Trump

[wufan]

We can take it from federal funds for global warming research.

After all thats settled science, right? What are we still researching/studying.

According to one government website, we spend 12 billion annually on climate change science and technology research. Those scientists could take a two year sabbatical and build the wall.

[jdshock]

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-n...oscars-9709430

[JEE]

I thought this was a Shocker web site not a political rant page.

[1979Shocker]

What the U.S. and Mexico need to do is negotiate on how much each pays for putting up the wall. You don't want to put up the wall and then ask Mexico to pay for it after the fact. It would be like my neighbor putting up a fence between our properties and then coming over and giving me the bill for all material and labor. There's no way I would agree to pay that. Now if my neighbor came over and said, "I want to put up a fence. Could you help pay for it?", then I might consider helping out. Or I might say I can't afford to pay anything right now. We'd have to negotiate on how much each person pays.

[1979Shocker]

http://www.washingtontimes.cm/news/2...-from-nonciti/

... This one could have some legs.

Here's the correct link.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/26/hillary-clinton-received-800000-votes-from-nonciti/

[ShockingButTrue]

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/after-nafta-cumulative-us-merchandise-trade-deficit-mexico-nears

The United States now sends more money to Mexico each year through our bilateral merchandise trade deficit than we spend on our own homeland security through the federal Department of Homeland Security.

[ShockTalk]

I thought this was a Shocker web site not a political rant page.

What part of clicking a thread link named "Trump" inside the "Politics" forum made you think that?

[1979Shocker]

Officials Say Visas Were Being Revoked Prior to Trump’s Executive Order

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/officials-say-visas-were-being-revoked-prior-trump-s-executive-n713546

[CBB_Fan]

You are going to lot of trouble to demonstrate that the wall will cost about $7B to $22B as if that price tag will shock the crap out of Trump, when Trump himself has already said it would cost $11B to $15B. And he's built a LOT of very expensive projects.

On the other hand, I wonder what our federal, state, and local government net loss is per year due to illegal aliens? I bet that annual number makes a one time outlay of $22B seem like chump change.

No, I'm saying the cost to put up single layer fencing near San Diego and El Paso translates to $7B to $22B. Which is why putting up 50ft walls over lakes and in deserts dozens or hundreds of miles from any major population center will cost many times the small number quoted by Trump or any other source of estimates. Concrete alone would cost $80B, and if the labor costs scale in the same manner then we rapidly approach hundreds of billions of dollars. We are talking 25-50% of the US's concrete production per year.

Say we put down a simple 2-lane road for transport across the border, that is billions. We maintain the wall, that is billions per year (fencing would require around $750M a year, a wall much more). We raise concrete prices dramatically across the entire country, particularly in the South, costing municipal projects billions. We disrupt the $531B a year in goods and services imported from and exported to Mexico, which also raises prices and hurts jobs on the border.

The price of illegal immigration?

The Urban Institute put the net national cost at $1.9 billion in 1992; a Rice University professor, whose work the Urban Institute criticized, said it was $19.3 billion in 1993. More recently, a 2007 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office examined 29 reports on state and local costs published over 15 years in an attempt to answer this question. CBO concluded that most of the estimates determined that illegal immigrants impose a net cost to state and local governments but "that impact is most likely modest."

Nearly every dollar earned by illegal immigrants is spent immediately, and the average wage for US citizens is $10.25/hour with an average of 34 hours per week. This means that approximately 8 million US jobs are dependent upon economic activity produced by illegal immigrant activities within the US - http://www.naid.ucla.edu/uploads/4/2...219226/b46.pdf

IRS estimates that about 6 million unauthorized immigrants file individual income tax returns each year. - https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/fi...mmigration.pdf

Illegal immigrants are estimated to pay in about $7 billion per year into Social Security. - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/bu...-billions.html

During 2006, Standard & Poor's analysts wrote: "Each year, for example, the U.S. Social Security Administration maintains roughly $6 billion to $7 billion of Social Security contributions in an "earnings suspense file"—an account for W-2 tax forms that cannot be matched to the correct Social Security number. The vast majority of these numbers are attributable to illegal workers who will never claim their benefits. For 2010, the Social Security Administration estimated that illegal immigrants and their employers paid $13 billion in social security (OASDI) payroll taxes - https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_notes/note151.pdf

The Texas State Comptroller reported in 2006 that the 1.4 million illegal immigrants in Texas alone added almost $18 billion to the state's budget, and paid $1.2 billion in state services they used. - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/bu...-billions.html

NPR reported in March 2006 that when the wages of lower-skilled workers go down, the rest of America benefits by paying lower prices for things like restaurant meals, agricultural produce and construction. The economic impact of illegal immigration is far smaller than other trends in the economy, such as the increasing use of automation in manufacturing or the growth in global trade. Those two factors have a much bigger impact on wages, prices and the health of the U.S. economy. But economists generally believe that when averaged over the whole economy, the effect is a small net positive. Harvard's George Borjas says the average American's wealth is increased by less than 1 percent because of illegal immigration. - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=5312900

