Where’s MY Tariff Refund?
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The government is getting ready to pay $166 billion in tariff refunds to American businesses. But the consumers who had to foot the bill for the higher costs? No such luck.
Guest: Justin Wolfers, economist and professor at the University of Michigan.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Okay, Justin, where is my tariff refund? |
| 0:11.0 | You're not getting it, mate. |
| 0:14.1 | Justin Wolfer's is an economist at the University of Michigan. |
| 0:18.1 | He's also, dare I say, one of YouTube's favorite money guys. |
| 0:21.6 | Well, wait a minute. Are you a big company? |
| 0:24.6 | Not last time I checked. |
| 0:25.6 | Are you lows? Are you Costco? You Trader Joe's? |
| 0:29.6 | Definitely not Trader Joe's. I'd have like a lot more frozen goods around here. |
| 0:34.6 | You're not getting one. |
| 0:36.6 | I called Justin to get an update on our very weird economy. |
| 0:41.5 | Starting with the fact that this week, the U.S. government began offering refunds on the Trump |
| 0:46.3 | administration's illegal tariffs, but only to businesses who paid the government directly. |
| 0:52.8 | That's even though many of those businesses passed their costs |
| 0:56.2 | onto consumers. Like I looked it up. Americans have spent something like $1,700 American families |
| 1:03.4 | over the last year on tariffs. That's the estimate from a congressional committee. It's a lot of money. |
| 1:08.6 | I've enjoyed every part of it. I got to put money into the Federal Treasury, which was a really |
| 1:14.0 | nice feeling. And then I now get to watch them take it out of the Federal Treasury and put |
| 1:18.2 | it in the pockets of corporations. |
| 1:22.4 | Here's the thing about these refunds. Even people who can get refunds, businesses, I was struck by the fact that |
| 1:30.0 | there are plenty of these people who are not filing for whatever reason. Small businesses, |
| 1:35.9 | they just may not have the support they need to do the filing or they may have something |
| 1:40.6 | that's too complex to really file about. And then some businesses I was reading actually were like selling their rights to the |
... |
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