Actually it’s worse! Because the current US secretary of Commerce, Howard Luttnick, and his sons went around to companies most impacted by the illegal tariffs, and said that they’d pay them a small amount of money now, for the rights to the full tariff refund later. Basically betting that the tariffs would be ruled illegal, and that there would be massive refunds issued. So they bought up the rights to millions of refunds, for pennies on the dollar, effectively leveraging their insider knowledge of the issue, in one of less blatant instances of corruption within this administration.
This is some street level thuggery. I am not surprised at all.
Who paid for the tariffs?
Who pays for the refund?
Isn’t this redundant? The tariff is federal income. The refund is federal spending. The amount is (presumably) identical.
The tariff is federal income
Officially, yes, but it’s much more accurate to call it a consumer expense. Because that’s what it is.
The federal government cut corporate taxes and otherwise enriched corporations by much more than the tariffs and the vast majority of the corporations just raised prices by as much as or MORE than the tariffs, raking in huge profits while most people have to be buried in debt to just survive.
The amount is (presumably) identical.
Weird to assume accurate math and a lack of grift from the fascist kakistocracy, but you do you, I guess 🤷🏻
it’s much more accurate to call it a consumer expense
Sure, in so far as one man’s income is another man’s expense.
The federal government cut corporate taxes and otherwise enriched corporations by much more than the tariffs
The Feds also ramped up issuance of debt to cover the deficit spending. But since we aren’t adhering to any kind of balanced budget, there’s no relation between these policies.
By contrast, the tariff rebates absolutely have a 1-to-1 correlation between income and refund. You’re double counting if you claim that you’ve paid a tariff AND you paid a refund. Your taxes didn’t go up to pay for the refund. As you noted, tax rates have only fallen.
Weird to assume accurate math
I’m assuming tariff = refund until I see evidence to the contrary.
I’m not just going to make up an extra imaginary offense because I don’t like the real policies from the real people really in office.
How do you stop this crap. That money could have paid for universal healthcare many times over.
Rob the poor to pay the rich USA mentality
How do you stop this crap.
You’d need some kind of large popular movement engaged in a collective struggle to reassert ownership over the physical and bureaucratic infrastructure of their communities.
Rob the poor to pay the rich USA mentality
Really no other way to become rich, when you think about it.
There’s levels. When the tariffs are for you friends and fuck the nation it’s broken.
When you can bomb several counties and threaten others and not give a shot that jo public who can’t afford food has to find extra cash for gas …. To fund an illegal war.
Never buy USA again
so glad the empire is destroying itself tho
I feel like a double loser because of these morons grifting for their corporate overlords.
A corporate stimmy!
Ted Dansons Voice: Woah woah woah, we weren’t promised to be Charlie Sheen-Grade winners.
I see a whole bunch of charlie sheens in my trailer park but it usually involves lower grade drugs and lower grade women and shit ton of fox news
But as long as they keep rebuilding the area and give their soul to Jesus they can do anything… Except find the right vein because they’re on the left arm
Hell yeah… all that “tarrif money” from the first go-arounds is in trump’s pocket. You don’t think HE’S going to pay for his criminal act, do you?
Get the fuck out of here !!! You crazy person you.
This is all a national-scale grift, and he still manages to get people to cheer for stealing the food from their mouths
They’re all fine with redistribution of wealth, but only in one direction.
The trickling up policy
evaporation theory?
nah, evaporation will rain down at some point. this wealth transfer only goes up
“there’s class war alright, but it’s our class, the owning class, that is waging war, and we’re winning”. – some rich person a few years ago
- Some guy sawing off the branch of the tree he’s goddamn sitting on.
Isnt everyone fine with redistribution of wealth in only one direction?
Some want it downwards, some want it upwards, some want it all thrown into the sun
Yes, but some won’t acknowledge that it’s already happening (upwards), and they’ll criticize the general concept as taking money away from people who earned it. I will tell you that I worked harder for near minimum wage than I do now for above median wage. The people benefiting from the status quo tend to demonize any threat of changing the status quo, and the language used is intentional in order to frame an argument that assumes that their preferred system is the default and normal one.
One of the main criticisms against environmental taxes is that they’re regressive. Many of us support those in addition to wealth taxes, so we’re in favor of redistribution both to and from the poor. Although perhaps then we could argue we’re transferring wealth into the future.
All of these corporate fines, where the citizens get screwed, but the government gets all the money, needs to be handled differently.
We need to start an “America First Fund” (irony intended) for these sorts of fines, which will be the seed money to fund our wish list of social programs, starting with Medicare 4 All. As we collect fines, settlements, confiscations, etc. from Sociopathic Oligarchs and their corporations, it should go into the America First Fund, to finance a better life for all American citizens.
fines
fund social programs
I think this is just called “taxes” in a functional society.
Taxes, tariffs, and fees, sure.
But even that’s just an end-run around publicly staffed and administered enterprises. Why do you even need a private middleman to begin with? Taxation is a means of reorganizing currency, sure. But a nation’s real material wealth is in its sovereignty, its industry, and its natural resources.
