The all-new Reason app is here!

For some companies, the refund is potentially massive. One company that has already filed suit for a refund is FedEx. The suit, filed Monday, doesn’t specify the exact amount the shipping giant paid in tariffs. But last year, the company disclosed that it expected a hit on the order of $1 billion as a result of trade policies. The precise figure isn’t clear, but at least some of that was a direct result of the tariff regime the Court struck down.

It’s really a remarkable situation. American companies were forced to pay billions in duties that the highest court in the land says were unconstitutional. They deserve their money back, expeditiously.

Minnesota Medicaid mess. In Tuesday’s State of the Union, Trump said that Minnesota had been ransacked by $19 billion in welfare fraud committed by Somalis. It’s true that Minnesota has a serious welfare fraud problem, with billions in dubious claims, but Trump’s figure was, at minimum, unproven.

Still, the state’s Medicaid program is clearly a mess, with rampant waste and abuse. Part of the problem with Medicaid is that it’s co-funded by the federal government on a matching basis. The formula is somewhat complicated and varies by state, but in general, the more a state spends, the more federal dollars it obtains. This gives states an incentive to drive up spending in order to reel in more dollars from Washington.

At a news conference yesterday, Vice President J.D. Vance announced that the administration would withhold $259 million in Medicaid payments from the state. And other blue states, like California, could follow.

I’m all for reducing federal spending on entitlements. But this is, in Vance’s own words, a temporary halt. And it looks more like a selectively deployed political maneuver than a meaningful step towards a better system. Medicaid’s entire funding structure needs permanent reform.

Scenes from Washington, D.C.: Last night, I attended a debate about whether AI will make work obsolete. The event, sponsored by Open to Debate and Johns Hopkins University and moderated by journalist John Donvan, featured Forward Party founder Andrew Yang and Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Simon Johnson arguing that AI will make work obsolete and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes and Rumman Chowdhury of Humane Intelligence arguing that it won’t.

Hughes made the strongest points of the evening, arguing that even if AI displaced some job categories, the surplus would create opportunities for other, perhaps totally new, types of work that we can’t yet imagine. There might be difficulties and disruptions. Work would change. But it would not be entirely displaced.

A surprising element of the debate was how much the two teams agreed: Yes, AI would be disruptive, but there would still be work after the disruptions. But at least for the foreseeable future, jobs like skilled construction will persist. As Yang, who was supposed to be arguing the case that AI would make work obsolete, said late in the debate, “I think everyone agrees that there’s going to be jobs in this new era.” That sounded an awful lot like a concession to me.

The audience voted before and after the debate to see how much the debate changed people’s minds. In both cases, the “no” side represented by Hughes and Chowdhury garnered 62.7 percent of the vote. The audience was clearly on their side. In the second vote, however, Yang and Johnson’s “yes” side, which started with 20 percent of the vote, improved their share by 1.8 percent, making them the “winners” in the sense that they moved more people to their position.