By Ben R. Williams
In February, the Supreme Court ruled that President Donald Trump’s use of emergency powers to enact tariffs was not legal, meaning that all of the money the government collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) would need to be refunded.
Just how much money are we talking about here? About $166 billion dollars, which must be refunded to roughly 330,000 businesses.
The vast majority of these companies passed a lot of their tariff-related expenses on to consumers, so this seems like great news! Finally, we can all be made whole and all the extra money we’ve spent on these tariffs will soon be returned to us!
Of course, that’s never going to happen. Most of these companies raised their prices to reflect the tariff costs and now they’re going to get our money refunded to them. They have no intention of returning this money to the people that actually spent it. The only exceptions to this that I can find are FedEx and UPS, which have claimed they will issue refunds to customers. Good for them, obviously, but they’re definitely in the minority.
But hey, at least prices for consumer goods are going to go back down again, right?
Ho ho! Of course not. These companies have seen that we’re willing to pay higher prices if forced to; what incentive do they have to lower their prices back to pre-tariff levels when higher profits can be had? Gotta get those Q2 margins back up for the shareholders, after all. Again, the only exception to this that I can find is Costco; CEO Ron Vachris, the man who swore that a Costco hot dog will never cost more than a buck fifty while he draws breath, said that Costco will lower their prices to return value to their customers. When it comes to CEOs, Vachris is a rare specimen indeed.
But hey, at least we have those other tariff checks coming! Remember those? Trump said multiple times last year that he was backing a plan to provide “a dividend of at least $2,000 a person” for working class American families, paid for with the incredible profits generated by the tariffs. When will those checks be arriving in our mailboxes?
Never. That was never going to happen, and besides, that money is now going back to the corporations we initially gave it to, and don’t they need it more?
But not all hope is lost: we’ve still got those DOGE checks coming, right? Remember those? Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was going to cut $2 trillion in government spending, and Trump said that they would take a fifth of those funds and mail every taxpayer a $5,000 check. It’ll be great! We can all pay down the debt we incurred thanks to the high prices from Trump’s tariffs!
Unfortunately, I have some bad news. I just checked, and DOGE was a politically-driven scam to steal data from taxpayers. Also, it didn’t save any money; it actually cost the government more than $20 billion and the IRS predicted it caused a half a trillion dollars in revenue loss due to cuts. It also cut foreign aid programs that, to date, have led to the deaths of an estimated 780,000 people, most of them children. And Elon Musk got off scot-free, and he’s poised to become the world’s first trillionaire.
Well, we might not be getting any financial relief, but at least we still have Trump’s campaign promises to look forward to: lower grocery prices, lower gas prices, no new wars, and the release of the complete and unredacted Epstein files. How’s that working out so far?
At this point, America is Charlie Brown and Trump is Lucy, pulling the football away again and again right before he can kick it. The only difference is, I never saw a Peanuts strip where Lucy picks Charlie Brown’s pockets while he lies on the ground, his back aching as he mutters to himself, “It’s actually good that this happened because otherwise Iran was going to nuke the Old Country Buffet.”
