from the seems-bad dept
The President of the United States is currently promising to spend the same pot of money on at least nine different things. The pot in question: revenue from all the random and fluctuating tariff duties that are almost certainly unconstitutional, which means he’s likely going to have to pay some or all of it back. While he’s busy making impossible promises with money that isn’t really his, his administration is simultaneously trying to hide that revenue from the courts to make it harder for companies to recover what they’re owed.
If this sounds like a multi-layered scam, that’s because it is.
I’m sure you’ve heard Trump mention this or that thing he’s planning to spend the tariff revenue on, such as rebate checks, farmer bailouts, better childcare or covering the loss of revenue from the tax cuts he gave to all his billionaire friends.
Ben Werkschkul, at Yahoo Finance, has now detailed nine different things that Trump has promised to fund with the tariff revenue (and I’m pretty sure the number was seven when I first opened the article, but it appears to have been updated).
According to Yahoo Finance’s count, the president has floated at least nine different ideas for how tariff money could be used, stretching back to the 2024 campaign.
It’s a list of promises that ranges from sending Americans $2,000 tariff dividend checks to paying for the tax cuts that Republicans instituted this summer.
The math alone should be disqualifying. The tariff revenue couldn’t cover even a fraction of these nine different spending promises if you added them all up. But Trump appears to be treating this like an endless pool of money—repeatedly spending the same dollars on different programs as if the laws of basic accounting don’t apply to him.
But, even worse, the tariffs are pretty clearly unconstitutional nonsense, and the Supreme Court seems poised to strike them down quite soon. Companies like Costco are already getting in line, demanding they get the money they paid for tariffs back from the US government.
And then, as if to emphasize how much of a criminals scam this is, rather than setting aside funds to pay back what’s likely to be tens of billions in refunds once the Court rules, the Trump admin is already trying to hide the money to make it harder to pay back.
The Trump administration is racing to deposit the money it’s raised from tariffs into the U.S. Treasury, a tactic that could make it harder for companies to get refunds for duties the Supreme Court may strike down in the coming months.
That has triggered a flurry of lawsuits in recent weeks, with companies ranging from wholesaler Costco to canned tuna seller Bumble Bee looking to preserve access to potential refunds for tens of billions of dollars worth of tariff fees. And it foreshadows the messy legal battles likely to play out if the high court rules President Donald Trump overstepped his legal authority when he imposed his steep “reciprocal” tariffs and other duties on major trading partners.
According to court filings and half a dozen people familiar with the cases, Trump’s Customs and Border Protection is denying requests to delay finalizing tariff payments and transferring the funds to the Treasury.
To recap: the administration is collecting what are effectively illegal taxes, rushing to co-mingle those funds with general Treasury revenue to make them harder to trace and recover, while simultaneously promising to spend that same money multiple times over on programs that would cost far more than the tariffs have generated. And they’re doing all of this while the Supreme Court is actively considering whether the tariffs are constitutional in the first place.
Here’s the final insult: when the Supreme Court strikes down these tariffs and orders refunds, American taxpayers will be on the hook to cover those payments. And that’s to pay back money that many of us already paid in the form of higher prices to companies to cover the cost of tariffs.
Trump was swept into office with promises of lowering costs. Instead, he raised taxes massively through tariffs, drove inflation higher, and engineered a scheme where Americans effectively pay twice—once through higher prices, and again through the tax refunds his unconstitutional gambit will require.
The guy who bankrupted a casino and built an empire on stiffing his vendors is now running the same playbook on the American public—except this time, we’re all stuck paying the bill.
Filed Under: donald trump, promises, tariffs, taxes, taxpayers
Companies: costco
