hckrnws

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)

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.

How is this not reverse Byzantine tax farming?

Where you going with this?

Afaik, Byzantine (or reverse) and other private tax collection setups aren't illegal.

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?

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

Lutnick is Secretary of Commerce. This is a smaller role than Scott Bessent, who is the Secretary of the Treasury.

You're right, I'm wrong, sorry, I was checking my memory on Wikipedia [1] which opens the section of his bio "Secretary of Commerce" with the line "Following the 2024 presidential election, Lutnick was being considered as secretary of the treasury." and I swapped the two roles.

While a smaller role, this is a worse conflict of interest as the secretary of commerce is directly responsible for recommending tarriff actions to the President.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Lutnick#Secretary_of_co...

[flagged]

?

Amazing. Did he get the role because of his skillset, of because of his skill at keeping his mouth shut?

His brother-in-law is a prison guard. Just kidding but would anyone be surprised?

And bought a house from Epstein for $10

[flagged]

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.

Trump has been obsessed with tariffs for decades. I fully believe he thought this was a great idea. Lutnick, on the other hand, quite obviously forsaw this eventuality (as did anyone who understands how power actually flows in the United States) and encouraged it while preparing to profit massively himself. It's an obvious play, good on him for getting away with it. It's clear at this point that this administration has utterly collapsed the idea of the rule of law, though. 15 years ago this would have been a scandal that would have led to firings and possibly impeachment

And now Scott Bessent has single-handedly made tariffs a seemingly illegitimate economic tool. Nice job.

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.

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.

The idea of getting a refund for mischaracterized tariffs is actually fairly common (it's called a duty drawback and there's a cottage industry around this). It's generally used when an importer incorrectly categorized their import under an HS code that has a higher duty than the correctly categorized HS code.

The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger. Will be interesting to see how they (importers and CBP) work through this.

A regular importer who routinely pays customs duties is now owed money by Customs and Border Protection. Can they now set off future duties against the balance owed them? Normally, reciprocal debt cancellation is legal.

The U.S. Treasury has a whole system for this, but in the other direction. If the government owes you money, and you owe the government money, the Treasury will deduct what you owe from whatever they are paying out.[1] But they're not set up for that in the other direction.

[1] https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/TOP/

> The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger.

The administration will just do nothing. They need 3 maneuvers for this to drag out longer than Trump 2.

There is no intention to follow the law here.

I wager he’ll:

1. Claim to refund the money to each taxpayer with a Trump-signed check.

2. The number of checks will not total $200 B. Any reporting to the contrary will take up space from the truth about Epstein.

3. Before 2028, a loyal SuperPAC will form with hundreds of billions in dark money.

"…refund the money to each taxpayer…"

I've got receipts.

Literally. I have receipts for hundreds of dollars where the tariff is itemized (from JLCPCB, etc.)

Smart money is that they will make some token comment about "leave it up to the states" or lower courts and then do absolutely nothing about it

The feds are the ones that control import duties, not the states. The courts will decide two years from now what to do.

I get how it works, I’m mostly talking about the how admin will spin it/shirk responsibility

I got charged a $600 tariff from UPS to ship a $30 25-pound sandbag into the US from Canada.

UPS didn't even deliver the product.

I'm suing them in small claims.

We'll see what happens.

I imagine that even after the ruling, our ass backwards legal system will somehow say this makes sense, even though the tariff rate was never near high enough for that bill to make any sense.

Further, they're going to get refunded the $10 it MIGHT have cost them.

> 25-pound sandbag into the US from Canada.

It's not the point, but why were you doing this? Surely internationally shipping a sack of sand is more painful than getting a local one?

This could just be across the border.

> just be across the border.

It was interesting to see shops in the border towns of south & south east Switzerland buying & selling products from Italy, a relatively cheaper market.

I mean, when I was young we lived in Poland right next to the border with Slovakia and we'd drive over once a week for groceries and to buy fuel because it was just so much cheaper over there. Nowadays it's the reverse since they got the Euro - most Polish shops near the border cater to Slovakian shoppers and even accept Euro for payment.

> even accept Euro for payment.

Pre Brexit, I encounter a shop that did this in London and was surprised.

Having just been over there again, it's not hard to be entirely cashless, so the convenience isn’t missed.

Italians seem to like dealing in cash, with various taxis and hotels being cheaper if you pay cash. I guess that means it’s off the books?

American here. My experience is that the US dollar seems to be accepted in tons of stores in countries all over in the Americas Europe and Asia. Trade is trade it seems.

Huh? In what world was the tariff on sand 2000%?

It wasn't the tariff. UPS has been tacking on a ridiculously high paperwork fee for the service of processing tariff payments. Other shipping companies have also had fees, but UPS is the main one that's made it exorbitant and disproportionately higher than the tariff itself.

I suspect that my recent experience confirms this. Our daughter shipped two suitcases home from the UK, paying some local company for "door-to-door" delivery. They contracted with UPS who demanded an additional $32 when the first bag showed up. For the second she paid the same fee online so they wouldn't require a check at the door.

I'm thinking the delivery agents such as UPS, Fedex, USPS now need to sue the United States so they can pay back all the recipients the fees they charged, plus interest.

There are going to be a raft of class action suits based on this.

As one of my lawyers once said, the only winners here are the lawyers.

“ As one of my lawyers once said, the only winners here are the lawyers.”

Congress is full of lawyers do it’s pretty natural that they make rules that favor lawyers.

That's a great question. I would also love to know that answer. I agree with you that they're not going to share the refund if the importer was the middleman in the supply chain, and same thing if the importer was also the seller.

There is a 1099 specifically for money received from the government.

https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-1099-g

I think the tax is basically on the profit made when you add up costs and expenses. Say:

Before: Importer pays China $10 for widget, pays $2 duty, sells to shop for $12 - profit zero, tax on that zero.

Now: Paid $10 for widget. Paid $2 duty, sold for $12, $2 refunded - profit $2, pays tax on the $2.

At least that's the normal way of doing accounting. There can be odd exceptions and complications in local laws.

Yes, I think that's the starting point. Another part of my question was whether a CPA applying GAAP would recommend recognizing the $2 as other income, or else as a liability against a future claim from the customer who bought the widget and is now seeking a partial refund.

I did what passes for research these days and concluded that if the claim is "probable and estimable," then it could be recorded as a "contingent liability" rather than other income. Relevant facts would include whether the tariff refund included a pass-through refund mandate (unlikely with this administration), or whether class actions for refunds against merchants were pending (inevitable).

I imagine the government will provide some sort of guidance for that kind of stuff?

Related question, unanswerable except maybe as a rough estimate: how much will it cost, in accountant/bookkeeper time, to do all the administrivia required to process all these refunds?

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.

> 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.

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.

Many are beyond furious

Many voted for this

Very few people voted for tariffs, specifically. They voted for a promise of a return to a world where they were on top.

> They voted for a promise of a return to a world where they were on top.

Very few were on top during The Gilded Age and it has been EXTREMELY clear for quite a long time now that the "Great" in M.A.G.A. is a reference to the 1880s, not the 1950s.

Where THEY were on top. Trump voting men wanted the world where they can rule over women. Trump voting whites voted to be over minorities. Trump voting christians want their religious state.

And so on and so forth. In each case, vote for Trump was to harm someone you look down at and to dominate over another group.

Begging for a 12h day of work every morning on the docks as a stevedore in crowds among hundreds of other men begging for the same job does not give one power to "rule over women".

They'd be too underpaid and exhausted to rule over their own dinner before falling asleep for the night.

No they absolutely did. Trump promised tariffs on multiple occasions: https://www.export.org.uk/insights/trade-news/us-presidentia...

When you vote, you vote for an entire platform and you especially vote for central campaign promises. You don’t get to say “I voted for a world where I’m on top” and then say “but not for the primary method the candidate promised to use!”

tariff were promised and implemented by Trump in his first mandate too, if you voted for him, you mostly voted for America Great Again Through Tariffs.

After the liberation day tariffs were announced, 34% of the people thought they were good.

https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/articl...

Project 2025 was publicly available prior to the election. Tariffs were one of the many policies within the larger plan. If you voted for Trump you are responsible for the Tariffs, this is not a hoodwink where Trump rug pulled everyone after getting elected — it was literally there in the open.

Even beyond/disregarding Project 2025, tariffs were a well-known part of the GOP platform in 2024; it was even included and discussed at the Presidential Debate. The Harris platform even called it a tax at that time, to attempt to make it quite clear to the voter who, in the end, would bear the cost, and the Trump platform equivocated on who would pay the tax to distract from that Harris was right.

Even if you knew nothing of Project 2025 (somehow), you were warned.

“ Even beyond/disregarding Project 2025, tariffs were a well-known part of the GOP platform in 2024;”

The tariff stuff is just a variation of the republican dream to replace income tax with a sales tax. Big tax cut for higher incomes while raising taxes for lower incomes.

On top you have news outlets and educated people not being clear what they are. See from the article:

He has long argued tariffs boost American manufacturing - but many in the business community, as well as Trump's political adversaries, say the costs are passed on to consumers

It’s reported as if someone still needs to figure out who pays the tariffs in the end. I’m aware that tariffs are a lever to potential move buying behavior and give incentives to move production locally. But in this instance and how it’s/ was implemented it’s clear who is the paying for it.

Trump believed that Obama was a secret Muslim infiltrate sent to destroy America because he's black, that's what they voted for. Racism.

The rest of it was just gravy.

The problem is USA doesn't get good choices. Given the choice between a walking corpse and trump, they choose the corpse. Given the choice between a woman and trump, they choose trump.

Care to elaborate why a person is a bad choice because she is a women? Especially compared to someone who shits his own pants in the public?

I assume they were suggesting that to those that voted for Trump they saw a woman as the worse choice. Perhaps as well when Hillary Clinton ran against him.

I think there is a language barrier issue here.

This is loony, all these guys knew eachother for years before and have cordial if nor friendly relationships. The Clintons, Trump, Bushes, Obamas, etc.

In 2016 65% of Trump supporters believed Obama was secretly Muslim. [0]

Trump claimed that Obama was "the founder of Isis" and claimed MANY times that he was not born in the United States. [1]

So yes, he is completely loony... and very blatantly a racist who sends dogwhistles to other racists regularly.

No, he is not friends with Obama or Biden. In fact, Trump is the first president in 150 years to refuse to attend the inauguration of his competitor after losing. [2]

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

[1] https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/508194635270062080

[2] https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/notably-absent-pres...

You can vote for AOC or whatever the Democrats prominent champagne Marxist will be starting 2028+.

Let's see how many countries still likely to deal w/ US if she would be installed.

These people are not necessary against tariff, they are against paying more for their stuff and having it benefit some middleman because the current government messed up badly.

I can otherwise understand how people would agree on paying more for their stuff if it allows their fellow citizens to have a job.

[flagged]

There are many reasonable ideas for import taxation. But what you describe was not what happened. China fought back with their own tariffs, and you may well have paid less import tax on your Temu knock-offs than you did for some widget made with both higher environmental and labor standards in some western European country.

You are pro thoughtless tariffs against every random country, because of temu ads?

Don’t panic too much yet, there are other legal bases for the tariffs.

We’ll see…

Check Truth Social, many are livid that the tariffs were found illegal. A lot of supporters of the current government prefer to pay higher prices for goods.

(I'll just take your word for it.)

So they basically figured out how to bribe all these companies?

Such a kleptocracy.

i read that Costco could actually refund everyone, as they can know exactly who bought what.

If they do, that's another matter, but they definitely can.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, most states that have sales taxes have "use taxes" to cover this case and the case of a wholesale item (no tax) being used in house. It gets enforced primarily in retrospect and on big ticket items that the state does see, like a vehicle purchase.

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

That would be no more legal than what the Supreme Court just struck down.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Not a bad idea, but how do we prevent this from creating incentives to engineer similar situations in the future?

Presumably such future attempts would be stopped immediately given this ruling.

So illegal actions shouldn't have consequences for anyone?

That's a good way to deter such acts in the future

>"maybe it goes against the national debt or lessens our deficit next year."

And help to prosecute those who broke the law and raised illegal tax /s

Government is a poor spender, we should not be handing them more money

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

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

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.

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

> 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...

Who pays the importer?

Seller doing the importing, so they pay the foreign entity for their goods and sends the appropriate cut to the US Government. At that point, they either eat the additional cost of business or make their customers do so. Or something in between.

Tariffs are like a national sales tax.

The person who wants it imported, the buyer?

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.

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...)

> 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.

> it seems like the were fulfilling their legal obligation (at the time)

Rather, their illegal obligation (at the time)?

It was clear from the start these import tariffs are illegal. Only congress can set them. It says so in the constitution! Hand waving at some pretend emergency doesn't give you the right to ignore constitutional law.

The logistics companies should probably have fought these clearly illegal tariffs from the start. Instead they played along and collected the fees. There's probably some interesting legal precedence here to be made, should this argument hold in court.

Yeah. But the guys collecting the tariffs can get guys with guns to back them up. FEDEX and UPS got the “law” on their side.

In many cases they charged me ~$25 in processing fees to collect a ~$3 tariff.

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

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

Then you’re on your own to collect.

You’re always on your own to collect.

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.

[dead]

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.

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

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.

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

It's less that and more that the sender just didn't arrange to prepay it for the receiver rather than it being in flux. A lot of shippers do handle it to avoid the surprise for customers but some didn't have the setup to do the prepayment.

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

>> 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...

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...

> 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.

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)?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I hope so!

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

Elections have consequences.

[dead]

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Well, they would likely have to lower their profit margin because the demand is reduced by the higher prices. Fewer purchasers will want to/be able to buy the item at the higher price. The supply and demand curve will find a new equilibrium, but it isn’t like the sellers are going to sell the exact same quantity of items with the price exactly increased by the tariff amount.

That assumes that demand is meaningfully elastic, that suppliers have room in their margins to absorb it, and that they're willing to. That is obviously not the case for a lot of things.

Products with inelastic or less elastic demand we can skip over because it's pretty self explanatory.

Products like the random cheap widgets a lot of us would buy from random Chinese sellers are often high volume low margin products with a lot of competition. Think about stuff like a USB->TTL serial board that's basically two connectors, one cloned chip, and a few supporting components on a single layer PCB. Hypothetically this is an ideal case for free market economics and these things should have already been basically as cheap as they can be at every step in the chain.

