Are Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Illegal?
In the wake of what President Donald Trump called “Liberation Day,” Victor Owen Schwartz has been scrambling.
As the owner of VOS Selections, a New York-based importer and distributor of wines and spirits, Schwartz is required by state law to list his prices every month on a publicly available database. The day after Trump’s tariffs were announced, he was poring over his records—drawn from more than 300 suppliers across six continents—and trying to figure out what to do with each of the thousands of stock-keeping units (SKUs) in his inventory.
“We had to go through every single SKU to make a strategic decision about what we were going to do with our prices on that item. When it was shipping, what was in stock, when we think we’re going to have to reorder, what was going to be the impact,” Schwartz told Reason in an interview on Tuesday.
It’s not just the added cost that’s been a problem—though that is certainly a big one in a competitive industry running on small margins. It’s also the fact that tariffs have been on and off and on again in recent weeks. That’s made it “impossible” to plan ahead, Schwartz says, and has left him unable to know what he’s buying, how much he needs to sell, or what the future could hold for his 19 employees.
For Schwartz and many other American business owners, there’s no doubt that Trump’s tariffs have sowed uncertainty, fractured supply chains, and raised prices.
They also violated the law, a newly filed lawsuit argues.
Schwartz is one of several plaintiff
Article from Reason.com
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