National Public Radio (NPR) reported in March 2006 that: "...overall, illegal immigrants don't have a big impact on U.S. wage rates. The most respected recent studies show that most Americans would notice little difference in their paychecks if illegal immigrants suddenly disappeared from the United States. That's because most Americans don't directly compete with illegal immigrants for jobs. There is one group of Americans that would benefit from a dramatic cut in illegal immigration: high-school dropouts. Most economists agree that the wages of low-skill high-school dropouts are suppressed by somewhere between 3 percent and 8 percent because of competition from immigrants, both legal and illegal. -http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5312900

Because of the U.S. Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 (42 U.S.C. § 1395dd), most hospitals may not refuse anyone treatment for an emergency medical condition because of citizenship, legal status, or ability to pay. An example of the cost conflict between federal government, state and local government, and private institutions, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) brings injured and ill illegal immigrants to hospital emergency rooms but does not pay for their medical care. Almost $190 million, or about 25 percent, of the uncompensated costs Southwest border county hospitals incurred resulted from emergency medical treatment provided to illegal immigrants - https://web.archive.org/web/20080409...A65FC41%7D.DOC

Undocumented immigrants contribute significantly to state and local taxes, collectively paying anestimated $11.64 billion a year ... Undocumented immigrants nationwide pay on average an estimated 8 percent of their incomes instate and local taxes (this is their effective state and local tax rate). To put this in perspective, the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay an average nationwide effective tax rate of just 5.4 percent. http://www.itep.org/pdf/immigration2016.pdf

CIS estimated that welfare payments to illegal immigrant households averaged $1,040 per household in 2001, mainly Medicaid "on behalf of their U.S.-born children." But the report did not attempt to come up with a total for all such households.

GAO noted that: (1) in fiscal year (FY) 1995, about $1.1 billion in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Food Stamp benefits were provided to households with an illegal alien parent for the use of his or her citizen child; http://www.gao.gov/products/HEHS-98-30

If you prefer to simply imagine the cost of illegal immigration, feel fine to do so. But they pay tens of billions in payroll, social security, and state/local taxes and receive very little in pay (if you hear figures of $5,000-$10,000 in welfare, those are talking about illegal immigrant households with legal American citizen children). The idea that illegal immigrants are some huge net drain on society is simply not backed up.

And again, THE WALL DOESN'T STOP ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. Repeat after me: The wall doesn't stop illegal immigration. The wall does NOT stop illegal immigration.

Only 52% of illegal immigrants are Mexican, and they aren't coming across the border. They are overstaying visas. Illegal immigration from Mexico is down (actually negative), overstaying visas is up. A wall doesn't prevent that, it doesn't remove the 11.5 million illegal immigrants, it does nothing to to 48% of illegal immigrants not from Mexico.

It is a vanity symbol that does not solve the issue. It isn't what we need to stop illegal border crossings, it doesn't prevent the modern source of illegal immigration, it has negative impacts on our economy, etc.

Honestly, this is beginning to remind me of Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism."

The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chiefcharacteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible,
in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears
but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once
universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and
not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which
they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because
of the common belief in the masses' inferior capacity to grasp and remember,
is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time. ...

The chief disability of totalitarian propaganda is that it cannot fulfill this
longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable
world without seriously conflicting with common sense.

The whole book is tremendously applicable:

Totalitarianism will not be satisfied to assert, inthe face of contrary facts, that unemployment does not exist; it will abolish
unemployment benefits as part of its propaganda.

Not too different from arguments for the wall.

[SHOCKvalue]

Concrete alone would cost $80B...

You and concrete...

Are you aware:

*On-site concrete production plants that can be broken down and moved are a thing. A very common thing.

*There are three components to concrete - portland cement, sand, and water. Sand and water are both immediately available on site over most of the length of the wall extension (we're talking about arid desert butting up to the Rio Grande). That leaves the drastically less voluminous portland cement component being the lone ingredient requiring transport to the site.

I have no idea why I am engaging you, as it appears you might not be well in the noggin. I'm not sure if you really realize how absolutely batshit crazy you look with the ever-changing numbers from nowhere you're throwing around. You must be fun at parties. Does a widget cost $3, $300, or $0.30? Depends on the minute you happen to ask ol' CBB_Fan. In the mean time, enjoy this 2000 word quote from an obscure author who lived in the seventeenth century.

[ShockerPrez]

Let's build it out of dead Persians.

[Kung Wu]

No, I'm saying the cost to put up single layer fencing near San Diego and El Paso translates to $7B to $22B.

Oh, well then post an abstract with the premise and conclusion next time.

[Dave Stalwart]

Has anybody asked how much it will cost in Pesos though?

[Kung Wu]

I'm good with a fence. Maybe a wall closer to the urban areas where people on both sides of the border are having their heads chopped off by the Mexican cartel.

[wufan]

On the topic of the wall; I am neither for it or against it. I am for a strong national defense and securing our borders. There are potentially three arguments against the wall:

1. We should have free and open borders. A wall is not necessary.
2. A wall will not stop illegals immigration, therefore it is a waste of money.
3. It's too expensive. It's cost vs benefit ratio is not supported.

@CBB_Fan:, in a simple 1, 2, 3 fashion, which of the listed oppositions do you support?