Don’t buy anything not entirely necessary until this shit is done. As usual consumers hold the bag.
I ordered a pair of boots from Mexico, they were shipped with all of the correct paperwork and should not have been tariffed at all. It added ~$60 to the original cost of $170.
When you submit a tariff refund request they warn you multiple times that if your submission is rejected you will be charged $100 per submission. It can be rejected for making a mistake on the paperwork even if they find the tariff was applied incorrectly. I almost didn’t submit for it, and a lot of people won’t but I decided to risk it. That was a few months ago and I still haven’t heard back.
What in the jesus brother. I take it you’re voting in november
And you never will. Thanks for playing The Decline of Democracy and Sanity.
No refunds 😆
We pay. Then we pay again.
It’s as simple as that and just as fucked up. Our so-called government does not work for us.
Socialize the losses, privatazie the games. It’s crazy when people complain about socialism while these billionaire companies get to reap the best parts of it.
“Pay to play? You mean the peasants get to play? Why?”
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“By existing within these borders through no conscious choice of your own, you are indicating that you agree to these terms.”
Which is why it needs to be burnt, and then built better.
As per its original design
As proposed by Thomas Jefferson; however, it is not assuredly by design because it was a group effort and the group was mixed.
Either way, the “decline of societies (at around 300y)” would support it anyhow.
This is why I can’t be angry at regular criminals, they’re just mimicking the world they see at the top.
Let’s be honest. The highest estimates I find are around $160 billion in illegal tariffs. If we split that evenly it would work out to around $640 for every person over 18 in the country.
What good would giving 250 million people each $640 do? For 99% of them it would be gone as soon as they got it. They’d waste it on things like rent, bills, food, gas money. Temporary things. Within a month almost no one would have anything to show for it.
But giving a relative handful of large companies hundreds of millions to several billion dollars each? For them it’s pure profit. Their bills are already paid. They’ve already used the profits from that year for stock buybacks to get their wealthy shareholders more money and divided the rest giving their executives huge bonuses. And now suddenly they all have huge amounts more profit almost out of thin air.
It’s money to invest in AI to replace human labor so the coming years can be even better, to do even more stock buybacks so that the people who own the most stock in each company see huge increases in their net worth, or do give CEOS a second round of yearly bonus. Months and years from now there will still be amazing homes, yachts, private islands, and new faces that we’ll all be able to point to as the lasting good that came from this.
Man for a second I thought you were serious and was getting my pitchfork ready. Bravo.
I mean… don’t put it away. You should still take the opportunity to make sure it’s nicely rusty and dull. We do need everyone to have them ready. That sarcastic message of mine is still describing what the government and corporations actually did to us. And they’re not raping and killing their own kids. Well… they probably are raping their own kids too. But not killing or possibly eating them.
Since they’re now all in charge of investigating and arresting themselves and their buddies and passing laws to stop their own blatant corruption it seems that us stepping in with pitchforks might be necessary very soon.
What good would giving 250 million people each $640 do?
You say that, but something a lot like that already happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Stimulus_Act_of_2008
Most taxpayers below the income limit received a rebate of at least $300 per person ($600 for married couples filing jointly). Eligible taxpayers received, along with their individual payment, $300 per dependent child under the age of 17. The payment was equal to the payer’s net income tax liability, but could not exceed $600 (for a single person) or $1200 (married couple filing jointly)
Most everyone I knew spent it on HDTVs. Economic stimulus indeed.
No matter what they spent it on, it was still stimulating the economy.
You think I don’t rem… oh Christ, it was 18 years ago? There really are people here who wouldn’t remember it.
Yes. I know. I’m sort of surprised anyone could read my post and not see all the sarcasm. I do not really believe that spending money on food or rent is wasting it. It’s needing to use that money in order to keep living. Companies getting it all to make the rich richer and buy yachts and new faces is not something I actually consider to be better.
Even if it was $6, refunding it to us and showing a little respect for a major cash grab fuck up would work wonders.
You forgot to add ‘in greenland’ at the end. That’s why they want it they can set up billionaire land while the rest of the world is 50C in summer.
Ooh, good point. I hadn’t thought much on it beyond the minerals thing the news likes to go with. That’s far more likely.
Your argument amounts to “you dont get your stolen money back because you will spend it irresponsibly.”
Thats sovcit-level quackery.
You ate at the onion.
redacted
Sorry, that response wasn’t for this post, it was for another one. I’m not sure why it went to yours.
So we were all robbed. Again.
That was always the plan, my friend.
