The Trump administration has officially begun the process of repaying up to $175 billion in illegally collected tariffs, following a February Supreme Court ruling. It’s the biggest such repayment program in history, and over 330,000 businesses stand to benefit. But American consumers—that is, the people who ended up shouldering higher prices thanks to these fees—likely won’t see the cash anytime soon.

Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, told Mother Jones the tariffs—a vast set of taxes Trump imposed on imports—“haven’t achieved what they were meant to achieve.”

“They were meant to onshore manufacturing—it’s continued to shrink. They were meant to lead to new factories being built—that hasn’t happened. They were meant to lead to an increase in government revenue—but the........

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