . .

gdilla• 5 months ago

yes, because the US elected a clown, and this is the clown show.

mullingitover8• 5 months ago

It’s disappointing but not surprising that the SC left the administration to illegally bilk US taxpayers for billions upon billions of dollars for something that was facially unconstitutional.

They should’ve allowed an emergency injunction from the outset.

coldpie6• 5 months ago

They should’ve allowed an emergency injunction from the outset.

That wouldn't have given the opportunity for SCOTUS's financial backers to build up their profits first https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089443

k1ko3• 5 months ago

You think corporations and the elite .01% support tariffs? It obviously was very unpopular with that class of society. The policy was aimed to help the working class of the country. You can argue that it was a piss poor way of doing so, but it's certainly not something that the elite class advocated for and getting rich off of.,

elAhmo3• 5 months ago

Given the current members of SC, as you said, disappointing but not surprising. Who knew that confirming Kavanaugh and people with similar moral compass would have such grave consequences.

Ajedi325• 5 months ago

They didn't rule it unconstitutional - it's not. They ruled that the specific statute Trump was using that allows him to "regulate imports" doesn't include regulating imports with tariffs.

mullingitover8• 5 months ago

They ruled that the specific statute Trump was using that allows him to "regulate imports" doesn't include regulating imports with tariffs.

Right, and thus because the Constitution gives congress the authority to levy tariffs, and the administration was usurping that authority, they violated the Constitution.

duxup4• 5 months ago

I don’t get what SCOTUS is up to as far as a practical matter goes.

They’re hands off so the president can clearly gather illegal taxes.

Then they change their mind. So what? The government gives the taxes back? Is that even possible?

Next step what? Trump does something else illegal and SCOTUS majority sits on their hands for a year or more?

SCOTUS majority’s deference to their guy has become absurd… the judicial branch is of no use…

leopoldj2• 5 months ago

I am not a lawyer. But I think cases need to work their way up to SC. Before today's ruling a Federal Trade Court ruled the tariffs illegal [1]. And later, a Federal Appeals Court did the same [2]

The process takes time.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/29/court-strikes-down-trump-rec...

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/29/trump-trade-tariffs-appeals-...

duxup4• 5 months ago

I know how that works but the speed and process should reflect the severity of the issue.

Illegally taxing billions from we the people? Should be addressed immediately.

And they have done that before….

estimator72922• 5 months ago

The government gives back overpaid taxes every year, and there are long-established mechanisms to deduct qualifying purchases from your tax burden.

If we lived in a functional society, one might expect that tarriffs could be refunded through the normal income tax refund process hinged upon supplying recipts of tarriffs paid. I do not expect this to happen in the USA.

duxup4• 5 months ago

Individual tax refunds are far different than this.

bgentry• 5 months ago

The actual decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf

Animats4• 5 months ago

Right. Most of the news articles don't link to the decision, which is worth reading.

It's a 6-3 decision. Not close.

Here's the actual decision:

The judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in case No. 25–250 is affirmed. The judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in case No. 24–1287 is vacated, and the case is remanded with instructions to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.

So what does that mean in terms of action?

It means this decision [1] is now live. The vacated decision was a stay, and that's now dead.

So the live decision is now: We affirm the CIT’s holding that the Trafficking and Reciprocal Tariffs imposed by the Challenged Executive Orders exceed the authority delegated to the President by IEEPA’s text. We also affirm the CIT’s grant of declaratory relief that the orders are “invalid as contrary to law.”

"CIT" is the Court of International Trade. Their judgement [2], which was unanimous, is now live. It reads:

"The court holds for the foregoing reasons that IEEPA does not authorize any of the Worldwide, Retaliatory, or Trafficking Tariff Orders. The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs. The Trafficking Tariffs fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders. This conclusion entitles Plaintiffs to judgment as a matter of law; as the court further finds no genuine dispute as to any material fact, summary judgment will enter against the United States. See USCIT R. 56. The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined."

So that last line is the current state: "The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined." Immediately, it appears.

A useful question for companies owed a refund is whether they can use their credit against the United States for other debts to the United States, including taxes.

[1] https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINIO...

[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cit.170...

liquidise• 5 months ago

The Gorsuch concurring is quite the read, but wish more Americans internalized its final paragraph (excerpts below).

Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. ... But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.

techblueberry6• 5 months ago

I agree with Gorsuch, and I love this idea, but until the legislative branch abandons procedures that prevent the deliberation from happening in the first place, this will keep happening.

aliceryhl2• 5 months ago

Hmm, I read some of the decision, and now I'm not sure what to make of all of it.

When I came to the opinion from Jackson, J., I found it extremely compelling. He says this:

... But some of TWEA’s sections delegating this authority had lapsed, and “there [was] doubt as to the effectiveness of other sections.” Accordingly, Congress amended TWEA in 1941, adding the subsection that includes the “regulate ... importation” language on which the President relies today. The Reports explained Congress’s primary purpose for the 1941 amendment: shoring up the President’s ability to control foreign-owned property by maintaining and strengthening the “existing system of foreign property control (commonly known as freezing control).”

When Congress enacted IEEPA in 1977, limiting the circumstances under which the President could exercise his emergency authorities, it kept the “regulate ... importation” language from TWEA. The other two relevant pieces of legislative history—the Senate and House Reports that accompanied IEEPA—demonstrate that Congress’s intent regarding the scope of this statutory language remained the same. As the Senate Report explained, Congress’s sole objective for the “regulate ... importation” subsection was to grant the President the emergency authority “to control or freeze property transactions where a foreign interest is involved.” The House Report likewise described IEEPA as empowering the President to “regulate or freeze any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.”

However, then I read Kavanaugh, J. who writes the following:

In 1971, President Nixon imposed 10 percent tariffs on almost all foreign imports. He levied the tariffs under IEEPA’s predecessor statute, the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA), which similarly authorized the President to “regulate ... importation.” The Nixon tariffs were upheld in court.

When IEEPA was enacted in 1977 in the wake of the Nixon and Ford tariffs and the Algonquin decision, Congress and the public plainly would have understood that the power to “regulate ... importation” included tariffs. If Congress wanted to exclude tariffs from IEEPA, it surely would not have enacted the same broad “regulate ... importation” language that had just been used to justify major American tariffs on foreign imports.

And I also find this compelling.

To add onto this, Roberts, C. J. says: IEEPA’s grant of authority to “regulate ... importation” falls short. IEEPA contains no reference to tariffs or duties. The Government points to no statute in which Congress used the word “regulate” to authorize taxation. And until now no President has read IEEPA to confer such power.

This seems directly contradictory to Kavanaugh, J.'s dissent! Kavanaugh, J. claims that Nixon used the word “regulate” to impose tarrifs. And apparently the word isn't just in some random other statute — Nixon did so from TWEA, the predecessor of IEEPA: when Congress enacted IEEPA in 1977 it kept the “regulate ... importation” language from TWEA. (from Jackson, J.) So the point that no President has read IEEPA to confer such power seems pretty weak, when Nixon apparently did so from TWEA.

I have no conclusion from this, but IMO both Jackson, J. and Kavanaugh, J. have pretty strong points in opposing directions.

sigwinch6• 5 months ago

Kavanaugh’s reasoning is that a wartime law, TWEA, can be congruent to a peacetime law, IEEPA. The rest of the court acknowledged that the President always had control of tariffs during war.

f33d5173• 5 months ago

Jackson is a woman just fyi.

gorgoiler• 5 months ago

”Based on two words separated by 16 others, the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time. Those words cannot bear such weight.”

Zing! Surprisingly spicy writing for such a gravely serious body.

apawloski• 5 months ago

Great news for people who had to bend over backwards pretending this disruptive, nakedly corrupt behavior was "good, actually."

