Trump's Wall -- It won't be and it won't go coast to coast and it won't be beautiful

[JBond]

Even on his signature campaign promise -- buiding "2000-mile big beautiful wall", the prettiest one you've ever seen -- it's unlikely that is going to happen. DHS Secretary John Kelly has already begun, in testimony before Congress, referring to it as a "barrier," presumably as the first part of the "spin" campaign to alterTrumpkins' expectations of the government building a wall on the southern border.

• It's not likely to be a wall at all. At best, it'll be a fence. "After the experts convince Trump the wall will not work and it will be a fence, "the White House will just have to figure out a way to spin it [to the public.]...all but one of the more than two dozen sources ...agreed that a concrete wall is not a good idea."
  • Trump's promises and executive order:
    • "On the fence -- it's not a fence. It's a wall. We're going to build a wall."
    • "'Wall' shall mean a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier."
    • "It's going to be made of hardened concrete, and it's going to be made out of rebar, and steel,"
• It's not going to be uninterrupted.
• A wall is not even a good common sense idea.

Now I don't care what the heck he builds on the border. For me the question is whether there is a positive and material cost-benefit case for building anything more, and supplementing it with more personnel, mechanized surveillance, and support personnel, administration and infrastructure. I have yet to see any such cost-benefit analysis. Is there any that's credible?

What I do care about, what I cared about during the election season, is that the stupidity of building a wall was not foreseen by Trump or Trumpkins PRIOR to his making the proposal. Literally tens of thousands of people all over the country hollered, "Build that wall." At the same time, experts all over said that's a ridiculous idea, and neither Trump nor his sycophantic Trumpkins would listen to them.

Now, the Trump Admin., and border physical-security experts have to, among other things, (1) undertake the process of convincing Trump that a fence is better and (2) "spinning" a fence, something that wastes resources and that really wouldn't have to happen had Trump in the first place actually been knowledgeable about border security and immigration, before he started on about a damned wall.

Were he just a little bit knowledgable, what might he have used as a mantra? Something as simple as "good fences make good neighbors," or something similar that at least aligns with what makes some damn sense to actually build on the border, would have done just fine. Of course, Trump was more focused on his greatness and his conviction that he knows more than everyone else and that he's infallible. In his mind, it should be a wall.

What concerns me is that during the campaign it was profoundly obvious that of nearly everything that man spoke about, he didn't at all know the subject well, and he wouldn't listen to people who did. Neither would the Trumpkins. Quite simply, knowing what you're talking about before you start talking about it is not a liberal or conservative "thing." It's just a behavior broadly intelligent people exhibit, and it's a trait Trump rarely exhibits. If that means they can't talk about something until they do know it well, well, then it just does, and they just don't.

(I write "rarely" only to allow for the off chance that he may have spoken about something on which he's highly knowledgeable.)

Just to clue you in, most conservatives do not expect a 40ft concrete wall that is over 2000 miles long. What we do except is that border security will be taken seriously and current law will be enforced. We know neither would have happened under the globalist Clinton agenda.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Even on his signature campaign promise -- buiding "2000-mile big beautiful wall", the prettiest one you've ever seen -- it's unlikely that is going to happen. DHS Secretary John Kelly has already begun, in testimony before Congress, referring to it as a "barrier," presumably as the first part of the "spin" campaign to alterTrumpkins' expectations of the government building a wall on the southern border.

• It's not likely to be a wall at all. At best, it'll be a fence. "After the experts convince Trump the wall will not work and it will be a fence, "the White House will just have to figure out a way to spin it [to the public.]...all but one of the more than two dozen sources ...agreed that a concrete wall is not a good idea."
  • Trump's promises and executive order:
    • "On the fence -- it's not a fence. It's a wall. We're going to build a wall."
    • "'Wall' shall mean a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier."
    • "It's going to be made of hardened concrete, and it's going to be made out of rebar, and steel,"
• It's not going to be uninterrupted.
• A wall is not even a good common sense idea.

Now I don't care what the heck he builds on the border. For me the question is whether there is a positive and material cost-benefit case for building anything more, and supplementing it with more personnel, mechanized surveillance, and support personnel, administration and infrastructure. I have yet to see any such cost-benefit analysis. Is there any that's credible?

What I do care about, what I cared about during the election season, is that the stupidity of building a wall was not foreseen by Trump or Trumpkins PRIOR to his making the proposal. Literally tens of thousands of people all over the country hollered, "Build that wall." At the same time, experts all over said that's a ridiculous idea, and neither Trump nor his sycophantic Trumpkins would listen to them.

Now, the Trump Admin., and border physical-security experts have to, among other things, (1) undertake the process of convincing Trump that a fence is better and (2) "spinning" a fence, something that wastes resources and that really wouldn't have to happen had Trump in the first place actually been knowledgeable about border security and immigration, before he started on about a damned wall.

Were he just a little bit knowledgable, what might he have used as a mantra? Something as simple as "good fences make good neighbors," or something similar that at least aligns with what makes some damn sense to actually build on the border, would have done just fine. Of course, Trump was more focused on his greatness and his conviction that he knows more than everyone else and that he's infallible. In his mind, it should be a wall.

What concerns me is that during the campaign it was profoundly obvious that of nearly everything that man spoke about, he didn't at all know the subject well, and he wouldn't listen to people who did. Neither would the Trumpkins. Quite simply, knowing what you're talking about before you start talking about it is not a liberal or conservative "thing." It's just a behavior broadly intelligent people exhibit, and it's a trait Trump rarely exhibits. If that means they can't talk about something until they do know it well, well, then it just does, and they just don't.

(I write "rarely" only to allow for the off chance that he may have spoken about something on which he's highly knowledgeable.)

Is it better than what we have now?

Go ahead and be part of the rhetorically partisan "echo chamber." I don't see you advancing the merit of your own position on the matter by putting forth:

• A cost-benefit analysis that shows how Trump's wall will be worth it.
• Any metrics that show how Trump's wall will yield greater border security than will a fence.
• Anything that indicates Trump knew what he was talking about by insisting on a wall rather than a fence.
• Anything showing that it's not a waste of resources to realign people's expectations re: the wall.

All I see is your asking an absurd rhetorical question that asks in the present tense about the qualitative superiority of an object that has yet to be built. In other words, all I see from you is incoherence.

I agree ANALYSIS: Border Wall Only Needs To Stop 9-12% Of Illegal Crossings To Pay For Itself

Okay. TY. [There is a rant at the end of this post.]

Let's take a look and see where that document takes us.....I'm writing as I go along -- largely because just looking at the 9-12% figure and doing "head" math with widely shared metric, something seems amiss -- so bear with me....