For less competitive items, particularly lower volume specialty items, a vendor may also decide that it's just not worth sacrificing profits in other markets by letting them know there's room to come down. A lot of the independent hardware designers I've been wanting to buy things from sell out every batch one way or another so they just don't care, demand exceeds supply even if demand from the US is reduced. Others have decided the volatility of the situation just isn't worth it with the risk of products getting delayed or additional charges added resulting in chargebacks and lost products and have simply stopped selling to the US altogether.

You know they can also sell to other countries than the US which would pay a higher price than the new lower price pre-tariff to the US?

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."

I have to assume that some of that 4% has second order negative effects on US importers and consumers.

Profit margins can not always go down by 4% and in those cases goods and services would then not be available to US importers and consumers is only one example.

My assumption is that the 96% statistic does not fully encapsulate the negative costs to consumers. I have to to wonder how much higher the burden is over 96% when all second order effects are taken into account.

That's not just consumers. That is "importers and consumers"

Importer != Consumer. I think that's very obvious to anyone paying attention to this whole thing. In fact, it's a small minority of imports that are direct to consumer.

It absolutely is a mix of the importer (e.d. manufacturer, producer, wholesaler, retailer, etc.) absorbing some in their margin and the consumer picking up the bill via price increases for the rest.

It's quite obviously not 96% being paid by the consumer across the board just from looking at the CPI numbers.

All this study states is the obvious: foreign producers didn't lower their cost by much in response to tariff burden. They largely charged the same rate to a buyer in the US vs. a buyer in Germany.

This isn't to defend the tariff situation - just that this study gets trotted out a whole lot in an extremely disingenuous manner. Other data that exists is better that measures direct consumer impact.

The study makes it clear that the people footing the bill for the tariffs are in the US - it is not the rest of the world paying Trump's taxes, it's Americans, whether directly as consumers or importers.

> 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.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff

  A tariff or import tax is a duty imposed by a national government, customs territory, or supranational union on imports of goods and is paid by the importer. Exceptionally, an export tax may be levied on exports of goods or raw materials and is paid by the exporter.

  The economic burden of tariffs falls on the importer, the exporter, and the consumer. [Wikipedia]

The importer is the consumer...

I am just saying that it eventually is paid by the end user, regardless of the bureaucratic steps in between. We can try and figure out who is directly paying them but I feel like that detail is unnecessary to my overall point.

US Consumers pay in fungible dollars, and so if your company paid for three pizzas eaten by an AWS team, and I paid for 1 ounce of Maersk fuel oil, and our Starbucks venti latte purchases paid to rethatch Juan Valdez's hut, who can even trace the serial numbers on our $1 bills?

A tariff is included in the cost of a product by the final seller. The final buyer ultimately pays the tariff.

It doesn’t matter who sends the actual tariff payment, it gets priced into the cost of the product.

> then I would expect to see a notation on the price tags and a line-item on my receipts,

Trump started threatening anyone who was going to do that, because he doesn't want his face attached to price hikes.

> The cost of the item that the end user pays should reflect all costs associated with production and distribution to that end user.

Eh, standard business school logic these days is that if you want to maximize profits, you should charge what the market will bear, not your costs + some fixed profit.

So if you're already charging what the market will bear, there may be more wiggle room to absorb some of the hit of tariffs, so long as it still leaves you making enough profit or in a favorable position. It still comes down to what maximizes tariffs: at higher prices, demand drops, but at lower prices, your profit/item drops.

Still, yeah, from what I understand, the bulk of the tariff costs were passed along to customers.

Sure, there might be some wiggle room in some of the margins, and when tariffs were like 10% that might have been something close to “sustainable”, but that doesn’t extrapolate forever. When Trump enacted 125% tariffs on China, they by definition couldn’t eat the cost.

> I have no idea how the fuck the rumor that these tariffs will be “paid by other countries” started.

It's what POTUS was saying since day 1. That we've been getting ripped off and we're gonna make the other countries pay us etc etc etc.

It is, as I said in the post, obviously wrong - but that's where it comes from.

I guess I mostly don't understand how anyone believed it.

He ran on lowering grocery prices, and he was going to do this by making tariffs. So his plan boiled down to "I'm going to lower prices by raising prices".

With Trump it can be tough to tell if it's idiocy of malice but at some point I suppose it's a distinction without much of a difference.

I've had multiple HNers message me saying that their gas bills and grocery prices have never been lower, and that since day 1 of the new administration prices have dropped. Looking at trends across all states, I wonder how they came to that conclusion at all.

Maybe they’re weird outliers, but I’ve noticed with stuff like this that people will just make shit up.

Well its completely wrong. Tariffs are regressive consumer taxes that hurt people who make <$200k/year the most while enriching the inner circle of crony capitalism. Corrupt and should be prosecuted for such criminal robbery of the American people

It wasn't a "rumor" it was explicit deliberate disinformation. Unfortunately many people in the US have insufficient education and accurate news feeds to realize.

See also: disinformation that "other countries charge us the same tariffs", which turns out to be either a plain lie, or they mean VAT (a sales tax, like we have in the US).

Here's Trump's claims debunked in detail: https://www.factcheck.org/2025/08/recapping-trumps-deceptive...

"But we found that Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariff rates weren’t based on tariffs that other countries charged on goods coming from the U.S. Instead, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative came up with the rates by dividing the size of a country’s trade imbalance with the U.S. in goods by how much America imports in goods from that nation. "

"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...

Exactly the type of info I was hoping for, thank you.

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.

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%.

I recommend that commenters shell out and pony up for a thesaurus before its import duty is magnified sixfold.

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-...

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]

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...

> 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.

The IEEPA one works where it can last as long as the "emergency," which Congress can vote to end. The "days don't count as days" game just lets the House have an easier time of not bringing it up for a vote.

This other authority is different: it's limited within the law to 150 days and then has to be extended by Congress. So the same kind of strategy of just avoiding a vote doesn't work here. They could monkey with the deadline, but can't do so any more easily than just actually extending the tariff for real. Of course just like today you can have Trump jump to some new authority on day 151 instead.

> it's limited within the law to 150 days and then has to be extended by Congress.

Isn't that one also limited to targetted tariffs? He's applied it worldwide...

> Of course just like today you can have Trump jump to some new authority on day 151 instead.

Of the many articles on this matter written in the last 24 hours, a few that I read sketched out other sections of old never used law that Trump might land on after the current "new" 10% tariff expires its 150 day life.

While I'm not a fan .. credit to the Project 2025 people behind Trump that really put the effort into gaming out the overthrow of the established post war US order .. seemingly no loophole left unexplored.

Damn, that’s pretty much all of them

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

Apologies, but I'm having a hard time parsing your sentence.

What exactly are you saying?

The GP is using a snowclone of the original: "It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy".

For example, if your boss is very rude and disparaging, but then he gets fired, you would say, sarcastically, "It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy", implying there's some element of karma at work.

By analogy, GP is saying these tarrifs were an undeserving act of vengeance. I assume "undeserved" in the sense that it wasn't deserved by those on the receiving end.

Roger. Surely it's twisted a bit more with the kind of things Trump spews, but for instance a great leader wins a well-deserved Nobel Prize, and you say it couldn't have happened to a more deserving contender.

You say the same thing when a complete moron fails to win the same prize.

Equal fairness to all ;)

[flagged]

Free trade is leftist now?

I thought a minute ago "communist China" was the protectionist one and "free capitalist America" was the one in favor of free trade.

I remember the anti-WTO protests and the peripheral movements that sprung out of that like No Logo, and the sneering directed at the anti-globalism protesters from people like Paul Krugman, who swore that the Great Depression was caused by Smoot Hawley and insisted there would be massive gains from trade.

Later, he fessed up and said that was another Noble Lie. There has been a lot of lying in the history of the economics profession, unfortunately, all for the greater good, I'm sure.

When these tariffs hit, I also expected broad price increases as well as a recession, when this didn't happen, I began to reassess some things.

In retrospect, I think that the massive expansion of investor rights in the late 1990s and early 2000s, culminating in the Clinton era agreements, was not really about trade at all, but about power -- e.g. getting the rest of the world to adopt legislation and reforms that would enable foreign investment/outsourcing.

I don't think the American consumer benefitted a whole lot, nor the American worker, from this movement.

I also don't think the rest of the world benefitted, apart from East Asia, but the East Asian countries famously industrialized not by pursuing unfettered trade, but by pursuing an export-led growth model with limit controls on capital inflows. E.g. they restricted trade by restricting foreign investment, the exact opposite of the WTO consensus.

Part of the reason I don't think trade was all that important, and what is important to the western consensus is investor rights and subordination of national policies is that the US has no problem levying sanctions on a large part of the world, and when these sanctions are levied, you hear barely a peep coming from the press or from economists about these sanctions.

Likewise, the EU just imposed massive sanctions on Russia, generally with the broad support of their think tanks and economic experts.

So I think trade in general is just a lot less important than we have been told. The real prize were the investor rights agreements and agreeing with western geopolitical goals.

I mentioned this to a friend who was bemoaning the terrible human rights situation in Iran, and I pointed out the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia, and said the moment KSA directly challenges western power in the same way Iran has, you will start hearing all sorts of complaints about human rights in Saudi Arabia.

It's not about human rights either. Just like it's not about trade.

I think these types of situations are a real test of character for the experts. It should be an eye opening moment for a lot of people.

Why do you call it investor rights when you have in mind power via sanctions?

To me, the latter is an outcome of the former. So the ultimate goal is to integrate the nation in a subordinate role into the western system, and a range of pressures levied against nations that refuse that. Investor rights is a key part of that because it means foreign capital floods into the country, buying up assets, funding political parties and local NGOs. The result of that is that western satellite offices offer the best jobs for local elites. It completely changes the local society and aligns the interest of local elites with western interests.

Once a nation is integrated into that system, the US can, for example, disrupt their economy by freezing assets or imposing sanctions because now the elites will lose their jobs, and this is often enough to change the government policy. In this way, we exert enormous control over the domestic politics of other countries. We do not care so much about deindustrialization in the US or the foreign nation losing key industries. This is basically how the US pulled Armenia into its orbit, but not only Armenia, many other countries have been subordinated to US interests in this way.

It's similar to how, in the European financial crisis, the European Central Bank was threatening to destroy the banking systems of Ireland or Spain if they didn't adopt certain political policies that Brussels wanted. They caved. The ECB would not have the power to do this if these nations refused to adopt the Euro or to be integrated into that system. The same thing was done to Greece. First a rush of foreign investment into Greece, then a debt crisis, and now the EU is dictating domestic political outcomes in Greece. Remember that foreign investment is just another way of saying foreigners hold your debt and own your assets.

This is why China has strict limits on foreign capital inflows. It does not want to be integrated as a subordinate role into the Western system. Russia also has adopted this role. I am not saying this as an enemy of China or Russia, nor am I an an apologist for them. What I'm saying is that their policy is rational, just as the east asian nation's mercantilist development model was also rational. It worked! This despite the classical economic critique. That tells me we don't really know the full story when it comes to trade and development.

I'm also not saying that classical economic welfare arguments for trade are entirely wrong. A trade restriction should have an effect of raising prices and reducing output. But clearly a 15% rate is not particularly noteworthy, given that 70% of our economy is services. The freakout about the tariffs was primarily political, because the tariffs were levied against allies not enemies, and they were levied with the aim of encouraging domestic production, not overthrowing geopolitical rivals. This is why the Europeans, in particular, were so offended by the tariffs. It was certainly not love of free trade, given the rising number of sanctions enthusiastically adopted by Brussels.

> When these tariffs hit, I also expected broad price increases as well as a recession, when this didn't happen, I began to reassess some things.

"this didn't happen" except for the over $1,300/household in tariffs paid for by us, directly attributable to tariffs in A SINGL YEAR, that is.

Anything other than fawning allegiance to whatever Donald Trump said most recently is "leftist" now.

It disturbs me to see this behavior in my country alt-right voters, or better said, fanatics. The party is full of contradictions, and they will go with the flow, double down and rationalize all of them.

Maybe the problem is that they make it part of their identity. Voting for a different party according to their agenda is reasonably easy, but it's hard to reject who we are.

In the end, they're supporting a lying, corrupt, violent, fascist party and they don't see it - to them, it's the other parties doing that, even though this one has the most accusations (with evidence backing them up, not just made up).

We already knew that Trump didn't care what the courts said, America is pretty much dead with trump, so nothing shocking, your deserved vengeance wasn’t delivered.

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.

> 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.

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."

> ...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.

Yeah.

If you look a little closely you'll see their current project is to establish the "major questions doctrine," which ultimately reduces executive power by stopping Congress from giving it all to the executive. It looks pro-POTUS when it reduces the power of executive agencies, and it looks anti-POTUS when it reduces the power of executive orders. It's really about resetting what powers Congress can delegate.

If so that’s great. Congress has long become too complacent and willing to just wait for their parties turn to use presidential overreach.

>because SCOTUS has proven to not be a puppet of the administration.

Several justices are openly taking bribes

[flagged]

No. Like actual bribes over a 20 year period.

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-cr...

Except for all the other blatantly unconstitutional rulings in his favor. Presidential immunity one will go down in history as a black stain on America and the courts.

and still this current ruling was a 6-3 vote.

I was flabbergasted that SCOTUS actually said that the concept of no man being above the law had caveats.

Earnestly, I think you need to actually read that opinion. They said some things the president does, he is immune for. And they pushed it back down to the lower courts to define the categories of official acts they laid out.

A hallmark of the Roberts court is leaving something technically intact, but practically gutted and dead.

You can still technically bring charges against the president for things they do while in office.

Practically speaking, after that ruling, you cannot, short of hypothetical scenarios so incredibly unlikely and egregious that even the incredibly unlikely and egregious acts of this administration don't meet that bar.

AFAIK bringing charges in office had much less to do with that case. It was dismissed because he was elected president. Which seems more like a pacing problem for the prosecution. In office, they are the prosecutions boss. You’re never gonna be able to charge a sitting president. That’s what impeachment is for. Then you prosecute.

there is no just world in which that man is not in prison for jan 6th and his corrupt handling of classified documents

Except for the 3 that dissented

Kavanaugh's dissent it honestly deranged

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.