But unfortunately, there are other channels for them to effectively do the same thing, as discussed in oral arguments. So still not a major win for American manufacturers or consumers, I fear.

dylan6044• 5 months ago

Sure, but now SCOTUS can say they are not a rubber stamp for POTUS. "See, we just ruled against him. Sure, it's a case that doesn't really solve anything and only causes more chaos, but we disagreed with him. This one time."

parineum6• 5 months ago

...but we disagreed with him. This one time.

They've actually done so numerous times already and have several cases on the docket that look to be leaning against him as well. There's a reason why most serious pundits saw this ruling coming a mile away, because SCOTUS has proven to not be a puppet of the administration.

zeroonetwothree10• 5 months ago

When they rule for Trump it’s proof they are just a rubber stamp. When they rule against Trump it’s somehow also proof they are a rubber stamp?

Pxtl• 5 months ago

Yep.

The president doing horribly fascist things with ICE like obliterating habeas corpus? Using the military to murder people in the ocean without trial? That's fine.

Screwing with the money? Not okay.

See also how the prez is allowed to screw with any congressional appointees except the federal reserve.

butterbomb2• 5 months ago

Great news for people who had to bend over backwards pretending this disruptive, nakedly corrupt behavior was "good, actually."

Actually they’re still doing it. I saw it not 2 minutes after seeing this post initially. The justifications for why they were “good, actually” has gotten increasingly vague though.

Rapzid4• 5 months ago

The damage goes far beyond the wallets of business and consumers. The unilateral, arbitrary tariff setting has little do with money and everything to do with the power it gave Trump. And was one of the primary instruments used to destroy relationships with our foreign allies including our closes neighbor..

luxuryballs• 5 months ago

To that point it was always relative to the advantage it gained overall when used as leverage for negotiations, now the issue is what other forms of leverage remain? Whether the outcomes of the agreements are good or not is one thing but there’s room for the argument that perhaps tariffs are a better form of leverage when compared with other available options.

cjbenedikt4• 5 months ago

Will the collected tariffs now have to be repaid? If so how. According to the Fed 90% were paid for by the consumers. https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is...

tracker121• 5 months ago

Likely the middlemen will pocket the difference depending on how the contracts between the shippers/distributers worked... "the people" who paid more at the market(s) for products won't be reimbursed.

sreekanth8502• 5 months ago

what happens to those billions of dollars already collected?

coldcode• 5 months ago

The importers would get the refunds, and any of their customers they charged more for would simply keep the refund. If you paid it directly (like international product order) you probably won't ever get repaid, as they probably deleted the transaction or otherwise failed to record it. Refunds even for importers might be caught up in lawsuits which might never resolve. It's a mess, and SCOTUS did not address the mess.

sreekanth8502• 5 months ago

this is a classic example of fuck around and find out.

bubblewand7• 5 months ago

Trump addressed the press a little while ago on this topic and claims he's not issuing any refunds until courts force him to. He chastised the Supreme Court for not telling him what to do about refunds, and essentially pleaded helplessness to do anything about it until he fights more lawsuits and rulings demanding specific action are issued, musing something to the effect of "I guess that will take another couple years".

He further claimed that this ruling puts his tariffs on a more certain basis(?!) because now he'll use different statutes that have been solidly litigated already (... so why weren't you opting to use those in the first place, if it's truly better? You didn't need to wait on this ruling to do that!) and that the only effect this ruling will have is a brief drop to ~10% across-the-board tariffs while they do the paperwork to bump them back up again under these other statutes. He repeatedly characterized this is good news for his tariffs, while also complaining extensively about the court and insulting the justices in the majority.

jonkoops2• 5 months ago

I wonder what this means for the EU. We made a new deal under pressure of the tariffs that is actually worse than the deal we had. If we had not bent the knee, we would have had that original deal back, or at least, so it seems? Now we seem to be properly shafted due to weak politicians.

saubeidl2• 5 months ago

We never actually ratified that deal.

Parliament froze it when Trump started threatening Greenland.

jonkoops2• 5 months ago

Great! Then the next step would be to simply pull out.

eigenspace• 5 months ago

The deal more or less had 3 'bad' things in it:

1. The EU would face higher tariffs on their exports to the USA. Now mostly struck down

2. The EU would not retaliate with tariffs of its own. Not really a big deal since the only US export to the EU that's worth worrying about are digital services, and those aren't subject to tariffs anyways.

3. The EU promised to buy lots of LNG and make investments in the USA to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. This was a bald-faced lie on the part of the EU negotiators. Even if the EU wanted to actually do this, they have no power or mechanism to make member states and companies within those member states buy more LNG or make more investments in the USA. This was just an empty promise.

___

So if the tariffs are struck down, we're more or less back to where we started.

rsynnott5• 5 months ago

The EU promised to buy lots of LNG and make investments in the USA to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. This was a bald-faced lie on the part of the EU negotiators. Even if the EU wanted to actually do this, they have no power or mechanism to make member states and companies within those member states buy more LNG or make more investments in the USA. This was just an empty promise.

The amounts named were also, ah, suspiciously similar to the amount of LNG Europe would generally buy, and the amount that would be invested in the US as a matter of course. It was kind of "well, the thing that would ordinarily happen will happen".

elAhmo3• 5 months ago

I am still baffled by the notion that Trump and co. managed to spread the 'other countries are paying for the tariffs' narrative into mainstream and having so many world leaders bend over just to have them not imposed. Knowing they are short-lived, unpredictable, illegal, and in the end hurting the US consumers primarily.

Sure, if there is a huge tariff on something, the user might look for an alternative, causing lower sales and, therefore, damaging the source company and economy, but for many products there isn't really a US-available substitute.

estimator72922• 5 months ago

The reality is that even though foreign sellers aren't paying the tarriffs directly, they do experience a direct decrease in demand because one of the largest markets on the planet has made your goods artificially more expensive.

Even if you're still making the same money per unit, tarriffs mean you sell fewer units. So many less that it's an existential threat to many businesses.

carlosjobim6• 5 months ago

I'm just here to enjoy the endlessly fractal spiraling double-think of tariffs being the devil when the US implements them, and being double-plus-good when the European Union implements them (or China or South America).

As hackers here are very intelligent but also very unwise, they find great enjoyment in double-think exercises and the resentment it gives them.

jjtwixman• 5 months ago

Tariffs are bad, there's no double think.

carlosjobim6• 5 months ago

Then where are the hackers in this comment section calling out for the European Council to strike down European tariffs like the US supreme court did?

Where were they before Trump?

rsynnott5• 5 months ago

The EU has a weighted mean tariff of about 1.3%. Prior to ol' mini-hands, the US had a weighted mean of 2.4%; it now has a weighted mean of about 8% (or, well, did until this ruling, who knows now). China is 2.1%. A couple of countries in South America have very high tariffs, but you'd expect that; high tariffs are normally a marker of a developing economy.

The idea that the EU is high-tariff, while popular on the internet, is simply not supported by the facts.

kshri245• 5 months ago

Tariffs are great for developing countries. It protects their nascent industries/businesses that are not even ready to compete with those from developed countries and specifically to prevent developed countries from dumping goods (look up anti-dumping laws). Tariffs suck for developed countries as it just raises tax on its own citizens without any benefits that are enjoyed by developing countries.

being the devil when the US implements them, and being double-plus-good when the European Union implements them (or China or South America).

You can also flip the argument and say that it is "double-plus-good" when USD is reserve currency but is the devil when Euro, Yen, Yuan, Rubles, Rupee et all want to be reserve currency too. Why does US admin go bananas when the topic of a BRICS currency is brought up?

Developed countries have levers. Developing countries have levers too. That's how balance has been maintained all these years since the World order was established post-WW2. Now if US wants to undo this World order (which it itself help setup) and wants to behave like a developing country, then developing countries will encroach on areas US holds dear to it: USD as reserve currency, cross-border transactions through SWIFT, imposing sanctions etc. Remember that it is not US alone that holds all the cards. Everyone else has their own cards as well.

anovikov• 5 months ago

Wait wait wasn't it wholly on Trump's payroll as the dems say?

arunabha2• 5 months ago

The ruling was 6-3 with Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh dissenting.

