Pour a big mug of schadenfreude and watch the federal government prepare to refund billions of dollars to businesses for taxes that never should have been imposed on them in the first place.
Importers this week can begin clawing back billions of dollars siphoned off by President Donald Trump’s reckless tariff scheme, a ruse the U.S. Supreme Court has now made crystal clear was not just misguided, but illegal.
Illegal is the key word here.
For more than a year, Trump bulldozed ahead with a tariff binge that defied history, ignored experts, mocked basic economic science and trampled common sense. Economists across the political spectrum warned exactly what would happen. Businesses pleaded for sanity. Consumers, whether they realized it or not, were already paying the price.
And now, after the damage is done, the courts step in and say, “Yes, this was unconstitutional. Yes, Congress and not the president holds the power to tax. Yes, those tariffs should never have existed.”
That’s nice. It’s also far too late.
The new refund system is expected to return a staggering share of the roughly $166 billion collected from more than 330,000 importers. Businesses can file claims, jump through bureaucratic hoops, wait months, and eventually see their money again. Maybe.
Good for them. Truly.
Many of these companies absorbed enormous costs, delayed investments, cut margins, and in some cases risked survival.
But the problem no one in Washington seems eager to solve is that businesses weren’t the only ones paying those tariffs.
I want my money back.
Despite Trump’s delusions, tariffs are taxes. They’re not clever negotiating tools or magical levers that punish foreign countries while Americans skate free. They are taxes, and like most taxes on goods, they get passed along. Maybe not all at once, maybe not evenly, but relentlessly.
The Trump administration insisted, against all evidence, that foreigners would bear the cost of tariffs. That claim wasn’t just wrong, it was willfully blind. Study after study, including real-time pricing data, predicted and then revealed the opposite. Importers paid the tariffs, businesses adjusted, and consumers got hit. Nearly all of the tariff burden landed right here at home, experts told the Associated Press this week and economist Alex Durante, writing for the Tax Foundation.
The data is clear. Prices on imported goods rose sharply, nearly 7 percentage points on average. Domestic goods climbed too, riding the same distorted wave. Clothing spiked. Furniture surged. Coffee, seafood, and building materials were all hit. Even when companies absorbed some of the cost, that didn’t spare consumers. It simply shifted the burden onto wages, jobs and investment.
Have you seen what’s happened to the price of apples? I spied some favorites over the weekend and was relieved to have to pay what I thought was only $1.89 a pound, as if even that were a bargain. It was $1.89 for one apple. One apple.
All told, American households have paid as much as $3,800 so far because of this tariff fiasco, according to an April 9 analysis by the Center for American Progress. That’s not theoretical. That’s real money out of real pockets, like yours and mine. And that estimate doesn’t even require you to have bought a car or replace your dishwasher. If you did, however, you probably paid thousands more.
So businesses get a path to refunds. Consumers get, umm, what?
A shrug?
The current system doesn’t require companies to return a dime to customers. Some might. Many won’t. Why would they?
They already navigated the chaos, absorbed losses, and now have a legal right to reclaim what they paid, even if they collected some or all of it from you.
Meanwhile, a patchwork of class-action lawsuits crawls through the courts, hoping to force some accountability. Delivery companies like FedEx say they’ll pass refunds along. That’s commendable, but far from universal.
What’s missing is any coherent plan from the people who created this mess.
Now the courts have confirmed what should have been obvious from the start, that the entire scheme rested on a legal fiction, a Trump abuse of emergency powers to bypass Congress and impose sweeping taxes on Americans.
And yet, despite that ruling, there is no serious effort from Congress to make consumers whole. No mechanism to track who paid what. No rebate system. No accountability.
So millions of Americans are left holding the bag for one of the most ill-conceived economic schemes in modern history.
I want my money back.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com
“They are taxes, and like most taxes on goods, they get passed along. Maybe not all at once, maybe not evenly, but relentlessly.”
Hilarious how, after decades of Diamond Dave and his team denying that businesses pass along costs to consumers and all they care about is greedy “profits over people!”, they’re suddenly admitting that this is, in fact, the case and lamenting what those businesses had to navigate.
Dave, you are absolutely correct! The entire GOP machine has to saddle the blame for this debacle. John Thune and Mike Johnson are the two most ineffective leaders we’ve had in the legislative branch for years. Time after time, they have caved to Trump’s executive order Sharpie! By doing so with tariffs there are imbedded costs with tariffs. First, the most pressing cost to small businesses that relied on imports were cash flow costs. They had to rely on savings, increased prices to consumers, or lines of credit and working capital loans. Many small businesses just called it a day. Small businesses hire 55% of employees in the US. Hiring creates upward pressure on wages. You saw that after the pandemic, but hiring and wages under Trump are stagnant according to data just released. With the Big Beautiful Boondoggle setting in, we working stiffs will be paying our fair share, while the wealthy billionaire class uses the tax money they should be paying to invest, buy superyachts, and send themselves on space rides that only billionaires can afford. How nice for them! Remember, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Altman, Musk, and other billionaire jerks not only paid for Trump’s inauguration, but quickly erased any regulations on their businesses. Skunks – all!
We still have tariffs. The Supreme Court simply said the justification Trump used was illegal; not tariffs themselves. Tariffs are being used by countries worldwide to protect their workers and economies. Other countries unfairly restrict or tax American goods while they are allowed to freely sell their products to Americans. This is patently unfair to Americans and their workers. As a businessman, Trump realized this and imposed tariffs on their goods to pressure them to treat us fairly. If Trump is guilty of anything, it is acting like a Democrat. The Democrat party has always traditionally stood up for the American worker. They always support unions and always lead the fight for increasing minimum wages. These policies always result in increased prices for consumers. Yet they argue the pros outweigh the cons. Same could be said for tariffs. Remember Joe Biden marching with auto workers on strike in Detroit. I don’t remember Democrats throwing a fit over the fact that increased wages for autoworkers would be passed on to consumers by higher new car prices. All government policies have pros and cons. This editorial is simply another partisan attack. No surprise.