So far, I have only looked quickly at the CIS document and I've downloaded the NAS study on which they say it's based, except for the bit about illegal immigrants, which is instead based on a Heritage Foundation report (HFR/HF) one can find here.

Let's take a quick look at the HF report....I'm just going for a "sniff test" level of analysis....I'm doing this because the NAS study is huge and doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants, much less Mexican legals vs. illegals. So really, I just want to see if the HF figures, thus whatever is in the CIS report you referenced, pass a quick sanity check.

Looking at the HFR, I see that among all U.S. households (Year - 2013):

• Well-educated households tend to be net tax contributors, contributing a fiscal surplus of $29,250 that government used to finance benefits for other households. (Not sure how useful this is to our discussion, but let's capture it here for now...)
  
• Other households are net tax consumers, creating an average fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $35,113 per household. These households receive ~$46K in benefits and pay ~$11K in taxes. (I guess these are the Trumpkins who think immigrants are taking something from them....)
  
• Illegal immigrants receive ~$24K/household in benefits and pay ~$10 in taxes thereby costing ~$14K/household. One sees illegals pay taxes at double the rate of citizens and legal residents. (The HF assume that illegal immigrants are, for the most part, not well educated. Okay.)
• Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.

Let's collect some data so we can do some simple math:

1. Premise: 11M illegal immigrants in the U.S.
2. Premise: $54B of deficit per year for them all.
3. Premise: Illegal immigrants live with at least one other illegal immigrants.
   • Why? Humans are social creatures. I just don't see "Miguel" just hauling across the desert/river alone to arrive in a foreign place where he doesn't speak the language and has no money of note. I'm sure some must, but I don't see that as the norm. I'm going with 80% of illegal Mexico-crossing live with another Mexico-crossing illegal.
4. Premise: 56% of the total population of illegal immigrants are from Mexico.
   • 11M x 0.56 x 0.80 = 4.92M illegal Mexico-crossing individuals in the U.S. Let's call it 5M.
5. Premise: 170K people illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border without being apprehended
6. Premise: 400K people try to illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border, but are caught.
7. Premise: Trump estimates his wall will cost ~$10B - $12B.

Now, let's see if the HF's figures "tie":

1. $54B/11M ≈ $4909 is what should be the cost per illegal immigrant per year.
   • Let's apply that back to the assumption about how many illegals live together to see if the assumption matches this.
     $14K/4.9K ≈ 2.8. That suggest I should probably go with 75% instead of 80%. Fine, but it's a difference that, for this level of analysis, obviously makes no difference.
2. $4909 x 5M ≈ $24.5B is the cost per year for existing Mexico-crossing illegal immigrants. The Wall isn't doing any good re: these people/costs.
3. $4909 x 170K ≈ $835M not spent each year assuming The Wall keeps out as many people as entered in 2015.
4. $835M/$10B ≈ 0.08 or 8%. AT that rate, it'd take over 10 years to pay for The Wall.

So now what does the CIS report say?

• "Based on the NAS data, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of approximately $74,722 during their lifetimes."

Excuse me? In their methodology, they also say:

• "Unfortunately, the NAS study has very little discussion of how legal and illegal immigrants differ in their fiscal impact."

Now let's consider the $75K figure. It's a lifetime figure. Well, working off the rough calculus I did above, that would suggest one of two things:

• Illegal immigrants only live 15 years after they arrive in the U.S., or
• After 15 years, they transition from being net consumers to net contributors.

Fifteen years of living or "suddenly" they're productive? That's quite a stretch...

Another thing to note is that I didn't adjust the $4909/illegal/year downward as have the CIS. Now one could come at the sanity check from a different direction -- taking the $75K and dividing it by an average life expectancy -- but that would produce a much lower per-year cost, thus making it take longer for the wall to pay for itself. You'll notice I've focused on the per-year costs. That's because we have to pay cash in current periods to build The Wall; we don't have people's lifetimes to pay for it.

There is also a related problem with the type of analysis we're -- the CIS, the HF and I, as a result of you offering that study -- doing: once you cut the illegal flow across the border to a sufficiently small number, The Wall isn't saving you anything. It's actually costing because we still have to maintain it. (I haven't even gotten to considering maintenance and support costs.)

We would have to leave gaps in The Wall so we have a then-current basis on which to say it's saving us money, and that basis must necessarily derive from assuming that given the number of folks who illegally get past The Wall must be some share of the quantity of people who otherwise would if it weren't there. Well, at that point, one is measuring pure hypotheticals. One might estimate that 1%, 10% , 40% or any other percent of people who want to cross actually get in; just pick the percent that fits the story one wants to tell.

But let's not leave gaps in The Wall. Well, okay, then there's still the problem of inflation and the time value of money. Once The Wall is built and unbroken, the only figures we'd have that're reliable as a basis for saying what The Wall is saving us are the number of illegals who entered in the most recent years prior to its completion. Well, you see it was ~170K in 2015. It should be lower still in 2017 and 2018, assuming Trump's Administration improves on Obama's results.

• The fewer that get in, the longer is the payoff time.
• The longer it takes to build The Wall, the more the cost to build it. (That doesn't have to be true, but we both know the U.S. gov't hasn't established a sinking fund to use current dollars and the accrued interest on them to pay for future costs.)
• The longer the payoff time, the more The Wall ends up costing due to the combined effects of inflation and increasing interdiction success.

Given the above, I don't buy the 9% to 12% estimate the CIS have provided because no matter from which direction I've sought to validate the figure nothing lines up, not even roughly. If you'd like to take a look at their report and the HFR too see where the reconciling differences are, great. If not, I think you should find a different report.

Note:

I want to point out that my "sanity check" of the CIS figure relied on their data and that of the HF, of which they approve, and that like the CIS is not a "friend" to immigration advocates.

​

RANT:

Several people have complained about the length of my posts. My posts wouldn't be so damned long if people would bother to do their own reasonable and reasoned analysis, "sanity checks," if you will, before they make claims. Were folks to do that, I could get away with saying a lot less. Since they often enough do not, I want folks to understand where I'm "coming from" and why when I say my piece.​

 

[Wiskers Von Pussyboots]

Even on his signature campaign promise -- buiding "2000-mile big beautiful wall", the prettiest one you've ever seen -- it's unlikely that is going to happen. DHS Secretary John Kelly has already begun, in testimony before Congress, referring to it as a "barrier," presumably as the first part of the "spin" campaign to alterTrumpkins' expectations of the government building a wall on the southern border.

