You probably won’t get a penny. The refunds will go to the ‘importer of record’ of the product YOU purchased at an inflated price to cover the tariff. And the importers probably won’t pass the tariff refunds on to the retailers, to pass on to you…
About 99 percent of imported goods of all types arrive in North America in intermodal
shipping containers such as those being unloaded from this oceangoing freighter.
A special Message for all American Readers…
Weird position
The US government is in a weird position: It’s trying to figure out how to, “refund $134 billion – and counting – worth of tariff revenue collected from President Donald Trump’s most sweeping tariffs, which were rendered illegal by the Supreme Court last week,” CNN reports.
That’s the good news.
The bad news…
… Is that average Americans – the consumers who paid that money into government coffers via inflated prices for imported goods – probably won’t see a penny of it.
What the… Funds?
Consumers will be frozen out of the refunds because they paid for them indirectly. That is, the ‘im-porters of record’ – the businesses which that paid the initial tariff bill – will get back what they re-mitted to the government. Who are these mysterious entities? “Think: Costco, Walmart, Target, etc.,” CNN suggests.
And it’s pretty naive to expect those importers to pass any of that cash down the line to consumers. One reason for that is, there’s probably no way to determine how big a slice of the refund any given consumer should get. Another is, the importers absorbed some of the tariffs themselves in an at-tempt to avoid raising the retail prices of affected products too much. That might have resulted in lost sales to competitors who were charging even less.
Even so…
Refunds of any kind are still, at best theoretical. Trump is fighting back with new 10 percent tariffs, imposed under another law. And the Supreme Court has not specified how refunds, if any, should be handled.
My take
When refunds or compensation are mandated by the courts in the private sector, corporations are ordered to come up with processes by which they will be handled. Often, those in class action suits receive equal shares of the booty. In that case, every American man, woman and child should receive about $1 million. But that’s just silly.
For one thing, how do you calculate how much of the tariffs the importers absorbed? Could we trust them to be truthful if they self-reported?
Taking another tack… What if Trump gave each adult American (18 and over) an equal share of the illegal tariffs, and told the fat cat importers and their shareholders to eat their alleged share? That would amount to just over $500 per person. And that would undoubtedly go right back into the economy – to pay bills, or buy food or other essentials.
Just a thought…
~ Maggie J.