I worked for an online pharmacy in Canada for many years, and it’s fraught and full of grey areas for sure. But so so many Americans count on importing generics to afford their medication. You’re talking several times the price difference for the same pills, life changing amounts of money for older people on fixed incomes with health problems. They will simply not be able to access their medication anymore.
Overall generic drugs in the US are indeed cheaper than in Canada, but that is not the case if you don't have insurance coverage. Without that, it might be cheaper for some to order the Canadian generic if they can't afford insurance.
The other factor is not price, but availability. Some generic are in limited supply or are outright not available in the US.
Generics need to be more carefully sourced if outside the U.S. I prefer brand names from reputable manufacturing areas (Singpore, Germany, etc.), and can get them for close to the price for generics, often starting research at PharmacyChecker.com
Yeah, it would...and yet, they covered that as well with another recent change:
Packages from foreign and Canadian online pharmacies will be prohibited from entering the U.S. if the same medication is sold domestically or if the foreign pharmacy targets U.S. buyers.
It was rarely enforced, prior to what GP explicitely called out as a recent change, that will come into effect October 22. We'll see what happens by end-of-year, though I wouldn't count on pharmacies replacing and re-shipping
It's not just making it more expensive, it's tying every single little thing that comes into the country up in an endlessly-growing loop of red tape that CBP has no way to handle. The de minimis exemption in most countries isn't motivated primarily by not hitting the little guy but by the fact that trying to enforce it for millions of low-value items would bring postal systems to a standstill.
This was exploited from the other side by sending billions of low-value packages, so now the EU adds €3 per article category (so 2 shirts = €3, 1 shirt and 1 spoon = €6) to every package that's under other customs thresholds (€150 usually). With the view this will be eventually replaced by automating the tariff calculation for every package in a few years.
As a result, the number of imported packages dropped anywhere from 30% to 80%, we'll have to wait for the full numbers, but there is a reason to expect something similar will happen in the US.
They are not planning on winning any more elections from here on out, I don't know what other people saw on J6 to make them think that's not the strategy from now on, whenever they lose an election.
But I'm assuming this was a joke about the conspiracy that midterms will be canceled one way or another due to a "national emergency". Which, sadly, is much more probable than it should be.
you're assuming media gives a lick about doing more than soundbites. The actual affect will be at best, 2 weeks after this is implemented, but probably 2 months while they actually figure out what legal means they can to infer which packages they can safely claim are foreign, along with actual foreign pharmacies giving 2 shits about todays shipping.
10 years of believing your color coded wave of choice is going to happen and still winding up with a 50-50 senate
the seats necessary to alter that aren't even open, how gullible do people have to be? well, not very, independents are the largest bloc now, but of the remaining partisans... hello? your algorithm is fake
SCOTUS has an unassailable majority unless Democrats grow a spine and pack the court or multiple conservative members have serious and unforeseen health issues. Neither seems all that likely.
'Kamala is no different than Trump, and she didn't earn your vote, you should just stay home' vibes.
We have learned Kamala was in fact much, much different than Trump, and many peoples rights have been trampled because of this sort of nonsense fatalism.
the adults are talking about the Senate, one of the chambers of Congress. Has almost nothing to do with the President, especially not how they are elected.
There's nothing in the CBP rule that prohibits importing prescriptions, although there will no longer be a duty exemption for them. The rule is about suspending the 'de minimis' exemption for shipments valued under $800...
Starting Oct 22, packages from foreign and Canadian online pharmacies will be prohibited from entering the U.S. if the same medication is sold domestically or if the foreign pharmacy targets U.S. buyers.
SCOTUS ruled that the executive order that included it was illegal. So it went away, even though they never ruled on the specifics of the de minimis system. Now it is back, under a different EO.
I have no affiliation. If anyone wants a domestic alternative to low cost pharmaceuticals this is a good one. Also sometimes GoodRx is worth checking out. Don’t hesitate to ask a pharmacist for a discount if you’re not using insurance. Sometimes that is the best price.