• It's not likely to be a wall at all. At best, it'll be a fence. "After the experts convince Trump the wall will not work and it will be a fence, "the White House will just have to figure out a way to spin it [to the public.]...all but one of the more than two dozen sources ...agreed that a concrete wall is not a good idea."
  • Trump's promises and executive order:
    • "On the fence -- it's not a fence. It's a wall. We're going to build a wall."
    • "'Wall' shall mean a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier."
    • "It's going to be made of hardened concrete, and it's going to be made out of rebar, and steel,"
• It's not going to be uninterrupted.
• A wall is not even a good common sense idea.

Now I don't care what the heck he builds on the border. For me the question is whether there is a positive and material cost-benefit case for building anything more, and supplementing it with more personnel, mechanized surveillance, and support personnel, administration and infrastructure. I have yet to see any such cost-benefit analysis. Is there any that's credible?

What I do care about, what I cared about during the election season, is that the stupidity of building a wall was not foreseen by Trump or Trumpkins PRIOR to his making the proposal. Literally tens of thousands of people all over the country hollered, "Build that wall." At the same time, experts all over said that's a ridiculous idea, and neither Trump nor his sycophantic Trumpkins would listen to them.

Now, the Trump Admin., and border physical-security experts have to, among other things, (1) undertake the process of convincing Trump that a fence is better and (2) "spinning" a fence, something that wastes resources and that really wouldn't have to happen had Trump in the first place actually been knowledgeable about border security and immigration, before he started on about a damned wall.

Were he just a little bit knowledgable, what might he have used as a mantra? Something as simple as "good fences make good neighbors," or something similar that at least aligns with what makes some damn sense to actually build on the border, would have done just fine. Of course, Trump was more focused on his greatness and his conviction that he knows more than everyone else and that he's infallible. In his mind, it should be a wall.

What concerns me is that during the campaign it was profoundly obvious that of nearly everything that man spoke about, he didn't at all know the subject well, and he wouldn't listen to people who did. Neither would the Trumpkins. Quite simply, knowing what you're talking about before you start talking about it is not a liberal or conservative "thing." It's just a behavior broadly intelligent people exhibit, and it's a trait Trump rarely exhibits. If that means they can't talk about something until they do know it well, well, then it just does, and they just don't.

(I write "rarely" only to allow for the off chance that he may have spoken about something on which he's highly knowledgeable.)

Is it better than what we have now?

Go ahead and be part of the rhetorically partisan "echo chamber." I don't see you advancing the merit of your own position on the matter by putting forth:

• A cost-benefit analysis that shows how Trump's wall will be worth it.
• Any metrics that show how Trump's wall will yield greater border security than will a fence.
• Anything that indicates Trump knew what he was talking about by insisting on a wall rather than a fence.
• Anything showing that it's not a waste of resources to realign people's expectations re: the wall.

All I see is your asking an absurd rhetorical question that asks in the present tense about the qualitative superiority of an object that has yet to be built. In other words, all I see from you is incoherence.

I agree ANALYSIS: Border Wall Only Needs To Stop 9-12% Of Illegal Crossings To Pay For Itself

Okay. TY. [There is a rant at the end of this post.]

Let's take a look and see where that document takes us.....I'm writing as I go along -- largely because just looking at the 9-12% figure and doing "head" math with widely shared metric, something seems amiss -- so bear with me....

So far, I have only looked quickly at the CIS document and I've downloaded the NAS study on which they say it's based, except for the bit about illegal immigrants, which is instead based on a Heritage Foundation report (HFR/HF) one can find here.

Let's take a quick look at the HF report....I'm just going for a "sniff test" level of analysis....I'm doing this because the NAS study is huge and doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants, much less Mexican legals vs. illegals. So really, I just want to see if the HF figures, thus whatever is in the CIS report you referenced, pass a quick sanity check.

Looking at the HFR, I see that among all U.S. households (Year - 2013):

• Well-educated households tend to be net tax contributors, contributing a fiscal surplus of $29,250 that government used to finance benefits for other households. (Not sure how useful this is to our discussion, but let's capture it here for now...)
  
• Other households are net tax consumers, creating an average fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $35,113 per household. These households receive ~$46K in benefits and pay ~$11K in taxes. (I guess these are the Trumpkins who think immigrants are taking something from them....)
  
• Illegal immigrants receive ~$24K/household in benefits and pay ~$10 in taxes thereby costing ~$14K/household. One sees illegals pay taxes at double the rate of citizens and legal residents. (The HF assume that illegal immigrants are, for the most part, not well educated. Okay.)
• Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.

Let's collect some data so we can do some simple math:

1. Premise: 11M illegal immigrants in the U.S.
2. Premise: $54B of deficit per year for them all.
3. Premise: Illegal immigrants live with at least one other illegal immigrants.
   • Why? Humans are social creatures. I just don't see "Miguel" just hauling across the desert/river alone to arrive in a foreign place where he doesn't speak the language and has no money of note. I'm sure some must, but I don't see that as the norm. I'm going with 80% of illegal Mexico-crossing live with another Mexico-crossing illegal.
4. Premise: 56% of the total population of illegal immigrants are from Mexico.
   • 11M x 0.56 x 0.80 = 4.92M illegal Mexico-crossing individuals in the U.S. Let's call it 5M.
5. Premise: 170K people illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border without being apprehended
6. Premise: 400K people try to illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border, but are caught.
7. Premise: Trump estimates his wall will cost ~$10B - $12B.

Now, let's see if the HF's figures "tie":

1. $54B/11M ≈ $4909 is what should be the cost per illegal immigrant per year.
   • Let's apply that back to the assumption about how many illegals live together to see if the assumption matches this.
     $14K/4.9K ≈ 2.8. That suggest I should probably go with 75% instead of 80%. Fine, but it's a difference that, for this level of analysis, obviously makes no difference.
2. $4909 x 5M ≈ $24.5B is the cost per year for existing Mexico-crossing illegal immigrants. The Wall isn't doing any good re: these people/costs.
3. $4909 x 170K ≈ $835M not spent each year assuming The Wall keeps out as many people as entered in 2015.
4. $835M/$10B ≈ 0.08 or 8%. AT that rate, it'd take over 10 years to pay for The Wall.

So now what does the CIS report say?

• "Based on the NAS data, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of approximately $74,722 during their lifetimes."

Excuse me? In their methodology, they also say:

• "Unfortunately, the NAS study has very little discussion of how legal and illegal immigrants differ in their fiscal impact."

Now let's consider the $75K figure. It's a lifetime figure. Well, working off the rough calculus I did above, that would suggest one of two things:

• Illegal immigrants only live 15 years after they arrive in the U.S., or
• After 15 years, they transition from being net consumers to net contributors.

Fifteen years of living or "suddenly" they're productive? That's quite a stretch...