Kavanaugh's dissent is particularly peculiar as he wrote 'refunding tariffs already collected could be a “mess” with “significant consequences for the U.S. Treasury.”'

So, the justification is that undoing an illegal act is going to be unwieldy for the govt, so presumably, as a corollary, the govt must be allowed to continue doing illegal acts. This honestly reads as a blanket support for Trump personally, than any reasoned legal argument.

padjo4• 5 months ago

That's Kavanaugh for you.

mordnis• 5 months ago

I think this is normal for the supreme court, I've heard that they largely upheld abortion in the 1992 case because they thought it would be a mess to undo, even though they thought the original ruling was unconstitutional.

tracker121• 5 months ago

I think it was more that they felt that the judgement should include instructions to dismiss any remedial action, not that the actions should continue. Without reading the dissent(s), I can't really say...

In the end, the people who bought products that paid more won't get it back... and who will receive the difference is the middle-men who will just pocket the difference profiting from both ends.

apexalpha3• 5 months ago

It's odd to me that something as fundamental as 'can the President unilaterally impose tariffs on any country he wants anytime he wants' is apparently so ill defined in law that 9 justices can't agree on it.

Ajedi325• 5 months ago

Fully agree, but that's what happens when you keep piling laws on top of laws on top of laws and never go back and refactor. If I recall correctly, the case hinged on some vague wording in a semi-obscure law passed back in 1977.

ssully• 5 months ago

Except that isn’t relevant at all. This Supreme Court is completely cooked. If the case was “can Trump dissolve New York as a state” you would still have 3 justices siding in his favor with some dog shit reasoning.

philistine2• 5 months ago

The whole legal apparatus of the US doesn't want to hear that but your laws suck. They're flawed because of the political system borne of compromise with parties incapable of whipping their members to just vote in favour of a law they don't fully agree with.

rtkwe7• 5 months ago

Old laws are often superseded or modified by newer legislation that's not novel or rare. This one wasn't because it hadn't been so roundly abused by previous presidents that it had been an issue worth taking up. It's the same with a lot of delegated powers, the flexibility and decreased response time is good when it's constrained by norms and the idea of independent agencies but a terrible idea when the supreme court has been slowly packed with little king makers in waiting wanting to invest all executive power in the President. [0]

[0] Unless that's power over the money (ie Federal Reserve) because that's a special and unique institution. (ie: they know giving the president the power over the money printer would be disastrous and they want to be racist and rich not racist and poor.)

Paradigma11• 5 months ago

An additional problem seems to be that this law had some congressional check that has been ruled unconstitutional since.

entuno• 5 months ago

And that it took this long to get an answer to that question.

loeg4• 5 months ago

This is relatively fast for an issue to move through the courts.

blibble2• 5 months ago

in the UK a similar unconstitutional behaviour by the head of government took...

from the start of the "injury":

    - 8 days to get to the supreme court
    - 2 days arguing in court
    - 5 days for the court to reach a decision

15 days to be ruled on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_The_Prime_Ministe...

karel-3d• 5 months ago

The thing is he usually cannot but sometimes can. The issue is around "sometimes".

loeg4• 5 months ago

Two of the justices would be happy to let Trump get away with murder. It's not that the law is ill-defined so much as a few justices are extremely partisan. Happily, a quorum of saner heads came about in this instance.

irishcoffee• 5 months ago

It sure is interesting how different things might be if RBG and Biden had stepped down instead of doing... whatever it was they did instead.

mastax4• 5 months ago

It seems likely to me the ruling took this long because John Roberts wanted to get a more unanimous ruling.

Additionally, the law in this case isn’t ill defined whatsoever. Alito, Thomas, and to a lesser extent Kavanaugh are just partisan hacks. For many years I wanted to believe they had a consistent and defensible legal viewpoint, even if I thought it was misguided. However the past six years have destroyed that notion. They’re barely even trying to justify themselves in most of these rulings; and via the shadow docket frequently deny us even that barest explanation.

blackjack_• 5 months ago

Alito is one of the original proponents of the unitary executive theory (way before he was a Supreme Court justice). Everything he does should be looked at as an attempt to impose said theory and destroy America.

bradleyjg2• 5 months ago

Kavanaugh clearly isn’t in the same bucket. His votes go either way. I don’t recall seeing a single decision this administration where either Alito or Thomas wrote against a White House position. Not just in case opinions but even in an order. I don’t think we’ve seen a justice act as a stalking horse for the president in this way since Fortas.

hinkley3• 5 months ago

Thomas isn’t a hack, he’s a shill. And he’s not even trying to be subtle about it. He’s somebody’s bitch and he literally drives around in the toys they bought for him as compensation.

If any justice deserves to be impeached it’s him. I can’t believe they approved him in the first place. Anita Hill sends her regards.

pdpi• 5 months ago

For many years I wanted to believe they had a consistent and defensible legal viewpoint, even if I thought it was misguided.

Watching from across the Atlantic, I was always fascinated by Scalia's opinions (especially his dissents). I usually vehemently disagreed with him on principle (and I do believe his opinions were principled), but I often found myself conceding to his points, from a "what is and what should be are different things" angle.

jasondigitized• 5 months ago

When all of your decisions can be predetermined without even knowing the context of the matter you are surely a hack. It goes like this.....'Does this matter benefit Trump, corporations, rich people or evangelicals?'. Yes? Alito and Thomas will argue its lawful. Every single time.

Andrex• 5 months ago

The dissent seems to be "Ignoring whether or not the President acted lawfully, it would sure create an awful big mess if we undid it. And he's gonna try again anyways, and maybe even succeed in that future attempt, creating an even bigger mess. So for these reasons, it shouldn't be undone."

Curious if others have different readings.

nitwit005• 5 months ago

They all agree. A couple of them just chose to pretend they didn't.

duped• 5 months ago

The opinion should merely read

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises

(which it does, and expounds upon)

zeroonetwothree10• 5 months ago

Yes but in practice they delegate this power to the executive. Congress doesn’t run the IRS themselves after all

onlyrealcuzzo2• 5 months ago

Statutory Law is 50,000 pages, and that's just the beginning of everything you need to consider.

Make stupid laws, win stupid prizes.

It's almost like the legal system is designed so that you can get away with murder if you can afford enough lawyers.

fwip• 5 months ago

Of which, only a small fraction will be relevant in any particular case.

It's kind of like pointing at any major codebase and arguing that it's "stupid" to have millions of lines of code.

keernan7• 5 months ago

apparently so ill defined in law that 9 justices can't agree on it

That is not how the Supreme Court works. SCOTUS is a political body. Justices do one thing: cast votes. For any reason.

If they write an opinion it is merely their post hoc justification for their vote. Otherwise they do not have to explain anything. And when they do write an opinion it does not necessarily reflect the real reason for the way they voted.

Edit: Not sure why anyone is downvoting this comment. I was a trial attorney for 40+ years. If you believe what I posted is legally inaccurate, then provide a comment. But downvoting without explaining is ... just ... I don't know ... cowardly?

fuzzfactor20• 5 months ago

downvoting without explaining is ... just ...

Like I've said before, if you can't tell whether it's a bot or a real person voting, it doesn't matter anyway.

Might as well be a bot either way.

corrective upvote made

tokai3• 5 months ago

In normal democracies you have multiple parties, so there is a much better chance of creating a coalition around the government and force election/impeachment if the leadership goes rouge. The US system turned out to be as fragile as it looks.

dmix6• 5 months ago

The failure of the US is not so much in judicial system (with some recent exceptions) mostly in how weak Congress has been for over a decade as executive power expands (arguably since Bush and including during Obama). The system was designed to prevent that from happening from the very beginning with various layers of checks on power, but the public keeps wanting a president to blame and fix everything. The judicial branch has been much more consistent on this matter with some recent exceptions with the Unitary executive theory becoming more popular in the courts.