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?

How do you get that from what I wrote?

How do you not see how they got that from what you wrote?

The argument is obviously that this is not enough to disprove rubber stamping.

"also proof" is a strawman, plain as day.

Is this a serious question? Hahah

SCOTUS rules for the rich and powerful. Most of the time Trump is aligned with them. Sometimes he does dumb shit like tariffs, or things that upset the order the rich and powerful want to maintain, and they rule against him.

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..

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.

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.

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.

> There is no strategy here.

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

This ruling like most of the kleptocracy, will show the kleptocrats who is willing to lick boot and who will not. The goal, whether extrinsic or intrinsic, is to find the fascist threats and harm them.

This specifically will happen when businesses request the legal refund and the "deep state" gets to decide whether they deserve a refund.

> the "deep state" gets to decide whether they deserve a refund.

yep. For someone who claims to be draining the swamp, this sure as hell sounds like they're digging it in even deeper.

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

I agree with the sentiment, but that is completely unrelated to the topic at hand.

Just because Congress is stuck doesn't mean the Executive gets to do whatever they want.

I think a lot of time Congress being stuck is a feature, not a bug.

What happens when things aren't stuck, they change too much, in both frequency and magnitude. Kind of like when one person in the executive branch gets to make the rules. It's utter chaos and uncertainty on the business environment, even on the consumer environment, they have no idea what anything costs anymore. Am I paying double from a year ago because of tariffs or because it's easy for the seller to say tariffs, I'll never know. As a business, should I charge more now in anticipation for future uncertainty, has seemed simultaneously unfair and prudent. Now, should I reduce prices to go back to pre-tariff or just pocket it and call it inflation. Uncertainty is chaos, it's hard to plan for anything or make big decisions. This is why high(er) rates didn't hurt the housing market but all the Trump related uncertainty did.

With Congress completely stuck, the executive branch takes over a lot of functions that probably belong to the legislature. I say "probably" because the Constitution isn't really explicit about it, but it's what most people would infer.

The executive branch is less accountable than the legislative one. You elect only the top office, and only once every four years. With so much bundled into a single vote, it's nearly impossible to hold any specific action to account.

It doesn't work out great for the judicial branch, either. They often rule that a decision is based on the law as written, and it's up to the legislature to fix that -- while knowing full well that the legislature can't and won't. And they're not consistent about that; they'll also interpret a law to favor their ideology, and again Congress is in no position to clarify the intended interpretation.

Congress was deliberately set up to favor inaction, and not without reason. But that has reached the point where it practically doesn't even exist as a body, and its ability to serve as a check on the other branches has vanished, leading to even more abuses.

Congress could stop this nonsense tomorrow. The problem is not the body's powers, the problem is that the GOP is happy with Trump doing whatever the hell he wants.

Vote the GOP out, and he'll be impeached.

Impeached, possibly. Conviction is effectively impossible.

That illustrates the structural problem. Congress was designed to have a high bar for action. But the bar is so high that it can't balance the other branches.

I'd argue that no system will work when so many voters are willing to overlook obvious crimes in order to remain in power. But even in less pathological circumstances, the legislative branch had too many internal checks to also participate in external ones.

It is because your congress and political system don't need coalition governments orvaby kind of agreements, winner takes it all. A true multy party system wpuld be mote flexible and less prone to catering to extremes on the left or right

Israel has such a system. Netanyahu is aloft because of a small, fringe party.

A multiparty systems has some advantages. But it also has flaws and it wasn’t able to stop Brexit.

And I don’t think a multiparty system would have been able to stop the rise of Trump all else being equal equal.

The UK Parliament was by all means a two-party system, with Labour in one side and the Tories in the other. If anything it has become more diverse post-Brexit. Compare that with the Bundestag, where no party has more than a quarter of the seats.

There were 7 major political parties in Germany in 1933, so I’m unsure that there is overwhelming evidence that more than 2 political parties is protective against extremism.

1933 Germany was already a failed state, you shouldn't infer anything from that.

Germany is the best argument multiple people in this thread made for how a multiparty system prevents the move towards extremism, but we are within living memory of Germany collapsing into what was arguably the worst case of extremism in history.

Of course there were special circumstances at play. Democracies don’t tend to collapse into dictatorship when things are going great. But the multiparty system did nothing to prevent it.

If a charismatic demagogue gains enough popular support, no constitution, multi party system, or separation of powers etc can stop him.

You could maybe argue that a demagogue is less likely to rise in a multi party system, but I haven’t seen any empirical evidence to support that.

There wasn't 7 major parties. Five maximum, even two could be argued. But '33 Germany is a weak argument against multiparty systems. Interwar Germany was not a well functioning democracy at all. They had armed street fights and deep political chaos going on for over two decades at that point. Hitler didn't have the majority and formed a coalition government. Only because Hindenburg agreed to dissolve the Reichstag could the nazis take power fully.

So the number of parties did actually block Hitler, and Presidential powers to subvert democracy was the problem. In modern multi party democracies an inability to form a government will result in a new election, not installing a dictator.

The Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, the German Democratic Party, the Center Party, the German People's Party, the German National People's Party, and the Nazi Party.

Germany is the best argument multiple people in this thread made for how a multiparty system prevents the move towards extremism, but we are within living memory of Germany collapsing into what was arguably the worst case of extremism in history.

Of course there were special circumstances at play. Democracies don’t tend to collapse into dictatorship when things are going great. But the multiparty system did nothing to prevent it.

By the time Hindenburg agreed to dissolve the Reichstag, the SA was powerful enough compared to the German Military and he had enough popular support that he could likely have taken power by force.

If a charismatic demagogue gains enough popular support, no constitution, multi party system, or separation of powers etc can stop him.

You could maybe argue that a demagogue is less likely to rise in a multi party system, but I haven’t seen any empirical evidence to support that.

It seems you wish for a system which would be able to stop Brexit against the will of the people.

Maybe a system where more than a simple majority in a single popular poll is required to make monumental policy decisions.

The uk doesnt really count, because it also has a fttp election system for the parliament, there are always 2 big parties and then some minor ones. Better example would be Germany.

There were 7 major political parties in Germany in 1933, so I’m unsure that there is overwhelming evidence that more than 2 political parties is protective against extremism.

The problem is we've kicked this can down the road for decades. We can't just let the president perform Congress's job, no matter how "stuck" they are.

I disagree with the metaphor.

In suggest: The can of worms was opened.

(i.e. subsequent us presidents, no matter which party, will use more freedom of movement in the office)

I actually think Congress is the one who controls the reins still with this one. All they have to do is simply say “no“ and stop falling in line with the party because their president is in charge. They won’t do it, but they need to just agree enough is enough and legislate instead of handing it off to the president so they can’t be held accountable for their votes. Still, at the end of the day the ball is in their court.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The entire point of the WTO was that countries can cooperate globally to reduce tariffs and other trade barriers, so it does matter what you think of other countries' decisions.

Not how they make them, as in who is responsible within their government or whatever the might have

I propose an idea that complete lack of protectionism (subsidies, tariffs, quotas) should not be the goal.

If we (countries) all are fully open, then we are fully globalised, and likely overall prices are lowest. (that is good)

But such system is fragile and very “shockable”, it entirely depends on stable shipping numbers and stable inter country agreements, both of which can be easily sabotaged (various motivations and agendas; just in 6 years: covid, Trump, Yemen Houthies)

Not implementable, but fun idea: protectionism based on distance, even within a country. E.g. supermarket must buy 10% of its apples from within 100km, 20% from within 1000km, 40% from within 10000km. (It does have numerous problems, feel free to identify them in comments)

> 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.

I agree that we do need robustness in our production and economies, and a lot of it. But I don't really believe that most tariffs, especially current ones, will ensure that in any way.

Generally if you want stable and reliable local production of something, you subsidize that production or industry. You guarantee a certain amount of product will be bought/paid for even if a foreign supplier can or is willing to undercut that cost. That is why we have a large agricultural surplus in basically every western country, subsidized crops means there is money on the table for somebody to be in that industry which ensures surplus production even when other places are offering cheap food to trade.

Those can also be misapplied and corrupted, but it is still better than nothing at all or not extremely well planned and implemented tariffs which can sometimes hurt local production of other things still.

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

Exactly this.

Economies follow the same general principles of our distributed products. There’s good reasons you pay extra and lower efficiency (a bit) to have redundancy and resilience. We saw that we need more of it during COVID lockdown chaos.

Generally lowering tariffs has been a good thing overall, but there’s a point where it stops being beneficial.

> The only way to get that is to give some protection to the little guys while they grow.

Industrial Policy

It has a very bad reputation in the West but in built Japan and Taiwan

In the West it meant "protect old industries" rather than grow new ones (e.g. British steel)

Absolutely!

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.

>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.”

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.

So many of you keep using the word “unfair.” What is so unfair? What can these countries do that we cannot?

Have you considered all the advantages the US has over some of these countries? Is that not “unfair”? I would say the US’s relationship with the Internet is certainly an advantage even if we call it “fair.”

I think what they mean is that post war US got a special treatment from their main allies in exchange for US globalism, diplomacy, security. For example in EU with digital technology the US got:

- always open arms for adoption (all govs prefer to use US software, although there have always been local alternatives). EU govs never really pushed adoption of their local software companies, they usually push for adoption of US tech

- extremely lax tax rules and enforcement towards US

- no protection of sales of local companies and startups (every successful EU tech company becomes US owned)

- lax enforcement of local laws towards US companies compared to EU ones. So many US businesses would be illegal but the companies do it anyway while EU alternatives have hard time existing (for example all consumer data gathering and sales but also companies like uber and airbnb)

All that is ok in eyes of EU politicians since there is “the silent deal”. But what do you do once one party doesn't keep their side of the bargain?

I totally agree and rereading it I completely flipped it. I thought he was another person in this thread saying that other countries have an unfair advantage against the US. My mistake.

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

this isn't about tariffs

it's about if the executive can impose them

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).

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

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.

Can you make an example of a tariff from the last 100 years that definitely benefitted the US in a long-lasting way?

Auto tariffs have kept Detroit producing automobiles despite various other entrants, while still being low enough for foreign competition.

I think the same effects can be achieved using subsidies, and I do accept such interventions can have legitimate justifications.

_Just about_. After significant government bailouts.

Ultimately, this sort of protectionism tends to be expensive, and yield an inferior product.

But may still be worth it to protect a skilled domestic industry.

At significant loss to the consumer. Sure a tariff can benefit a subset of people, by costing others even more.

We could also do this without tariffs by simply taking money from some group and handing it to another.

Someone mentioned a week or two ago on HN that the point of the auto tariffs was national security (maintaining the industry/expertise/etc. in the US, I assume), not economic.

Receiving money for free is different than money earned for work (even if subsidised).

It creates different incentives for the receiver.

Auto tariffs are currently keeping far less expensive - yet much more advanced - Chinese EVs out of the US market, costing American consumers thousands of dollars on every car purchase.

While not allowing an entire industry and supply chain to die. One of the last heavily industrial and manufacturing industries left in the US at any decent sized scale.

You need such things for national security, so it's very likely "worth it" even all the way down to the American consumer level.

Look at the shipbuilding industry if you want to see what happens to that capacity without it. Due to the lack of commercial shipbuilding in the US, we can't even keep up with building for our Navy during peacetime. If a war ever were to attrit naval forces to any meaningful degree there would be zero hope of scaling up that supply chain in a relevant timeframe.

Arguments could of course be made if the auto manufacturing industry (and it's suppliers) are useful in an actual hot war, but I think without them we'd be in even heavier dire straights in that regard.

The US ship building industry is barely kicking along .. by intent, for whatever reason the US is not competing for the 90% of global commercial ship building demand currently met by China, Korea, and Japan.

This does not mean there is zero hope of scaling up should wartime demand come into existence.

  Although U.S. shipbuilding is greatly diminished today, it is not the national security concern many would lead us to believe. America’s rapid expansion of ship production during World War II serves as a reminder of what allowed America to increase its ship production historically. Orders surged from the US government and other allied nations for commercial ships. Companies converted capital and entered the ship building business to meet the orders; Henry Kaiser built a shipyard in Richmond and got it operational in 78 days.

Currently the demand for US military shipping is low, some suggest a change in organisational structure and siloing might be a path forward: The Next Great Era in U.S. Shipbuilding https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2025/february/nex...

You could make a rational argument for short-term protectionism if the US government were simultaneously pushing the domestic auto industry to modernize, but the government is doing the exact opposite: it opposes electric vehicles.

The large American manufacturers are able to keep on selling technologically outdated, overpriced vehicles in the US, because they have a captive market.

When the Chinese imposed protectionist measures in the auto industry, they were aimed at allowing Chinese domestic manufacturers time to catch up technologically, and they were scaled back as that happened. Any international car manufacturer can now set up shop in China and compete directly with the local brands on an even footing. But the US has imposed drastic protectionist measures with no end-game (worse than that: US policy is backwards-looking and intended to maintain an old technology). It's just a permanent state of affairs.

How do you feel about allowing the import of goods from nations using slavery to create those goods? Would you be okay with a foreign nation undercutting domestic production as a strategy to destroy your industry to control a market?

That's aside from my position that most taxes should be at a point of trade/exchange.

The question was for a specific example, not some moral vague strawman.

The question is a good one, right to the heart of the claim. Without specific examples, especially ones that are not post selected (i.e., pick all tariffs at a point in time and see of that was beneficial), it is silly to claim tariffs are useful when there is ample evidence of when they cause significant harm to the economy.

So, have a case for a timepoint where the set of tariffs ended up being demonstrably beneficial for an economy?

You have to see there's a hefty dose of hypocrisy in this, right? American might has been used, quite extensively, to impose unfavorable conditions to local companies in their own soil in favor of American companies. Multiple American multi national corporations have used exploitative labor conditions in underdeveloped countries to prop up their own margins. The American government has used multiple coercive tools to de-industrialize many nations and has, in the 21st century, an explicitly paternalistic attitude towards the Western Hemisphere with literal stealing of their resources.

I understand and even respect when someone says "I'm American so I wish to maintain the status quo where the US can undercut other nations but they can't undercut us". But if there's some rose tinted view of how the US is actually the morally aggrieved one, I just can't bear it.

