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The Government Told Courts It Could Easily Refund Tariffs. Now It Says It Can't
- kazinator 8mo ago> meaning CBP personnel would have to manually untangle the amounts. Processing each individual refund takes about 5 minutes, which across 53 million entries works out to over 4.4 million hours. Assuming nobody looks at the requirements of the problem to write a single line of code in order to tool up to the task.
- arealaccount 8mo agoThey'd have to beef up the servers to accommodate the extra processing and we all know how much RAM costs these day
- b112 8mo agoCBP says it needs 45 days to build new software before it can start writing checks. Honestly? It doesn't seem unreasonable if it really is 45 days. Imagine if they started working on software additions for mass refunds, and the decision went the other way? And they didn't have to refund? Wouldn't they be wasting money for no reason?
- mandevil 8mo agoThen they should have mentioned that in their court filings! The reason that the tariffs were collected while there was doubts as to their legality is that the US Government promised, in court filings (courts literally marked this as estoppel in a ruling: they are unable to change their mind on it, locked in argument) that they could repay this easily, and so courts allowed them to collect it while they figured out the legality. When they promised this, if it did require software changes, they should have done that then, or else they were lying to courts. This is why the judges are not giving them any slack here. They promised to courts that this could be done easily, in such a way that they can't change their mind now. This is all very basic tenets of law that even non-lawyers can understand.
- ElevenLathe 8mo agoThey would at least be wasting "their own" (taxpayer) money, instead of punishing random importers with chaotic effects to our entire globalized system of political economy.
- psadauskas 8mo agoHow many hours did it take to charge all those illegal tariffs, though? Surely not the 500 years they say it'll take to refund them /s
- budman1 8mo agoMany lifetimes ago I worked on a project where all customer desired changes were 'scoped' by engineering. A little report was written about how the change could be implemented, to include any possible complications and a LOC estimate. My manager, did not want us to do a customer desired change. So he wrote the 'impact report'. The problem basically required taking functionality that applied to 1 thing, and made it apply to an (existing) array of things. His solution was as if arrays did not exist, and the resulting LOC was N times bigger than it actually was going to be. Of course, this change was not authorized until the manager left, and someone that knew it was BS spoke up. Same thing here.
- josefritzishere 8mo agoI can't think of a constructive way to respond to news this dumb. Anyone have a silver lining?
- Herring 8mo agoChina's GDP (PPP) overtook the US in 2016. It is currently ~30% higher and will reach double by 2035. They haven't dropped bombs on foreign soil in over 40 years.
- tgv 8mo agoWho cares about a few Uygurs, right? Or the Chinese Seas. Or Tibet and Taiwan. You can say what you want, but China is not a silver lining.
- soperj 8mo agoWho cares about undocumented immigrants, or Venezuela, or Iran, or Iraq, or Afganistan, or Iraq a second time, or putting Iran into it's current situation by overthrowing a democratically elected government in the 1950s, or Hawaii, or the Virgin Islands, Indigenous people of North America etc etc.
- drecked 8mo agoOr Cuba… Another brilliant humanitarian crisis caused entirely by the U.S. for no good reason at all.
- tgv 8mo agoI'm not arguing the USA is a good guy. Just that that doesn't make China any better.
- raven12345 8mo agoChina cannot be compared to the two warmongers, the US and Russia, in any dimension.
- simonw 8mo ago> CBP’s Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system can apparently only batch-process 10,000 entry summary lines at a time, and there are over 1.6 billion entry summary lines that need updating. Importers frequently lumped their IEEPA duties together with other duties on the same line, meaning CBP personnel would have to manually untangle the amounts. Processing each individual refund takes about 5 minutes, which across 53 million entries works out to over 4.4 million hours.
- nisegami 8mo agoUnemployment numbers about to drop like a rock.
- fwipsy 8mo ago44000000 / 2000 hours/year = 2200 jobs for 1 year. *50k/year = $110,000,000
- tocs3 8mo agoYou should add in time for training.
