When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts

And herein lies the rub: It's been like this in many countries for the longest time. In Thailand, say, you receive an order from abroad, the post office sends you a slip and you have to pay the assessed duties to receive the package. It often ends up feeing arbitrary; some stuff comes through, others get assessed at a higher value and you have to show receipts and convince them that no, this isn't that expensive of an item. The officially published rate of X matters little when the assessed value is up to an overworked official (in the most generous of readings of the situation). Nothing's exempt; somehow gifts from family and used items always seem most likely to trigger the tripwire.

Ship something through DHL or a similar service, and they follow the letter of the law so you'll both end up paying the official duty (at least there, it's almost guaranteed to follow the declared value) plus their processing fee, storage fee, and whatever else they include. I've easily paid double the price of a product for all of those fees together.

And worst, it's all unpredictable. At least if there's a 10% sales tax you can calculate that into if you want to buy an item. But once you get hit enough times, you start just not feeling like it's worth the mental load, time, and random financial hit to order stuff.

America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.

> America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.

The de minimis exception was absolutely insane. It was a full-blown loophole that caused tens of billions of dollars in goods to come through the border almost completely unregulated, ranging from the stuff that should have had tariffs on it, to knockoffs, to drugs and chemicals that shouldn't be in the United States at all.

Even if you are a free trade enthusiast, having 100 million individually wrapped packages not checked by anyone rather than organized container shipping and warehousing is still insane and wasteful and makes a mockery of the concept of even having an international border.

Closing that loophole is literally the only sane path forward. Yes, also, it is a rule that government regulations should be easy to follow and well-administered to avoid the confusing and difficult process of trying to send a package to your friend or order some computer parts.

But, way we had it in the "before times" was absolutely unworkable. It was being exploited to the detriment of American businesses.

It was only exploitable by lying about the value of a shipment.

The only was you can stop that sort of loophole exploitation is by massive enforcement (i.e. large numbers of random package investigations to establish the actual value of the shipment and comparing it with the declared value).

The cost of such enforcement is very high - possibly not as high as the value of the goods imported by lying about their value, but there's actually no way to know that (since we don't know the actual value of goods that entered under the de minimis exception).

If significant parts (either in numbers or purchasing power) of your population are willing to lie to break the law, you've got problems larger and more widespread than the de minimis exception.

I'm not sure if you understand what the de minimis exception was. That's just factually incorrect.

Literally billions of dollars were getting through because they were being shipped one at a time to fulfill e-commerce type orders, which completely circumvented the spirit of the law, if not the letter.

It was absolutely a loophole. The word betrays the loophole, since de minimis is a legal term that means something is too small to matter or worry about. But it became tens of billions of dollars in merchandise.

The stated purpose of the exception was to allow individuals who are the "final destination" to import relatively low value items from overseas without the hassle and work of customs duties.

Your claim appears to be that this was abused in an organized way that led to a scale of use that was not anticipated when the exception was created. What evidence do you have for this claim?