Ultimately no system can't stop that if there is a societal culture that tolerates the drumbeat of authoritarianism and centralization of power.

cael4504• 5 months ago

It really isn't ill-defined at all. Both the constitution and the law allowing the president to impose tariffs for national security reasons is clear. There are just some partisan hacks on the Supreme Court.

tyre2• 5 months ago

This specific law does not allow imposing tariffs, which is the whole point of the ruling. Roberts’s opinion says that a tariff is essentially a tax, which is not what Congress clearly delegated.

nutjob2• 5 months ago

Wrong law. Trump chose not to use the "impose tariffs for national security reasons" law in this case.

allywilson• 5 months ago

But that's not the issue.

'can the President unilaterally impose tariffs on any country he wants anytime he wants'

No, he can't impost tariffs on any country. He can only impose tariffs on American companies willing to import from any country.

shevy-java2• 5 months ago

It kind of shows that the USA does not have that strong means against becoming a dictatorship. George Washington probably did not think through the problem of the superrich bribing the whole system into their own use cases to be had.

hshdhdhj4444• 5 months ago

It’s one of the few things in the U.S. constitution that is not ill defined. Tariffs are very explicitly the prerogative of Congress.

The fact that the administration of tariffs is so much better defined than really anything else shouldn’t be surprising because tariffs is the proximate cause of the Revolutionary war.

It’s embarrassing that the 3 justices put their partisanship ahead of the clear language of the constitution and explicitly stated intentions of the founders.

csense2• 5 months ago

I don't think tariffs should be imposed capriciously at the President's whim.

But I do think tariffs are an appropriate policy tool that should be used to protect US companies against overseas competitors that get government subsidies or other unfair advantages: Low wages, safety regulations, worker protection, environmental rules, etc.

cogman10• 5 months ago

I agree with this assessment. And I think that the way it's setup in the constitution is correct, that congress needs to ultimately create the tariffs rather than the president. Creating tariffs unilaterally should almost never happen.

simonh3• 5 months ago

They can be and are. The USA had tariffs on many products prior to Trump.

tracker121• 5 months ago

I think GPs point was that Tariffs are legitimate as a practice and that some people have been led to believe that they shouldn't exist at all.

rozap• 5 months ago

Yep, that's why you need to convince Congress of that fact, as has been done in the past. Tariffs absolutely make sense as a strategic tool. There is no strategy here.

warmwaffles• 5 months ago

Ever try to get Congress to agree on something without packaging in another thing?

heresie-dabord• 5 months ago

There is no strategy here.

Unless the money is fully accounted and restituted, I believe we can assume what the strategy is.

omnimus2• 5 months ago

Do you agree with countries doing the opposite to the US? When for example US tech is better than the local alternative but the countries create unfair advantages to the local alternatives?

jdashg• 5 months ago

Absolutely!

conductr7• 5 months ago

I believe as a US citizen I have no say in how they make these decisions so this thought exercise is pointless. We all structure our governments differently and so compete globally with differing rules, I only care about how we do it here in the US. At times, what we do may be in reaction to others, but how we do it needs to be agreed upon here at home and for that we have a Constitution that gives this power to congress not the executive. I'm glad the court got it right, it's a glimmer of hope that the constitution still has some meaning.

Forgeties797• 5 months ago

Do you agree with countries doing the opposite to the US?

If their laws allow their leaders to enact tariffs then sure, they're welcome to do it. Foreign relations is complicated partially because countries operate differently. In the US, Congress is supposed to levy taxes and impose tariffs. Not the president. This game of nibbling (now chomping) at the edges of that clearly outlined role needs to end.

When for example US tech is better than the local alternative but the countries create unfair advantages to the local alternatives?

We can still enact tariffs and similar policies. We have the same mechanisms they do. I don’t understand what is so “unfair.” Trump just seems to call everything he doesn’t like “unfair.”

9dev• 5 months ago

That is not an unfair advantage, but protecting their domestic industries for reasons unrelated to the quality of the tech, for example to keep people in active employment, prevent bankruptcies, allow an industry to get up to speed, or a lot of other reasons entirely unrelated to the USA. All of these are valid; any country gets to decide who they want to allow on their markets, and to what conditions.

That is not what Trump has been doing, though. Using tariffs as retaliatory measures? As a threat because he didn’t get to "own" Greenland?

Let’s stop comparing sane political strategies to the actions of a narcissistic madman.

bsder• 5 months ago

Do you agree with countries doing the opposite to the US?

Yes, please! Maximally efficient is minimally robust.

We need robustness in the global economy more than some megajillionaire needs another half cent per customer in profit.

In addition, we need competition in a lot of areas where we have complete consolidation right now. The only way to get that is to give some protection to the little guys while they grow.

skeletal883• 5 months ago

This has nothing to do with tariffs and everything to do with us companies hsving an unfair advantage or justnot following EU regulations. Or musk trying to interfere in our politics and supporting extreme right wing parties. Also us government having access to our cloud data, etc. All our advertising money goes to the US to google/fb, because everyone is using them, not because they are inherently better at anything, for example.

unethical_ban4• 5 months ago

That's the issue: He used an emergency act passed in the 1970s designed for rapid response to other countries' "first strike" of economic hardship like the oil embargo.

Tariffs in general have not been touched at all, those that Congress wishes to pass. This is a ruling that the President cannot use the 1970s act to be a one-person economic warfare machine to the entire world when he doesn't like something.

linhns3• 5 months ago

Agree, and it should be Congress decision.

lawn• 5 months ago

Thoughtful application of tariffs are good.

Trump's usage of tariffs is pretty damn dumb.

softwaredoug• 5 months ago

We have laws explicitly for imposing tariffs for these reasons (like Trade Expansion Act of 1962, Trade Act of 1974)

The difference is they have to go through administrative procedure, and are subject to more judicial review to ensure administrative process was followed. Even if its a fig leaf in this administrative, its a tad slower with higher judicial oversight.

What Trump wants to do is impose tariffs on a whim using emergency powers where administrative procedure laws don't apply.

So the hope here: we have at least more predictability / stability in the tariff regime. But tariffs aren't going away

learingsci• 5 months ago

Or treaties or accords. All basically the same if squint. Sign something like the Paris Accord, you’re basically taxing consumers.

rkeene22• 5 months ago

Good news ! It is against the law (i.e., illegal) for a US President to impose tariffs (on a whim or otherwise) -- a US President doing so is doing so illegally and without constitutional authority!

When the US President commits crimes as the US President, he has absolute immunity from prosecution (otherwise, he might not be emboldened to break the law) so there is no judicial recourse, but the US Congress can still see the illegal activity and impeach and remove him from office to stop the execution of illegal activity. As our representatives within the US Government, they are responsible to us to enact our legislative outcomes. It appears they have determined that the illegal activity is what we wanted, or there would be articles of impeachment for these illegal acts.

The legislative branch can of course deliberately impose tariffs at any time for the reasons you listed.

cyanydeez3• 5 months ago

These tariffs have no basis in rational economics.

Full stop. It really is only about whether or not the president could do it.

That's all.

salawat• 5 months ago

There is no such thing as rational economics. Full stop.

whyenot• 5 months ago

I agree with you, but it's a tool that should only be used very sparingly because tariffs can be incredibly difficult to get rid of. See for example the "chicken tax" for light trucks which was instituted in 1964 (because the Europeans tariffed US chicken exports).

SmirkingRevenge4• 5 months ago

Maybe in rare cases, but for each of the various policy goals tariffs are used for, there are other kinds of targeted industrial policy that work better and cost less.

Tariffs are the most expensive way to try to onshore manufacturing. The cost per "job created" is astronomical usually. They incentivize corruption and black markets.

Even regular old subsidies are usually easier, cheaper, and less problematic

sigwinch6• 5 months ago

With as much respect as possible, isn’t this disproven by data now? You can’t connect tariffs to a single manufacturing job created.

olalonde• 5 months ago

It protects US compagnies at the expense of US consumers. Almost no economist think they are actually good for the economy, not even retaliatory tariffs.

