I think this reveals a great deal about the thinking of the ruling elites.
The K shaped recovery phenomenon demonstrated that the economy can continue to thrive, when consumption by the lowest earners is replaced and concentrated by earners at the top. This demonstrated to the elites that actually, we don't need as many consumers to grow the economy, and that it's possible to redistribute wealth upward without losing growth.
These public comments just show that the elites are more and more comfortable making it explicit that there are too many "useless eaters" in their opinion, and that the change has been from considering just the Third World to be where these "useless eaters" are while still preserving an imperial core, to now considering everyone that isn't them, regardless of First or Third world, to be a useless eater.
Very dangerous thinking, but at least it's out in the open now.
They want to capture the entire value of everyone's labor and hoard it for themselves, and discard the people that produced it.
The importer pays the tax and passes it on as higher prices to the consumer. So the importers are the one that had the tax collected from them and would be getting the refund.
The importer CAN be the seller, but other times the importer is a middleman in the supply chain.
To the CPAs among us: will the refunded import taxes be treated as extra profit for all the importers who paid them?
I could see an argument that they don't have a legal obligation to pass the refunds on to their customers, any more than my local grocery store owes me 5 cents for the gallon of milk I bought last year if the store discovers that their wholesaler had been mistakenly overcharging them.
The idea of getting a refund for mischaracterized tariffs is actually fairly common (it's called a duty drawback and there's a cottage industry around this). It's generally used when an importer incorrectly categorized their import under an HS code that has a higher duty than the correctly categorized HS code.
The difference this time is the scale is orders of magnitude larger. Will be interesting to see how they (importers and CBP) work through this.
A regular importer who routinely pays customs duties is now owed money by Customs and Border Protection. Can they now set off future duties against the balance owed them? Normally, reciprocal debt cancellation is legal.
The U.S. Treasury has a whole system for this, but in the other direction. If the government owes you money, and you owe the government money, the Treasury will deduct what you owe from whatever they are paying out.[1] But they're not set up for that in the other direction.
I got charged a $600 tariff from UPS to ship a $30 25-pound sandbag into the US from Canada.
UPS didn't even deliver the product.
I'm suing them in small claims.
We'll see what happens.
I imagine that even after the ruling, our ass backwards legal system will somehow say this makes sense, even though the tariff rate was never near high enough for that bill to make any sense.
Further, they're going to get refunded the $10 it MIGHT have cost them.
It was interesting to see shops in the border towns of south & south east Switzerland buying & selling products from Italy, a relatively cheaper market.
I mean, when I was young we lived in Poland right next to the border with Slovakia and we'd drive over once a week for groceries and to buy fuel because it was just so much cheaper over there. Nowadays it's the reverse since they got the Euro - most Polish shops near the border cater to Slovakian shoppers and even accept Euro for payment.
American here. My experience is that the US dollar seems to be accepted in tons of stores in countries all over in the Americas Europe and Asia. Trade is trade it seems.
It wasn't the tariff. UPS has been tacking on a ridiculously high paperwork fee for the service of processing tariff payments. Other shipping companies have also had fees, but UPS is the main one that's made it exorbitant and disproportionately higher than the tariff itself.
I'm thinking the delivery agents such as UPS, Fedex, USPS now need to sue the United States so they can pay back all the recipients the fees they charged, plus interest.
There are going to be a raft of class action suits based on this.
As one of my lawyers once said, the only winners here are the lawyers.
I suspect that my recent experience confirms this. Our daughter shipped two suitcases home from the UK, paying some local company for "door-to-door" delivery. They contracted with UPS who demanded an additional $32 when the first bag showed up. For the second she paid the same fee online so they wouldn't require a check at the door.
That's a great question. I would also love to know that answer. I agree with you that they're not going to share the refund if the importer was the middleman in the supply chain, and same thing if the importer was also the seller.
Yes, I think that's the starting point. Another part of my question was whether a CPA applying GAAP would recommend recognizing the $2 as other income, or else as a liability against a future claim from the customer who bought the widget and is now seeking a partial refund.
I did what passes for research these days and concluded that if the claim is "probable and estimable," then it could be recorded as a "contingent liability" rather than other income. Relevant facts would include whether the tariff refund included a pass-through refund mandate (unlikely with this administration), or whether class actions for refunds against merchants were pending (inevitable).
Related question, unanswerable except maybe as a rough estimate: how much will it cost, in accountant/bookkeeper time, to do all the administrivia required to process all these refunds?
It depends on the terms of the transaction. Most business-to-business transactions would have the importer responsible for duties, but many, maybe the majority of business-to-consumer transactions have taxes & duties covered by the exporter and included in the final price which would typically reflect the additional taxes & duties in the prices. In those case, the exporter would be the one refunded.
> They voted for a promise of a return to a world where they were on top.
Very few were on top during The Gilded Age and it has been EXTREMELY clear for quite a long time now that the "Great" in M.A.G.A. is a reference to the 1880s, not the 1950s.
Where THEY were on top. Trump voting men wanted the world where they can rule over women. Trump voting whites voted to be over minorities. Trump voting christians want their religious state.
And so on and so forth. In each case, vote for Trump was to harm someone you look down at and to dominate over another group.
Begging for a 12h day of work every morning on the docks as a stevedore in crowds among hundreds of other men begging for the same job does not give one power to "rule over women".
They'd be too underpaid and exhausted to rule over their own dinner before falling asleep for the night.
When you vote, you vote for an entire platform and you especially vote for central campaign promises. You don’t get to say “I voted for a world where I’m on top” and then say “but not for the primary method the candidate promised to use!”
tariff were promised and implemented by Trump in his first mandate too, if you voted for him, you mostly voted for America Great Again Through Tariffs.