Or it means everyone has to deal with just how broken the system is, together, regardless of whether you knew the and could take advantage of the cheap way or not
Not that it'll play out like that, America still has a wealth inequality problem that will insulate some that would otherwise push for a less-broken system. But I'm optimistic by default, and the bright side is more people complaining, loudly, at how broken America's health care system is, and pushing for a fix.
I suspect the only thing that would make people demand a better solution is if we got rid of employer paid health care. If everyone had to buy from the exchange, people would freak out.
Various pharmacies in Canada will accept a US prescription and send you the medication via mail, usually at far cheaper than what you would pay for the same in the US.
Canadian pharmacies pay Canadian tariffs. Americans pay American tariffs. American importers are no longer exempted from paying American tariffs applied by the US government for goods de minimis goods they import from Canada.
This post is about American importers no longer having exemption on tariffs they would have otherwise paid to the US government.
At no point has Canadian pharmacies ever paid American tariffs. This is fiction you invented.
I don’t know what you’re saying, but for those confused. Starting in 2025, the de minimis exception was removed. This added delays to purchases of drugs from Canada to the US, and required consumers to pay new duties. These duties were collected by the pharmacies at order time, or at least my experience was that the pharmacies would charge your card for them. This is the common sense understanding of what I said above.
These duties were annoying but bearable. However these new changes will effectively shut down all consumer orders of drugs from Canada starting on Oct 22. So if you need these drugs to stay alive, order them right now.
PS This new rule is going to put my family’s health at risk and I’m deeply pissed about it. Having some HNer pick this moment for pedantry is incredibly on brand.
And that's the problem. It doesn't get much more simple than "Canadians pay Canadian import taxes" and "Americans pay American import taxes". Can you at least recognize that reality? For any country, its own people pay its tariffs.
> required consumers to pay new duties.
Required American consumers to pay new American levied duties.
This is an article about new rules for US consumers purchasing drugs for mail delivery from Canadian pharmacies. I understand that you want to make some point about the situation for Canadian consumers, and I appreciate that. But I think you should post that to the other thread, the one that deals with that topic.
> This is the common sense understanding of what I said above.
It's very dangerous to assume common understanding here when Trump has been loudly claiming the opposite, i.e. that the tariffs would be paid by the sender rather than the importer. It would have been more accurate to state that "Canadian pharmacies have already been including the tarrifs in the total order cost".
As a Canadian that sells products to the US I can say that we absolutely pay tariffs to the US government in place of our customers who should be paying it, depending on what shipping provider you use. USPS doesn't have the infrastructure or care to collect tariffs, so they won't, meaning the shipper has to just pay them up front and either jack the shipping cost by an arm-and-a-leg or just eat the cost. Canada Post even requires you as the shipper to pay them. If I ship UPS I can have the buyer pay upon delivery. It's 100% bullshit. I'm luckily under CUSMA, but the first month of tariffs when no one knew what was going on I paid out the ass on shipping and never got any refunds for it like Americans supposedly did, I just got fucked. In Canada and most other places it's normal to pay tariffs and duties when you order anything international (upon delivery) and all carriers know how to collect at delivery (or collect ahead of time online), but the US does not and it's alien to them (as seen by many customers screaming bloody murder over a $4 duty fee that anyone else in the world would kill to only have to pay).
This was the case for at least a year. I used to use AliExpress for affordable small electronics, and when this came into effect, it killed the whole thing (and my hobby, because no way I'm paying the Amazon or eBay tax).
Trump is trying to trade the petro dollar and opec for Venezuelan oil that will tank the dollar and make debt unpayable (every advisor has said this), how he's trying to make medicine unaffordable before alternatives are ready. Sheesh.
Every use case for tarrifs include got subsidy and small trade barriers so it can grow with market share.
He didn't manage to sell them. Everyone hates the tariffs, which are widely understood to have contributed to high prices and economic stagnation.
What he did manage to do is bully the abjectly servile GOP leaders of Congress into not doing anything about the tariffs, even though setting trade policy is expressly assigned to Congress by Article I of the Constitution, and Trump has repeatedly exceeded any legal authority.
We are a country of laws, and the SCOTUS ruled that his first attempt at tariffs was illegal. Whether or not a plurality or majority of Americans favor them is largely irrelevant.