QuadmasterXLII• 5 months ago

This has the air of getting congratulated for getting shanked in an alley while running to the hospital in hopes of getting treated for appendicitis. A knife, after all, is an appropriate surgery tool.

whateveracct3• 5 months ago

this isn't about tariffs

it's about if the executive can impose them

wesapien• 5 months ago

The cover story for tarrifs was re-Industrialization. The facts are that they are used more as another rent seeking maneuver, a street rat style protection racket or a means to coerce. Sell the theory but do something else.

dizzant2• 5 months ago

The opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf

wiradikusuma• 5 months ago

"The ruling applies to his so-called "Liberation Day" tariffs, but not individual tariffs he's imposed on specific countries or products " -- So what's gonna happen next?

For countries that negotiated special treatment, they'll be stuck with a (now worse) deal?

For other countries, they'll return to the previous deal (non-tariff)?

mandevil• 5 months ago

So I am far from an expert, but I saw that Capital Economics (a Macroeconomic analysis firm) put out a note saying that Trump still had power under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. But there are three catches for that. First, it only lasts for 150 days unless Congress votes to approve them. Second, that it has to apply to all countries equally: meaning that it can't be used to give some countries a break if they sign a deal, so all of the deals are going to be unenforcable on America's end. Third, it caps the tariff rate at 15%.

Like with refunds, this is a mess of Trump's own making, and now we get to figure it out.

rtkwe7• 5 months ago

They've already voted once that a day isn't a day to avoid having to maintain some of his emergency declarations so I don't think that 150 day timer will actually end up running.

https://rollcall.com/2025/03/18/house-majority-rules-when-a-...

NooneAtAll3• 5 months ago

First, it only lasts for 150 days unless Congress votes to approve them

what's the cooldown of this ability?

appointment• 5 months ago

As far as I know none of Trump's deals have been ratified by the Senate. None of them are valid.

cmrdporcupine• 5 months ago

This is one of the things that drives me nuts about certain conservatives here in Canada who have been crying that Carney just "needs to make deal" (on some realpolitik basis) -- that would have been completely insanely bad bargaining. Everyone knew this court date was coming (and also that there's midterms this year). Why on earth would Canada show its belly to Trump when Trump himself was potentially about to be de-fanged? Why ink an unfavourable deal and then find two years later that we're stuck with it while the US political arena has changed?

excerionsforte• 5 months ago

Should have been done sooner, I take issue with the 3 who dissented and how long it took there get there. The constitution is clear on this matter. Prices are insane already, we don't need fake emergencies to drive up prices even more.

lysace• 5 months ago

https://apnews.com/live/supreme-court-tariff-ruling-updates

Furious about the defeat, Trump said he will impose a global 10% tariff as an alternative while pressing his trade policies by other means. The new tariffs would come under a law that restricts them to 150 days.

Don't you americans have some kind of mechanism for removing a president from office when the trust is no longer there? I remember hearing a lot about it during the Clinton era in the 90s.

DangitBobby4• 5 months ago

Turns out, no, that mechanism doesn't actually exist.

carefulfungi• 5 months ago

In the US, Congress has two parts: the House of Representatives (members proportional-ish to state populations elected every 2 years) and the Senate (two members per state with 1/3rd of the body elected every 2 years to a 6 year term). To remove the President (impeachment), requires the House to "indict" the President with a majority vote; and the Senate to "convict" with a 2/3rds majority vote.

Both of these bodies are currently controlled by Trump's party. So .. it ain't happening. Trump's party supports his actions.

If Democrats win the house in the upcoming (November) elections, it is likely that they can pass an impeachment indictment for a number of causes. It is unlikely that the Senate finds the 2/3rds necessary to remove him from office, though.

Trump was impeached by the House twice in his first term (impeachment is rare in US history - it has happened 4 times and 2 of those are Trump); the Senate declined to remove him from office both times. Even after the January 6th riot, with MAGA literally storming through their offices threatening to hang their leader, only 7 Republican Senators voted to impeach. 43 Republicans voted No. With one of them, Susan Collins, famously saying she thought Trump had "learned his lesson." It's fair to say he did learn a lesson; but not the one Collins imagined.

NickC25• 5 months ago

Great, no more tariffs...which means that all those corporations who raised prices to compensate, will willingly drop prices back down to normal levels...right?

...Right?

tracker121• 5 months ago

Not likely... most of the inflation pricing increases were just exercises in maximizing profits during emergency circumstances started during COVID and carrying into today. Actually starting in the later 2010's if you look at say fast-food pricing that was dramatically outpacing inflation... like a massive conspiratorial experiment to see how much you could squeeze out of the population in terms of pricing.

neonmagenta• 5 months ago

So this means all prices are finally coming down soon, right? RIGHT?

tracker121• 5 months ago

No... because most conventional pricing increases exceeded the economic demands... at least in terms of groceries, which is one of the bigger areas of growth along with insurance rates (looking at auto insurance, required by govt in most states).

The food industries were seeing record profits at the same time of massive inflation, they were maximizing prices to see how much they could grow their wealth, while trying to minimize costs, decreasing quality and just absolutely abhorrent behavior all around.

I'm all for capitalism, but I strongly feel that the limitations granted to corporations by govt should come as part of a social contract that has largely been ignored completely. We should curtail a lot of the limitations granted and actually hold executives responsible for their decisions. We should also establish that "shareholder value" is not the only focus that companies should have. A corporation is not a person, that a corporation exists is fine, that they've been shielded from responsibility altogether in that limited liability now means you can literally destroy towns and executives and boards face no consequences is deplorable.

Governments should be limited, by extension the shields govt grants to corporations should similarly be limited. When the US constitution was written most corporations were formed around civil projects, then disbanded. Most companies were sole proprietorships or small partnerships. I think we need to get closer back to these types of arrangements.

dolphinscorpion• 5 months ago

Iran is f-ed!

tracker121• 5 months ago

Just a thought.... I would think that "refunds" in the form of US Bonds with varying rates of maturity would probably be appropriate so as not to "shock" the system so to speak.

That said, I'm still a proponent of having the bulk of the federal budget based on tariffs and excise taxes. I don't like income and property taxes in general. I'd be less opposed to income taxes if there was truly a way to fairly leverage them, there simply isn't. VAT is at least more fair IMO. I also wouldn't mind a tax as part of leveraged asset loans (including cars/homes) with maybe a single exclusion for a primary residence and vehicle under a given price.

apexalpha3• 5 months ago

Since tariffs apparently brought in about $200 billion I guess you can add another 0.66% to the 2025 deficit.

tracker121• 5 months ago

Hence my (somewhat downvoted) comment in that I think the refunds should probably just be issued aa Treasury Bonds with varying maturity dates. Cashing out all t once can only lead to more chaos/disruption to the broader economy.

micromacrofoot2• 5 months ago

It's going to be nearly impossible for it to happen at once anyway, it's going to take a long time to unravel this mess

pseingatl• 5 months ago

Because of thw tariffs, it has not been possible to send small packages from Asia to the US. I wonder now how long it will take for service to be restored.

linhns3• 5 months ago

I believe this is due to the USPS loophole being closed, tariffs only play a small part.

sowbug6• 5 months ago

It may also have been because of the end of the de minimis ($800) tariff exemption. Without that exemption, even something valued at one cent would have to go through the import-tax collection process, which meant that small packages were no longer economical to send. That exemption is still gone.

throw03172019• 5 months ago

The damage is done though. Other countries have imposed their own tariffs along with the strained relations with all of our allies.

motbus3• 5 months ago

As a foreigner, I approve the increase of taxes in US.

It would fix most of my country economy that needs to pay food in USD

ChicagoDave• 5 months ago

So Trump will now see the economy grow despite his preferences.

He’ll take credit for it too.

“This was the plan all along.”

linuxhansl2• 5 months ago

Finally some sanity. The administration has use laws about "national security" and other so call "emergencies" to impose tariffs. If everything is an emergency then nothing is, and that was clearly not congress' intention with those laws.

