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Quite a good article by Spencer Morrison on Trump being Trump.
Do the Math: Trump’s Wall Is $25 Billion, Illegals Cost $165 Billion
It outlines how he was able to one-by-one eliminate all contenders for POTUS in the GOP primaries.
Scott Adams, the creator of the popular cartoon “Dilbert,” transformed himself into a persona non grata in 2016 by exposing how Donald Trump manipulated the media by using sophisticated persuasion techniques. History proved Adams was correct and Trump won the election. As it turns out, Trump was not the bumbling blowhard of CNN’s fever dreams. He was a marketing mastermind whose words went far beyond “resonating” with ordinary Americans—they stuck. Epithets like crooked, lyin’, and low-energy were not just insults, they were silver bullets spoken by a silver tongue. Hillary, Ted, and Jeb didn’t know what hit ’em.
Two years on and Trump’s word-wizardry is as potent as ever—Pocahontas‘s racial fraud is now common knowledge, and Trump’s little rocket man jab arguably set the stage for North Korea’s denuclearization summit. At this point, Trump’s language is indistinguishable from political magic. For example, Trump’s push for “the wall” has turned ardent socialists into laissez-faire economists on the issue of illegal immigration—who cares if migration hurts America’s most vulnerable? We need aliens to grow the economy!
Yes, Trump has caused the Dems to expose themselves for the hypocrites that they are and show America that they are more interested in illegal aliens than Everyman in the US.
This flip-flop has made it clear to ordinary Americans: the Democratic Party cares more about illegal aliens than it does the common citizen.
Another Brick in the Wall
The Democratic Party shut down the government to avoid funding President Trump’s border wall with Mexico. In the meantime, the media has harped incessantly on the wall’s futility. The wall is too expensive, they claim. And in any event, the wall won’t work!
Nonsense. Illegal aliens cost American citizens more in three months than the wall will cost to build in its entirety. What’s more, the available evidence suggests that walls are fantastically effective at arresting migrant flows.
To begin with: how much will Trump’s wall cost to build?
In her informative piece, statistician Liberty Vittert estimates that Trump’s wall will cost some $25 billion to build. Vittert breaks her estimate down as follows:
Size of the wall: 1,150 miles long; 40 feet high; 10 feet deep into the ground; 1 foot wide
Total volume of material: 11.2 million cubic yards
Materials: Approximately $8.7 billion in concrete (97 percent of the materials); approximately $3.6 billion in steel (3 percent of the materials)
Labor: Approximately $12.3 billion (given the labor costs on the original 654 miles of barriers we can assume a conservative 1:1 ratio of materials to labor)
Land acquisition: About 60 percent of the border is privately owned land. While the federal government has the power to take privately owned property for public purposes, it must provide “just compensation.” Based on previous purchases from the 2006-2009 wall construction, the cost at most would be $300,000 per mile acquired, or approximately $200 million altogether.
In total, the actual physical cost of the wall would be about $25 billion.
Conservative and Liberal estimates range from $16 billion to $60 billion. Still a one-time pittance for the billions lost by local, state and federal programs and societal institutions.
The Democrat’s Dilemma
Illegal aliens cause economic harm to Americans because they consume far more in government services than they contribute in taxes. We make: they take.
According to a 2017 report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), illegal aliens and their children cost American taxpayers $135 billion annually—$8,075 per alien per year. These costs are partially offset by taxes collected from illegal aliens, which total around $19 billion. Thus, the net cost of illegal immigrants to American taxpayers is $116 billion annually.
The report also details how those billions are spent. Unsurprisingly, state and local governments bear the majority (two-thirds) of the costs, spending $88 billion annually. The federal government has it relatively easy, spending just $45 billion. This is ironic, given that the federal government created this problem. What’s more, the federal government receives the lion’s share of taxes paid by illegal aliens ($15.4 billion), while state and local governments receive just $3.5 billion in annual taxes from illegal immigrants.
Unsurprisingly, the single greatest cost associated with illegal immigration is educating their children ($46 billion a year). Not only is this expensive, but it reduces school quality for American students. Consider that one-in-five California students is an illegal alien or anchor baby. This crowding is the main reason why California’s public school system is one of America’s worst: California has one of the highest student-teacher ratios and among the lowest per-student spending in America. Government also spends $29 billion on medical expenses, $23 billion on law enforcement, and $9 billion on straight-up welfare programs (some of which actually favor illegal aliens over American citizens).
I have first-hand knowledge and experience of the burden of illegals in the classroom.
Illegal aliens also cost Americans indirectly by sending $30 billion in remittances abroad per year—this is the “hidden tax” that Americans pay for illegal labor.
Functionally there is little difference between these remittances and a maximally inefficient tax. Consider: you hire a gardener who then remits five cents to the government as a sales tax. Now imagine that the government spends this money in Washington building marble monuments—none of the money returns to your community. This tax is maximally inefficient because you get no return for your “investment” in the common weal.
How is this any different than remittances? Americans hire illegal aliens, who then remit a large portion of their income back to their homeland. This money is spent abroad, never to return to your local community. Hypothetically it may return—a decade from now. But realistically, the velocity of money is reduced to nil. In this way, the remittances sent by illegal aliens are effectively a tax that Americans pay for the privilege of hiring “cheap” illegal labor.
For this reason, it is reasonable to bundle the remittances sent by illegal aliens in with America’s tax burden. This means that illegal aliens cost Americans $165 billion annually.
Walls aren't immoral. They are just like the doors on the homes of private citizens. They protect the people inside.
There is plenty of international evidence that walls work. For example, Hungary has claimed that fences along its borders with Croatia and Serbia have stemmed the flow of migrants by 99.7 percent since 2015. Specifically, “the number of successful attempts to illegally cross the border fell from 391,000 in 2015 to 18,236 in 2016 and only 1,184 in 2017” according to Gyorgy Bakondi, the Hungarian prime minister’s chief security advisor. Neighboring Austria refused to build a fence, and now their nation’s social services are being abused by migrants to a terminal degree.
Finally, even left-leaning Politico was forced to admit that walls are effective. Specifically, it found that the construction of a 150-mile long border wall between Israel and Egypt cut the number of illegal border crossings from 16,000 in 2011 to less than 20 in 2016. Basically, Israel’s wall was 100 percent effective.
America could build a highly-effective border wall for some $25 billion. Meanwhile, illegal aliens cost Americans $165 billion worth of taxes and remittances every year. Do the math.
The Americans who voted for Trump did so because he despised the political class as much as the Everyday American. They voted for Trump because they had an idea that he wouldn't take any crap, would get things done and would call out those hypocrites in the swamp who ignore the People and undermine the security of the country. They voted for Trump, despite his imperfections and issues in his private life, because he is the right guy for the job at the right time. I'm betting they do it again in larger numbers in 2020.