Whether it's illegal or not is irrelevant to the comment I was responding to, which incorrectly claimed "He didn't manage to sell them. Everyone hates the tariffs".
He campaigned and won with tarrifs as one of his main policy points. Voters favour them. Americans get tarrifs because Americans want tarrifs. Deal with it.
That's not how a country governed by the rule of law is supposed to work.
We have laws that limit what presidents (and Congress) can do. By extension that limits what voters can get by voting. Americans got/get tariffs because we currently have an administration that is willing to break the law.
In addition, to focus on the point you claim that voters favored them. I've never seen any convincing evidence that this is true, and what evidence I have seen always seems predicated on the claim that the foreign suppliers pay tariffs, which is generally completely false. So, if they were in favor of what they understood, they did not in fact support tariffs in the real world. Further, I did see some polls suggesting that voters favored highly selected tariffs for specific products from specific origins. Again, that's not what the administration has sought to impose.
Even so, I never saw polling that indicated even a plurality of voters were in favor of them one way or another.
Nope, Congress has authorized the executive to impose tariffs multiple times for multiple different reasons. Tariff Act of '30, Trade Expansion Act of '62, Trade Act of '74, etc.
Past congressional actions were premised on an executive acting in good faith, upholding their oath of office, and following Congress's explicit intentions described in the laws you mention.
A situation where a corrupt and incompetent president is explicitly trying to blow up the US economy using not-really-relevant laws as a pretext was not ever anticipated, and he will hopefully be strongly rebuked (e.g. impeached) by the next Congress.
SCOTUS ruled that his initial attempts at tariffs were illegal. He's used an entirely different part of the US code to try again (whether it stands is currently unclear; of course, the question of precisely who received the refunds for his previous illegal effort has received astoundingly little attention).
Your comment begins "Nope, Congress has authorized ..." which just supports the point of the GP that it is Congress that controls the setting of tariffs, even if that may sometimes mean delegating it to the executive branch.
He gets away with it because a lot of right-wing elites _love_ the idea of taxing consumption rather than income (or, heaven forbid, wealth).
Additionally, Trump, Hassett, etc are still blaming Biden for inflation caused by the tariffs... and a lot of their base would rather believe that than admit that they got suckered by an obvious scam.
> Trump, Hassett, etc are still blaming Biden for inflation caused by the tariffs
I'm starting to see this backfire with a lot of "personal responsibility" type old-school republicans to whom I talk. They're getting fed up with the administration just blanket blaming anything bad on Biden. Whether that will translate to actual political change, I do not know. But I found it interesting that I'm hearing the frustration more lately.
It doesn't need to translate to actual political change. It needs to translate to them staying at home instead of enthusiastically voting for more sadistic traitorous insanity.
Which is looking quite likely.
Although it does assume there are no peculiar and unexpected anomalies with the vote counting.
Populists of all stripes love tariffs and the illusory promise of autarky. We didn’t see Biden remove any of Trump 1’s tariffs and not a single Democrat in congress has committed to repealing the tariffs.
He doesn't actually "get away" with it. A lot of people, left and right, are unhappy about tariffs. But for now, he controls the executive, so it is what it is.
The problem is it was never an executive power to begin with. The unitary executive theory pushed by the Heritage Foundation is counter to everything the US was founded on. Decisions from the current SCOTUS are questionable given the conflicts of interest with certain spouses and the endless improper gifts.
His core base (a solid 25-50% of the party) would rather die than vote for a democrat and all this DSA scare mongering is only entrenching them further/pulling the more moderate among them back into the fold.
The blue wave will likely be a result of blue turnout and some small number of red sitting at home. And sadly the senate is still a toss up
It's silly to claim that a lot of people on the right are unhappy about tariffs.
When Obama put a tariff on Chinese tires, right-wingers (correctly) argued that it was a bad idea that caused American consumers to pay almost a million dollars per "job saved" in the tire industry.
Today the right is in control of the executive, the legislative, the judicial, and and far more news media and... basically just crickets.
As for "he controls the executive". Bullshit. When a Democrat is in office, right-wingers remember that the President is not a king.
Please don't "both sides" this extremely one-sided attack on the American worker.
