Turns out that under $800 shipments into the U.S. are a huge business, and Trump’s new tariff is putting pressure on all links of the supply chain, throwing it into turmoil. From David Haggith at thedailydoom.com:
A lot more news streamed in since my Deeper Dive on the labor market, affirming the major recessionary downturn I reported in my analysis. However, since I covered that extensively in the Deeper Dive, I’ll let the headlines below speak for themselves in telling the same story as corroboration. One headline sums it up well: “Big Jobs Miss Suggests Economy Is Sicker than Believed.”
What I want to look to today is the potential calamity the US economy and government could run up on if the Supreme Court rules current tariffs unconstitutional as a reach beyond presidential powers into the jurisdiction of congress. I’ve briefly mentioned this risk in the past, but some articles today really lay out what a disaster this could turn into, depending on how the Supreme Court rules. Team Trump has asked for an expedited ruling before the problem builds up even worse.
(The Supreme Court has been very friendly toward Trump, so maybe his friends on the court will continue to invest him with presidential powers no previous president has exercised to this degree, and a turmoil worse than what has already been seen this week will be averted … though perhaps at the expense of rule of law.)
It is not anti-Trumpism that causes me to say that a Supreme Court overturning of Trump’s tariffs-by-decree (already overturned by two lower federal courts) would be a huge blow to the economy and the national debt. His own Treasury Secretary warned today that the refunds required if the Supreme Court rules against what Trump has done by disagreeing with his interpretation of his emergency powers (or what constitutes a true emergency), would be “massive.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that he is “confident” that President Donald Trump’s tariff plan “will win” at the Supreme Court, but warned his agency would be forced to issue massive refunds if the high court rules against it.
If the tariffs are struck down, he said, “we would have to give a refund on about half the tariffs, which would be terrible for the Treasury,” according to an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
He added, however, that “if the court says it, we’d have to do it.”