Another thing to note is that I didn't adjust the $4909/illegal/year downward as have the CIS. Now one could come at the sanity check from a different direction -- taking the $75K and dividing it by an average life expectancy -- but that would produce a much lower per-year cost, thus making it take longer for the wall to pay for itself. You'll notice I've focused on the per-year costs. That's because we have to pay cash in current periods to build The Wall; we don't have people's lifetimes to pay for it.

There is also a related problem with the type of analysis we're -- the CIS, the HF and I, as a result of you offering that study -- doing: once you cut the illegal flow across the border to a sufficiently small number, The Wall isn't saving you anything. It's actually costing because we still have to maintain it. (I haven't even gotten to considering maintenance and support costs.)

We would have to leave gaps in The Wall so we have a then-current basis on which to say it's saving us money, and that basis must necessarily derive from assuming that given the number of folks who illegally get past The Wall must be some share of the quantity of people who otherwise would if it weren't there. Well, at that point, one is measuring pure hypotheticals. One might estimate that 1%, 10% , 40% or any other percent of people who want to cross actually get in; just pick the percent that fits the story one wants to tell.

But let's not leave gaps in The Wall. Well, okay, then there's still the problem of inflation and the time value of money. Once The Wall is built and unbroken, the only figures we'd have that're reliable as a basis for saying what The Wall is saving us are the number of illegals who entered in the most recent years prior to its completion. Well, you see it was ~170K in 2015. It should be lower still in 2017 and 2018, assuming Trump's Administration improves on Obama's results.

• The fewer that get in, the longer is the payoff time.
• The longer it takes to build The Wall, the more the cost to build it. (That doesn't have to be true, but we both know the U.S. gov't hasn't established a sinking fund to use current dollars and the accrued interest on them to pay for future costs.)
• The longer the payoff time, the more The Wall ends up costing due to the combined effects of inflation and increasing interdiction success.

Given the above, I don't buy the 9% to 12% estimate the CIS have provided because no matter from which direction I've sought to validate the figure nothing lines up, not even roughly. If you'd like to take a look at their report and the HFR too see where the reconciling differences are, great. If not, I think you should find a different report.

Note:

I want to point out that my "sanity check" of the CIS figure relied on their data and that of the HF, of which they approve, and that like the CIS is not a "friend" to immigration advocates.

​

RANT:

Several people have complained about the length of my posts. My posts wouldn't be so damned long if people would bother to do their own reasonable and reasoned analysis, "sanity checks," if you will, before they make claims. Were folks to do that, I could get away with saying a lot less. Since they often enough do not, I want folks to understand where I'm "coming from" and why when I say my piece.​

Yeah, I'll take the summary.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Even on his signature campaign promise -- buiding "2000-mile big beautiful wall", the prettiest one you've ever seen -- it's unlikely that is going to happen. DHS Secretary John Kelly has already begun, in testimony before Congress, referring to it as a "barrier," presumably as the first part of the "spin" campaign to alterTrumpkins' expectations of the government building a wall on the southern border.

• It's not likely to be a wall at all. At best, it'll be a fence. "After the experts convince Trump the wall will not work and it will be a fence, "the White House will just have to figure out a way to spin it [to the public.]...all but one of the more than two dozen sources ...agreed that a concrete wall is not a good idea."
  • Trump's promises and executive order:
    • "On the fence -- it's not a fence. It's a wall. We're going to build a wall."
    • "'Wall' shall mean a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier."
    • "It's going to be made of hardened concrete, and it's going to be made out of rebar, and steel,"
• It's not going to be uninterrupted.
• A wall is not even a good common sense idea.

Now I don't care what the heck he builds on the border. For me the question is whether there is a positive and material cost-benefit case for building anything more, and supplementing it with more personnel, mechanized surveillance, and support personnel, administration and infrastructure. I have yet to see any such cost-benefit analysis. Is there any that's credible?

What I do care about, what I cared about during the election season, is that the stupidity of building a wall was not foreseen by Trump or Trumpkins PRIOR to his making the proposal. Literally tens of thousands of people all over the country hollered, "Build that wall." At the same time, experts all over said that's a ridiculous idea, and neither Trump nor his sycophantic Trumpkins would listen to them.

Now, the Trump Admin., and border physical-security experts have to, among other things, (1) undertake the process of convincing Trump that a fence is better and (2) "spinning" a fence, something that wastes resources and that really wouldn't have to happen had Trump in the first place actually been knowledgeable about border security and immigration, before he started on about a damned wall.

Were he just a little bit knowledgable, what might he have used as a mantra? Something as simple as "good fences make good neighbors," or something similar that at least aligns with what makes some damn sense to actually build on the border, would have done just fine. Of course, Trump was more focused on his greatness and his conviction that he knows more than everyone else and that he's infallible. In his mind, it should be a wall.

What concerns me is that during the campaign it was profoundly obvious that of nearly everything that man spoke about, he didn't at all know the subject well, and he wouldn't listen to people who did. Neither would the Trumpkins. Quite simply, knowing what you're talking about before you start talking about it is not a liberal or conservative "thing." It's just a behavior broadly intelligent people exhibit, and it's a trait Trump rarely exhibits. If that means they can't talk about something until they do know it well, well, then it just does, and they just don't.

(I write "rarely" only to allow for the off chance that he may have spoken about something on which he's highly knowledgeable.)

Is it better than what we have now?

Go ahead and be part of the rhetorically partisan "echo chamber." I don't see you advancing the merit of your own position on the matter by putting forth:

• A cost-benefit analysis that shows how Trump's wall will be worth it.
• Any metrics that show how Trump's wall will yield greater border security than will a fence.
• Anything that indicates Trump knew what he was talking about by insisting on a wall rather than a fence.
• Anything showing that it's not a waste of resources to realign people's expectations re: the wall.

All I see is your asking an absurd rhetorical question that asks in the present tense about the qualitative superiority of an object that has yet to be built. In other words, all I see from you is incoherence.

I agree ANALYSIS: Border Wall Only Needs To Stop 9-12% Of Illegal Crossings To Pay For Itself

Okay. TY. [There is a rant at the end of this post.]

Let's take a look and see where that document takes us.....I'm writing as I go along -- largely because just looking at the 9-12% figure and doing "head" math with widely shared metric, something seems amiss -- so bear with me....

So far, I have only looked quickly at the CIS document and I've downloaded the NAS study on which they say it's based, except for the bit about illegal immigrants, which is instead based on a Heritage Foundation report (HFR/HF) one can find here.