If only it were so simple. Many of CBP's policies are clearly defined by U.S. Congress (most recent example, which actually establishes CBP: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/644/...). That said, Congress appears to have ceded their oversight role by allowing these rules to change without comment.
I flagged this and wanted to explain my reasoning.
At the time of writing, the article states something that its own link doesn't support (i.e. it is inaccurate). CBP hasn't "suspended all personal prescription importation." What they've done is removed De Minimis Exemption (i.e. duty free below $800), and that's it. Meaning you can still important personal medication before and after Oct 22nd, what has changed is that now it is subject to normal duty.
Do I think this is bad for people importing personal medication? Absolutely I do, and I oppose it. However, I don't think misstating the argument is constructive nor warranted. You could make the argument using the facts on the ground, and then re-state that in the thread title.
So the story is worthy of discussion, and interesting (even the personal medication POV). But this link and this title aren't "it." Hopefully we can get a higher quality source and title on this topic.
It's not as simple as "You will now pay duty." Senders will be required to pay bond, and there will be a crushing load of new paperwork. Combined with extra duty, that will have the same effect as an outright ban.
This will be financially catastrophic for many Americans who may suddenly have to find hundreds of dollars a month.
That's standard operating procedure for any non-de-minimis importer. The $800 limit was only imposed in 2016, historically it was a lot lower than that.
This is actually tragic.
I worked for an online pharmacy in Canada for many years, and it’s fraught and full of grey areas for sure. But so so many Americans count on importing generics to afford their medication. You’re talking several times the price difference for the same pills, life changing amounts of money for older people on fixed incomes with health problems. They will simply not be able to access their medication anymore.
You're claiming that generics tend to be cheaper in Canada than the US. What are you basing this belief on?
Overall generic drugs in the US are indeed cheaper than in Canada, but that is not the case if you don't have insurance coverage. Without that, it might be cheaper for some to order the Canadian generic if they can't afford insurance.
The other factor is not price, but availability. Some generic are in limited supply or are outright not available in the US.
Generics need to be more carefully sourced if outside the U.S. I prefer brand names from reputable manufacturing areas (Singpore, Germany, etc.), and can get them for close to the price for generics, often starting research at PharmacyChecker.com
I'd imagine even with duty added they'd still end up being multiple times cheaper
Yeah, it would...and yet, they covered that as well with another recent change: Packages from foreign and Canadian online pharmacies will be prohibited from entering the U.S. if the same medication is sold domestically or if the foreign pharmacy targets U.S. buyers.
It is rarely enforced though. And the pharmacies will just replace it and ship it again.
It was rarely enforced, prior to what GP explicitely called out as a recent change, that will come into effect October 22. We'll see what happens by end-of-year, though I wouldn't count on pharmacies replacing and re-shipping
Are we talking duties imposed on the generics, or generics imports outright banned?
goes into effect 12 days before a midterm election that is already starting to look like a blue tsunami.
It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em.
Never interrupt your enemy when they are busy making a mistake.
Never assume your enemy is making a mistake either, unless you possess the gift of perfect knowledge.
Hard to see how making things more expensive for consumers is not a mistake, but I could totally be missing something.
It's not just making it more expensive, it's tying every single little thing that comes into the country up in an endlessly-growing loop of red tape that CBP has no way to handle. The de minimis exemption in most countries isn't motivated primarily by not hitting the little guy but by the fact that trying to enforce it for millions of low-value items would bring postal systems to a standstill.
This was exploited from the other side by sending billions of low-value packages, so now the EU adds €3 per article category (so 2 shirts = €3, 1 shirt and 1 spoon = €6) to every package that's under other customs thresholds (€150 usually). With the view this will be eventually replaced by automating the tariff calculation for every package in a few years.
As a result, the number of imported packages dropped anywhere from 30% to 80%, we'll have to wait for the full numbers, but there is a reason to expect something similar will happen in the US.
It's a strategic decision. Pharma companies promised campaign donations if Trump can make sure their profits go up.
you'll soon find out that I'm _also_ the bond market
--Scott "The House" Bessent maybe?