This was so obvious that anyone paying attention could see this coming a mile away. I’m probably the unpopular opinion, but I think the government should have just not issued any refunds. I would rather the government get funds to potentially use for social welfare than to give it back to businesses. The only problem is that would create an incentive for the government to try it again for another quick payday. Some mechanism would have to be put into place to stop this. Take away the power from the president to issue tarrifs on his own. Which we should probably do anyway.
Funded the war didn’t they
But without the refunds, how would Cantor Fitzgerald (where Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s son is the chair) get their money from the rights to the tariff refunds they bought?
Nutlick needs to be the first into the woodchipper
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaany moment now…
… it’s going to start to trickle down.
I kicked a trumper out of my D&D group after I finally got of tolerating his shit. He thought Trump would be better for our economy. No regrets.
We should be doing a lot more than kicking them out of social groups. They’re traitors to our nation who are degrading our quality of life.
But we do what we can on an individual basis. I applaud you. I’ve removed all of them from my life as well. One of the best moves I’ve ever made.
If you, as a consumer, directly paid one of the illegal tariffs, you can get a refund via the shipper who acted as an agent for you.
For example, here’s the form if you shipped something over the border using UPS and paid an illegal tariff to get it released from customs.
Neat. I paid a business that forwarded the costs to me. Who do I appeal to?
Depends probably on the nature of what “forwarded the costs” means.
If the business collected the costs from you and then forwarded them to CBP while acting as your agent, then you can demand a refund from them or sue them.
If you agreed to purchase goods for one price while also agreeing to pay a separate “tariff reimbursement fee” in exchange for purchasing the goods, you’re probably shit out of luck.
Various shades in between might be arguable or litigatable one way or another.
Do Amazon receipts have “extra tariff fee” as a line item?
no, the prices are technically unrelated to tariffs.
Yes, technically the truth. In practice the vast vast majority of consumers bought from a business that imported the item. So it’s good to highlight people have options, but the broad point of the post stands, that the businesses have the option of pocketing the difference and most of them seem to be taking that option.
Does this mean UPS is going to stop sending me demand letters for extra money on a thing I already bought, paid for and received?
I keep wondering if they’ll escalate, but I’m refusing on principle.
If you already received your item(s) and you don’t immediately need to do any more business with them, it sounds like they don’t have a lot of leverage to get you to pay.
Sounds like that might have been a screw up on their part.
Maybe they thought it was like income tax, which the government will enforce even if you already got your stuff (money.)
That doesn’t matter if you paid inflated prices on already imported goods.
Yeah, the comment conveniently seems to forget that most people paid tariff costs not by directly importing something, but by simply buying the thing at a tariff inflated price in a store.
There’s no refund for those, and that is where the largest part of tariff costs has been paid.
Fines like this should go to the consumer, but that’s impossible, so they should go into the America First Fund (irony intended), which be the seed money to provide the initial funding for all the social programs we need to start - healthcare, college/trade, student loan forgiveness, pre-k, UBI, etc.
As we investigate and prosecute MAGA crimes, any fines and confiscations, which should be harsh (including the confiscation of entire estates of treasonous families like the Trumps or the Ellisons), should be put into the America First Fund. The level of the fund should be mentioned in the evening news every night. Rich people can take note of the Dow, and workers can take note of the America First Fund.
The civilised world has always sneered at 'Murica
But now we look upon the disaster with great pity for those who have been unfortunately born there who deserve better
Please and Thank You.
I want better for us, and I’m fighting for it, but I have very limited personal power to enact change.
The way “we” looked at those “third-world” countries when I was a child feels like how everyone should be looking at us. Our squalor is not that of unclean water (but that is still true in places) or of systemic violence by the government (but that is still true in places) or of lack of reliable food (but that is still true in places). We have cellphones and internet, cars and roads, and air-conditioning, so we should be happy.
Our squalor is in the apathy and even antipathy a bulk of our fellow citizens have towards others.
The fix is education and awareness, but the means of enacting it have been hijacked. How do I reach someone on the west coast to be kind when I can’t touch them from the east coast?
There was a post recently, and I’ll link it if I can find it again, about Kevin and his truck, and how helping others builds community. Very wholesome. Community has been lost here outside of the uber-wealthy (they all know each other), or the “poor” who need it to survive. The “middle class” has lost the plot.