You’re responding to a different question than what was asked.

The question wasn’t about American hypocrisy, it was can you imagine a situation where tariffs are potentially good.

You can just ban imports from people who use sweatshops, or hash that out in trade agreements.

Because Trump is so fixated on tariffs, it's centered tariffs in too many conversations on these trade topics. People have developed a kind of tunnel vision here.

There are other kinds of policy levers besides tariffs for securing supply chains, promoting domestic manufacturers, or cutting out businesses that rely on slave labor from international trade. Most of them are cheaper and more effective than tariffs.

Softwood lumbar from Canada.

US stumpage fees are set by the market, while Canada sets a below market fee.

Tariff adjusts cost of softwood lumbar from Canada to adjust for this.

Where is my prize?

There's a tarriff on sugar that means we have to use HFCS in processed foods and beverages. Oh wait...

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.

Agree, and it should be Congress decision.

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.

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

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

I read that as “when you use them correctly”.

“Correctly” means building consensus so capitalists can expect the new trade framework they're operating under to be reasonably stable, signaling what you’ll do well in advance, then phasing it in, ideally also with a guide to what a phase-out will look like and why or when you would begin doing that. Also, you’d usually avoid tariffing too widely at once. Focused is far more effective.

The stability is needed to get businesses to invest serious money in new buildings, machines, and training, when it won’t pay off for years.

You signal ahead of time and phase them in to minimize damage done. Gives companies time to adjust their stance before the pressure is on.

You focus them on specifically the goods you want to protect, so you don’t also raise the prices of inputs to those goods more than you have to.

You’ll notice zero of those key components were present in this scheme.

Sorry, yes, I wasn’t clear. The point I wanted to make was that this tariff strategy seems to fail propelling any job creation at all. To the degree that if it wasn’t tariffs but some kind of protection money, we’d more clearly call it a strategy.

Yes, this particular tariff regime is, well - completely insane and really is all downside.

But even under the best regime, they still are not great, and probably more harmful than helpful

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

Thoughtful application of tariffs are good.

Trump's usage of tariffs is pretty damn dumb.

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.

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.

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...

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%.

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.

Its like going 70 mph in a sleepy subdivision because a road sign on the interstate says you can go 70 there.

Trump is taking an law that says "You can do X if Y" and saying "I can do X"

150 days thing is just moving the goal posts.

> Its like going 70 mph in a sleepy subdivision because a road sign on the interstate says you can go 70 there.

> Trump is taking an law that says "You can do X if Y" and saying "I can do X"

I think it's more like going 70mph downtown because there's a sign saying "if onn an interstate you can do 70mph" -- the "if on an interstate" is pretty important there!

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

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

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?

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

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.

You are correct. My country does not have the similar separation of powers the US has. I do not understand why Americans have a hard time realizing this: the President and other elected officials work for YOU. They literally run for office to get the position, and they get voted in. Why would someone let an elected official enrich themselves and their friends with your money? Why would the legislative branch allow that?

A populace with a functioning representative democracy deserves its leaders.

There is no mechanism for citizens of the united states to recall a president or member of congress. They must wait 2, 4, and 6 years depending on who they'd like to replace. This contributes to the the current woes as as many members of congress and some presidents (like this one) would certainly undergo recall battles or be immediately recalled. Since we can't though, and elections in this country are a 12-16 month barrage of lies, propaganda and ads by the time voting does come around people just check which ever box matches their team, zero thought given and are thankful the whole mess is over with so they can mostly ignore politics until its time to start complaining again about how poorly they're represented. Repeat.

Another issue is that you actually need a lot of money to meaningfully run for most federal office roles, so that's one filter which promotes rich guys who don't care about doing the job well.

To put it another way, I have not participated in a federal election where I was excited about my options, ever. I have always been triage voting in federal elections ever since I was old enough to vote.

So yes, we do vote for our clowns, but only because we're not given any decent options to vote for.

Fortunately, the US giving a lot of power to states means that our more local elections are a lot more interesting to participate in and at least in my state, I have several decent options to vote in people who will make a real difference.

>”Why would someone let an elected official enrich themselves and their friends with your money? Why would the legislative branch allow that?”

Let is a heavily loaded term here. The most an individual can reasonably do is cast their single vote in an election year. I could attempt to bring a lawsuit against a politician, but it would almost certainly be thrown out due to a lack of standing. Activism is certainly an option, but that is really just an effort to convince others to cast their single vote differently. Outside of those options, one would have to break some laws.

About 30% of our electorate consists of so-called "deplorables" who are geographically distributed in a way that gives them outsized influence. The deplorables were happy to set aside their own best interests at the voting booth because Trump promised to hurt other people more.

Promises were made, and as far as the deplorables are concerned, promises were kept. They continue to approve of his actions wholeheartedly.

There is probably no way back for us, unfortunately. Please keep in mind than a healthy majority of American voters either voted against Trump or chose to sit out the election. We are largely powerless, though, due to system-level weaknesses that have been present since the nation's founding but couldn't effectively be exploited until recently.

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

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...

”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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Scalia wrote some really interesting opinions for sure. Feel like the arguments are only going to get worse :(

Because in practice the US Supreme Court is a partisan body, the United States is deprived of the potential for excellent jurists you'd expect with a population of hundreds of millions and some of the world's best law schools. Only a subset of your best will exhibit the desired partisan skew.

Despite the larger population and improved access, my guess is that the quality of Supreme Court Justices today is probably worse than in 1927 when it decided Buck v Bell (which says it's fine for states to have a policy where they sterilize "unfit" citizens, straight up Eugenics)

How would you suggest selecting jurists in a way that doesn't introduce partisan incentives?

It would be worth looking at how other countries with comparable legal systems do it.

Eg., members of the Supreme Court of the UK are appointed by the King on the advice of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is required by law to recommend the person nominated by an independent commission.

The selection must be made on merit, in accordance with the qualification criteria of section 25 of the Act, of someone not a member of the commission, ensuring that the judges will have between them knowledge and experience of all three of the UK's distinct legal systems, having regard to any guidance given by the Lord Chancellor, and of one person only.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_of_the_Supreme_Court_o...

This seems to work fairly well and, although specific decisions are argued over as part of normal political discourse, it is generally seen as being non-partisan.

Ireland (which also has a common law legal system) has a similar setup, with the President appointing supreme court justices based on the recommendation of the government who, in turn, are advised by an independent panel. That advice is technically not legally binding, so this is in theory a less-strictly non-partisan system - but in practice it works out about the same.

If creation of independent nonpartisan panels is so easy, why not just have such a panel govern the entire country?

Any country which struggles to appoint justices in a nonpartisan way will also struggle to assemble a panel in a nonpartisan way, I think.

I think the difference is that you can specify independently verifiable criteria for the selection process and require participants to decide based on those criteria alone without forcing them to become political actors who must directly bear the consequences of political decisions.

Not totally immune to issues of partisanship, but at least somewhat insulated.

OK, so what criteria would you specify?

BTW, the original intent of the Electoral College in the United States was pretty similar to this. Electors were supposed to be independent actors exercising their independent judgement in selection of the president. It wasn't sustainable for long.

This understates the failure: it was about as close to “immediate” as it could be. The whole structure was pointless just about as soon as the new state began to operate.

The electoral college is basically an appendix, except it was never a useful organ. It malfunctioned completely, right out of the gate.

Sure, so that suggests that these so-called "independent nonpartisan panels" are likely to fail immediately as well. It illustrates the principle that good intentions are no match for incentives.

It works fairly well because your PM and King aren't complete loons. At the end of the process there has to be someone making decisions, and when that person is a narcissistic 8-year-old in an 80-year-old's body, bad things are going to happen no matter how the system is written.

Given that the current system maximises partisan bias, it's actually hard to do worse.

Ideally you'd want to reform this hierarchically, but supposing we can only fix that final court, you want say a committee consisting of roughly a couple of academics who've taught this stuff, a couple of real on-the-ground attorneys who've argued before this court, a couple of retired judges from this court (if it had age limits, but today it does not) or the courts below it who've done this job, and five otherwise unconnected citizens (no specific business before any court now or expected) chosen at random the way most countries pick their juries.

That committee is to deliver a list of several people best qualified to fill any vacancies on the court which arise before the next committee does the same, if such a vacancy arises you just go down the list.

>roughly a couple of academics who've taught this stuff, a couple of real on-the-ground attorneys who've argued before this court

How are these members of the committee chosen then? Seems like you're just moving the problem around, if choice of committee member is also subject to partisan incentives.

Amy Coney Barrett has somewhat taken up the mantel, but her legal reasoning is probably superior.

Thomas wants to pretend he's the OG originalist, but I don't think he is anywhere near Barrett's peer.

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.

Kavanaugh strikes me as principled, but in kind of a Type-A, "well, actually" sort of way where he will get pulled into rabbit holes and want to die on random textual hills.

He is all over the map, but not in a way that seems consistent or predictable.

His dissent in this case was basically "Don't over turn the tariffs because it will be too hard to make everyone whole" Which doesn't strike me as "principled" at all.

Wasn't it JFK who said "We choose to Not do these things bc they're kinda hard actually"? /s

That is not the thrust of his argument; he believes they were legal. I don't think we need people spreading this uninformed meme all over HN.

This is nonsense, and the same nonsense as we heard in the insurrectionist ruling. Allowing fascism "Because it's inconvenient to do otherwise" is bonkers.

Your misbehavior is so egregious we have to reward you for it

His reputation will be forever tarnished by "Kavanaugh stops"

That the the four sexual assault allegations (Thomas had "only" one during his nomination):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh#Sexual_assault...

Kavanaugh votes either way, but I don't think this is out of principle... I just think he's just kind of an idiot and thinks he can write a justification for just about any of his biases without making those biases obvious. It's kind of apparent if you read his opinions; they tend to be very verbose (his dissent here is 63 pages!) without saying a whole lot, and he gets sloppy with citations, selectively citing precedent in some cases while others he simply hand-waves. Take his opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo (the "Kavanaugh stop" case): there's a reason why no one joined his concurrence.

You need to be cautious with the notion of “his votes go either way”. In Hungary, where I’m from, and a Trump kinda guy rules for 16 years, judges vote either way… but they vote against the government only when it doesn’t really matter for the ruling party. Either the government wants a scapegoat anyway why they cannot do something, or just simply nobody cares or even see the consequences. Like the propaganda newspapers are struck down routinely… but they don’t care because nobody, who they really care about, see the consequences of those. So judges can say happily that they are independent, yet they are not at all.

This fake independence works so well, that most Hungarians lie themselves that judiciary is free.

Well under that theory, this would have been a good time for Kavanaugh to go against Trump, since his vote didn't matter.

Weren’t Sotomator and Jackson the same with Biden? Kagan is much more principled.

In major case, sure. But every last emergency petition? I don’t think so.

> Weren’t Sotomator and Jackson the same with Biden? Kagan is much more principled

Very respectfully, there is no comparison between Trump and Biden in this respect. Indeed, the court adopted a new legal concept, the Major Questions Doctrine, to limit Biden continuing the Trump student loan forbearance.

The Major Questions Doctrine has been a thing for decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine

> The Major Questions Doctrine has been a thing for decades:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine

I've read the Wikipedia page before and also reviewed it before posting, but thanks for your insightful analysis.

Care to share when it was used in the majority before the current Roberts court?

Well, at this point the Roberts court has been a thing for decades so I’m not sure what distinction you’re driving at.

FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. is an example of the same principle without the name (afaik it wasn’t named that until later.)

Basically the FDA tried to use its powers to regulate drugs and devices to regulate nicotine (drug) via cigarettes (device.) The conservatives on the court said, in effect, “look obviously congress didn’t intend to include cigarettes as a medical device, come on.”

Then Congress passed a specific law allowing the FDA to regulate cigarettes. This is how it should work. If congress means something that’s a stretch, they should say so specifically.

I think that's a fair example but it had the wrinkle that an FDA commissioner explicitly changed what the Agency's position on tobacco regulation was [1].

I don't have as much time to offer a similar assessment of the first two 'official' Major Questions Doctrine cases in the Biden administration, but neither was nearly as contentious as the FDA reversing its prior position.

For this reason, I see this decision as an argument against an agency changing course from an accepted previous (but not Congressionally defined) perspective. However, Chevron—at least according to interviews with lawmakers responding to the 'MQD' usage—ran counter to what the supposed understanding of how agency work would function. Again, I can find primary sources later.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/22/us/high-court-holds-fda-c...

> the court adopted a new legal concept

You phrased something very poorly. Someone replied and you moved the goalposts; claiming that you were actually referring to the majority using a concept. And now you’ve moved the goalposts again.

I don’t know why you’re doing backflips to avoid admitting that you were wrong.

> Indeed, the court adopted a new legal concept

I wasn't wrong - the first time the concept was named in a decision was in the Biden administration. It sounds like you're not actually reading any of these, or aware of this issue?

I do agree that the idea that some agency actions should be used appeared in the case OP cited. But it's obvious that SCOTUS is using this concept much more broadly now.

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.

its truly bizarre that anyone with this view could get approved by congress. its so antithetical to the entire american political system. just blows my mind how spineless congress as an institution has been for decades.

Repealing the 17th amendment will once again incentivize the Senate to choose Supreme Court justices who seek to strengthen federalism & decentralize power

I don't think that is compatible with his ruling in Biden v. Nebraska, nor some others during Biden's term.

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.

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.

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.

I remember being shocked, albeit not surprised, when I read that he had quite a lot of contact with Ron de Santis.

https://americanoversight.org/email-suggests-that-supreme-co...

But the toys are so cheap. It can’t possibly be just a matter of the money, there has to be some blackmail involved. Either that or he was always self hating.

Why would there need to be bribery or blackmail involved? He's ideologically aligned with the goals of the republican party.

His patrons lavish him with gifts because they don't want him to retire, not because they want a specific ruling.

It’s the same thing.

Keep doing exactly what we want you to do, or the money goes to someone who will.

Which is also a message to the rest.

Then why accept them and face the embarrassment of being found out not reporting them properly?

You are correct compared to the $320k/year salary these empty nesters pull these things seem not that expensive. So why not just save up and buy them himself?

