--- title: "A massive 'corporate welfare' program is underway - and consumers want a bigger cut of it" type: "News" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/296680377.md" description: "Multinational corporations are receiving nearly $200 billion in tariff refunds following Supreme Court rulings, sparking lawsuits from consumer groups alleging unjust enrichment. Companies like Nike, Amazon, and Walmart face litigation for allegedly pocketing funds while claiming tariffs necessitated price hikes. Critics label this 'corporate welfare,' arguing refunds should benefit consumers rather than boost record corporate earnings, though some firms reinvest in U.S. manufacturing or refund customers." datetime: "2026-08-22T11:00:16.000Z" locales: - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/296680377.md) - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/296680377.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/296680377.md) generator: "portal-rs" --- # A massive 'corporate welfare' program is underway - and consumers want a bigger cut of it By Kenneth Rapoza Tariff refunds have been flowing back to companies since President Donald Trump's levies were rejected by the Supreme Court. Multinational corporations are getting nearly $200 billion back in tariff refunds from the U.S. government, helping to turbocharge some companies' earnings. Consumer groups heard all of these companies bemoan how tariffs on China and other Asian countries, in particular, meant they would have no choice but to raise prices. But with rebates flowing, counterparties are now suing some of these companies for pocketing those higher costs. Just months after the White House's International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs were announced, then almost immediately paused by President Donald Trump, Nike (NKE) CFO Matthew Friend said in a June earnings call that the new tariff regimes would lead to "surgical price increases in the United States." Friend said Nike expects to recover $986 million in IEEPA duties, while a class-action suit against them, filed in Nike's home state of Oregon, asserts claims including alleged "unjust enrichment" and violations of Oregon's Unlawful Trade Practices Act. Nike spent years telling policymakers and shareholders that tariffs burden consumers, and then in 2025 expressly identified price increases as one of its tariff-mitigation measures, even if Nike sneaker prices barely budged thanks in large part to the massive labor discount it enjoys in Asia - Southeast Asia even more so than China. Nike is not alone in attracting litigators. Lawsuits have been filed against Amazon (AMZN), Walmart (WMT), Target (TGT), Costco (COST), FedEx (FDX) and UPS (UPS), to name a few. Three core arguments are being made in these cases. Lawsuits against UPS and FedEx allege that the shippers are getting tariff refunds that should have been passed back to clients; lawsuits targeting retailers like Fabletics say they allegedly added a separate "tariff surcharge" line at checkout, what lawyers refer to as "double billing"; and lawsuits against companies like Walmart say they marked up products under generic "tariff pass-through" justifications. In a sense, companies who import finished goods are getting a fat check for buying Chinese- and Asian-made products, something the tariffs were ideally trying to disincentivize. A recent report by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston said tariffs cannot fully explain resilient and persistent 3%-plus inflation for core personal-consumption expenditures inflation. Consumer-price inflation primarily concerns services like rent and insurance, not imports. The Boston Fed found that labor-productivity gains, and investments in new equipment and production processes, offset the tariff impact, leaving a net inflation contribution of just half a percentage point. This notion that a 25% tariff means a 25% price hike was D-student-level math all along. Even as propaganda, it was pretty dumb - never discounting for currency fluctuation, alternative sourcing or domestic capacity increases, to name a few counterindicators. "The 'tax on you' campaign never matched the data, and now every refund check is made out to the multinationals that have been cutting U.S. jobs for decades, not the American household," says my colleague Andrew Rechenberg, senior economist at the Coalition for a Prosperous America. "These refunds also aren't relief from any hardship. They're a bonus on top of record corporate earnings. If the money wasn't theirs going in, it isn't theirs coming back." Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the refunds "ultimate corporate welfare" in a Fox News appearance earlier this year. He dared companies to deflate. Good - we can all use the help more than Walmart. Then again, Walmart reportedly said it will start reducing prices. Apple (AAPL) says it is directing its tariff refunds into additional U.S. manufacturing investment rather than returning the money to consumers, which is acceptable. Apple reported in July that tariff refunds added roughly 2 percentage points to its quarterly gross margin and $0.11 per share to earnings. FedEx has already received about $800 million in refunds, but has booked $749 million as liabilities owed back to customers whose tariff payments it can trace. Back to Nike: Many of their models never saw a price increase, despite their crying about it. The classic Air Force 1s are still around $115 nationwide. By "surgical," Nike may have meant higher prices for special colors. Air Jordan prices have also been stable, barely moving for the flagship models at around $185. Nike did not return requests for comment. Trump's tariff policy continues to be chipped away at, either by the courts or by trading partners seeking new deals, like Canada. Tariffs are for revenue and for protection. They are mainly designed to persuade multinationals away from making everything in China and Asia, and at the very least consider moving to North America, with hopes of greater investment in the U.S. We have seen this happen under a combination of industrial policies like the Chips Act and the Inflation Reduction Act's tax benefits, and the Section 232 sectoral tariffs. In August 2025, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the tariffs, if maintained, would cut primary deficits by $3.3 trillion over a decade and interest costs by another $700 billion - $4 trillion in total deficit reduction, with customs duties running near $200 billion a year. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that losing the IEEPA tariffs entirely collapses that total deficit reduction to maybe $900 billion. Our national debt is now over $40 trillion and the fiscal deficit is over $1.7 trillion, up by $170 billion. The market initially liked the idea of a broad 10% revenue tariff to pay for tax reductions. Well, that's gone. Meanwhile, the refunds are being wired back to the largest corporate importers in the country - with interest - and living costs are still rising. It's not the tariffs - it never was. Kenneth Rapoza is an analyst for the Coalition for a Prosperous America and a former journalist who has reported from Brazil and covered the BRIC economies. This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. 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