After the liberation day tariffs were announced, 34% of the people thought they were good.
Project 2025 was publicly available prior to the election. Tariffs were one of the many policies within the larger plan. If you voted for Trump you are responsible for the Tariffs, this is not a hoodwink where Trump rug pulled everyone after getting elected — it was literally there in the open.
Even beyond/disregarding Project 2025, tariffs were a well-known part of the GOP platform in 2024; it was even included and discussed at the Presidential Debate. The Harris platform even called it a tax at that time, to attempt to make it quite clear to the voter who, in the end, would bear the cost, and the Trump platform equivocated on who would pay the tax to distract from that Harris was right.
Even if you knew nothing of Project 2025 (somehow), you were warned.
On top you have news outlets and educated people not being clear what they are. See from the article:
He has long argued tariffs boost American manufacturing - but many in the business community, as well as Trump's political adversaries, say the costs are passed on to consumers
It’s reported as if someone still needs to figure out who pays the tariffs in the end. I’m aware that tariffs are a lever to potential move buying behavior and give incentives to move production locally. But in this instance and how it’s/ was implemented it’s clear who is the paying for it.
“ Even beyond/disregarding Project 2025, tariffs were a well-known part of the GOP platform in 2024;”
The tariff stuff is just a variation of the republican dream to replace income tax with a sales tax. Big tax cut for higher incomes while raising taxes for lower incomes.
The problem is USA doesn't get good choices. Given the choice between a walking corpse and trump, they choose the corpse. Given the choice between a woman and trump, they choose trump.
I assume they were suggesting that to those that voted for Trump they saw a woman as the worse choice. Perhaps as well when Hillary Clinton ran against him.
This is loony, all these guys knew eachother for years before and have cordial if nor friendly relationships. The Clintons, Trump, Bushes, Obamas, etc.
In 2016 65% of Trump supporters believed Obama was secretly Muslim. [0]
Trump claimed that Obama was "the founder of Isis" and claimed MANY times that he was not born in the United States. [1]
So yes, he is completely loony... and very blatantly a racist who sends dogwhistles to other racists regularly.
No, he is not friends with Obama or Biden. In fact, Trump is the first president in 150 years to refuse to attend the inauguration of his competitor after losing. [2]
These people are not necessary against tariff, they are against paying more for their stuff and having it benefit some middleman because the current government messed up badly.
I can otherwise understand how people would agree on paying more for their stuff if it allows their fellow citizens to have a job.
There are many reasonable ideas for import taxation. But what you describe was not what happened. China fought back with their own tariffs, and you may well have paid less import tax on your Temu knock-offs than you did for some widget made with both higher environmental and labor standards in some western European country.
Check Truth Social, many are livid that the tariffs were found illegal. A lot of supporters of the current government prefer to pay higher prices for goods.
> The importer pays the tax and passes it on as higher prices to the consumer.
So it matters how we’re interpreting “paying”. One way to look at it is that if the cost was passed on to the consumer, the consumer paid it. The importer simply handed over the money.
and if so, do you really believe any importers who paid the tariff will further refund back to the consumer ? It's eventually a net win for the importer.
Jobs are the only way that you survive in this society (food, shelter). Look how we treat unhoused people without jobs. AI is taking jobs away and that is putting people's survival at risk.
It's such a shame, because they had one of the best services out there. Being able to push via Git and end up with a running deployment was a killer feature. It may not have been the first (Elastic Beanstalk was way older but when it first came out it was Java only iirc, ick) but it was incredibly popular.
Seeing them now chasing AI as a "me too" after being acquired by Salesforce just shows that huge companies will acquire something then sit on it for years and let it rot.
Yup, their Git Push Deployment was really a killer concept and a huge gateway for people just writing good apps not needing to care about infra and still being able to get a production-ready setup.
Couldn’t agree more. That “git push and you’re live” moment removed a huge amount of accidental complexity, and it’s been the guiding experience behind what we’re building at Build.io.
Even when you build cool things it's respectful not to plant them in HN comments :)
I think the usual solution to this is to talk about cool stuff you've done that is only incidentally relevant to the product you're selling. For example, some detail on how you built a technical system or solved a problem, etc...
Great article, shows a lot of interesting PostgreSQL features. I have used PostgreSQL and MySQL for decades, and this article showed me that I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.
I've used Postgres for more than a decade and everytime I wade into the docs I feel the same way, I'm barely scratching the surface. It's so immensely powerful.
I love what LLMs are doing for me in PG's SQL. I discovered many features by having LLMs write them for me, often spot-on 100% on first prompt.
Since I know conceptually how RDBMSes work, I can ask vey specifically what I want. Also asking for feedback on schemas/queries really helped me. I use a lot more of PGs features now!
the way PG was originally implemented does have some overlap with operating systems design IMHO.. PG internals define and use PG tables in internal schema to implement core architectural features. The PG code that bootstraps the PG environment is minimal in important ways.
You completely missed the point of that quote. The point of the quote is to highlight the fact that automated systems are amoral, meaning that they do not know good or evil and cannot make judgements that require knowing what good and evil mean.
The K shaped recovery phenomenon demonstrated that the economy can continue to thrive, when consumption by the lowest earners is replaced and concentrated by earners at the top. This demonstrated to the elites that actually, we don't need as many consumers to grow the economy, and that it's possible to redistribute wealth upward without losing growth.
These public comments just show that the elites are more and more comfortable making it explicit that there are too many "useless eaters" in their opinion, and that the change has been from considering just the Third World to be where these "useless eaters" are while still preserving an imperial core, to now considering everyone that isn't them, regardless of First or Third world, to be a useless eater.
Very dangerous thinking, but at least it's out in the open now.
They want to capture the entire value of everyone's labor and hoard it for themselves, and discard the people that produced it.
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