Yes, RED FLAG. Because apparently he likes nice things and spending money so much he can't seem to afford them himself or forgo the gifts and spare himself the scandal.

He was gifted a motor coach worth $80,000, and that’s just one of the bigger things he can’t launder.

[flagged]

What liberal justices do has no bearing on OP's argument at all. You must be able to recognize the fallacy?

Why are conservatives always so angry?

Why do angry people tend to lean conservative?

Constant fear.

[flagged]

It’s not an absurd scenario. The law was written specifically to allow blocking imports from a country.

The nuance is that nothing Congress passed granted to right to tax. Additionally, they did grant the power to partially block imports. Nothing says you have to enact “no imports from Japan” vs. “no imports of networking equipment from Lichtenstein.”

>The law was written specifically to allow blocking imports from a country.

The precise wording is regulate. The idea that "regulate" means you can turn it on or off with no in-between is beyond parody. Absurd. Hilarious. Farcical.

That said the headline is misleading and should be renamed, nothing is changing from this ruling.

The precise wording is

"investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit..."

> As usual, interesting discussion about the nuances of this ruling are happening on X.

@grok is this true

If you listen to the oral arguments, this issue was discussed at length.

There are two reasons for this distinction:

1. That's what congress decided. They get to determine tariffs, not the president. If the president doesn't like the law congress passed, he doesn't get to just ignore it.

2. Congress is very jealous of the right to tax and spend. They do not want to hand over this power to the president. Tariffs are taxes. If the president can just impose whatever tariffs he wants, he can raise revenue without asking congress for permission. That would grant the president enormous power to go around congress. Banning imports from a country does not bring in revenue for the president, so it doesn't pose the same risk to congress' power.

Trump has been trying to create a situation in which he can both raise revenue (through tariffs) and spend it however he wants (e.g., through DOGE's arbitrary changes to government spending) without ever asking congress. If he succeeds, the balance of power will be completely destroyed. The president will rule alone.

> discussion about the nuances of this ruling are happening on X

I'm sure they are lol.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Karl Popper would like a word

"In fact, [proportional representation] robs him of personal responsibility; it makes of him a voting machine rather than a thinking and feeling person. In my view, this is by itself a sufficient argument against proportional representation. For what we need in politics are individuals who can judge on their own and who are prepared to carry personal responsibility."

https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2016/01/31/fr...

This is a global issue, laws aren't math formulas, law is interpreted, hence the need of judges.

That's the case in any country where a parliamentary body is split so closely.

When you need every vote to get legislature to pass, because you control 51% of a chamber, backbenchers on the ideological fringe of a party, (DINOs and RINOs) have a lot of power.

When you have a majority with comfortable margins, you can care a lot less about what the Sinemas and Manchins and McCains of a party think.

You're looking at the world with your American blinders on. The rest of the world's elected representatives vote with their party or they leave their party. What you're describing is a fundamentally American phenomenon.

But parties typically have to compromise with other parties in their coalition, so it would seem to amount to the same thing (compromise is required to pass legislation)?

Correct. The difference between FPTP and PR systems (Or countries with very strong regional parties) is that in a multi-party PR system, the coalition happens between party, in a FPTP two-party system, the coalition happens within the big tentpole parties.

There are many reasons for why two-party FPTP sucks, but this phenomena is present in multi-party systems, too. And, of course, sometimes politicians end up crossing the aisle, much to the chagrin of the party whip.

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.)

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.

Read the opinions. Both are pretty reasonable. I think the dissent has a good point that a plain language interpretation of the term "regulate imports" would seem to include tariffs.

The bigger issue I think is that that statute exists in the first place. "Emergency powers" that a president can grant himself just by "declaring an emergency" on any pretense with no checks or balances is a stupid idea.

The original law (like many laws that delegated congressional authorities at the time) contained a legislative veto provision which gave the legislative final oversight of any administrative action. In the 80’s the Supreme Court found that legislative veto provisions were unconstitutional, but left all of those delegations standing. After that ruling, the administration can now do what it wanted without congressional oversight and the ability to veto any attempt to repeal the laws. In the oral arguments, Gorsuch raised the possibility that the law itself should have been found unconstitutional in the 80’s because the legislative veto was essential to its function. It looks like the court today took a minimalist approach, letting these delegations stand but minimizing the scope of the powers delegated.

Not a lawyer, but I found the majority opinion's position on "regulate" much more compelling than the dissent. In particular, the majority's argument that "regulate" is a pretty common function of the executive branch that in no other context implies the authority to tax (tariff), which is a pretty clear Article I power. The majority also convincingly argued that it seems unreasonable to interpret a law to broadly delegate Congressional power to the Executive branch without Congress making that intent explicit in the law. The dissent not only didn't make good counter arguments even read by themselves, but the majority opinion did a pretty good job refuting those arguments specifically.

Only if you ignore the explicit grant to Congress in Article 1 Section 8... You're trying to argue an implicit grant somehow trumps an explicit grant.

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

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C1-1-...

It's obviously not that simple. If we follow your logic then we would expect that no previous President was able to enact tariffs. We obviously know that to be false as Presidents in the past have enacted a wide range of tariffs.

We also know that in the past the constitution has been violated for political expedience.

Well, not really because that part doesn't grant the US President arbitrary powers to perform any action that would result in regulation (for example, he is not given the power to go around killing random people even if doing so would effectively regulate international trade; he can't declare war on another country even if doing so would be the best way to effectuate regulation of trade with another country) it gives him the OBLIGATION to perform regulation, using the powers delegated to him.

If giving the US President unlimited and arbitrary authority as long as they can claim it was useful for meeting a legal obligation created by Congress were the correct interpretation then we need look no further than the "Take Care" clause of the US Constitution, where the US President is given the obligation to take care that all laws are faithfully executed -- which, with this interpretation, would mean that any action would be under the purview of the US President as long as they could claim at doing that action resulted in the laws being faithfully executed.

Indeed, if you want to case intuitional blame here, it’s far more Congress’ fault for forcing the court to split these linguistic hairs rather than address this issue head on themselves.

Kavanaugh's opinion seems to say "well, this would be too hard to undo, so we should just leave it alone and let Trump continue". That hardly seems 'reasonable'. Just lazy and/or partisan.

> The plaintiffs argue and the Court concludes that the President lacks authority under IEEPA to impose tariffs. I disagree. In accord with Judge Taranto’s careful and persuasive opinion in the Federal Circuit, I would conclude that the President’s power under IEEPA to “regulate . . . importation” encompasses tariffs. As a matter of ordinary meaning, including dictionary definitions and historical usage, the broad power to “regulate . . . importation” includes the traditional and common means to do so—in particular, quotas, embargoes, and tariffs.

That doesn't sound like "well, this would be too hard to undo" to me, and making that argument elsewhere doesn't diminish the main point.

It's hard for me to pay my taxes

In fairness Trump is the first guy who uses this cheatcode so blatantly. There used to be a kind of decorum.

But yes it is basically eliminating parliament and rule by a monarch- making a mockery of 1776.

> 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.

As a counter-example, if the case was, say, "can a college use race as a factor in admissions"[0], you get 3 justices siding in favor using dogshit reasoning, just from the other side of the aisle. It's a bit ridiculous to think there aren't Democrat partisan judges on the Supreme Court.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

The Bakke decision in 1978 upheld that race could be used as a factor in admissions. Your counter-example is precedent from 50 years ago. Does that same precedent exist in this tariff case?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...

I guess there are “hacks” on both sides?

That is not contraexample. It does not show conservative justices not being hacks.

Besides, conservatives including conservative justices are literally pro racial profiling and arresting people on race only.

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.

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

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

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

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

Ah,yes, british constitutional law. In a country where no parliaments can bind its successors it means there is no constitution and the constitutional law is a polite fiction poorly held together with tradition and precedent.

it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than the US system

The difference is that the US system is given by God, as commonly said by many Americans over the decades. And what power is greater than God?

I've never heard anyone say this and I come from an extremely religious area.

All systems have weaknesses, but the utter criminal farce the US system has been betrayed to be yields a situation where zero Americans should be gloating about their constitution or values any more.

Oh look, Trump just declared a new, 10% global tariff because lol laws. Congress is busted. There are essentially zero real laws for the plutocrat class.

That was the fastest Supreme Court ruling in UK history though...

Similarly in the US, Watergate (Nixon impeachment) took only 16 days, and Bush v. Gore (contested election) took just 30 days to reach a Supreme Court judgement.

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

Yes. "Relatively". We really need a fast-track process for genuinely insane nonsense to get shot down in a matter of days, not months.

It takes a long time for something to get through all the appeals. Getting an injunction to put a stop to something during the appeals doesn't take that long.

The problem in this case is that Congress made such a mess of the law that the lower court judges didn't think the outcome obvious enough to grant the injunction.

> The problem in this case is that Congress made such a mess of the law that the lower court judges didn't think the outcome obvious enough to grant the injunction.

The lower courts issued several such injunctions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/trump-tariffs...

"On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of International Trade dealt an early blow to that strategy. The bipartisan panel of judges, one of whom had been appointed by Mr. Trump, ruled that the law did not grant the president “unbounded authority” to impose tariffs on nearly every country, as Mr. Trump had sought. As a result, the president’s tariffs were declared illegal, and the court ordered a halt to their collection within the next 10 days."

"Just before she spoke, a federal judge in a separate case ordered another, temporary halt to many of Mr. Trump’s tariffs, ruling in favor of an educational toy company in Illinois, whose lawyers told the court it was harmed by Mr. Trump’s actions."

There were presumably lower court judges who didn't issue injunctions, or what are people objecting to?

The appeals level stayed the injunctions temporarily, probably expecting a quick emergency docket ruling rather than a long delay.

The appellate court decides whether to stay the injunction based on how likely they think you are to win more than which docket they think the Supreme Court is going to use. Cases going on the emergency docket are not common.

> The appellate court decides whether to stay the injunction based on how likely they think you are to win…

If multiple appeals courts thought this case was a winner for the administration, we have an even bigger problem.

(Also, no. They might, for example, disagree on immediate irreparable harm, but not the overall merits.)

> Cases going on the emergency docket are not common.

Sure. But some of them look clearly destined for it. Including this one.

> If multiple appeals courts thought this case was a winner for the administration, we have an even bigger problem.

Do we? The law here was a mess. Prediction markets didn't have the outcome at anything like a certainty and the relevant stocks are up on the decision, implying it wasn't already priced in -- and both of those are with the benefit of the transcripts once the case was already at the Supreme Court to feel out how the Justices were leaning, which the intermediary appellate court wouldn't have had at the time.

> Sure. But some of them look clearly destined for it.

It's not a thing anyone should be banking on in any case. And if that was actually their expectation then they could just as easily have not stayed the injunction and just let the Supreme Court do it if they were inclined to.

> the relevant stocks are up on the decision

Predictable result, unpredictable timing.

> they could just as easily have not stayed the injunction and just let the Supreme Court do it if they were inclined to

Hindsight is, as always, 20/20.

> Predictable result, unpredictable timing.

That wouldn't explain the prediction markets thinking the administration had a double digit chance of winning. The sure things go 99:1.

> Hindsight is, as always, 20/20.

It's not a matter of knowing which docket would be used. Why stay the injunction at all if you think the Supreme Court is going to immediately reverse you?

> That wouldn't explain the prediction markets thinking the administration had a double digit chance of winning.

I am not a believer in the accuracy of prediction markets.

> Why stay the injunction at all if you think the Supreme Court is going to immediately reverse you?

They didn't think that.

They thought SCOTUS would back them up faster.

Back in November: https://fortune.com/2025/11/07/trump-tariffs-supreme-court-i...

"That suggests a potentially lopsided 7-2 vote against Trump, who appointed Gorsuch, Barrett and Kavanaugh during his first term."

We got 6-3.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/international-trade/trump-tari...

"Though he normally aligns with Thomas and Alito, Gorsuch may be more likely to vote against Trump’s tariffs than Kavanaugh is, according to Prelogar. “It might actually be the chief, Barrett and Gorsuch who are in play,” she said."

https://www.quarles.com/newsroom/publications/oral-arguments...

"During the argument, several Justices expressed skepticism about the IEEPA expanding the President’s powers to encompass the ability to set tariffs."

This was the widespread conclusion back then; that the justices were clearly skeptical and that the government was struggling to figure out an effective argument.

> They thought SCOTUS would back them up faster.

They were the court removing the injunction, i.e. saying the tariffs had enough of a chance to be upheld.

As pointed out in other comments this process is entirely by choice of the court. In other cases where they just felt like ruling on something they have put things on their emergency docket and ruled on them immediately. Letting this situation ride for a year was a choice by the court.

Not doing something you could have done is frequently less of a choice and more of a lack of bandwidth to simultaneously consider everything which is happening at the same time. The vast majority of cases don't make it onto the emergency docket.

Many reasonable people would argue this was significant / enough of an emergency to justify devoting that bandwidth, even by the standards of the Supreme Court.

The fast track is congress clarifying their own shit. Courts are slow, it's a feature not a bug.

SCOTUS can move much quicker than this when they want to.

And have fairly regularly to benefit this administration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_docket#Second_Trump_pre...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.G.G._v._Trump was vacated within days.

"On Friday, March 14, 2025, Trump signed presidential proclamation 10903, invoking the Alien Enemies Act and asserting that Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization from Venezuela, had invaded the United States. The White House did not announce that the proclamation had been signed until the afternoon of the next day."

"Very early on Saturday, March 15, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Democracy Forward filed a class action suit in the District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of five Venezuelan men held in immigration detention… The suit was assigned to judge James Boasberg. That morning, noting the exigent circumstances, he approved a temporary restraining order for the five plaintiffs, and he ordered a 5 p.m. hearing to determine whether he would certify the class in the class action."

"On March 28, 2025, the Trump administration filed an emergency appeal with the US Supreme Court, asking it to vacate Boasberg's temporary restraining orders and to immediately allow the administration to resume deportations under the Alien Enemies Act while it considered the request to vacate. On April 7, in a per curiam decision, the court vacated Boasberg's orders…"

TL;DR: Trump signs executive order on March 14. Judge puts it on hold on March 15. Admin appeals on March 28. SCOTUS intervenes by April 7.

That was on the emergency docket. This decision was the merits docket, which always takes much longer.

