I agree that the best way to do this would be a tax rebate. It’s a convoluted chain of credits to pass the refund back down the line the same way it was charged with no guarantee it will ever make it to the consumer in any meaningful way. Let the government be liable instead of forcing every company in the chain to take on liability. The consumer and small business will always be the loser in the chain while the lawyers get richer.
Like most of these cases it’ll have to be done as a class action lawsuit at this scale. That means the consumer is going to get a check for a dollar and the lawyers are going to get rich. The consumer never wins.
My suppliers show a tariff surcharge on my invoices. I charge a tariff surcharge on my products so the consumer knows where that cost comes from and also knows that I can remove that charge from the quote if the tariffs get pulled back before they sign a contract. Note that a surcharge is not a tariff. It just indicated the cause for the increased price. Sure the consumer paid the cost in the end, but so did the retailer, the distributor and the importer. Unless a refund trickles down from the importer, who is the only party that actually paid a tariff, which is never going to happen, then no one is getting their money back once it’s been spent. You can sue all you want and pretend it’s setting a precedent, but you are really just wasting time and resources because you don’t understand the supply change and who is actually liable. Hell, even the importer has to sue the government to get that tariff money back before they would even remotely be liable to pass it down the chain. More than likely they’ll just pocket the money if the government voluntarily gives it back (unlikely) because passing it down the chain would be a logistical nightmare. I guess the real answer here is that every company that tried to be transparent about the tariff costs should have just lumped it into the cost of goods so it was invisible to the consumer. You can’t sue for something you can’t prove is there. Punish the honest parties while the people that profited get to keep the money anyway.
This doesn’t make sense to me at all. First of all the only party paying an actual tariff is the party that imports the goods. Is that Amazon? For a lot of things, I’m sure it is. For other things, Amazon is just paying a higher price for the goods due to tariffs, but they are not the one paying the tariffs and thus could not be the one to refund them. I work with a lot of different companies to source materials and none of them are refunding any tariffs. What makes Amazon different? Also, last I heard the tariffs were deemed illegal, but that ruling is under appeal so nothing has really changed at this point. Also keep in mind that only the latest round of tariffs is in question. There were tariffs that went into effect in Trump’s first term and were upheld during the Biden era. Those aren’t going anywhere. I’m not a big fan of Amazon, but I don’t see where this lawsuit has any teeth since every other company out there is handling things the same way.
Thankfully I have gas heat and so far the weather has been pretty cool for the current time of year so my AC hasn’t had to run at all. I hope we have a mild summer. I’ve seen some of the insane electric bills around here lately and how much of them is actual usage vs all the fees. Usage doesn’t count for much these days.
I’m from VA, which has more data centers in the state than any other in the country. They want to push even more into place and our local and state government seems to be all for it. All it’s doing is costing us money so AI companies can cash in on all the people that want to make stupid memes. The modern world sucks.
That’s the problem we have locally. No one wants these things, but local government keeps trying to push them through anyway because all they see is tax dollars.