alt Hacker NewsThat’s smart though. If you don’t want to lose your rights to tariff refunds, don’t sell them. Would the alternative be to forbid companies from selling those rights in this case?
As for whether consumers should get anything, I’m sympathetic. It’s a matter of implementation though. How would you refund so many people? You’d have to quantify how much overhead they’ve paid in tariffs, and that seems like an IRS-scale job. Dealing with it at the scale of individual companies is at least tractable.
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Wasn't the whole point of selling your right to refunds that the initial tariff was so onerous to businesses that they needed a cash injection to stay afloat.
Don't sell your right to your tariff refund is one of those things that sounds good in principle, but falls apart when you apply some sense to it.
It's enriching himself on the taxpayers expense.
Or would you trust someone on advising you, that has a pretty huge financial interest in proposing you policies that will fail because they are illegal?
> That’s smart though. If you don’t want to lose your rights to tariff refunds, don’t sell them. Would the alternative be to forbid companies from selling those rights in this case?
Definitely smart, but also sure looks like an insider play / corruption / self-dealing.
i guess there would be much more initiative for Lutnik not to refund (ignore courts order, or drag them out like in other cases) if no one would have sold their rights to refund.
Calling outright corruption at the expense of citizens as "smart" is quite a statement of morality O.o
I don't think anyone is disagreeing it's a shrewd decision by the corporations, just that it shouldn't benefit the Secretary of Commerce. We're a long way from having to put your peanut farm in a blind trust to avoid the perception of corruption.
Imagine instead if the government didn't do the illegal thing in the first place. Or if the supreme court had not intervened on the initial stay of the tariffs to allow them to go into place while the suit proceeded.
The fact that businesses were put in a position to make this choice is outrageous in the first place.
> It’s a matter of implementation though. How would you refund so many people?
This was the point of the tariffs, wasn't it? The White House now has a $130B slush fund to distribute more or less however they want, with no accountability because accountability is by-design impossible. Sure maybe half of it will go where it ought to as a fig leaf, but a very large chunk of that cash will be making its way to Trump's loyalty crew.
It's not smart, it's extortion by someone connected to the state and self dealing.
If you think this is smart then you may as well go around clubbing old ladies over their heads, as long as you don't get caught it's like free money right?
The alternative is not to forbid companies from selling those rights, the alternative is to undo this deal and pay the whole amount back to those that originally forked it over and who needed to sell these 'rights' in order to keep their companies alive.