That's a distinction entirely invented by the court, and under their control.

The emergency docket is whatever they want to treat as an emergency. The decision not to treat this as such - it's hard to imagine many clearer examples of "immediate irreprable harm" - was clearly partisan.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, in an alternative universe RBG and Sotomayor both stepped down and got replaced under a Dem admin.

It'd be interesting if Biden had taken the new doctrine of presidential immunity to heart in the last few months of his term.

A true hero would have done whatever it took to pack the SC and then resigned.

How would those confirmations have worked exactly?

The president is immune to prosecution for official acts. He could have "officially" arrested republican senators, if necessary.

You realize that would be an utterly insane road to go down and would hopefully lead to immediate impeachment, right?

i would've said the same thing about the jan 6th coup attempt but here we are

[flagged]

> The one where he specifically told people to protest peacefully?

I know the rules say to assume good faith but I don't see how anyone can do that given what you wrote. I'm really struggling to understand how that is your main takeaway from all the events that transpired that day.

But rather than rehash that maybe it's better to focus on current events. What are your thoughts on Trump, the first day assuming office in his second term, issuing a blanket pardon for all of the crimes his supporters committed that day in his name? Why would Trump who just wanted people to "protest peacefully," pardon those convicted of... beating officers with a flag pole, stomping on officers' heads, and crushing an officer in a metal door frame using a riot shield?

I do agree with you on one thing though:

> it's like they're living in another world

It truly saddens me to see so many people living in completely different realities. But I honestly don't think it's me or the person you're replying to that decided to relocate.

> You realize that would be an utterly insane road to go down

We're already down that road; SCOTUS put us on it.

The question is now how much damage it'll do to the car to do a U-turn.

> would hopefully lead to immediate impeachment…

This describes like a hundred things in the Trump second term so far.

>immune to prosecution for official acts.

nope not true at all. go away troll

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States

> Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court determined that presidential immunity from criminal prosecution presumptively extends to all of a president's "official acts" – with absolute immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate such as the pardon, command of the military, execution of laws, or control of the executive branch

Seems accurate.

[flagged]

The most stupid idea ever. Biden, despite his frailties, was conscious enough not to do this.

I think they were just overly confident that they would be re-elected. Why throw the baby out when the bathwater is still warm?

Packing the court just means passing legislation. It isn't some criminal thing.

The court is an expression of political power. Expressing political power through it is not stupid.

Packing the court is unprecedented, and as soon as anyone did it, they would both do it continuously. It would also outrage the other party and make the first to do it more likely to lose the next election.

So you would get to pack the court for the rest of your current term before the other party gets back in and packs it the other way, and thereafter lose the courts as a check on the party in power forever because the first thing a party would do when they get into power is pack the courts.

It's a monumentally stupid idea.

As with partisan gerrymandering, packing the court cannot be the only step.

It would need to come with a commitment to a package of difficult to undo (i.e. amendments) reforms. SCOTUS term limits, preventing the Senate from refusing to even consider nominees, bans on justices receiving gifts (https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...), revocation of Presidential immunity, etc. You pack the court with an explicit promise to largely return to the old status quo when it's fixed.

The SC should be formed by lot from judges in the lower courts, every so often (every session might work OK).

We form other courts by lot. Constitutionally, there just must be a Supreme Court. It doesn’t say how it should be composed.

Packing is a band-aid, and likely to be unpopular. This is a fix with a less nakedly-partisan result, so should be easier to sell.

Do you really think that if you packed the court, there is anything you could do to prevent the other party from doing the same thing the next time they're in power? Your plan would have to be to prevent them from ever getting back into power, and that's a civil war.

On top of that, Clarence Thomas is the oldest person on the court and Alito is only two years younger. By the end of the next Presidential term they'll both be in their 80s. You don't have to pack the court, you just have to be in office for the term or two after this one.

You also need to control congress or they'll just block you till they get their guy in.

That's when you give them a moderate because you'd both rather that than flip a coin for who gets control of both branches at once first.

Nope, Obama tried that and McConnell still refused.

That was in a Presidential election year after Obama had already appointed two other Justices and the vacancy was the deciding vote, and Garland was more of a centrist than the previous nominees but was still left-leaning and would have flipped the court. Then they definitely lose if they confirm him but maybe win if there is a President from the other party the next year, and on top of that as long as they held the Senate even if they didn't retake the Presidency they could just confirm Garland in the fall instead of the summer.

That's not what it looks like in most cases. In the first half of any term the next election can't gain you the Presidency but it could lose you the Senate. On top of that, when it isn't the deciding vote, e.g. the first of either Alito or Thomas to be replaced, a moderate is a much better hedge than the coin flip even in the second half of a term, because if you take the moderate and then lose the next election at least you have the moderate in the other party's majority, meanwhile if you win the next election then you keep the majority regardless.

Which is to say, that's only likely to happen in the next few years if it happens for the second of the two Justices in the second half of a Presidential term and the Democrats lose the subsequent Presidential election.

> Do you really think that if you packed the court, there is anything you could do to prevent the other party from doing the same thing the next time they're in power?

I don't think it's 100% possible to stop a determined political movement in the US from doing A Holocaust, but I think it's worth at least trying to make it tough.

And that's a good reason not to do a Holocaust of your own, seeing as you likely don't want to kick start a chain of Holocausts.

We can distinguish between packing the court in response to the other party doing it and doing A Holocaust, right?

The point is your objection also applies to A Holocaust.

We can't 100% prevent anything; the Constitution could get amended to permit mass summary executions, with enough votes and public support. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying to make that tougher to accomplish.

The way you make that tougher to accomplish is by adding more checks and balances or repealing laws granting excessive authority to the executive. Packing the court would de facto remove an important one. The thing that would help that is a constitutional amendment prohibiting court packing.

> But the way you make that tougher to accomplish is by adding more checks and balances or repealing laws granting excessive authority to the executive.

That is what I describe as the "package" of reforms, yes.

> The thing that would help that is a constitutional amendment prohibiting court packing.

Good idea! Pack the court, and in that law, include a trigger provision that repeals it as soon as said amendment is passed.

(This has similarly been proposed in gerrymandering.)

> Good idea! Pack the court, and in that law, include a trigger provision that repeals it as soon as said amendment is passed.

Except then the other party just packs the court again instead of passing the amendment, whereas if you already have the votes to pass the amendment then you would just do that without packing the court.

The idea is to establish a "we can keep the everyone-loses war going, or we can fix it for both of us". It's hardly unprecedented; you're seeing it right now with the decision to reopen the government except DHS.

The real way you do this is by thinking ahead for five minutes. We consistently have the problem that everybody realizes checks and balances are important when the other party is in power but that's when they don't have the ability to institute them, and then they forget all about it the next time they're in power.

The easiest time to reduce executive power is when your party is in the executive branch to sign the bill.

> The easiest time to reduce executive power is when your party is in the executive branch to sign the bill.

This has the exact same problem you're complaining my proposal has; it can be undone, quite easily. Probably more easily.

Except that court packing is a purely partisan play where they gain nothing from not reciprocating in kind, whereas they benefit symmetrically from a reduction in executive power for the same reason as you -- it helps them the next time they're in the minority. And the symmetrical move wouldn't be to re-grant those powers to the executive, it would be to further limit the executive from unilaterally doing some things the other party doesn't think it should be doing.

The best case scenario would be to somehow get both parties actually targeting the other's corruption instead of just trying to get the votes needed to be the ones sticking the money in their own pockets.

I see no reason we can't have hundreds of supreme court judges.

Biden shared a delusion with Schumer and first-term Obama, that the Republicans have a behavioral floor they won't gleefully take a jackhammer to.

Democrats are finally waking up to this, I think, given the recent retaliatory gerrymandering in CA and VA.

Both of which (especially Virginia) are much more egregious than what happened in Texas, and it’s not like gerrymandering is new to either side. I’m not sure which side you think has a “behavioral floor,” but the answer is neither other than what we hold them to, so don’t excuse “your side.”

> Both of which (especially Virginia) are much more egregious than what happened in Texas…

"Mom, he punched me back after I sucker-punched him!"

It's more like "Mom, he punched me after I punched him after he punched me after I punched him after he punched me after..."

Nobody would have cared about Texas' gerrymandering except for Trump (stupidly) called for it - pretty much every political party has done it in their state over the years, but it's generally been gently putting their finger on the scale. But now that someone that half of the country have been convinced is literally Hitler had a part in it they feel like they can go absolutely wild with it. Everyone should be mad when gerrymandering happens, whether it helps your side or not. Representatives that feel absolutely secure in their seats are bad at their jobs, whether they're on your side or not. Going so hogwild in 'retribution' isn't virtuous.

How is the citizen-voted CA response - contingent entirely on Texas actually implementing - "much more egregious than what happened in Texas"?

Because the Texas redistricting hopes to bring the Democrats seats down from 13 to to 8, but a lot of those could still easily go either way. California made theirs to also pick up 5 but theirs are more sure. Virginia is the real whopper, where a purple state will move to all seats but one for Democrats instead of the reasonable almost down the middle split they now have.

I'm not defending what was done in Texas. Gerrymandering is gross. But I do hate how the discourse seems to be that Texas started it. They absolutely didn't. Neither party can be blamed for that, and this tit and tat back and forth is the wrong way to deal with it - so are so called "nonpartisan" committees, by the way. It's easy for a nonpartisan committee to quickly become quite partisan. What I wish would have happened is that there was a real dialogue about better fixes for the problem, but instead it became political mudslinging.

Easy part solution - put mathematical limits on the geometry. It wouldn't eliminate gerrymandering but it would certainly help.

"Whatever it took" is just appointing more judges. The president can do that. Unfortunately, the result would be that Trump would have just packed it the other direction and this case would have gone the opposite way.

Are you should that would have been a good idea?

Yes. Eventually people would get tired of the court getting packed every 4 to 8 years and maybe fix the core weaknesses in the system.

Bills have gotten introduced to keep it at 9, but are generally shot down by democrats. Most recent one (I think, this isn't the easiest to research) is here. See all the sponsors are Rs[1]

Part of the problem is it requires an amendment so you need a super majority.

Imo democrats are waiting until they have enough of a majority to tank the reputation hit court packing would bring, but then lock it to 15 after they do so.

[1] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/grassley...

> Unfortunately, the result would be that Trump…

...would have been sentenced for his 34 felony convictions and probably never get reelected?

Are you saying a Biden-packed SC would have directly resulted in Trump being jailed? How? And my understanding was he was sentenced for the felonies, to unconditional discharge, because he was days away from beginning his second term. So how would that have gone differently just because the SC was packed?

Edit: Oh, maybe you’re thinking of things like the Colorado ballot eligibility case. Then if he hadn’t been electable, he would have been sentenced to serve time. Maybe, but are you arguing the Constitutional merits of Trump losing that case? Or are you okay with partisan hacks in the SC as long as they are Dems instead?

> Edit: Oh, maybe you’re thinking of things like the Colorado ballot eligibility case.

No, I'm thinking of the get-out-of-jail card they gave him in Trump v. US that immediately impacted NY v. Trump.

> Then if he hadn’t been electable, he would have been sentenced to serve time.

No, I think an electable person should still be able to be locked up for crimes.

> Or are you okay with partisan hacks in the SC as long as they are Dems instead?

I think the only chance of saving SCOTUS from partisan hackery is to stop surrendering.

> Are you saying a Biden-packed SC would have directly resulted in Trump being jailed?

I don't think a Biden-packed SC would've found the President to be immune to criminal charges, no.

> And my understanding was he was sentenced for the felonies, to unconditional discharge, because he was days away from beginning his second term.

He was sentenced to nothing, directly because of the SCOTUS ruling. Per the judge: "the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land".

Pre-SCOTUS ruling, no such "encroachment" existed.

His felony convictions came from crimes committed in the 2016 campaign. The judge “subsequently ruled that Trump's conviction related "entirely to unofficial conduct" and "poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the Executive Branch."” (https://abcnews.com/US/judge-trumps-hush-money-case-expected...) so I don’t think it relates to SCOTUS’s immunity ruling.

> Merchan subsequently ruled that Trump's conviction related "entirely to unofficial conduct" and "poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the Executive Branch."

Again, at the actual sentencing, his ruling stated an unconditional discharge was "the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land".

"I can sentence you, but only to nothing" is functionally not being able to sentence him.

If he was referring to the 2024 SCOTUS ruling, I guess I expected him to spell it out well enough for an armchair lawyer like myself, but you are probably right. Though I wonder if the "encroach" wording could be about the Supremacy clause and separation of powers (him being a state judge encroaching on the elected federal executive.) He wrote a lot at https://www.nycourts.gov/LegacyPDFs/press/PDFs/People%20v.%2... but I can't tell how much this SCOTUS ruling weighed into it. There are references to "presidential immunity" that, I think, encompass older cases than the 2024 one.

Anyway, in agreement with your larger point, the legal analyst at https://youtu.be/4tbaDI7ycrA?t=592 says he believe this SCOTUS would not have allowed a real sentence, so my nitpicking about the interaction of the 2024 decision with the lower court's sentencing doesn't matter much; SCOTUS would have let Trump go either way, and probably a Biden-packed court wouldn't have.

It's just another sign that modern Republicans aren't truly "Constitution-lovers" or textualists, that their leader is only safe because judicial activism invented immunity for him.

If trump had lost he would have ended up in prison for his many obvious crimes (most especially Jan 6th and the classified documents fiasco)

None of these three things are related.

SCOTUS doesn't rule on criminal cases, sentencing for state level crimes is done at the state level and he could have still run for president in jail.

The fact that the conviction only made his polling go up should tell you what the result of jailing him would have been.

> SCOTUS doesn't rule on criminal cases…

SCOTUS ruled that the President has immunity from criminal prosecution.

(And they very regularly rule on other, more mundane criminal cases. Where on earth did you get the idea they don't? https://oklahomavoice.com/2025/02/25/u-s-supreme-court-tosse... as a super random example.)

> sentencing for state level crimes is done at the state level

SCOTUS ruled that said immunity applies to state crimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States#Opinion...

This was... rather large news.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/10/trump-unconditional...

> “This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land is a sentence of unconditional discharge,” Merchan said at the sentencing.