The power to impose tariffs rests with the legislator, not the executive. Of course our congress is effectively useless - we can thank decades of Mitch McConnell's (and others) "not giving the other side anything" thinking for that.

dmix6• 5 months ago

The most dangerous part of the current admin is the fealty he demands from congress and how exploits his popularity to be a kingmaker in local elections.

This is something FDR did heavily in the 1930s to expand his own power and bully congress into passing the New Deal. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/purge-1938 He also used legally questionable executive orders like crazy.

shimman• 5 months ago

lol you say FDR was bullying Congress, as if the New Deal coalition wasn't the most successful political movement that this country ever had (won nearly every Presidential election (only losing to the man that defeated Nazis in Europe), had control of the House from like 1932 to 1992, nearly controlled the Senate for just as long too).

Attacking FDR, someone who stood up against business interests to defend labor, kinda exposes the game here.

goldfish3• 5 months ago

Can always count on HN to mindlessly equivocate.

mullingitover8• 5 months ago

Honestly FDR doesn't get enough credit for probably saving capitalism.

He borrowed just enough of the stuff socialists were promising, and bolted it onto the government to mollify the working class who'd been absolutely ravaged by oligarchs for the preceding decades. You only have to look at the rest of the world to see how things might've turned out without FDR's very reasonable interventions.

UltraSane5• 5 months ago

The New Deal was a good thing when the US was in the Great Depression and there was a communist revolution in Russia.

linuxhansl2• 5 months ago

Congressional Republicans let him do it.

Congressional Republicans confirmed every single one of his cabinet members.

So perhaps he demands it, but does not give congress a pass. At all. They chose to let him.

Telemakhos• 5 months ago

If everything is an emergency then nothing is, and that was clearly not congress' intention with those laws.

The state of exception is the true test of sovereignty, and powers that crave sovereignty therefore seek out states of exception. The PATRIOT act created new institutions and authorities like the TSA. Just a few years ago local health departments were making business-shuttering decisions that ruined life for a lot of people over the common cold. Ukrainian war funding provides the EU with opportunities for exports and new experiments in joint funding (Eurobonds). Emergencies and exceptions are how power grows, so everything can become an emergency if you look at it in the right way.

zanellato19• 5 months ago

Are you equating covid to the common cold? If so, this comment is absurd.

c223• 5 months ago

I mean, you're right that a lot of liberties are taken with what constitutes an "emergency" these days, but when every other country on the planet is declaring the same emergency there might be some substance there.

somenameforme5• 5 months ago

We're currently in the midst of 51 ongoing "national emergencies" [1], dating back to at least Carter. I think something that the next great empire will learn from is to limit emergency powers as well as the ability to create emergency powers, because in spite of their name they inevitably end up becoming normalized and just used as regular powers.

The description of some of those emergencies is comedic: "Declared a bank holiday from March 6 through March 9, 1933, using the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 as a legal basis."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...

techblueberry6• 5 months ago

Most of these seem at least plausible to me given they almost all have to do with foreign conflicts, and given that they have to be renewed every year, they can't be too excessive since Trump has kept in place 8/9 of Biden's emergency declarations? and your description of the most comedic one was actually maybe the most important one?

It was to stave off a bank run at the beginning of the great depression, and it was only done as a temporary measure so that Congress had time to write the long term legislation which they did 4 days later on March 9th.

m4rtink• 5 months ago

This has been unfortunatelly an issue at least since Caesar times. :P

SunshineTheCat• 5 months ago

Still find it kinda wild that it's the Republicans fighting tooth and nail against any balance of power to...

...raise taxes

justin66• 5 months ago

Rip van Winkle, let me tell you how they are treating conflict with Russia…

kgwxd• 5 months ago

There's nothing sane about it. All part of the plan. Next comes ignoring of this ruling (err, looks like that already happened) and they put another log on the fire under the pot.

dec0dedab0de2• 5 months ago

I swear that whoever is advising trump is trying to purposefully give tariffs, and immigration enforcement a bad name.

It seriously feels like a scheme to ensure cheap labor.

oldcigarette• 5 months ago

Yeah the resulting stigma on tariffs is a bit unfortunate. You could imagine a system of tariffs that was intended to set a sort of globalized minimum wage in certain segments. The US could even have foreign entities to distribute the tariff income to the workers in those countries for example.

Tariffs are totally a reasonable tool for protecting national security interests or leveling the playing field for the American worker. Unfortunately none of that was done in a coherent or legible way.

With all the global fallout and nothing to show for it I'm really not sure I could have come up with a better way to sabotage the United States.

dec0dedab0de2• 5 months ago

I definitely think we should highly tax, or completely ban imports from countries that basically allow slavery of their working class. Though, if anyone were to bring that up now, it would incite all kinds of emotional attacks.

I could imagine people being on board with it if they could get a tariff funded subsidy for things made in America. If the average person got an explicit discount on their Ford because some rich person paid extra taxes on their Audi, then tariffs wouldn't seem so bad. I just think the actual goal is to make them political suicide for decades.

jacknews• 5 months ago

what a mess

and, i'll bet, just the first of many

marojejian• 5 months ago

Surprised that in all the comments so far, no one has noted that Trump has many fallback options, which he said he'd use to re-create the tariffs, when this happens:

https://www.cato.org/commentary/trump-has-many-options-supre...

https://www.myplainview.com/news/politics/article/trump-has-...

A step in the right direction, but there's a lot of progress yet to be made if we want to restrain the executive.

epistasis• 5 months ago

This is what I've been complaining about as much as the tariffs themselves: the president does not levy taxes and should not be levying tariffs except for the very narrow authority that has been used in the past through explicit congressional delegation.

Congress is already completely in Trump's pocket. By doing it through Congress, Trump loses most of his bribery and bullying opportunities.

techblueberry6• 5 months ago

Look I hate Trump as much as the next guy and don't want him power for a multitude of reasons, but there is a big difference between "a government does things I don't like but basically follows the rules to do them" and "a government can act completely unrestrained from the rules". The Trump administration having to do more work to justify their actions in a legal manner is good, and the checks and balances working to maintain the law is good.

rylan-talerico• 5 months ago

Relieved to see checks and balances in action, and a largely Trump-appointed Supreme Court enforcing limits set by law

NalNezumi• 5 months ago

I wonder how this will be interpreted outside US? realistically there's no way countries affected will get any "sorry" out of this, legally or from the administration.

By the neo-royalist [1]interpretation of the current administrations policies, many countries have either decided to pay for the royalty fee to get tariff exemption in a way aristocats in pre-Westphalian Europe dealed with each other. While other stuck with the idea that it's stil the country you do deal with, not royals/aristocats.

All those countries (like the Swiss giving Trump golden rolexes for appeasement) that bent their knee: are they now gonna roll it back or are they thinking that the US system is so compromised, current administration will just find another way to play the neo-royalist game, creating new policies similar to the tariff so that each side lose, and then carve out an exemption for "the buddies" of the administration (and if you don't pay the tithe, you shall lose)

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organi...

resters• 5 months ago

The real issue is emergency powers. Trump defines an emergency as something congress doesn't agree with him on. There has not been any use of emergency powers in recent years that is remotely appropriate.

Mr_Eri_Atlov• 5 months ago

Finally some good fucking food

supjeff• 5 months ago

does anybody think prices will fall after this?

i don't

zeroonetwothree10• 5 months ago

The average effect of tariffs on prices was less than 1% so it would be hard to notice

Surac• 5 months ago

The damage is done. Nobody will trust USA ever again

1over137• 5 months ago

"ever" is a long time. But for years/decades indeed. Certainly the case where I live.

strongpigeon• 5 months ago

So, the majority decision makes sense to me, but I'm annoyed that they're unwilling to tackle whether there was an actual emergency or not. The was no "unusual and extraordinary" situation that happened to warrant this emergency declaration and judging what's "unusual and extraordinary" seems like something that falls pretty squarely in the Supreme Court's purview.