Americans will put up with anything. Fucking losers
It’s ironic
They have to work so hard to survive, and yet, when it comes to thinking, they’re incredibly lazy
I genuinely pity them, because I know that as a society, they’re only in such a situation because they’re beaten into submission and apathy
They’re placated by unbelievable convenience, having everything an hour’s delivery away, and numbed to the fact that that means someone is slaving (I use that term deliberately) for their laziness
The mental gymnastics to justify every part of that shitty, exploitative excuse for a society are endless
And when they see other cultures, where we are actually free, they point and laugh, because they are too ignorant to understand
I spend a lot of time in 'Murica, under duress
I hate the place, I see the cruelty and ignorance, and I would gladly offer asylum to those who deserve it, but even amongst the relatively civilised, that’s a small number
They’ve been trained from a very young age to never question the system. Pledge of allegiance before classes. Anthem before every match. Flags everywhere. Hollywood teaching everyone America will save the world yet again. It’s very hard and impossible for many to break that programming.
I still remember when I first came to the US and my class did the pledge of allegiance. I was so confused, it was like I’d unwittingly joined a cult.
Oh, I know it
Even those who move to civilised countries still struggle to break the chains sometimes
Freedom doesn’t come with intelligence, morals or ethics, only consequences.
'Murica is one of the least free places I have ever experienced in the world
They are quite pathetic. All these decades of saber rattling and pleasuring themselves to the fantasy of American freedom and democracy only to be led passively by the collar into their prison cells.
I’d like to see them at least stop melting down at each other and at least unify to remove their problem. I saw a post in the politics sub about Sanders asking them all to just vote and they’re attacking each other across the entire post. This is probably the smallest of the places out there to discuss but if it’s any indication, the same shit will happen this election as well.
They’re resigned to two options and the sooner they accept it the better off they’ll be. The first one is coming up in a couple of months and as many as possible need to be on one page about it.
as long as there things like tiktok, amazon, youtube,etc. yes. and many enough of a income to have creature comforts.
As long as i can have my 5 dollar burger for 20 dollars delivered home by a guy who makes no money, it’s all good
I’m not sure what other system is even conceivably possible in the general case. There’s no straightforward universal relationship between tariffs paid by businesses and prices paid by the customers of those businesses.
I think the best system would be not to allow tariffs to be illegally implemented in the first place. But I realize that’s asking a lot.
Hindsight is 20/20
I dream of having a functional government. I know everywhere has issues, but rule by EO from a wannabe dictator is tiring.
Sounds very unAmerican.
How about, instead, all tariffs money paid go directly to rich, land-owning white men?
Now that’s closer to the American that I know.
We could at least not have taxpayers foot the bill for businesses to get free money.
There were some businesses passing the fees on directly to the end consumer via tariff implementation fees, but unless you have something like that itemized on an invoice, I believe you would be correct.
A business that passed 100% of the tariffs on to consumers via higher prices could still be worse off after getting a refund than it would have been if there never had been tariffs, if demand is elastic enough, so I’m not sure even that sort of data could resolve the question of who deserves what.
Take the total tariff income, divide it by the number of people in the country, and send out the checks.
It’s the ONLY legitimate way to handle it.
That sounds fair in theory, but would not hold up as soon as the first person felt slighted and challenged those terms in court.
Let them. It’s better than “nobody will let it be fair so we won’t even try.”
From a fairness point of view, for non essential goods, if you paid higher prices with the tariffs you would also have paid it without the tariffs, so you weren’t really harmed by it.
Essential and non-essential are almost meaningless distinctions for most goods people use on a daily basis. I could LIVE on beans and water. Do I NEED toothpaste? Aspirin? How much am I allowed to enjoy something before it’s a non-essential good?
People paid more for something because they were forced to, and it wasn’t for any economically necessary reason, and the cause was illegal, making it tantamount to theft, and refunds to companies equivalent to receiving stolen goods.
Nitpicking the necessity of the good is a cheap excuse to do nothing, not a gotcha.
If you paid the higher value with tariffs you would pay it any way. And if everyone was willing to pay the higher price then it would already have been higher. That’s how capitalism works. No CEO will charge less unless they think it will increase profit through volume.
Companies that increased prices because of tariffs probably lost customers in the process.
How about lowering prices? Do companies have a straightforward way to do that?
The system would be not having a lunatic who implements tariffs at a whim and based purely on insider speculation and temper tantrums.
It would at least be a start.
I’m not sure what other system is even conceivably possible in the general case
How about a check to taxpayers rather than a handout to businesses who had already marked up and profited from the sales anyway?
do you have proof every buisness did that?
Just wondering how many more times in my life I’m going to watch dipshit Republicans make dipshit moves that require dipshit bailouts that aren’t for the people paying for the dipshit bailouts.