- mattnewton 8mo agoSo you’re telling me we could do this all for just a few million dollars more than the price of the three fighter jets recently shot down over Kuwait, and provide good American jobs while doing so? Sounds like a deal. (In reality it would be more expensive because you would have to source, train, and administer those people plus audit the results afterwards. But the government had said it would be doable before to the courts!)
- nisegami 8mo agoOr 1 job for 2200 years
- protimewaster 8mo agoWhile ridiculous, from a technical standpoint, it's not hard to see how this scenario arises. On the one hand, there was probably pressure to implement the tariffs as quickly as possible. Consequently, there likely wasn't much effort put into the "what if we have to undo all this in a year" use case, because that wasn't strictly necessary to get the tariffs implemented. On the other hand, now that the "we need to undo all this" use case actually needs to be used, they've gotta go back and solve the problem after the fact. Unsurprisingly, it's going to take a while to develop that solution. I'm not excusing it, but I do think it's interesting to think about the technical and political issues.
- solid_fuel 8mo ago> While ridiculous, from a technical standpoint, it's not hard to see how this scenario arises. On the one hand, there was probably pressure to implement the tariffs as quickly as possible. Consequently, there likely wasn't much effort put into the "what if we have to undo all this in a year" use case, because that wasn't strictly necessary to get the tariffs implemented. No, I disagree. It is actually quite hard to see how this scenario arises without intentional malfeasance. This isn't something that was overlooked, the government was specifically asked in court it they would be able to issue refunds quickly if the tariffs were overturned. The government lied and said they could. This isn't some surprise thing where we can just forgive these guys in the government for not accounting for the potential need for refunds. They were asked. They lied.
- protimewaster 8mo agoMy thinking is that it's very unlikely the people actually responsible for implementing it were the same as the ones in court arguing it would be easily reversible. From a strictly technical standpoint, if your boss says "Make this happen ASAP, even if you have to cut corners", and then a year later says, "Undo all of that", it's gonna be a shitshow. I completely agree that it's malicious, but I'm thinking the people actually responsible for implementing it (the software, procedures, etc.) probably weren't themselves malicious. I think the technical people responsible for implementing it were intentionally put into a position, by their bosses, where they'd basically be the fall guys and provide a reasonable technical excuse for their boss's maliciousness.
- AdmiralAsshat 8mo agoWell Trump's track record of "No Plan-B" has historically worked out for him pretty well so far. He had ample reason to think the SCOTUS--which has been giving him a green light to act like a god-king up to this point--would have his back on this as well, in which case who cares if his backup plan turned out to be complete rubbish?
- fwipsy 8mo agoI wouldn't say it's complete rubbish because that implies there was a plan at all
- stevetron 8mo agoThis is like a previous administration trying you re-unite children with their families.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- greatgib 8mo agoWhen there is no financial data to steal or person to randomly fire, suddenly there is not anymore 20 years old DOGE morons pretending to be able to fix the system overnight...
- kgwxd 8mo agoSorry fools, they got your money. Everyone that voted for this, deserves to lose everything.
- onlypassingthru 8mo agoThe importers are the beneficiaries of any refunds. Those of us that paid the higher prices because of tariffs will just enjoy the camaraderie of being screwed over as a collective group, twice.
- kgwxd 8mo agoThe importers definitely voted for this, and funded campaigns to get other people to vote for it. Jacking up prices won't work this time, everyone is already broke af.
- avanticc 8mo agoClaiming it takes 5 minutes of manual work per entry while also saying it would take 45 days to build a software solution is a strange contradiction. In any private sector logistics setup, if you have 53 million records to untangle, you don't even consider the manual route; you spend the first 30 days building the parser and the next 15 days running edge-case tests. The fact that they are even presenting the '4.4 million hours' figure as a viable metric for the court shows how disconnected the administrative process is from modern data engineering.
- LorenPechtel 8mo agoWorking as designed. Yet another court order they never intended to comply with.