> The fact that the conviction only made his polling go up should tell you what the result of jailing him would have been.

We have precisely zero information on what a campaign by a jailed candidate who can't travel, campaign, or schmooze donors would result in.

> SCOTUS ruled that the President has immunity from criminal prosecution. > SCOTUS ruled that said immunity applies to state crimes.

And yet he was criminally prosecuted.

> And they very regularly rule on other, more mundane criminal cases.

Sorry, they don't convict in criminal cases.

> “This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction without encroachment on the highest office of the land is a sentence of unconditional discharge,” Merchan said at the sentencing.

You're conflating things again. He was not punished for his crimes. That doesn't mean he was not convicted. You can't be immune and convicted. If he was immune, the case would have been thrown out. He's still a felon and so, clearly, not immune.

The immunity granted by SCOTUS was far more limited in scope than news outlets would have you believe.

> We have precisely zero information on what a campaign by a jailed candidate who can't travel, campaign, or schmooze donors would result in.

This time it will be different, surely!

> And yet he was criminally prosecuted.

BEFORE THE RULING.

Come on.

NY v Trump was a state criminal case. The Supreme Court would not have been involved.

> NY v Trump was a state criminal case. The Supreme Court would not have been involved.

Bullshit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause

SCOTUS overturns state laws and convictions plenty.

State criminal case: https://oklahomavoice.com/2025/02/25/u-s-supreme-court-tosse...

State laws held unconstitutional: https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/state-laws-held-uncon...

Exactly.

>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?

>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

It never occurred to me that bots are voting on threads. In the age of AI agents, that's pretty dumb of me.

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)

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

> Yes but in practice they delegate this power to the executive.

No, they do not delegate the power to lay (set) taxes to the executive, they do assign the executive the function of collecting the taxes laid by Congress.

> Congress doesn’t run the IRS themselves after all

The IRS doesn't freely set taxes, it collects the taxes set by Congress.

> No, they do not delegate the power to lay (set) taxes to the executive, they do assign the executive the function of collecting the taxes laid by Congress.

The quote from the constitution is "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes," not for the executive to collect taxes. If they can delegate collecting to IRS in the executive branch, why not can they not delegate the "Power To lay" taxes?

The moment Congress authorizes that the Executive may use discretion then the Executive can effectively levy taxes. They may be wielding a bat owned by someone else, but who swings it is ultimately what's important.

Now I'm generally of the opinion that Congress shouldn't be allowed to give the Executive discretion but seems no one agrees with that and Congress would rather let the Executive write "not quite laws" on their behalf.

They don't delegate the policymaking. Tax code is always congressionally approved, and I'm unaware of any even remote argument that changing tax policy is delegated to the executive.

OTOH enforcement of congressional policies is basically always the role of the executive, so the fact that the IRS exists and does things doesn't really impact delegation.

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

[flagged]

[flagged]

Did you actually read it? Seems unlikely. I agree with the majority but I think the dissent does make some ok points.

[flagged]

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

That might actually be a pretty genius strategy.

Spoiler, that attorney supplies the list of people to charge.

Well what you're describing could just be finding the most skilled lawyer in town. What the other person is describing is bribery and nepotism.

Maybe Brad Bondi is the most skilled lawyer in town. It's certainly not in the interest of the clients to have any material knowledge otherwise, nor for it to be revealed to them.

It is, however, in the interest of the American public not to have a corrupt justice system. Thus, we should not rely on far fetched assumptions instead of investigating corruption where it appears.

The lack of the later leads to the former.

It likely is nepotism (and maybe bribery depending on your definition, but very unlikely to meet the legal bar of bribery), but I'm not sure what about the GP's comment makes it so obviously clear to you that it is both of those things.

is it doesn't meet the legal bar for bribery, it's only because the supreme Court has made most forms of bribary legal (presumably to prevent Thomas from being arrested for taking lots of bribes)

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...

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.

> 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.

It’s not really excusing anything, just pointing out that Cantor Fitzgerald would be making money whether this Supreme Court ruling went for or against the Trump tariffs. So it’s not like they had to have any inside knowledge to be making money.

They do make more money the more pervasive tariffs are though as more people would buy tariff related financial products.

It's true that a volatile environment in general is good for certain types of investment banking business, including facilitating this trade. I nevertheless think it's unlikely - honestly, a galaxy brain take - that Cantor Fitzgerald or other investment banks with influence in the Trump administration would push for policies like unconstitutional tariffs just to drive trading revenue. Maybe the strongest reason is that other, frankly more lucrative investment banking activities, like fundraising and M&A, benefit from a growing economy and a stable economic and regulatory environment.

It stretches your imagination to conceive of a financier chasing short term gains over the long term stability of the investment bank they are part of? I seem to recall an event back in the late '00s that you may want to look into.

That's what a bookie does. Middleman.

If you are the risk and the insurance for that risk you aren’t a middle man you are the mob.

> my impression is

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

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”.

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

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

There are Non-Resident Importers, which are foreign companies that import goods into the USA, but do not have a presence in the United States. About 15% of USA imports come through NRIs.

For them this reversal sets up a true irony. Trump effectively forced US citizens to pay more the imported goods. He thought that money would go to the USA treasury. Now the US treasury has to pay it back, so it is a free gift to the exporting countries. Like China.

Truly delicious.

It is a return of their capital illegally acquired by the federal government.

No the consumers paid the price of the tariffs. These refunds are going to businesses who just passed the price along

You don't think Target is going to send me a check? I had assumed it would arrive by mail in the next few days.

With Donald Trump's signature right across the bottom, right?

I’m betting on that

"Vote better next time I suppose" is the message to the electorate, because it would be impossible to return the funds to them due to diffusion.

The best you could do is perhaps model the additional per household cost (which has been done) and issue them checks from the Treasury (stimulus check style), but who is going to pay for it? The taxpayer! There is no way to incur this economic cost on the people who incurred the harm (this administration). You could potentially get the funds back from companies through higher corp taxes. Is Congress going to pass that? Certainly not. Them the breaks of electing Tariff Man. Does exactly what it says on the tin.

> ....I am a Tariff Man. When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so. It will always be the best way to max out our economic power. We are right now taking in $billions in Tariffs. MAKE AMERICA RICH AGAIN 9:03 AM · Dec 4, 2018

https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1069970500535902208 | https://archive.today/BBEmH

Historical lesson in governance failure. Can't change history, the outcome is regrettable, we can only try to do better in the future. Onward. Let the lesson not be for naught.

> it would be impossible to return the funds to them due to diffusion.

It's very much possible if money isn't (or only partially) returned to the companies and used for targeted investment benefiting the public. Of course this won't help much if government spending priories and legislative objectives aren't revised, but that's unlikely because there's nobody in government or academia with anything close to a good idea about it.

That allows the illegal tax to continue. The tax has to be returned to the people it was collected from, and that’s the importers.

Otherwise it’s the same as just leaving the illegal tax in effect.

> Otherwise it’s the same as just leaving the illegal tax in effect.

The SCOTUS didn't say that in their decision. No matter how you call it, the tariffs were found in breach with simple law passed by Congress - that is, the undoing of tariffs can be legislated by Congress and it can take any shape they like - it will be legal. Anyway, fine-tuning this is a waste of time, the big problems are elsewhere.

Without these tariffs Trump and his advisors' already legislated and approved agenda adds 2 trillion dollars to our national debt. Step one is the Republican Congress rolling back the big beautiful bill that is no longer funded, if they truly are the fiscally responsible political party.

But we all know they are actually the party of unsustainable debt (with the political agenda of it blowing up the country as they lay out in their 40+ years of starve the beast policy). They then come to threads like this and talk about...the unsustainable debt that their 40+ years of policymaking has created and how government doesn't work (because of their 40+ years of policy making) and we need to get rid of it. 40+ years of destroying the country via starve the beast policy and placing the country in unsustainable financial peril all for a political agenda they can't reach any other way.

If there was a functioning DOJ, they could bring RICO charges against the whole administration, their business associates and involved family members, all of whom are co-conspirators to corruption of government and bribery. But that would never happen, of course, because Americans don't riot en masse and demand accountability for corrupt government officials.

It's the job of the Congress to hold the executive branch accountable, with the ultimate endpoint being impeachment and removal if necessary. Unfortunately, the Senate republicans are completely sold out to the cult of Trump so there will be no relief from that quarter.

Some of them are lawyers, some even with law enforcement background.

They should be well aware of what extortion is.

If Trump did it on his own that's one thing if not it's a conspiracy.

They’re aware.

There must be a mind boggling amount of profit going to these importers to get basically all of the tariff proceeds back on already completed transaction with zero expectation that it be paid back to the people bearing the cost.

I can't imagine their margins are usually very high, the tariff rates are astronomical compared to their usual margins. Hopefully someone here has more information than me because to my naive mind this basically absolutely explodes the free cash reserves of importers from high volume high tariff countries creating a lottery winnings for a business sector of epic proportions rarely seen.

> the consumers paid the price of the tariffs. These refunds are going to businesses who just passed the price along

This story is often repeated, especially by businesses advocating against taxes, but transparently false if you think about it: Taxes and tariffs are costs for a business, no different than an increase in the cost of hops for Budweizer, or an increase wholesale cost of M&M's for the corner store.

When hops' cost increases, Budweizer doesn't just pass it along to consumers; the corner store also doesn't just raise the price of M&Ms. Everyone knows that if you raise the price, fewer people buy your beer/candy and your profits may drop overall, while your scarce assets (money) will be sunk in products sitting on the shelves when you need those assets elsewhere. They can't just raise prices arbitrarily: if Budweizer charged $20/can they'd have zero profit.

As we know well, some companies even sell products at a loss because that is the best outcome for their profits - e.g., car manufacturers, rather than have a hundred million in assets 'lost' indefinitely to unsold cars, and having no pricing that is more profitable, will sell at a loss to get what they can out of it. The clothing store puts last season's unsold clothes on sale around now.

In economics the tradeoff between price and quantity sold is called the demand curve. There's a theoretical point on the curve, hard to identify precisely in reality, which maximizes your profit.

So when costs increase, businesses still want to maximize profits: They decide how much of extra cost to pay directly out of their profits, and how much to raise the price and have consumers 'pay' for it. The consumers don't always go along with the plan: For products that are easy to forgo, such as M&Ms, consumers won't pay much more and businesses tend to eat cost increases. For products that are more unavoidable, such as gas for your car, consumers are compelled to pay more (until they buy more fuel efficient cars, or take a bus or ride a bicycle).

The CBO estimates [1] that foreign exporters bear 5% of the burden of the tariffs, with American consumers bearing the remaining 95%:

> [T]he net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)

This is a serious document written by a bunch of serious economists. You can find a list of them at the bottom of the page. That you have written their conclusion off as "transparently false" should give you pause.

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62105#_idTextAnchor050

> you have written their conclusion off as "transparently false"

I didn't say that. I said that the common argument that tax/tariff increases are always passed along 100% to consumers is transparently false. And contrary to your criticism, the cited paper agrees with my claim (in this case, while my claim is general):

"In CBO’s assessment, foreign exporters will absorb 5 percent of the cost of the tariffs, slightly offsetting the import price increases faced by U.S. importers. In the near term, CBO anticipates, U.S. businesses will absorb 30 percent of the import price increases by reducing their profit margins; the remaining 70 percent will be passed through to consumers by raising prices."

It goes on to say that other businesses, whose costs haven't increased, will raise prices - which is not at all 'passing along costs to consumers' but a different dynamic - and that the combined two dynamics yield the overall consumer impact equal to 95% of tariff costs:

"In addition, U.S. businesses that produce goods that compete with foreign imports will, in CBO’s assessment, increase their prices because of the decline in competition from abroad and the increased demand for tariff-free domestic goods. Those price increases are estimated to fully offset the 30 percent of price increases absorbed by U.S. businesses that import goods, so the net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)."

I think the tariffs are a big mistake but the argument I was addressing - if you tax businesses then consumers effectively pay the tax - is widespread disinformation.

The final quoted portion doesn't seem to agree with your final statement though?

> Those price increases are estimated to fully offset the 30 percent of price increases absorbed by U.S. businesses that import goods, so the net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)."

The idea expressed previously in your excerpts is that domestically-produced US goods do increase their revenues by the amount that their produced-abroad competitors. So things are okay from that perspective.

But what that final quotation says is that those increased revenues are 95% paid for by US consumers. In other words, they "effectively pay the tax."

I ordered a soccer team jersey from UK which cost $100. I had to shell out $75 in tariffs. So yes while what you are saying might apply to businesses, there is a real cost paid by consumers as well.

Both can be true. On competitive environments it's harder to pass along costs to consumers, but when a supply pressure is unilaterally applied the competitive pressure to eat the increased costs goes away and is more easily passed along to consumers.

There's a bit of truth to what you say, but also truth in the fact ultimately the consumer pays for everything. You're right that in effect the business might absorb the loss to profit, but ultimately ~100% of the revenue is from receipts from customers in the business model you proposes of things like selling a simple business of merely producing and selling M&Ms.

Thus both of you are really right. The tariff is paid 100% by consumer receipts if you track the flow of money, but this might also still be reflected in reduced profits. The actual flow of money might be $X revenue from customers, out of the $X paid from customers $Y is taken out for tariffs. $Y comes from the dollars received from customers but still reflects lowered potential profit if $X rose by less than $Y after tariffs started.

That's theoretical (and wrong: businesses' assets come from many places besides consumers, especially from investors) but meaningless to the question in this thread:

Tariffs do not necessarily increase prices for consumers, especially not at a dollar-for-dollar rate.

>(and wrong: businesses' assets come from many places besides consumers, especially from investors)

You were the one that presented the dichotomy of receipts from customers and diversions of profits. Then when I used your own framing, by using the exact same two variables, you switched the game and object to not including the investors. This is absolutely hilarious, as you're objecting to the very foundation you outlaid.

>Tariffs do not necessarily increase prices for consumers, especially not at a dollar-for-dollar rate.

The 'question' was twofold. Whether consumers pay it. And whether tariffs increase price for consumers. It can be true that the consumer pays ~100% of the tariff, yet the price doesn't rise as much as tariffs. It's still the consumers paying, they're just paying more to tariffs and less to profit. So you're both right, and your failure to acknowledge that is why your comment got grayed out. Had you acknowledged that, it would have been a very easy 'win' for you and close out of a decent argument.