Rather than letting a handful of grifters and gatekeepers rent-seek off the public, then skimming a vig off the top, we could abolish the landlord class entirely and manage the productive forces democratically.
There should be an “econonomic” as a separate government estate of power. It could be much more direct democracy with people voting every month on economic proposals. Like the federal bank printing the money, which the people then can vote for to fund this or that project. Buy this or that factory, or shut it down. Parts of the economy planned, but democratic in many ways.
It’s so ludicrous that we’re stuck on 19th century democracy when we have better voting systems and internet access and cheap usb authentication dongles.
Ohh god. Please no popular voting to control nation state monetary policy.
Sure, some parts should be more institutionalized and run by experts. But people should definitely get a say if their “taxes” (printed money really) are spend on wars and goes to the military industrial complex or not. Independent of the executive and legislative.
For example why do we need the stock market at all? If it’s for getting investments, this could be democratically voted on by the people, not by capitalists.
Obviously democracy can’t be absolute, but we’ve mostly stopped any talk about improving our democratic systems. If people actually want change and overcome the current crisis that has developed of the previous century, we don’t just need a reconstruction era but also need to learn about the failure modes and drastic improvements. And that HAS to include economics and how we run it. There is little doubt now that liberal capitalism will lead to humanities extinction.
Budgeting I totally agree should be democratic. monetary policy is a whole different matter.
Since you are a ml person I recommend checking out how China and the Soviet Union do/did monetary policy. Small group of centralized well informed people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy_of_China
https://archive.org/details/monetarypolicyin0000naka/page/n10/mode/1up
And obviously none of this would work without some sort of revolution and a “restoration” and a massive education campaign about how the economy can work to serve the people.
I think after such a successful education the vote would be to let a small group of highly educated informed people manage monetary policy. Like small small changes can flatten potential for material growth or just destroy all savings.
The biglyest winning! So much YUGE win! In fact, many men, big burly men, have said “Sir, Sir! Please Sir, take more money from us to make business richer, so we can be in debt for your fantastic plans!” They said it while literally crying, believe me.
I can picture Adam Something saying this mid-rant :)
This is called wealth transfer, conservatives only like it when it goes from the bottom to the top.
If there is one conservatives know about, its bottom and tops.
They just lost a huge amount of institutional knowledge.
And the world is a better place for it
It’s been a big slow robbery the whole time.
I’ve had some conversations with some pretty generationaly wealthy people, the underlying sentiment is, if you aren’t going to call us out on the stock market literally there to enrich the wealthy and steal the wages, then we are just going to keep pushing the envelope.
I think you’re right. I keep hearing about how the stock market bubble will burst, but I can’t help but think that a) billionaires will use a lot of power to resist that and b) if it does, they’ll buy up all the leftovers for cheap and leave the little guy with the true loss
Billionaires love it when the bubble bursts. If everyone is “selling” who do you think is buying? The people with real wealth buy it all up knowing that the workers will put it back together and they can profit the whole way through.
“Always has been” pic
It’s actually even worse than just taxpayers paying businesses: Since the US doesn’t have the tax revenue to pay the businesses, it will need to take out more debt to pay them. So the taxpayers will not only pay the businesses, but they will also pay interest. (That is, if you believe that the US will be able to stabilize its debt before defaulting. At the rate we’re going, with the looter class taking US government funds, the US will end up defaulting before taxpayers have a chance to pay down the debt. To be clear, a default would be far more painful than the austerity required to stabilize the debt.)
To be clear, a default would be far more painful than the austerity required to stabilize the debt.)
Hard disagree. The debt is already unpayable, and austerity cuts the kind of investment that creates economic activity, like schools and infrastructure. And our schools and bridges are already collapsing
And it’s not just national debt that has become unpayable… We have levels of debt that can’t be repaid at all levels. It’s a big part of why everything is becoming unaffordable
This is part of the collapse of an empire. It’s happened before. There’s three ways out of it. The first is a jubilee, a one time general forgiveness of all debt (unlikely). The second is a revolution and reorganization where we don’t acknowledge prior debt
The most likely path forward is hyperinflation, where the majority of debt is shrunk by devaluation of the currency
No amount of austerity will get us out of this hole… The purpose of austerity is to extract wealth through opening outside investment and suppressing economic development. It’s purpose is to keep countries on a debt treadmill indefinitely
Forgive me for not understanding as I’m not from the US, but what happened to the funds from the collected tariffs?
They go to Trump’s sovereign wealth fund which he uses to give his allies cushy government contracts.
Do you have a source where I could read more about this? I tried looking all of this up and the only articles I found contradict the original comment about taking loans to repay tariffs and that putting tariff revenue into a sovereign wealth fund was proposed but never happened.
Edit: further reading shows neither is factual.
Probably spent on ICE
People in USA: so are your import tariffs gone now? Have tariff related price increases gone back down? Or have businesses just decided to keep that free money too?
That’s the fun part: the ratchet only goes one way. Another fun part? We’re doing more tarrifs!