Let's take a quick look at the HF report....I'm just going for a "sniff test" level of analysis....I'm doing this because the NAS study is huge and doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants, much less Mexican legals vs. illegals. So really, I just want to see if the HF figures, thus whatever is in the CIS report you referenced, pass a quick sanity check.

Looking at the HFR, I see that among all U.S. households (Year - 2013):

• Well-educated households tend to be net tax contributors, contributing a fiscal surplus of $29,250 that government used to finance benefits for other households. (Not sure how useful this is to our discussion, but let's capture it here for now...)
  
• Other households are net tax consumers, creating an average fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $35,113 per household. These households receive ~$46K in benefits and pay ~$11K in taxes. (I guess these are the Trumpkins who think immigrants are taking something from them....)
  
• Illegal immigrants receive ~$24K/household in benefits and pay ~$10 in taxes thereby costing ~$14K/household. One sees illegals pay taxes at double the rate of citizens and legal residents. (The HF assume that illegal immigrants are, for the most part, not well educated. Okay.)
• Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.

Let's collect some data so we can do some simple math:

1. Premise: 11M illegal immigrants in the U.S.
2. Premise: $54B of deficit per year for them all.
3. Premise: Illegal immigrants live with at least one other illegal immigrants.
   • Why? Humans are social creatures. I just don't see "Miguel" just hauling across the desert/river alone to arrive in a foreign place where he doesn't speak the language and has no money of note. I'm sure some must, but I don't see that as the norm. I'm going with 80% of illegal Mexico-crossing live with another Mexico-crossing illegal.
4. Premise: 56% of the total population of illegal immigrants are from Mexico.
   • 11M x 0.56 x 0.80 = 4.92M illegal Mexico-crossing individuals in the U.S. Let's call it 5M.
5. Premise: 170K people illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border without being apprehended
6. Premise: 400K people try to illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border, but are caught.
7. Premise: Trump estimates his wall will cost ~$10B - $12B.

Now, let's see if the HF's figures "tie":

1. $54B/11M ≈ $4909 is what should be the cost per illegal immigrant per year.
   • Let's apply that back to the assumption about how many illegals live together to see if the assumption matches this.
     $14K/4.9K ≈ 2.8. That suggest I should probably go with 75% instead of 80%. Fine, but it's a difference that, for this level of analysis, obviously makes no difference.
2. $4909 x 5M ≈ $24.5B is the cost per year for existing Mexico-crossing illegal immigrants. The Wall isn't doing any good re: these people/costs.
3. $4909 x 170K ≈ $835M not spent each year assuming The Wall keeps out as many people as entered in 2015.
4. $835M/$10B ≈ 0.08 or 8%. AT that rate, it'd take over 10 years to pay for The Wall.

So now what does the CIS report say?

• "Based on the NAS data, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of approximately $74,722 during their lifetimes."

Excuse me? In their methodology, they also say:

• "Unfortunately, the NAS study has very little discussion of how legal and illegal immigrants differ in their fiscal impact."

Now let's consider the $75K figure. It's a lifetime figure. Well, working off the rough calculus I did above, that would suggest one of two things:

• Illegal immigrants only live 15 years after they arrive in the U.S., or
• After 15 years, they transition from being net consumers to net contributors.

Fifteen years of living or "suddenly" they're productive? That's quite a stretch...

Another thing to note is that I didn't adjust the $4909/illegal/year downward as have the CIS. Now one could come at the sanity check from a different direction -- taking the $75K and dividing it by an average life expectancy -- but that would produce a much lower per-year cost, thus making it take longer for the wall to pay for itself. You'll notice I've focused on the per-year costs. That's because we have to pay cash in current periods to build The Wall; we don't have people's lifetimes to pay for it.

There is also a related problem with the type of analysis we're -- the CIS, the HF and I, as a result of you offering that study -- doing: once you cut the illegal flow across the border to a sufficiently small number, The Wall isn't saving you anything. It's actually costing because we still have to maintain it. (I haven't even gotten to considering maintenance and support costs.)

We would have to leave gaps in The Wall so we have a then-current basis on which to say it's saving us money, and that basis must necessarily derive from assuming that given the number of folks who illegally get past The Wall must be some share of the quantity of people who otherwise would if it weren't there. Well, at that point, one is measuring pure hypotheticals. One might estimate that 1%, 10% , 40% or any other percent of people who want to cross actually get in; just pick the percent that fits the story one wants to tell.

But let's not leave gaps in The Wall. Well, okay, then there's still the problem of inflation and the time value of money. Once The Wall is built and unbroken, the only figures we'd have that're reliable as a basis for saying what The Wall is saving us are the number of illegals who entered in the most recent years prior to its completion. Well, you see it was ~170K in 2015. It should be lower still in 2017 and 2018, assuming Trump's Administration improves on Obama's results.

• The fewer that get in, the longer is the payoff time.
• The longer it takes to build The Wall, the more the cost to build it. (That doesn't have to be true, but we both know the U.S. gov't hasn't established a sinking fund to use current dollars and the accrued interest on them to pay for future costs.)
• The longer the payoff time, the more The Wall ends up costing due to the combined effects of inflation and increasing interdiction success.

Given the above, I don't buy the 9% to 12% estimate the CIS have provided because no matter from which direction I've sought to validate the figure nothing lines up, not even roughly. If you'd like to take a look at their report and the HFR too see where the reconciling differences are, great. If not, I think you should find a different report.

Note:

I want to point out that my "sanity check" of the CIS figure relied on their data and that of the HF, of which they approve, and that like the CIS is not a "friend" to immigration advocates.

​

RANT:

Several people have complained about the length of my posts. My posts wouldn't be so damned long if people would bother to do their own reasonable and reasoned analysis, "sanity checks," if you will, before they make claims. Were folks to do that, I could get away with saying a lot less. Since they often enough do not, I want folks to understand where I'm "coming from" and why when I say my piece.​

Yeah, I'll take the summary.

What? You think I'm going summarize the post above after you posted that folderol that caused me to write it? You got another think comin', buddy.

 

[Wiskers Von Pussyboots]

Is it better than what we have now?

Go ahead and be part of the rhetorically partisan "echo chamber." I don't see you advancing the merit of your own position on the matter by putting forth:

• A cost-benefit analysis that shows how Trump's wall will be worth it.
• Any metrics that show how Trump's wall will yield greater border security than will a fence.
• Anything that indicates Trump knew what he was talking about by insisting on a wall rather than a fence.
• Anything showing that it's not a waste of resources to realign people's expectations re: the wall.

All I see is your asking an absurd rhetorical question that asks in the present tense about the qualitative superiority of an object that has yet to be built. In other words, all I see from you is incoherence.

