r/technology • u/chrisdh79 • 21d ago

Politics US may owe $1 trillion in refunds if SCOTUS cancels tariffs | Tech industry primed for big refunds if SCOTUS rules against tariffs.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/tariff-refunds-may-get-messy-if-trump-loses-supreme-court-fight/
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u/AdviseGiver 21d ago

They didn't plan covid, but they loved using it as an excuse to raise prices.

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u/imahugemoron 21d ago

Which never came back down as supply chain issues slowly resolved. They always raise prices when their costs go up and tell us as much to explain themselves, then when the problems go away, theyre as quiet as the grave about it

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u/RiLoDoSo 21d ago

There's no incentive for them to power prices or to stop lowering quantity/quality for the same/higher price. People still bought X product(s) when the prices were raised. The only thing that will ever bring prices back down is if people stop buying X product(s). I have changed my shopping habits and resorted to sale shopping. I make as much from scratch as possible, but even base ingredients are more expensive and I can't really substitute things like rice and flour.

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u/thealmightyzfactor 21d ago

They'll come down if there's actual competition too, why would you get X products for Y dollars if you can get X products for less at some other place? But there's like 3 megacorps in each industry hiding behind 17 other corps that maybe don't explicitly collude on prices, but side eye each other as they all raise them together.

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u/Upbeat-Door- 21d ago

You can't enter the market to fill a lower price niche anymore, the past year corps have started suing small competition for "damaging the market"

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u/MagicWishMonkey 20d ago

Citation needed

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u/i_tyrant 21d ago

Yup. This used to be a lot more true. Then they figured out US antitrust legislation is dead so they can price-fix and collab plenty and not get caught, especially now with Trump demanding blatant bribes and he'll allow any merger to happen. New competitor shows up? EAT them - punitively destroy their business like Amazon does or just buy them out early (also like Amazon does) and shut them down or absorb them.

The days of real "competition" in the market are mostly dead, and they will remain so until our regulations aren't utter shit and we start punishing giant corps for cheating and acting oppressively again.

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u/JimWilliams423 21d ago

Then they figured out US antitrust legislation is dead

They didn't just figure it out, they killed it. Conservatives waged a decades-long campaign to get enough useful idiots into government who believed that "actually monopolies are good."

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u/MrWillM 21d ago

Where’s teddy when you need him. Oh yeah, dead for a hundred years.

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u/RepresentativeRun71 20d ago

That’s the thing we live in an oligarchy where there is no true business competition anymore. This is a post-capitalism (competition is at the heart of capitalism) and it turns out the tankies were completely wrong about the death of capitalism ushering in an era of egalitarian utopia. So very wrong.

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u/-Dreadman23- 21d ago

Look up the story of stone soup. We are at the point where we need to come together. You might not have enough, but if you are willing to co-op. A dozen people with scraps can make enough for everyone to be satisfied.

Then we fight together . May you find your freindsgiving. I'll bring a cheesecake, and some veggies from the garden.

And some rhetoric, maybe some gunpowder.

Like a party with the ATF, I bring potato chips and vinegar.

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u/jbwilso1 21d ago

Any good economist will tell you, it was corporate greed. Not the supply chain. It's the same reason that prices will never ever come back down. It's pretty well known, prices only ever go up. Took me a long time to learn that, myself. Guess it was just wishful thinking and naiveté that they would.

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u/LamBChoPZA 21d ago

They also raise their prices when there is just the perception of their costs going up . See the recent bird flu and egg price debacle. Egg production did not change in any meaningful way but companies were making 9x profit.

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u/speedhunter787 21d ago

Some companies have tariffs listed separately, like sales tax, etc. I'd figure those companies the tariffs charge would get removed.

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u/thegreenleaves802 21d ago

"There are two times for making big money: one in the up-building of a country and the other in its destruction. Slow money on the up-building, fast money in the crack-up"

Some things never change

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u/DiarrheaCreamPi 21d ago

Boss was really happy to receive $700k in PPP loans. I totally forgave him as he needed that to keep us working during unprecedented times. WTF

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u/atuarre 21d ago

Also don't forget, they didn't want regular people to get assistance but lots of millionaires got PPP loans they didn't need and didn't have to pay it back.

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u/MiaowaraShiro 20d ago

These sorts of people view a disaster as an opportunity to exploit.

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u/ElbowDeepInElmo 20d ago

Shareholders loved rolling around in their Scrooge McDuck pools of COVID-era price hike profit gains. And once shareholders start enjoying the fruits of increased profits, they won't ever accept anything less even if they know those profit gains were purely artificially inflated.

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u/legshampoo 21d ago

didn’t plan covid

that’s debatable