We Want Our $1,700 Back
The Supreme Court says Trump’s tariffs were illegal. So why are corporations first in line for refunds while American families wait?
by Lawrence Winnerman
The Supreme Court has ruled that Trump’s tariffs were imposed without lawful authority. That is not a marginal technicality; it means the federal government collected money it did not have the legal right to collect.
Over the life of those tariffs, the government took in hundreds of billions of dollars in duties. And while the payments were made at the border by importers, economists were consistent from day one: roughly 90–95% of those costs were passed directly on to American consumers. Prices went up. Families absorbed the difference. That is how tariffs work.
Which means this is about real cash, from real people’s wallets. If you divide the economic burden across households, it comes out to roughly $1,500 to $1,700 per family. The people who were told tariffs would punish China ended up paying for them at Target, at the grocery store, and at the hardware store.
Now the Court says the authority wasn’t there.
So who gets the money back? Personally, I want my $1,700 back.
Twelve states—Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and Vermont—sued over the legality of the tariffs. They were right to do so.
Governors like JB Pritzker in Illinois have now sent letters demanding that roughly $8.6 billion be returned to Illinois families. Gavin Newsom has publicly demanded refunds for Californians. They are arguing, correctly, that their residents bore the economic harm.
At the same time, more than 1,800 refund cases have already been filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade by corporations seeking to recover the duties they paid at customs. Companies including Costco, Revlon, EssilorLuxottica, J.Crew, Illumina, Dole, Diageo, Prada, and Dolce & Gabbana are either in litigation or preparing to file. And that number will grow.
Here is the chaos no one wants to say out loud.
Corporations have the cleanest paperwork. They were the importers of record. They can show exactly what they paid. So legally, they are positioned first in line for refunds.
But they already passed those costs along in higher prices.
If they get refunds and do not reduce prices or rebate consumers—and there is currently no mechanism forcing them to—they recover money that American families already reimbursed them for at the checkout counter.
Now layer in state claims. If California successfully recovers funds on behalf of its residents while California-based corporations also receive customs refunds, do Californians get double compensation while Nebraskans get nothing? If Illinois recovers billions, and corporations operating nationally recover separately, how is that reconciled? The federal government collected once. It cannot logically pay twice. But absent a coordinated national mechanism, that is exactly the kind of unevenness that could emerge.
And all of this will be litigated for years. Standing battles. Pass-through arguments. Sovereign immunity questions. Appeals. Administrative recalculations. The cost of unwinding this mess will itself cost billions more in legal fees and bureaucratic overhead. Money we do not have. Money that could have been used for actual infrastructure, healthcare, housing relief—anything real.
This was not an unavoidable crisis measure. It was a discretionary gamble. Economists warned it was reckless. Trade lawyers warned that the statutory footing was shaky. It was sold as strength. It turned out to be a self-inflicted wound.
American consumers are already stretched thin. Inflation is not theoretical. Affordability is not partisan. Families feel it every week. And now we are told the money was taken unlawfully — but the path to getting it back is murky, unequal, and likely to favor the entities best equipped to navigate federal courts.
That is infuriating.
It should be infuriating.
In 2009, the Tea Party rose up over the perception that ordinary Americans were paying for elite mistakes. Whether you agreed with that movement or not, the emotional catalyst was economic unfairness. What we are looking at now is far clearer. A bad policy choice was made. The courts say it exceeded legal authority. The costs landed overwhelmingly on consumers. And the refund structure is tilted toward corporations.
This is the moment for a new kind of populist demand.
This is not performative outrage, or a culture-war distraction. It’s a single, simple civic insistence: Return the money to the people who paid it.
Congress must create a consumer refund mechanism before a single corporate check goes out the door. If corporations receive refunds, there must be a statutory requirement that those funds be passed through proportionally to consumers. If states recover funds, those funds must be distributed equitably across residents, not captured for general budgets. There must be transparency. There must be a uniform national framework. And there must be accountability for the administrative costs of this debacle.
Because otherwise, the average American family will once again pay for a policy failure twice — once at the register and again through the tax dollars required to unwind it.
There’s a scene in Better Off Dead where a paperboy relentlessly chases John Cusack for two dollars. It’s absurd. It’s funny. But the joke works because the debt is real.
That’s where we are.
The amount isn’t two dollars. It’s closer to $1,700 per household. And millions of Americans are looking at Washington and thinking the same thing:
We want our money back.
If this administration and this Congress don’t build a fair, transparent refund system, they shouldn’t be surprised when voters organize around that single demand. Not as a partisan slogan. As a civic reckoning.
Because this wasn’t just bad policy.
It was an unnecessary, reckless, self-inflicted wound.
And the people who paid for it—us—deserve restitution.
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That’s right the American people are the ones buying this high price stuff
The big corporations are aways first in line since the make the BIG Campaign Donations and employ lobbyists to curry favor..