I agree ANALYSIS: Border Wall Only Needs To Stop 9-12% Of Illegal Crossings To Pay For Itself

Okay. TY. [There is a rant at the end of this post.]

Let's take a look and see where that document takes us.....I'm writing as I go along -- largely because just looking at the 9-12% figure and doing "head" math with widely shared metric, something seems amiss -- so bear with me....

So far, I have only looked quickly at the CIS document and I've downloaded the NAS study on which they say it's based, except for the bit about illegal immigrants, which is instead based on a Heritage Foundation report (HFR/HF) one can find here.

Let's take a quick look at the HF report....I'm just going for a "sniff test" level of analysis....I'm doing this because the NAS study is huge and doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants, much less Mexican legals vs. illegals. So really, I just want to see if the HF figures, thus whatever is in the CIS report you referenced, pass a quick sanity check.

Looking at the HFR, I see that among all U.S. households (Year - 2013):

• Well-educated households tend to be net tax contributors, contributing a fiscal surplus of $29,250 that government used to finance benefits for other households. (Not sure how useful this is to our discussion, but let's capture it here for now...)
  
• Other households are net tax consumers, creating an average fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $35,113 per household. These households receive ~$46K in benefits and pay ~$11K in taxes. (I guess these are the Trumpkins who think immigrants are taking something from them....)
  
• Illegal immigrants receive ~$24K/household in benefits and pay ~$10 in taxes thereby costing ~$14K/household. One sees illegals pay taxes at double the rate of citizens and legal residents. (The HF assume that illegal immigrants are, for the most part, not well educated. Okay.)
• Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.

Let's collect some data so we can do some simple math:

1. Premise: 11M illegal immigrants in the U.S.
2. Premise: $54B of deficit per year for them all.
3. Premise: Illegal immigrants live with at least one other illegal immigrants.
   • Why? Humans are social creatures. I just don't see "Miguel" just hauling across the desert/river alone to arrive in a foreign place where he doesn't speak the language and has no money of note. I'm sure some must, but I don't see that as the norm. I'm going with 80% of illegal Mexico-crossing live with another Mexico-crossing illegal.
4. Premise: 56% of the total population of illegal immigrants are from Mexico.
   • 11M x 0.56 x 0.80 = 4.92M illegal Mexico-crossing individuals in the U.S. Let's call it 5M.
5. Premise: 170K people illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border without being apprehended
6. Premise: 400K people try to illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border, but are caught.
7. Premise: Trump estimates his wall will cost ~$10B - $12B.

Now, let's see if the HF's figures "tie":

1. $54B/11M ≈ $4909 is what should be the cost per illegal immigrant per year.
   • Let's apply that back to the assumption about how many illegals live together to see if the assumption matches this.
     $14K/4.9K ≈ 2.8. That suggest I should probably go with 75% instead of 80%. Fine, but it's a difference that, for this level of analysis, obviously makes no difference.
2. $4909 x 5M ≈ $24.5B is the cost per year for existing Mexico-crossing illegal immigrants. The Wall isn't doing any good re: these people/costs.
3. $4909 x 170K ≈ $835M not spent each year assuming The Wall keeps out as many people as entered in 2015.
4. $835M/$10B ≈ 0.08 or 8%. AT that rate, it'd take over 10 years to pay for The Wall.

So now what does the CIS report say?

• "Based on the NAS data, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of approximately $74,722 during their lifetimes."

Excuse me? In their methodology, they also say:

• "Unfortunately, the NAS study has very little discussion of how legal and illegal immigrants differ in their fiscal impact."

Now let's consider the $75K figure. It's a lifetime figure. Well, working off the rough calculus I did above, that would suggest one of two things:

• Illegal immigrants only live 15 years after they arrive in the U.S., or
• After 15 years, they transition from being net consumers to net contributors.

Fifteen years of living or "suddenly" they're productive? That's quite a stretch...

Another thing to note is that I didn't adjust the $4909/illegal/year downward as have the CIS. Now one could come at the sanity check from a different direction -- taking the $75K and dividing it by an average life expectancy -- but that would produce a much lower per-year cost, thus making it take longer for the wall to pay for itself. You'll notice I've focused on the per-year costs. That's because we have to pay cash in current periods to build The Wall; we don't have people's lifetimes to pay for it.

There is also a related problem with the type of analysis we're -- the CIS, the HF and I, as a result of you offering that study -- doing: once you cut the illegal flow across the border to a sufficiently small number, The Wall isn't saving you anything. It's actually costing because we still have to maintain it. (I haven't even gotten to considering maintenance and support costs.)

We would have to leave gaps in The Wall so we have a then-current basis on which to say it's saving us money, and that basis must necessarily derive from assuming that given the number of folks who illegally get past The Wall must be some share of the quantity of people who otherwise would if it weren't there. Well, at that point, one is measuring pure hypotheticals. One might estimate that 1%, 10% , 40% or any other percent of people who want to cross actually get in; just pick the percent that fits the story one wants to tell.

But let's not leave gaps in The Wall. Well, okay, then there's still the problem of inflation and the time value of money. Once The Wall is built and unbroken, the only figures we'd have that're reliable as a basis for saying what The Wall is saving us are the number of illegals who entered in the most recent years prior to its completion. Well, you see it was ~170K in 2015. It should be lower still in 2017 and 2018, assuming Trump's Administration improves on Obama's results.

• The fewer that get in, the longer is the payoff time.
• The longer it takes to build The Wall, the more the cost to build it. (That doesn't have to be true, but we both know the U.S. gov't hasn't established a sinking fund to use current dollars and the accrued interest on them to pay for future costs.)
• The longer the payoff time, the more The Wall ends up costing due to the combined effects of inflation and increasing interdiction success.

Given the above, I don't buy the 9% to 12% estimate the CIS have provided because no matter from which direction I've sought to validate the figure nothing lines up, not even roughly. If you'd like to take a look at their report and the HFR too see where the reconciling differences are, great. If not, I think you should find a different report.

Note:

I want to point out that my "sanity check" of the CIS figure relied on their data and that of the HF, of which they approve, and that like the CIS is not a "friend" to immigration advocates.

​

RANT:

Several people have complained about the length of my posts. My posts wouldn't be so damned long if people would bother to do their own reasonable and reasoned analysis, "sanity checks," if you will, before they make claims. Were folks to do that, I could get away with saying a lot less. Since they often enough do not, I want folks to understand where I'm "coming from" and why when I say my piece.​

Yeah, I'll take the summary.

What? You think I'm going summarize the post above after you posted that folderol that caused me to write it? You got another think comin', buddy.