Assuming there is no chicanery
They are not planning on winning any more elections from here on out, I don't know what other people saw on J6 to make them think that's not the strategy from now on, whenever they lose an election.
midterms are in November?
People are downvoting you.
But I'm assuming this was a joke about the conspiracy that midterms will be canceled one way or another due to a "national emergency". Which, sadly, is much more probable than it should be.
"The compliance date for 19 CFR 145.12(a)(2)(v) and (vi) is on October 22, 2026"
wait until you find out what month is before november lol
you're assuming media gives a lick about doing more than soundbites. The actual affect will be at best, 2 weeks after this is implemented, but probably 2 months while they actually figure out what legal means they can to infer which packages they can safely claim are foreign, along with actual foreign pharmacies giving 2 shits about todays shipping.
10 years of believing your color coded wave of choice is going to happen and still winding up with a 50-50 senate
the seats necessary to alter that aren't even open, how gullible do people have to be? well, not very, independents are the largest bloc now, but of the remaining partisans... hello? your algorithm is fake
> the seats necessary to alter that aren't even open
Seems to be anyone's win right now: https://www.realclearpolling.com/maps/senate/2026/toss-up (and RCP is considered to be conservative).
Nate Silver now has it at a 66% chance that the Dems take the senate. (https://www.natesilver.net/p/expert-ratings-are-ignoring-sig...)
Granted, 66% chance is still essentially a toss up.
a 51% Senate gets to do agency appointments, judge appointments, and particularly SCOTUS
but it cant pass any laws. they’re still cooked by the filibuster (until they get bored of it)
SCOTUS has an unassailable majority unless Democrats grow a spine and pack the court or multiple conservative members have serious and unforeseen health issues. Neither seems all that likely.
'Kamala is no different than Trump, and she didn't earn your vote, you should just stay home' vibes.
We have learned Kamala was in fact much, much different than Trump, and many peoples rights have been trampled because of this sort of nonsense fatalism.
the adults are talking about the Senate, one of the chambers of Congress. Has almost nothing to do with the President, especially not how they are elected.
The hoops you poor Americans have to jump through to get affordable health care is ridiculous in what is presented as a developed nation.
The hoops are in place to ensure those at the top continue to get their take.
It is deliberate. Americans want the hoops because they hate poor people.
And we don't realize that we are the poor just because we can point to poorer people.
you said this as if we were developed nation :)
There's nothing in the CBP rule that prohibits importing prescriptions, although there will no longer be a duty exemption for them. The rule is about suspending the 'de minimis' exemption for shipments valued under $800...
Starting Oct 22, packages from foreign and Canadian online pharmacies will be prohibited from entering the U.S. if the same medication is sold domestically or if the foreign pharmacy targets U.S. buyers.
Source?
Wasn't that already suspended in, like, 2025?
SCOTUS ruled that the executive order that included it was illegal. So it went away, even though they never ruled on the specifics of the de minimis system. Now it is back, under a different EO.
I believe it had a phased rollout, which impacts all parcels soon.
I was charged $46 of import fees on a $137 of art supplies from the Czech Republic this May.
Now is a good time to mention:
costplusdrugs.com
I have no affiliation. If anyone wants a domestic alternative to low cost pharmaceuticals this is a good one. Also sometimes GoodRx is worth checking out. Don’t hesitate to ask a pharmacist for a discount if you’re not using insurance. Sometimes that is the best price.
https://youtu.be/YvEH8zENOos?si=jROCWiVgT-YBeuI_
Canadian pharmacies are duct tape for Americas broken health care system. If we rip the tape off first without a fix we're gonna be in trouble.
Or it means everyone has to deal with just how broken the system is, together, regardless of whether you knew the and could take advantage of the cheap way or not
Not that it'll play out like that, America still has a wealth inequality problem that will insulate some that would otherwise push for a less-broken system. But I'm optimistic by default, and the bright side is more people complaining, loudly, at how broken America's health care system is, and pushing for a fix.
I know very little about this topic, but maybe this ultimately helps force a real solution to our prescription drug cost problem?
There are so many problems with American healthcare that should have forced a real solution. But nothing much has happened.
