Following Neal Katyal’s Feb. 25 op-ed, “Tariffs were illegal. Now Trump wants to delay refunds.,” Post Opinions asked readers, “If you run a business, what opportunities did your company lose because capital was redirected to tariffs?” Here are some of the responses.
My husband and I own a small remodeling business. Tariffs increased costs on many materials and items used in kitchen and bath remodels. We are too small to absorb the tariffs, so we had to raise our prices. Many people have decided not to remodel with prices increasing, so we have had fewer leads and prospects. We had to lay off most of our employees. I had semiretired; I’m 69. I’ve had to return to work in our business full time to replace employees we couldn’t afford to keep. I’m doing the work that four employees used to do. My husband and I cannot even afford to pay ourselves a consistent salary. We are living off of our Social Security benefits and doing our best not to go out of business.
Kimberly Blanton, Alva, Florida
I run a small business that imports lasers used by manufacturers in the semiconductor industry and by researcher institutions developing treatments for diseases like cancer. We have been in business for 23 years.
Over the years, there have been small tariffs on some of the goods we import, in the range of 3 to 6 percent. Large across-the-board tariffs, such as those President Donald Trump imposed under the auspices of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, are extremely disruptive.
Our company paid tens of thousands of dollars in tariffs last year. The tariffs delayed purchases by our customers and our business slowed, forcing us to reduce salaries. As owners, we did not take salaries for some part of the year. We also delayed hiring any additional staff.
We appreciate the work by Neal Katyal and the clear ruling by the Supreme Court.
Phillip Crowley, Scotts Valley, California
I’m a sales rep in the housewares industry. Tariffs not only caused prices to rise, to the detriment of shopkeepers and shoppers, but did so in such a chaotic way that millions of man-hours were wasted adjusting prices and products. That time can never be regained or refunded and could have been used in infinitely more productive ways.
Nancy Travers, Menlo Park, California
I am the owner of a small business established in 1975. Last month, my firm was sent some needed parts from a manufacturer in Europe. Two weeks later, we received an eight-page bill from FedEx for “Total Duties, Tax, Custom, Other Fees.” The European manufacturer emailed me: “As you can see, taxes are huge with the current administration, and they keep increasing randomly. Ironically, taxes are higher than the value of the package itself.”
I have also noticed that several of my U.S.-based parts suppliers now add an “estimated tariff” to the invoice, which also states: “Final tariff amount will be calculated at the time of shipment.”
Daniel Meijer, Silver Spring
Neal Katyal was correct to demand that refund payments be made as soon as a lower court creates a process for doing so.
Small businesses in the U.S. have been disproportionately harmed by tariffs imposed on their purchases of goods from foreign suppliers. President Donald Trump has long and wrongly claimed that exporters in foreign countries are the ones paying. His treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has perpetuated that falsehood in interviews and refused to commit to issuing the more than $100 billion in refunds for these illegal tariffs.
This is an evasion. Pay up now with interest so the businesses that paid these tariffs can pay their bills and their workers. Many of these small companies import intermediate goods needed to complete the assembly of products they’ve invented here. Many of these items are not made in the U.S. and probably never will be. In one case covered by Minnesota Public Radio, a maker of loudspeakers in the Twin Cities imported a component from China. But the illogical way in which tariffs are applied made it cheaper for consumers to buy entire speaker sets from China at a cheaper price, making the Minnesota product uncompetitive. Cases like this one can be found across the country.
The moral of the story is don’t use tariffs to punish other countries because in today’s global economy, you end up punishing people whose success you need.
Doug Barry, Washington
The writer, a former trade official with the Commerce Department, is the author of “Smart Rabbits: American Small Businesspeople, Trade Wars and the Future of U.S.-China Relations.”
An unclean fight in Maine
Regarding Carine Hajjar’s March 26 online column, “Neither tattoos nor slurs are slowing down this Senate candidate”:
As a Maine Democratic voter, I had hoped we could have a clean, homegrown Senate primary campaign focused on Maine and Democratic priorities. But once political newcomer Graham Platner got some traction, the establishment, most obviously Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, stepped in, and Gov. Janet Mills threw her hat in the ring. The D.C. fist on the scale didn’t sit well. Now the 78-year-old Mills, behind in the polls, has come out swinging (flailing?) with negative campaign ads: but his posts, but his tattoo. Mills could credibly campaign on her experience, instead of doing Republicans’ dirty work for them.
What Mills, and Schumer, are really fighting is the much-needed generational change and party reform that the 41-year-old Platner represents — and that Mainers have already indicated they want.
Annlinn Kruger, Bar Harbor, Maine
Numismatics, new and old
The March 20 front-page article “Heads or Trump? The call is partly made.,” reported that a federal arts commission appointed by President Donald Trump voted to approve a commemorative gold coin featuring the president looming over a desk. Chamberlain Harris, Trump’s executive assistant, was quoted as saying the image captured Trump looking “very strong and very tough” and that it would be “fitting” to have him on a coin to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary.
The idea of any single president’s image on a 250th-anniversary coin is absurd. Great contributions by individual presidents already have well-established methods for recognition. Our 250 years — hopefully the first of many — have been due not to any president as much as to we the people. The front side should depict an array of Americans’ faces from across the years, races and sexes. The back side should depict a selection of symbols associated with those years: old U.S. flags, a ballot box, a lone gravestone on a hill at a military cemetery, people demonstrating, worshipers at a church service, children in a civics class.
Jack Cassidy, Fairfax
A photo caption accompanying Philip Kennicott’s March 20 Critic’s Notebook, “Like Caesar before him, Trump plays the iconoclast,” on the proposed 24-karat Trump coin, referred to Julius Caesar as an emperor. This is a common misunderstanding. His title was “dictator,” which was not synonymous with “emperor” in ancient Rome. The first Roman emperor was Caesar’s great-nephew and adoptive heir, Augustus.
James L. Shapleigh, Falls Church
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