The trade attorney was explaining why companies that passed the struck-down emergency tariffs on to customers are unlikely to work out which customers should share in the refunds. The government puts the tariff money it collected at roughly $166–170 billion.
…what do companies do with money? They give the money to shareholders and buy back. Yeah, they either pay the money out to their shareholders in the form of dividends, or they use the money to make more things, better things, create more factories for making more things, etc. So they reinvest- who
aren't the shareholders, the consumers who bought the items.
Exactly. In terms of it being, is it absolutely like physically impossible for them to untangle that? Maybe not, but it would be, I mean, at what point are you like, well, we spent more money figuring out who we owed $5 to than was worth each person's $5.
Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That said, you could argue that the best possible conditions for a possible tariff refund is the situation at the center of today's episode with the Playdate video game system because they had individually broken tariff charges out on every single order, with, of course…
That was a lot.
Panic's customers had paid about $100,000 in tariffs that Panic would get in refunds, theoretically. And, you know, Cable Sasser, the CEO, says that like that much refund money, I mean, that is so much for his tiny little 25-person company. It's, it's something. It's meaningful. And so, yes, there…