As a result, Nintendo's legal team is far more likely to ensure they get refunded, and quickly. They could provide a template for others to follow.
Say, they get pissed off too much… they could run campaigns just days before the election if they wanted.
Here's the Courtlistener docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72373888/nintendo-of-am...
Also, do/will these companies drop prices if/when tariffs are reversed?
This is no different from any other cost. Their cost of goods is lower in retrospect than they thought it was, so it will show up as a gain on their income statement.
What's the economic effect, though? One way to model a tariff that's later refunded is that it's sort of like if a cartel colluded to temporarily keep prices higher. Competition between firms often keeps prices close to costs, but this wouldn't be true for a monopoly or a cartel.
Whether some downstream consumer of those imported goods paid a price that would have been lower if not for the tariff is a commercial question between them and whoever they paid. Maybe they would have, maybe they wouldn't have. There isn't any objective way to calculate what the price of suchandsuch Nintendo product would have been in the counterfactual.
Every shipment from overseas would essentially have a line item for tariffs due. Just add them up.
1. Trump could decide what to apply the negative tariff to (e.g. Trump merchandise or his buddies)
2. If there's a fixed amount of money to dole out and suppliers know it, approximately zero dollars will be given back to consumers because it will be easy to capture the money on the importer side.
The money that has passed various deadlines may be more difficult to return, however it is still money that is due to Nintendo. That may be more difficult to obtain, but it isn't the government's money in the first place.
US tax payers aren't paying money to Nintendo - they're paying for the government's lawyers to try to argue against not paying back illegally collected tariffs.
https://realeconomy.rsmus.com/ieepa-tariffs-struck-down-what...
I don't see how the consumer won in any of this.
Taxpayers already paid for it, companies raised their prices to compensate.
The taxpayer that paid the tariff was the consumer. The fact Nintendo actually wrote the check is largely accounting, this was passed on to the consumer.
The taxpayer that receives the refund is Nintendo, straight into their profits.
So the taxpayer paying and the taxpayer receiving are totally different. This is basically like regressive welfare where consumer paid a private but government imposed tax to corporations.
The Trump administration immediately invoked Section 122 for a 10% duty on nonexempt imports and announced expanded Section 232 and 301 investigations.
This scheme amounts to yet another free handout for corporations. They should be required to use this money to reimburse their customers, but that would obviously going to get very complicated.
Well done America.
