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.
And you never will. Thanks for playing The Decline of Democracy and Sanity.
This is why I can’t be angry at regular criminals, they’re just mimicking the world they see at the top.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
So we were all robbed. Again.
That was always the plan, my friend.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaany moment now…
… it’s going to start to trickle down.
They really are speedrunning how fast were gonna Bastille their asses
Not gonna happen.
IDK, but it does make sense?
The total income of the business is P x C, where P is the number of sold items and C is the cost. Under some model of P(S), businesses try to maximize this product. The tariffs caused an imbalance in this product, but they still were able to maximize it. Only the maximum value of this product was reduced.
Also, the businesses were paying tariffs, so obviously tariffs increased expenses.
Then the government decided to do the reimbursement for the expenses, but not for the difference in maximum incomes.
Thus, on average
-
businesses lost some income
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government spends all its tariff income on reimbursement
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customers payed more
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chineese manufactureres lost some income too
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GOP and Trump will be reelected because fuck China I guess
IDK, but it does make sense?
For business that were in on the grift, and/or just gouging customers “because tariffs”, it absolutely made sense.
This kinda works for essential commodities and not for luxury
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Just wondering how many more times in my life I’m going to watch dipshit Republicans make dipshit moves that require dipshit bailouts that aren’t for the people paying for the dipshit bailouts.
That’s wealth redistribution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
