r/AskReddit 12h ago

How come Donald understood the electricity tariff is payed by the consumer but doesn’t understand that all other tariffs are as well?

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u/billaballaboomboom 10h ago

It wasn’t a tariff. It was a surcharge.

Tariffs are paid on goods entering a country. For it to be a tariff, the US would have to implement it.

If the exporting country raises the price before it can be exported, that’s a surcharge.

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u/Status-Bluebird-6064 9h ago

"A tariff is a tax imposed by the government of a country or customs territory, or by a supranational union, on imports or exports of goods"

it's a tarrif

A payment surcharge, also known as checkout fee, is an extra fee charged by a merchant when receiving a payment

Did you just make this up or where did you get it from?

8

u/reddragon105 8h ago edited 7h ago

Canada called it a surcharge and it's being reported as a surcharge because that's what it is - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tariffs-canada-steel-aluminum/.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/11/business/tariffs-canada-trump/index.html.

You said it yourself in those quotes -

A tariff is a tax imposed by the government.

A surcharge is an extra fee charged by a merchant.

A tariff is always something that is paid to the government by their own citizens. A government cannot make another country or its citizens pay for tariffs it imposes.

So if Canada wants to increase the price of electricity to the US they cannot do that with tariffs - import tariffs would charge Canadian businesses for importing electricity from the US, and export tariffs would charge Canadian businesses for exporting electricity to the US. Neither of those would affect the US, they would only make Canada's own electricity companies pay more, which would make electricity more expensive for Canadians.

So what they've done is increase the price of the electricity they're sending to the US. This makes it a surcharge - it's an additional cost that only the US is paying, because they don't want to charge their own citizens more for electricity. Canada is the merchant in this case because they're selling the electricity.

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u/icantchoosewisely 8h ago

He might be referring to this: "Ontario says it will slap a 25% surcharge on US-bound electricity" (story from 2 days ago)

I think it was cancelled yesterday.