Very well, then you wrote it for nothing. Oh, and I'm incapable of giving those moments of your life back so don't ask.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Go ahead and be part of the rhetorically partisan "echo chamber." I don't see you advancing the merit of your own position on the matter by putting forth:

• A cost-benefit analysis that shows how Trump's wall will be worth it.
• Any metrics that show how Trump's wall will yield greater border security than will a fence.
• Anything that indicates Trump knew what he was talking about by insisting on a wall rather than a fence.
• Anything showing that it's not a waste of resources to realign people's expectations re: the wall.

All I see is your asking an absurd rhetorical question that asks in the present tense about the qualitative superiority of an object that has yet to be built. In other words, all I see from you is incoherence.

I agree ANALYSIS: Border Wall Only Needs To Stop 9-12% Of Illegal Crossings To Pay For Itself

Okay. TY. [There is a rant at the end of this post.]

Let's take a look and see where that document takes us.....I'm writing as I go along -- largely because just looking at the 9-12% figure and doing "head" math with widely shared metric, something seems amiss -- so bear with me....

So far, I have only looked quickly at the CIS document and I've downloaded the NAS study on which they say it's based, except for the bit about illegal immigrants, which is instead based on a Heritage Foundation report (HFR/HF) one can find here.

Let's take a quick look at the HF report....I'm just going for a "sniff test" level of analysis....I'm doing this because the NAS study is huge and doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants, much less Mexican legals vs. illegals. So really, I just want to see if the HF figures, thus whatever is in the CIS report you referenced, pass a quick sanity check.

Looking at the HFR, I see that among all U.S. households (Year - 2013):

• Well-educated households tend to be net tax contributors, contributing a fiscal surplus of $29,250 that government used to finance benefits for other households. (Not sure how useful this is to our discussion, but let's capture it here for now...)
  
• Other households are net tax consumers, creating an average fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $35,113 per household. These households receive ~$46K in benefits and pay ~$11K in taxes. (I guess these are the Trumpkins who think immigrants are taking something from them....)
  
• Illegal immigrants receive ~$24K/household in benefits and pay ~$10 in taxes thereby costing ~$14K/household. One sees illegals pay taxes at double the rate of citizens and legal residents. (The HF assume that illegal immigrants are, for the most part, not well educated. Okay.)
• Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.

Let's collect some data so we can do some simple math:

1. Premise: 11M illegal immigrants in the U.S.
2. Premise: $54B of deficit per year for them all.
3. Premise: Illegal immigrants live with at least one other illegal immigrants.
   • Why? Humans are social creatures. I just don't see "Miguel" just hauling across the desert/river alone to arrive in a foreign place where he doesn't speak the language and has no money of note. I'm sure some must, but I don't see that as the norm. I'm going with 80% of illegal Mexico-crossing live with another Mexico-crossing illegal.
4. Premise: 56% of the total population of illegal immigrants are from Mexico.
   • 11M x 0.56 x 0.80 = 4.92M illegal Mexico-crossing individuals in the U.S. Let's call it 5M.
5. Premise: 170K people illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border without being apprehended
6. Premise: 400K people try to illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border, but are caught.
7. Premise: Trump estimates his wall will cost ~$10B - $12B.

Now, let's see if the HF's figures "tie":

1. $54B/11M ≈ $4909 is what should be the cost per illegal immigrant per year.
   • Let's apply that back to the assumption about how many illegals live together to see if the assumption matches this.
     $14K/4.9K ≈ 2.8. That suggest I should probably go with 75% instead of 80%. Fine, but it's a difference that, for this level of analysis, obviously makes no difference.
2. $4909 x 5M ≈ $24.5B is the cost per year for existing Mexico-crossing illegal immigrants. The Wall isn't doing any good re: these people/costs.
3. $4909 x 170K ≈ $835M not spent each year assuming The Wall keeps out as many people as entered in 2015.
4. $835M/$10B ≈ 0.08 or 8%. AT that rate, it'd take over 10 years to pay for The Wall.

So now what does the CIS report say?

• "Based on the NAS data, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of approximately $74,722 during their lifetimes."

Excuse me? In their methodology, they also say:

• "Unfortunately, the NAS study has very little discussion of how legal and illegal immigrants differ in their fiscal impact."

Now let's consider the $75K figure. It's a lifetime figure. Well, working off the rough calculus I did above, that would suggest one of two things:

• Illegal immigrants only live 15 years after they arrive in the U.S., or
• After 15 years, they transition from being net consumers to net contributors.

Fifteen years of living or "suddenly" they're productive? That's quite a stretch...

Another thing to note is that I didn't adjust the $4909/illegal/year downward as have the CIS. Now one could come at the sanity check from a different direction -- taking the $75K and dividing it by an average life expectancy -- but that would produce a much lower per-year cost, thus making it take longer for the wall to pay for itself. You'll notice I've focused on the per-year costs. That's because we have to pay cash in current periods to build The Wall; we don't have people's lifetimes to pay for it.

There is also a related problem with the type of analysis we're -- the CIS, the HF and I, as a result of you offering that study -- doing: once you cut the illegal flow across the border to a sufficiently small number, The Wall isn't saving you anything. It's actually costing because we still have to maintain it. (I haven't even gotten to considering maintenance and support costs.)

We would have to leave gaps in The Wall so we have a then-current basis on which to say it's saving us money, and that basis must necessarily derive from assuming that given the number of folks who illegally get past The Wall must be some share of the quantity of people who otherwise would if it weren't there. Well, at that point, one is measuring pure hypotheticals. One might estimate that 1%, 10% , 40% or any other percent of people who want to cross actually get in; just pick the percent that fits the story one wants to tell.

But let's not leave gaps in The Wall. Well, okay, then there's still the problem of inflation and the time value of money. Once The Wall is built and unbroken, the only figures we'd have that're reliable as a basis for saying what The Wall is saving us are the number of illegals who entered in the most recent years prior to its completion. Well, you see it was ~170K in 2015. It should be lower still in 2017 and 2018, assuming Trump's Administration improves on Obama's results.

• The fewer that get in, the longer is the payoff time.
• The longer it takes to build The Wall, the more the cost to build it. (That doesn't have to be true, but we both know the U.S. gov't hasn't established a sinking fund to use current dollars and the accrued interest on them to pay for future costs.)
• The longer the payoff time, the more The Wall ends up costing due to the combined effects of inflation and increasing interdiction success.

Given the above, I don't buy the 9% to 12% estimate the CIS have provided because no matter from which direction I've sought to validate the figure nothing lines up, not even roughly. If you'd like to take a look at their report and the HFR too see where the reconciling differences are, great. If not, I think you should find a different report.

Note:

I want to point out that my "sanity check" of the CIS figure relied on their data and that of the HF, of which they approve, and that like the CIS is not a "friend" to immigration advocates.