And that fee was likely passed almost directly onto the consumer. I think I read... 90%?

Prices will keep increasing, as US consumer spending was resilient in 2025 and kept going up irrespective of tariffs. Consumers can be charged even more than previously assumed.

But I was certain that now that the tariffs were overturned the merchants would voluntarily lower their prices to pre-tariff level and not just hope the consumer doesn't notice that the only direction prices go is up.

[dead]

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.

There were something like six different stated intentions, most of which were entirely mutually-exclusive. Replacing income taxes was always the least credible of them.

Least viable at least; considering the "tax reforms" it aligns with his goals.

It's not a legitimate tax.

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

maybe i lean too much in one direction, but what is a "legitimate tax"?

Once again, count on hn for the downvotes. Yep, those shall not speak of downvotes, or taxation.

> but what is a "legitimate tax"?

One that goes through all three branches of government, the way it's been since we decided "no taxation without representation" is how such things should be collectively implemented.

If a citizen's stance is there is no such thing as a legitimate tax, perhaps there should be a legal process for banishing them from all public services, including roads, electricity, telephone, fire and rescue services, etc. and make consuming them a crime. But I guess even that would be a problem because we need to pay for the justice system that would prosecute such a sovereign citizen that breaks the rules...

Basically an "opt-out" of modern life almost in its entirety. I think most people that subscribe to "no legitimate taxes" might be surprised how isolating that would be if they actually think it through.

To be clear, I don't think this is a good idea, it's simply a thought exercise.

Exactly great response. The point of my post to be a thought exercise, but apparently struck downvote nerve. Heh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It was a bad thought exercise.

from another comment you made> The way I see it, those who can't see through my statement to the true meaning with some form of EQ, are the ones downvoting.

Nah.

Does it feel good to say the people that disagree with you have lost the ability to reason? I hope you don't actually believe that flamebait self-aggrandizing nonsense.

"don't cross-examine"

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think that's what cross-examine means there.

Though I'm surprised you're citing the guidelines after writing the comment I referred to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47093780

I'm not trying to backseat mod here but do you really think that comment is okay?

I'm not attacking individuals.

> I'm not attacking individuals.

Not knowing exactly who you're attacking doesn't make the attack okay.

I'm going to keep hoping you said that out of anger rather than actually meaning it. It's a completely unreasonable inference to make about people.

I hope you don't actually believe that flamebait self-aggrandizing nonsense.

> I hope you don't actually believe that flamebait self-aggrandizing nonsense.

So, that line was snarky. But my last few comments have been far from flaming, and I'm not going for a cheap putdown. You made some very harsh judgements about people based on a tiny interaction. That's bad for discussion in a whole bunch of ways.

And I guess that's about all I can say, and as clear as I can make it.

In this context it simply means "legal".

As in only Congress can create new taxes and regulate commerce.

One the usually friendly Supreme Court doesn't strike down as too blatantly illegal even for them?

Libertarians, please sit this one out. We can have the taxation is theft dialog some other comment section.

I don't really think I'm a libertarian.

Whatever society decides it is via a legal and consistent proccess?

Excellent question.

I lean quite heavily myself.

In more ways than one though ;)

The most legitimate tax I see is one that citizens would cheerfully pay willingly under any economic conditions.

ALL citizens, or informed / educated citizens? There's a whole network of agitators in the US whose entire job / goal is to make sure there are people unhappy with any tax, no matter how great the benefits.

Good question.

Citizens still need to come to some consensus.

One key feature I didn't emphasize was the requirement for the tax rate to never rise to a significant enough level to be a burden on the wage-earning taxpayer.

Otherwise it's just a sinkhole which brings down the prosperity ceiling with it.

If you define legitimacy like that, excise taxes look like the only truly legitimate taxes. In my province, that’s things like gasoline, alcohol, tobacco and cannabis. Provincially owned casinos could even be considered a legitimate form of tax though they’re not really a tax.

Can you think of one? I was thinking infrastructure, but then I think about all the fraud and waste that goes along with it and it makes me sad.

You don’t really see a lot of positive in the world and that’s an issue.

But that’s irrelevant - excise taxes are the classic example of taxes people pay willingly.

Oh come on, I didn't say anything like that. sunsets at the beach every night are amazing, and don't cost anything.

excise taxes are hidden taxes, so I wouldn't agree with "willingly"

usually one imposed by congress, from my distant memory of reading the us constitution.

Often comments are sufficiently poorly reasoned or defecient that it makes more sense to downvote than reply.

For instance complaining about downvotes always draws more as does collectively insulting the community you are participating in.

As to the original question the problem is that it suggests confusion on a basic topic that was decided here centuries ago and taught in elementary school. If someone said what even is addition in an adult forum would you teach them addition or would you assume that they actually know addition and are arguing in bad faith because they feel math really ought to work differently?

Also when you can divide a particular topic into clearly delineated camps appearing to disagree or question the basic premises that one camp holds is oft taken for disagreement and alignment with the opposing camp even when you are just debating a side issue and may in fact be mostly or entirely aligned with the people who feel like you are opposed to them. This shortcut as far as identifying motive and perspective can misfire but it's often correct and "just asking questions" is often underhanded opposition.

Lastly a legitimate tax is one that is passed by Congress in the normal fashion and not overturned by the courts.

I've been on this site since 2009. The level of discourse has dropped dramatically in recent times, yet I still love it here. The way I see it, those who can't see through my statement to the true meaning with some form of EQ, are the ones downvoting.

As for talking about what shall not be talked about, how else shall we talk about it? Once I hit -4, it doesn't matter anyway so a few drops on what I have is not really a big deal. In reality, I'm not counting the numbers, I'm counting the people who have fundamentally lost the cognitive ability to reason about deeper meaning in a more philosophical sense and just click click click.

Legitimate from a cultural / legal sense, but not from a philosophical one.

Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution makes it the job of Congress, not the President, to levee taxes.

When Donald Trump didn't run his tariffs through Congress he blatantly violated separation of powers. In normal times this would be 9-0 ruling from the Supreme Court for being so open and shut and it would not have taken over a year for the decision, but those times have passed.

Or maybe, this wasn't a tax.

The expression "this is a tax on..." is analogy for purposes of deciding if this tax was legal based on the process for enacting new taxes.

Down votes because the supreme Court ruled it was illegal.

That's means its not a legitimate tax

Well I get the idea that latchkey doesn't think any tax is legitimate.

Not true at all.

Thanks for correcting me.

I don't know if your comment was intentionally ambiguous or not but it makes sense to either extreme, plus anything in between.

Really one of the things that can (has) stimulate ideas from many directions.

Too bad when you end up as a punching bag from the fraction of partisans just because some of them are so extreme, usually it's only the ones that harbor a lot of hate more than anything else, where negative outlook emanates in all directions.

So you get put down from all directions :(

When the message stands alone as completely neutral and it ends up as a target of the "non-nattering nabobs of negativity" it is still kind of disappointing. So much better responses could be made. I still haven't found any reason to downvote anybody, ever.

Hope it wasn't my mischaracterizing your comment that dismayed anybody worse.

Now with more meat on the bone, infrastructure and real public utility are table stakes which somebody has to pay for, and I'm perfectly willing. Cheerful only if the rate is not exorbitant, which is the real problem.

I'd like to be more cheerful but the corruption sunk in so long ago that it's not pretty. One of the reasons that things dedicated to the public are always more expensive than they could be.

I happily pay my taxes in order to feel like a productive citizen in society. I'm very glad and lucky that I am in a position where I can pay my taxes. I drive on roads, I should absolutely contribute to the building and maintenance of said roads. It is a no brainer.

But I also don't agree with the taxes I pay because I feel like too much goes to waste and that I don't get the value back from what I'm putting in. Most of the roads I drive on today, are very poorly maintained. Where did the money go?

I pay the taxes that employ local lifeguards at my beach. They save people's lives. Good. But they also get angry at me when I'm not holding my dogs leash, even if there are no other dogs around. I don't think that overlapping ocean safety with a nanny state around dogs, is a good use of my taxes. Especially when there are people living in RVs at the beach who are breaking the laws stated on posted signs and they do nothing about it.

The original question about legitimacy was more philosophical. If you are a believer in government and laws, then legitimate is that a group has made up a rule (or law) in order to make it legitimate. I don't agree with that defining legitimacy, it is something else. It isn't law, it is a social contract. We should contribute to society by definition, not by law

So at the end of the day, it is a lot of give and take. Some better or worse. It is what it is. I just try to live my best life and ignore the rest.

>But I also don't agree with the taxes I pay because I feel like too much goes to waste

Why do you feel this?

Can you clarify which part?

You said you feel too much of your tax dollars go to waste.

Why do you feel this

> 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.

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.

Totally with you on the corruption angle. I was just pointing out that loaning businesses money isn’t inherently evil. I’m also unconvinced anyone I lent to actually wants to go through the trouble and political risk of fighting for a refund.

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.

> 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?

It's not just powerless, I see that Republicans seem to not care a yota about this type of fraud.

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.

[flagged]

Don't be so disparaging with your terminology.

These are persons of Trump-like character, not just your average booster :\

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

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.

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.

Curious if part of this was the overall decline in government compensation relative to the private sector. The president makes roughly what the typical SV engineer makes after 5 years in big tech or as a fresh grad from a top PhD program. Meanwhile the people the president deals with have become unfathomably wealthy.

In 1909, the US president made 75k - roughly 2.76 Million in today's dollars. This is in comparison to the current 400k dollar salary of the president. As the president is the highest paid government employee by law/custom - this applies downward pressure on the rest of the governments payroll.

I see no reason why the president shouldn't be modestly wealthy given the requirements or the role and the skill required to do it well. Cutting the payscale to less than some new grads seems like a recipe for corruption.

Since 1958 with the Former Presidents Act [1] the Presidency guarantees you'll live very comfortably for the rest of your life with a lifetime pension (and even a small pension for your wife), funding for an office/staff, lifetime secret service protection, funded travel, and more. It was passed precisely because of the scenario you describe playing out with Truman who was rather broke, and ran into financial difficulties after leaving office.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Former_Presidents_Act

> Truman who was rather broke, and ran into financial difficulties after leaving office.

Nope[0]. He was a shameless grifter just like Trump.

[0] https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/01/the-immortal-le...

Your source does not seem aware of the history of tax brackets. In Truman's era the top rate started at $100k income and was 90%. Even at $60k it was 80%. Those are figures from 1953, when Truman left office. [1]

This wasn't that big of a deal for the average person at a time when the median salary was somewhere around $3k, but for a person with significant overhead and large, but not enormous, income -- in other words, exactly like Truman -- it was devastating.

[1] - https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-income...

> Your source does not seem aware of the history of tax brackets.

"Beginning in 1949, the president was also granted a $50,000 (equivalent to $677,000 in 2025) expense allowance, which was initially tax-free, and did not have to be accounted for."[0] That's 4 years of $677,000 tax-free which I make to be about $2.7M which lines up with "Truman embezzled about two and half million dollars, in 2025 money, from the White House expense account"[1] - "tax-free", "did not have to be accounted for" -> tax brackets are meaningless.

But, you say, "the allowance became taxable later in his presidency"[0], and I reply "Truman never reported it on his tax return"[0], "and also didn’t pay the taxes he owned on the money."[1] which also somewhat scuppers the "history of tax brackets" angle, no?

Further, "In February 1953, Truman signed a book deal for his memoirs, and in a draft will dated December of that year listed land worth $250,000 (equivalent to $3,008,000 in 2025), savings bonds of the same amount, and cash of $150,000 (equivalent to $1,805,000 in 2025)"[0] which I reckon comes to about $8M which, again, lines up with "Truman had a net worth of about $8 million in 2025 dollars when he left the White House"[1].

Further, further, "In January 1959, Truman calculated his net worth as $1,046,788.86 (equivalent to $11,561,000 in 2025)"[0] which, to be fair, is slightly lower than the "$14 million in 2025 dollars when he was successfully shaking his tin cup to Sam Rayburn and John McCormack in 1958"[1] but in the same "NOT AT ALL POOR GTFO" ballpark.

In summary - he embezzled $2.5M, got $8M for your memoirs, and ending up being worth $11-14M within 6 years of leaving the White House and thus I rate the claim "Truman who was rather broke, and ran into financial difficulties after leaving office" as 100 Pinocchios.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman (look at "Financial Situation")

[1] https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/01/the-immortal-le...

Wikipedia is not a source. All of the dirt on that page is exclusively relying on one article [1] from a self-citing author, the same author you again cited in your post here, from 'lawyersgunmoney.' I don't find it compelling. It may indeed ultimately turn out to be accurate, but I find it generally unwise to rewrite history on the words of a single person, who seems to have a strong bias towards a certain narrative.

That bias could indeed just be because he believes he's discovered a truth which most people don't know, completely contrary to the 'official narrative', which is indeed quite a frustrating place to find oneself. But it can also cause one to be blind in some ways. For instance assuming everything as written is accurate, the author simply then jumps to malice (like tax evasion), seemingly without consideration of issues such as inconsistent or flawed record keeping which I imagine was extremely common in the days prior to computers.

[1] - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-truman-show.html

Are most fresh grads from a top PhD program really making $400k/year? Sure, the ones hired by OpenAI are making at least that much, but the vast majority are not. However the broader point remains, that the president’s (and the rest of government’s) pay structure has not kept up with the private sector.

>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.

Are you sure that people in the past viewed wealth as less important? If anything, the 1960s hippie movement would represent a shift away from a cultural emphasis on wealth, no?

I would suggest that internet commenter nihilism and politician nihilism form a self-reinforcing spiral. If commenters will take a nihilistic view of your actions no matter what you do, you might as well secure the bag. And if politicians are always securing the bag, you might as well write nihilistic internet comments about them.

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.

The older I get and the more I learn, the crazier it is that evangelicals abandoned / were conned into supporting Reagan over Carter, all the while claiming that Reagan was sent from God or something.

But then, I have seen the same thing played out recently: Biden, a devout catholic is considered borderline evil by my fundagelical parents (mostly due to religious channels from the US, even though they're in Canada), while Trump is approaching sainthood.

Religion does weird things with the brain. I don't understand it either.