But no. The court pretty much says the president decides what's an emergency, leading us to having 51 active emergencies [0], with one starting back in 1979 (in response to the Iran hostage crisis) and with Trump leading the pack with 11 of such declarations. Congress didn't say "the president can just decide and that's it", but that's what's happening because of the SC's deferential posture.

Deferring so much to the political sphere (which is the reason behind this posture) is leading to a much less stable and more "swing-y" country.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...

01100011• 5 months ago

Well, the good news for Trump and other elites is that we will all take a day off from discussing the Epstein files and wondering

- why no one in America is being charged

- why the files were so heavily redacted in violation of congress

- why the redactions were tailored to protect the names of some powerful people and not victims

Trump started talking about aliens yesterday. If the tariffs and aliens can't get people distracted from the Epstein filed then we'll be bombing Iran in 2 weeks...

paul7986• 5 months ago

Politics is always a sh!t show on both sides we humans constantly think the next one will better. It will never be better maybe unless AI destroys society and we all go back to living on the land cause money/greed/power always drives the madness!

tgv• 5 months ago

And all that at the reasonable costs of a few billion lives. What a bargain!

dizzant2• 5 months ago

In his dissent [1], Justice Kavanaugh states:

Given that the phrase “adjust the imports”—again, in a statutory provision that did not use specific words such as “tariff ” or “duty”—was unanimously held by this Court in 1976 to include tariffs, and given that President Nixon had similarly relied on his statutory authority to “regulate . . . importation” to impose 10 percent tariffs on virtually all imports from all countries, could a rational citizen or Member of Congress in 1977 have understood “regulate . . . importation” in IEEPA not to encompass tariffs? I think not. Any citizens or Members of Congress in 1977 who somehow thought that the “regulate . . . importation” language in IEEPA excluded tariffs would have had their heads in the sand.

The roll-call vote for HB7738 (IEEPA) was not recorded [2], so we seemly can't confirm today how any sitting members voted at the time. But there are two members of Congress remaining today who were present for the original vote: Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ed Markey (D-Mass). They clearly both agree with the Court, while having different opinions on the tariffs themselves.

Statement by Grassley [3]:

I’m one of the only sitting members of Congress who was in office during IEEPA’s passage. Since then, I’ve made clear Congress needs to reassert its constitutional role over commerce, which is why I introduced prospective legislation that would give Congress a say when tariffs are levied in the future. ... I appreciate the work [President Trump] and his administration are doing to restore fair, reciprocal trade agreements. I urge the Trump administration to keep negotiating, while also working with Congress to secure longer-term enforcement measures.

Statement by Markey after previous decision in August [4]:

Today’s ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit makes it clear that President Trump’s chaotic tariff policy is illegal. ... Today’s ruling is an important step in ending the economic whiplash caused by Trump’s abusive tariff authority.

N=2 is scant evidence, but it seems like both sides of the aisle "had their head in the sand", or Justice Kavanaugh's historical interpretation is a bit off.

[1] p.127: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf

[2] g. 22478: https://www.congress.gov/95/crecb/1977/07/12/GPO-CRECB-1977-...

[3] https://www.ketv.com/article/lawmakers-from-nebraska-iowa-re...

[4] https://www.sbc.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2025/8/ranking-m...

interestpiqued6• 5 months ago

Someone needs to track all the investment "promises" Trump touted he gained through negotiation with foreign countries. I got to imagine foreign countries had no plans on making good on those deals.

bonif• 5 months ago

Intercooler

arttaboi2• 5 months ago

Does this mean that Make in America subsidies will have to double? Make in America only made sense when offset by high tariffs.

deadbabe• 5 months ago

I’m tired of the blackpilled redditors who kept saying this was never gonna happen, the court was just going to do whatever Trump wants. I really need to stop visiting that site.

arttaboi2• 5 months ago

Also, who thinks that striking this down now is too little, too late because the rest of the world has already imposed retaliatory tariffs? And what’s the guarantee that they will lower them?

michelb• 5 months ago

The damage has been done, and probably can't be undone. Not sure you can convince me that they didn't think it wouldn't be struck down. It has destroyed a part of the underclass economy and probably some smaller to medium-sized businesses. Pretty sure some people figure they have had a good run with it until now.

Buttons840• 5 months ago

Justice delayed is justice denied.

throw_gold• 5 months ago

A total mess of an opinion, should have gone all the way, as always only the lawyers win.

skizm• 5 months ago

My first reaction to this was: Matt Levine will need to cut his vacation short. Again.

EchoReflection• 5 months ago

Who dissented in the Supreme Court tariff ruling?

The dissenters were Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh, with Kavanaugh authoring the principal dissent.[1][2][3]

Citations: [1] Supreme Court strikes down tariffs - SCOTUSblog https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-dow... [2] Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (Tariffs) - SCOTUSblog https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/learning-resourc... [3] Northwestern experts on SCOTUS decision in tariff case https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2026/02/northwestern-e... [4] Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump: An Empirical Breakdown of the Court’s IEEPA Tariff Decision https://legalytics.substack.com/p/learning-resources-inc-v-t... [5] Live updates: Trump vows new tariffs after 'deeply disappointing' Supreme Court ruling https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/live-blog/-tr... [6] Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump | 607 U.S. - Justia Supreme Court https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/607/24-1287/ [7] [PDF] 24-1287 Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (02/20/2026) - Foxnews https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2026/... [8] Why a Republican Supreme Court struck down Trump's tariffs - Vox https://www.vox.com/politics/479919/supreme-court-trump-tari... [9] Learning Resources v. Trump - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_Resources_v._Trump [10] The Supreme Court has struck down Trump administration's use of ... https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/1r9y4z8/the_supr... [11] Supreme Court Strikes Down Use of Emergency Powers for Trump's ... https://www.agweb.com/news/supreme-court-strikes-down-use-em... [12] Supreme Court strikes down Trump's tariffs - NPR https://www.npr.org/2026/02/20/nx-s1-5672383/supreme-court-t... [13] Supreme Court Invalidates Executive Tariffs Under IEEPA https://www.currentfederaltaxdevelopments.com/blog/2026/2/20... [14] Live updates: Trump pans tariffs ruling, warns he can impose ... https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5746060-live-upd... [15] Supreme Court strikes down most of Trump's tariffs in a major blow ... https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court...

epolanski5• 5 months ago

So, are they gonna be reversed tomorrow? What happens?

frm88• 5 months ago

They will, but Trump signed a new round of global 10% tariffs into being which hs a limited duration of 150 day until Congress has to ratify it. I couldn't find out whether there's a cool down on that, so that he could maybe wait day 151 and then start all over or if it's a one time measure.

The new 10% will be effect I've from tuesday and he expects all deals he made with several countries to just continue without protest.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-imposes-10-tar...

consumer4512• 5 months ago

In response, POTUS just declared a global 10% tariff. Does anyone understand if this is legal?

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-orders-temporary-1...

morkalork• 5 months ago

Aw shucks, I guess we'll have to wait another year to find out won't we?

cmurf3• 5 months ago

In a sense this is the correct level of punishment for all. The courts are slow and deliberative.

The Congress could solve this in a week. Impeachment and removal from office.

ckmate-king-2• 5 months ago

Offhand, yes, this looks legal, under section 22 of the Trade Act of 1974. Such tariffs, however, are limited to 150 days and a maximum rate of 15%.

whateveracct3• 5 months ago

The question is if after 150 days..does he just do it again?

davorak3• 5 months ago

I think I found the law:

SEC. 122. BALANCE-OF-PAYMENTS AUTHORITY.
(a) Whenever fundamental international payments problems
require special import measures to restrict imports—
(1) to deal with large and serious United States balanceof-payments deficits,
(2) to prevent an imminent and significant depreciation of
the dollar in foreign exchange markets, or
(3) to cooperate with other countries in correcting an international balance-> of-payments disequilibrium,
the President shall proclaim, for a period not exceeding 150 days
(unless such period is extended by Act of Congress)—

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-10384/pdf/COMPS-10...

search for "SEC. 122." to find it quickly.