I suspect the only thing that would make people demand a better solution is if we got rid of employer paid health care. If everyone had to buy from the exchange, people would freak out.
The fact your health insurance is tied to your employer is the source of many of the problems.
But how long would the real solution take if it ever comes and what would the collateral damage be while we wait?
What does this actually mean?
Various pharmacies in Canada will accept a US prescription and send you the medication via mail, usually at far cheaper than what you would pay for the same in the US.
This prevents it.
Interesting. Got some examples of the pharmacies?
https://northwestpharmacy.com
Okay Kash, you almost got him this time.
It’ll likely be a rep hit but - I’d argue livestock imports and booze imports over pharma would be Kash’s interest.
Means you can no longer legally^W practically buy far cheaper prescription medicines from Canada, Mexico, India, China etc and ship them to the US.
Their own primer on the topic: https://www.personalimportation.org/understand-the-issue
That’s not what it says. It’s still legal. You just have to pay duties. It’s also not just on medication. They shared these rules a while ago too.
Well... the legal route is no longer "far cheaper" than domestic supply.
Canadian pharmacies already pay tariffs. What does this actually change?
Your comment is nonsense.
Canadian pharmacies pay Canadian tariffs. Americans pay American tariffs. American importers are no longer exempted from paying American tariffs applied by the US government for goods de minimis goods they import from Canada.
This post is about American importers no longer having exemption on tariffs they would have otherwise paid to the US government.
At no point has Canadian pharmacies ever paid American tariffs. This is fiction you invented.
I don’t know what you’re saying, but for those confused. Starting in 2025, the de minimis exception was removed. This added delays to purchases of drugs from Canada to the US, and required consumers to pay new duties. These duties were collected by the pharmacies at order time, or at least my experience was that the pharmacies would charge your card for them. This is the common sense understanding of what I said above.
These duties were annoying but bearable. However these new changes will effectively shut down all consumer orders of drugs from Canada starting on Oct 22. So if you need these drugs to stay alive, order them right now.
PS This new rule is going to put my family’s health at risk and I’m deeply pissed about it. Having some HNer pick this moment for pedantry is incredibly on brand.
> I don’t know what you’re saying
And that's the problem. It doesn't get much more simple than "Canadians pay Canadian import taxes" and "Americans pay American import taxes". Can you at least recognize that reality? For any country, its own people pay its tariffs.
> required consumers to pay new duties.
Required American consumers to pay new American levied duties.
This is an article about new rules for US consumers purchasing drugs for mail delivery from Canadian pharmacies. I understand that you want to make some point about the situation for Canadian consumers, and I appreciate that. But I think you should post that to the other thread, the one that deals with that topic.
Nobody is being a pedant. How you phrased it is wrong and, more importantly, politically charged.
> This is the common sense understanding of what I said above.
It's very dangerous to assume common understanding here when Trump has been loudly claiming the opposite, i.e. that the tariffs would be paid by the sender rather than the importer. It would have been more accurate to state that "Canadian pharmacies have already been including the tarrifs in the total order cost".
As a Canadian that sells products to the US I can say that we absolutely pay tariffs to the US government in place of our customers who should be paying it, depending on what shipping provider you use. USPS doesn't have the infrastructure or care to collect tariffs, so they won't, meaning the shipper has to just pay them up front and either jack the shipping cost by an arm-and-a-leg or just eat the cost. Canada Post even requires you as the shipper to pay them. If I ship UPS I can have the buyer pay upon delivery. It's 100% bullshit. I'm luckily under CUSMA, but the first month of tariffs when no one knew what was going on I paid out the ass on shipping and never got any refunds for it like Americans supposedly did, I just got fucked. In Canada and most other places it's normal to pay tariffs and duties when you order anything international (upon delivery) and all carriers know how to collect at delivery (or collect ahead of time online), but the US does not and it's alien to them (as seen by many customers screaming bloody murder over a $4 duty fee that anyone else in the world would kill to only have to pay).
The people in charge betting they only need to count the "red" ballots this time?
Hasn't it effectively been suspended for over a year now?
Yes, and it has driven the decline of Temu and Shein
It has fuelled Chinese exports to Europe. The enormous industrial capacity of China hasn't gone down they've simply rerouted the cargo ships.
