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Comment by hoppyhoppy2 | Hacker News Reader

Am I reading between the lines correctly, that consumers who paid higher prices to help cover the cost of these tarriffs can expect no refunds?

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Yes, it's effectively a transfer of wealth from the consumer to the companies above them, much like everything else these days

Yup, another failure of a policy. And again not a surprise, it was widely explained ahead of time they were illegal, but instead they were forced through under an "Emergency" situation and now enormous amount of money wasted and what's returned is being refunded to corporations even though the consumer ultimately paid the bill.

Another case of acting impulsively.

Kinda like the reason the price of oil is so high right now.

The true irony is 10% .. 15% of importers to the USA (Importer of Record in the lingo) are foreign entities. For them, the tariff refund is a transfer directly from the USA consumer to the foreign countries ... that Trump was trying to penalise.

Yup. More theft from regular Americans.

That's what I wonder too.

Ultimately it's the customer who paid more for his his'goods, not the importer.

Is the us government seriously going to give American citizens money to some Chinese importers ?

Plenty of companies didn't change their prices and ate the tariffs.

Right, this is what I remember seeing. Overall, inflation didn't increase much last year even after the tariffs because a lot of companies had stockpiled inventory and were able to postpone the price increase. Seems like that bet paid off, and now they should ideally be able to get their money back without increasing prices.

Obviously there were some companies who did raise prices because of tariffs, but I'm saying that on average, they must not have since inflation didn't go up by 15%

Can you name any? Everything I purchased went up in a price, even if some of the better ones tried to hold out for a couple months.

Scenario: A company's costs increased because of both the tarriff and some other factors (perhaps a supplier increased their prices, and the staff unionized and negotiated a salary increase, all around the same time). They probably would have eaten the cost if it was just the tarriff (who can say?), but because the total increase from all factors. was too much, they decided three months later to increase their prices to partially offset the combined loss of revenue. They then discover that sales did not drop from the increased price, so they decide to leave the prices where they are, even after the tarriffs end.

How much of the cost increase is 'because' of the tarriff? Which of their customers should they be forced to refund and how much?

I understand that businesses are trying to say it is impossible to calculate because they do not want to give consumers refunds.

I specifically asked for any business that did not increase prices.

If the company got overcharged for materials, you don’t get a refund either.

Unless the company wants to. Apparently, Costco has said they will be providing refunds:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/costco-pass-along-tariff-refu...

Absolutely and I highly doubt those businesses will lower the prices on anything they raised prices on. Double dip FTW.

I keep seeing basically this comment over and over, which on reddit would be expected but I'm surprised how much it pops up here. I would expect the HN crowd to be a bit more cognizant of the fact that the consumer is at the end of a potentially long chain and that direct-to-consumer refunds through that chain are at best impractical and at worst literally impossible.

This study actually follows that chain:

https://www.nber.org/202603/digest/pass-through-tariffs-evid...

In this case the importer was losing money post tariff so was the exporter. the consumer was actually paying more than the tariff (due to margin).

making each actor "whole" in even this short, cut-and-dry chain would be extremely difficult not even counting the overhead of each entity issuing refunds. A product with multiple importer inputs and more hands in the pot would be nearly impossible to even trace and you'd have to be able to definitively construe that each change in price at each step was directly related to tariffs, maybe someone in the chain was already going to raise prices some and then didn't raise any more on top of the tariff thus the tariff increase was absorbed by a pre-planned price hike.

Did people get charged more? yes. Are you getting your money back, no. does it suck? yes. Is it some conspiracy to make importers more wealthy? no. Were more than just end consumers harmed? yes! Is this fair? fuck no, but truly fair is impossible so might as well do something rather than let the corrupt government keep their ill gotten gains.

It’s not really impossible to do refunds to consumers. Businesses wouldn’t have to be compelled to cooperate either. If they are suitably enticed, they will go through their own records, find rationale for higher prices because of tarries and submit individual records to the government.

Businesses are already basically forced to do KYC on direct to consumer imports so they have the information on file.

It’s only for the wider market, where items aren’t imported to be sold direct, that it’s harder to tell because as you said there is a chain of actors.

The government acted illegally, and those illegal actions caused harm to consumers. It is reasonable for consumers to expect to be made whole in some manner. It would also be nice for the government administrators and agents that flagrantly broke the law to end up facing repercussions as well. But of course both of these are essentially pipe dreams in our broken down society.

PPP 2.0

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