The Trump Tariffs Turn Out To Be A Reverse Robin Hood Corporate Scam

The following is part of a post by Tim Dickinson at The Contrarian:

On “Liberation Day” in April 2025, Donald Trump imposed a massive set of tariffs on imported goods from around the world. The federal government then collected those funds — raking in ten upon tens of billions of dollars — for nearly a year, until the Supreme Court ruled that the president had unconstitutionally usurped Congress’s taxation powers.

As a result, the federal government has now begun the process of refunding about $166 billion in illegal tax revenue — payable to the corporations that originally handed over the money to the U.S. Treasury.

But did these corporations actually pay the tax? Or, after all, was it you and me?

In truth, the fat tax-rebate checks from the IRS will be going to corporations that already passed those costs on to shoppers in the form of tariff-bloated prices. American consumers paid the premium, but Treasury’s refunds will be going to huge companies. Ford announced it expects a $1.5 billion payback; General Motors anticipates a $500 million return. Both companies will reportedly be using the cash to boost their earnings.

Whether by incompetence or dark design, Trump’s illegal tariffs have worked like a reverse-Robin Hood scheme, on steroids. The pockets of the poor and middle classes were picked — during an affordability crisis, no less. And, following a detour through the IRS, that cash is now topping off the coffers of multinational corporations for whom the economy is already delivering record profits.

The economic ins and outs of tariffs, or import taxes, can be confusing at the best of times. And Donald Trump has added to that confusion with a constant stream of lies. To hear the addled president tell it, foreign countries pay the bulk of tariffs. But that is not true: A study by the New York Fed shows that foreign exporters absorbed only a small fraction of the costs of Trump’s tariffs. Instead, roughly 90 percent of the costs were paid by Americans.

An independent study by the Kiel Institute, a leading European economic think tank, pegs the cost paid by Americans even higher, at 96 percent. The report, titled “America’s Own Goal,” also illuminates how the costs of Trump’s tariffs, though initially paid by importers, are “ultimately” passed through to consumers via higher prices. The net effect of Trump’s tariffs, the study described, was to “transfer wealthfrom American consumers to the U.S. Treasury.”

In other words, American consumers bore the costs of Trump’s tariffs. The corporate importers were just the middleman. And yet, those same corporations are now in line to pocket the massive rebates from the Treasury, leaving consumers all the poorer.

To be plain: This isn’t a little bit of money around the edges. According to Congress’s Joint Economic Committee, the Trump tariff burden per household over the last year was about $1,700 — or more than the cost of one month’s groceries for a family of four.