This was the case for at least a year. I used to use AliExpress for affordable small electronics, and when this came into effect, it killed the whole thing (and my hobby, because no way I'm paying the Amazon or eBay tax).
Trump is trying to trade the petro dollar and opec for Venezuelan oil that will tank the dollar and make debt unpayable (every advisor has said this), how he's trying to make medicine unaffordable before alternatives are ready. Sheesh.
Every use case for tarrifs include got subsidy and small trade barriers so it can grow with market share.
It truly boggles the mind how Trump managed to sell tariffs as anything other than a tax on American consumers
> managed to sell tariffs
He didn't manage to sell them. Everyone hates the tariffs, which are widely understood to have contributed to high prices and economic stagnation.
What he did manage to do is bully the abjectly servile GOP leaders of Congress into not doing anything about the tariffs, even though setting trade policy is expressly assigned to Congress by Article I of the Constitution, and Trump has repeatedly exceeded any legal authority.
He campaigned and won on tariffs. A plurality of Americans favor them, evidently.
We are a country of laws, and the SCOTUS ruled that his first attempt at tariffs was illegal. Whether or not a plurality or majority of Americans favor them is largely irrelevant.
Whether it's illegal or not is irrelevant to the comment I was responding to, which incorrectly claimed "He didn't manage to sell them. Everyone hates the tariffs".
He campaigned and won with tarrifs as one of his main policy points. Voters favour them. Americans get tarrifs because Americans want tarrifs. Deal with it.
That's not how a country governed by the rule of law is supposed to work.
We have laws that limit what presidents (and Congress) can do. By extension that limits what voters can get by voting. Americans got/get tariffs because we currently have an administration that is willing to break the law.
In addition, to focus on the point you claim that voters favored them. I've never seen any convincing evidence that this is true, and what evidence I have seen always seems predicated on the claim that the foreign suppliers pay tariffs, which is generally completely false. So, if they were in favor of what they understood, they did not in fact support tariffs in the real world. Further, I did see some polls suggesting that voters favored highly selected tariffs for specific products from specific origins. Again, that's not what the administration has sought to impose.
Even so, I never saw polling that indicated even a plurality of voters were in favor of them one way or another.
Nope, Congress has authorized the executive to impose tariffs multiple times for multiple different reasons. Tariff Act of '30, Trade Expansion Act of '62, Trade Act of '74, etc.
Past congressional actions were premised on an executive acting in good faith, upholding their oath of office, and following Congress's explicit intentions described in the laws you mention.
A situation where a corrupt and incompetent president is explicitly trying to blow up the US economy using not-really-relevant laws as a pretext was not ever anticipated, and he will hopefully be strongly rebuked (e.g. impeached) by the next Congress.
SCOTUS ruled that his initial attempts at tariffs were illegal. He's used an entirely different part of the US code to try again (whether it stands is currently unclear; of course, the question of precisely who received the refunds for his previous illegal effort has received astoundingly little attention).
Your comment begins "Nope, Congress has authorized ..." which just supports the point of the GP that it is Congress that controls the setting of tariffs, even if that may sometimes mean delegating it to the executive branch.
He gets away with it because a lot of right-wing elites _love_ the idea of taxing consumption rather than income (or, heaven forbid, wealth).
Additionally, Trump, Hassett, etc are still blaming Biden for inflation caused by the tariffs... and a lot of their base would rather believe that than admit that they got suckered by an obvious scam.
A lot of his base believe his lie that the other countries are paying the tariffs.
His followers are literally beyond reason and will accept anything he says. It's so very depressing.
> Trump, Hassett, etc are still blaming Biden for inflation caused by the tariffs
I'm starting to see this backfire with a lot of "personal responsibility" type old-school republicans to whom I talk. They're getting fed up with the administration just blanket blaming anything bad on Biden. Whether that will translate to actual political change, I do not know. But I found it interesting that I'm hearing the frustration more lately.
Narrator: It did NOT translate to actual political change.
It doesn't need to translate to actual political change. It needs to translate to them staying at home instead of enthusiastically voting for more sadistic traitorous insanity.