None of these seem to apply and I am not a lawyer, but if they do not apply then, why would the president have the power of taxation when that is given to the legislative branch not executive branch.

Not clear to me why these new tariffs would be on better footing than the last and the last never seemed to be on good footing.

ifwinterco2• 5 months ago

The irony is 10% universal global tariff might actually make some economic sense if he got rid of all the other ones

consumer4512• 5 months ago

In practice, isn't this just a blanket federal sales tax/VAT? Isn't that inflationary?

I am curious, what do you see as the benefit of this style of taxation?

remarkEon• 5 months ago

Link to SCOTUSblog coverage, which has the link to the actual opinion. I tend to eschew early media coverage of things like this and just go to the source.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-dow...

shevy-java2• 5 months ago

Hmm. This is celebrated as a victory - I don't mind that, who likes the crazy pro-russian orange man anyway. But I think it should be pointed out that he went on to use an old law. So the supreme court basically said that this was an unfit use case. Ok. They could just come up with a new law that is tailor-made and may eventually be approved. It may take some time but they could technically do so, right? So I am not sure if that victory dance isn't just too early.

Ronje2• 5 months ago

You do realize these tariffs aren't going away. They just used a different legal way to use them. Section 232, 301, 201, 122 and 338 will allow him put these right back on

Tadpole91812• 5 months ago

They still have to pay back all the money collected. And those other tariff avenues have different restrictions, like maximum amounts or limited durations.

UltraSane5• 5 months ago

Those are more limited in duration and percentage.

rsynnott5• 5 months ago

They could just come up with a new law that is tailor-made and may eventually be approved.

Allowing Trump to trash the US economy is one thing, but even a Republican congress may be a little unwilling to actively _do it themselves_. Trump won't last forever, and they need to get re-elected.

herzigma• 5 months ago

What a collosal missed opportunity for Trump. His supreme court was about to save him from himself and his ruinous tariffs. He could have continued to insist that his tariffs were genius while letting someone else take responsibility for bad outcomes. Economy does poorly? Blame the supreme court for striking down his beautiful tariffs.

Economy does well? Take credit for shepherding the economy past a hostile court.

Remember, in his narcissistic mind, Trump can never fail he can only be failed.

Instead he's now insisting he'll restart the tariffs under some even more flimsy interpretation of executive power.

thrawa8387336• 5 months ago

Is the US a country or a market?

Animats4• 5 months ago

Useful site for daily tariff updates: Trade Compliance Resource Hub.[1] They've marked which tariffs are now invalid and which are still valid.

[1] https://www.tradecomplianceresourcehub.com/2026/02/20/trump-...

dgellow2• 5 months ago

Damn, that’s pretty much all of them

fuzzfactor20• 5 months ago

It couldn't happen to a more deserving act of vengeance.

Animats4• 5 months ago

This law firm seems to be on top of changes. The site just updated with Trump's latest proclamation.

    Section 122: Implemented (effective Feb. 24, 2026) [1]

That's Trump's new 10% tariff applied to most countries. There are some exceptions. Most of the extreme per-country tariffs are gone. For now, anyway. Trump may add Section 201 tariffs later, but those are per product category. What Trump can do in this mode doesn't include most of his per-country "deals".

Amusingly, the new 10% tariff doesn't apply until Feb 24th, so you have a few days to avoid it. All this expires July 24th, because the law being invoked here has a time limit unless Congress extends it.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/02/impo...

defrost3• 5 months ago

because the law being invoked here has a time limit unless Congress extends it.

Like many similar US laws it probably has a time limit expressed in lapsed Congressional days.

Heavy emphasis on "Congressional days".

Catch me up here, has the Congressional "clock" (count of lapsed days) been restarted since the current admin shut it down as almost the first order of business for 2025?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43358343

  Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622) with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025.

Is it still "legally" the first week of the 119th United States Congress 11 months later ?

rtkwe7• 5 months ago

This may not reflect the tariffs shipping and customs attempt to gather. Generally shipping companies just comply with what the customs agents say is required and at least publicly the Trump admin is saying they're going to continue collecting last I heard.

ArchieScrivener• 5 months ago

British reporting on American news is barf retarded.

almosthere2• 5 months ago

That's unfortunate - it was mostly a tax on the rich!

kyoji• 5 months ago

lol, I would love to hear how you arrived at this conclusion.

almosthere2• 5 months ago

It all depends on what you buy. Mostly the wealthy are buying things these days. Everyone else is buying US grown food.

agentifysh2• 5 months ago

Doesn't seem like the market has priced the implication of this yet?

All in all, this seems like a major major blow to Trump. I'm more impressed that United State's laws are capable of gate keeping the president like this and despite people like Dalio dooming it up, it makes me more confident in America ironically.

Tadpole91812• 5 months ago

Have you not seen that Trump already announced he's ignoring this decision and retroactively applying a different justification for the tariffs? He's also imposing a 10% global tariff on top of anything, just for the audacity of trying to stop him.

Ronje2• 5 months ago

Glad the Tariffs are back on! Good shit trump!

UltraSane5• 5 months ago

There is no excuse for why the Supreme Court took this long to make this obvious ruling. The delay made the refund situation much worse.

jongjong• 5 months ago

We need to abolish the legal system. Just go back to old-school vigilante justice. It's just too arbitrary. Blanket tariffs were a good idea but if they're being selectively applied, then it's fundamentally unfair; it becomes a matter of who is better at bribing the government using lobbyists. Justice is impossible at scale.

ngetchell• 5 months ago

Blanket tariffs were a terrible idea. And the advisors that told Trump he could successfully start a gun fight with just his pointed finger in his pocket should scare us all.

No adults in the room to stop him.

ihaveone• 5 months ago

What a loser

bdelmas3• 5 months ago

People may or may not have voted for Trump but I find this extremely disturbing. Unless it’s illegal when did the DOJ become involved in politics and policies? They are more and more stepping outside of their role. Setting tarifs is one of the tools and role of the executive branch. This will limit even more what a president can and cannot do.

padjo4• 5 months ago

The DOJ? What are you talking about? This is the judicial branch, you know one of the three coequal branches of government. It just ruled that the power to set tariffs is not in fact a power of the executive branch.

bdelmas3• 5 months ago

I am not sure what you are not understanding since you know there are 3 branches.

The judicial has no say on this. The judicial branch is more and more pushing political agenda when it’s not their role. Tariffs were always part of the executive branch, it’s by itself an executive action in the spirit of the law. Still if the US decides that it should not be part of the executive branch anymore, it is not to the judicial branch to decide! But it is up to the legislative branch.

This is what I am saying. Plus the fact that the US is stripping more and more power from a branch called the "executive branch" making it less and less what it is supposed to do.

Dansvidania• 5 months ago

And once again “ask for forgiveness don’t ask for permission”, especially if you’d be asking about fucking up western civilisation (corollary)

Sparkyte• 5 months ago

I'm for reciprocal tarifs. I'm just not for the politics and narcisism of the government.

BrenBarn• 5 months ago

A stopped clock is right twice a day. Let's not let this decision distract us from the fact that the supreme court is a complete charade, all day, every day. It is a corrupt and meaningless institution and has been for at least 10 years, if not multiple decades.

Havoc• 5 months ago

And the US circus continues

hn_acker• 5 months ago

In Justice Gorsuch's concurrence, his argument that the majority opinion written by Justice Kagan in this tariffs case is inconsistent with votes of previous Democratic justices in previous cases about executive branch discretion does not hold water [1]. Also, there's this tidbit (where MQD stands for major questions doctrine) [1]:

After falsely claiming that the Democratic appointees “do not object to [the MQD’s] application in this case” (which, in point of fact, they do),

[1] https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/212-the-gorsuch-kagan-tariffs...

Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court

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