Which is looking quite likely.
Although it does assume there are no peculiar and unexpected anomalies with the vote counting.
It will not because there are still immigrants and trans people to hate.
Populists of all stripes love tariffs and the illusory promise of autarky. We didn’t see Biden remove any of Trump 1’s tariffs and not a single Democrat in congress has committed to repealing the tariffs.
If that were true, the Republicans would implement a VAT. Trump is legitimately just a moron with a cult of personality.
He doesn't actually "get away" with it. A lot of people, left and right, are unhappy about tariffs. But for now, he controls the executive, so it is what it is.
The problem is it was never an executive power to begin with. The unitary executive theory pushed by the Heritage Foundation is counter to everything the US was founded on. Decisions from the current SCOTUS are questionable given the conflicts of interest with certain spouses and the endless improper gifts.
This is entirely in the “rights” control right now, any of them “unhappy” with it are outliers.
The right doesn't like, control the executive by democratic vote. Trump single-handedly does.
We'll have to wait and see how many of those outliers end up voting, and how.
His core base (a solid 25-50% of the party) would rather die than vote for a democrat and all this DSA scare mongering is only entrenching them further/pulling the more moderate among them back into the fold.
The blue wave will likely be a result of blue turnout and some small number of red sitting at home. And sadly the senate is still a toss up
Ok but losing 50-75% of 2024 Trump voters would in fact cede control of more or less every democratically elected position.
25-50% have intensely strong feelings on the matter. I’m not saying 50-75% will vote blue or sit at home.
As I like to say to my fellow blue friends who don’t seem to understand this “what would Joe Biden have to have done for you to vote for Trump”
A very fair question!
It's silly to claim that a lot of people on the right are unhappy about tariffs.
When Obama put a tariff on Chinese tires, right-wingers (correctly) argued that it was a bad idea that caused American consumers to pay almost a million dollars per "job saved" in the tire industry.
Today the right is in control of the executive, the legislative, the judicial, and and far more news media and... basically just crickets.
As for "he controls the executive". Bullshit. When a Democrat is in office, right-wingers remember that the President is not a king.
Please don't "both sides" this extremely one-sided attack on the American worker.
weird title change.
Related:
U.S. Small Biz Can't Ship to the EU Anymore
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49791246
Is this even in CBP's wheelhouse or is this another egregious overreach?
this is their thing, yeah.
the C in CBP, "Customs", is specifically this kind of stuff.
If only it were so simple. Many of CBP's policies are clearly defined by U.S. Congress (most recent example, which actually establishes CBP: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/644/...). That said, Congress appears to have ceded their oversight role by allowing these rules to change without comment.
> Congress appears to have ceded their oversight role
If there is one most-bipartisan-thing-ever, ceding oversight is it. ex:FastTrack Trade
I flagged this and wanted to explain my reasoning.
At the time of writing, the article states something that its own link doesn't support (i.e. it is inaccurate). CBP hasn't "suspended all personal prescription importation." What they've done is removed De Minimis Exemption (i.e. duty free below $800), and that's it. Meaning you can still important personal medication before and after Oct 22nd, what has changed is that now it is subject to normal duty.
Do I think this is bad for people importing personal medication? Absolutely I do, and I oppose it. However, I don't think misstating the argument is constructive nor warranted. You could make the argument using the facts on the ground, and then re-state that in the thread title.
So the story is worthy of discussion, and interesting (even the personal medication POV). But this link and this title aren't "it." Hopefully we can get a higher quality source and title on this topic.
It's not as simple as "You will now pay duty." Senders will be required to pay bond, and there will be a crushing load of new paperwork. Combined with extra duty, that will have the same effect as an outright ban.
This will be financially catastrophic for many Americans who may suddenly have to find hundreds of dollars a month.
That's standard operating procedure for any non-de-minimis importer. The $800 limit was only imposed in 2016, historically it was a lot lower than that.
Better link: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/06/24/2026-12...
VERY difficult to read. It seems almost everything important is hidden in the details somewhere.
I read a lot of it - enjoy reading the butt-covering “legal justifications” written in explaining why there was no public comment period, etc.