​

RANT:

Several people have complained about the length of my posts. My posts wouldn't be so damned long if people would bother to do their own reasonable and reasoned analysis, "sanity checks," if you will, before they make claims. Were folks to do that, I could get away with saying a lot less. Since they often enough do not, I want folks to understand where I'm "coming from" and why when I say my piece.​

Yeah, I'll take the summary.

What? You think I'm going summarize the post above after you posted that folderol that caused me to write it? You got another think comin', buddy.

Very well, then you wrote it for nothing. Oh, and I'm incapable of giving those moments of your life back so don't ask.

I don't need them back. I will be sure not to so spend any past right now.

 

[Wiskers Von Pussyboots]

I agree ANALYSIS: Border Wall Only Needs To Stop 9-12% Of Illegal Crossings To Pay For Itself

Okay. TY. [There is a rant at the end of this post.]

Let's take a look and see where that document takes us.....I'm writing as I go along -- largely because just looking at the 9-12% figure and doing "head" math with widely shared metric, something seems amiss -- so bear with me....

So far, I have only looked quickly at the CIS document and I've downloaded the NAS study on which they say it's based, except for the bit about illegal immigrants, which is instead based on a Heritage Foundation report (HFR/HF) one can find here.

Let's take a quick look at the HF report....I'm just going for a "sniff test" level of analysis....I'm doing this because the NAS study is huge and doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants, much less Mexican legals vs. illegals. So really, I just want to see if the HF figures, thus whatever is in the CIS report you referenced, pass a quick sanity check.

Looking at the HFR, I see that among all U.S. households (Year - 2013):

• Well-educated households tend to be net tax contributors, contributing a fiscal surplus of $29,250 that government used to finance benefits for other households. (Not sure how useful this is to our discussion, but let's capture it here for now...)
  
• Other households are net tax consumers, creating an average fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $35,113 per household. These households receive ~$46K in benefits and pay ~$11K in taxes. (I guess these are the Trumpkins who think immigrants are taking something from them....)
  
• Illegal immigrants receive ~$24K/household in benefits and pay ~$10 in taxes thereby costing ~$14K/household. One sees illegals pay taxes at double the rate of citizens and legal residents. (The HF assume that illegal immigrants are, for the most part, not well educated. Okay.)
• Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.

Let's collect some data so we can do some simple math:

1. Premise: 11M illegal immigrants in the U.S.
2. Premise: $54B of deficit per year for them all.
3. Premise: Illegal immigrants live with at least one other illegal immigrants.
   • Why? Humans are social creatures. I just don't see "Miguel" just hauling across the desert/river alone to arrive in a foreign place where he doesn't speak the language and has no money of note. I'm sure some must, but I don't see that as the norm. I'm going with 80% of illegal Mexico-crossing live with another Mexico-crossing illegal.
4. Premise: 56% of the total population of illegal immigrants are from Mexico.
   • 11M x 0.56 x 0.80 = 4.92M illegal Mexico-crossing individuals in the U.S. Let's call it 5M.
5. Premise: 170K people illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border without being apprehended
6. Premise: 400K people try to illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border, but are caught.
7. Premise: Trump estimates his wall will cost ~$10B - $12B.

Now, let's see if the HF's figures "tie":

1. $54B/11M ≈ $4909 is what should be the cost per illegal immigrant per year.
   • Let's apply that back to the assumption about how many illegals live together to see if the assumption matches this.
     $14K/4.9K ≈ 2.8. That suggest I should probably go with 75% instead of 80%. Fine, but it's a difference that, for this level of analysis, obviously makes no difference.
2. $4909 x 5M ≈ $24.5B is the cost per year for existing Mexico-crossing illegal immigrants. The Wall isn't doing any good re: these people/costs.
3. $4909 x 170K ≈ $835M not spent each year assuming The Wall keeps out as many people as entered in 2015.
4. $835M/$10B ≈ 0.08 or 8%. AT that rate, it'd take over 10 years to pay for The Wall.

So now what does the CIS report say?

• "Based on the NAS data, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of approximately $74,722 during their lifetimes."

Excuse me? In their methodology, they also say:

• "Unfortunately, the NAS study has very little discussion of how legal and illegal immigrants differ in their fiscal impact."

Now let's consider the $75K figure. It's a lifetime figure. Well, working off the rough calculus I did above, that would suggest one of two things:

• Illegal immigrants only live 15 years after they arrive in the U.S., or
• After 15 years, they transition from being net consumers to net contributors.

Fifteen years of living or "suddenly" they're productive? That's quite a stretch...

Another thing to note is that I didn't adjust the $4909/illegal/year downward as have the CIS. Now one could come at the sanity check from a different direction -- taking the $75K and dividing it by an average life expectancy -- but that would produce a much lower per-year cost, thus making it take longer for the wall to pay for itself. You'll notice I've focused on the per-year costs. That's because we have to pay cash in current periods to build The Wall; we don't have people's lifetimes to pay for it.

There is also a related problem with the type of analysis we're -- the CIS, the HF and I, as a result of you offering that study -- doing: once you cut the illegal flow across the border to a sufficiently small number, The Wall isn't saving you anything. It's actually costing because we still have to maintain it. (I haven't even gotten to considering maintenance and support costs.)

We would have to leave gaps in The Wall so we have a then-current basis on which to say it's saving us money, and that basis must necessarily derive from assuming that given the number of folks who illegally get past The Wall must be some share of the quantity of people who otherwise would if it weren't there. Well, at that point, one is measuring pure hypotheticals. One might estimate that 1%, 10% , 40% or any other percent of people who want to cross actually get in; just pick the percent that fits the story one wants to tell.

But let's not leave gaps in The Wall. Well, okay, then there's still the problem of inflation and the time value of money. Once The Wall is built and unbroken, the only figures we'd have that're reliable as a basis for saying what The Wall is saving us are the number of illegals who entered in the most recent years prior to its completion. Well, you see it was ~170K in 2015. It should be lower still in 2017 and 2018, assuming Trump's Administration improves on Obama's results.

• The fewer that get in, the longer is the payoff time.
• The longer it takes to build The Wall, the more the cost to build it. (That doesn't have to be true, but we both know the U.S. gov't hasn't established a sinking fund to use current dollars and the accrued interest on them to pay for future costs.)
• The longer the payoff time, the more The Wall ends up costing due to the combined effects of inflation and increasing interdiction success.

Given the above, I don't buy the 9% to 12% estimate the CIS have provided because no matter from which direction I've sought to validate the figure nothing lines up, not even roughly. If you'd like to take a look at their report and the HFR too see where the reconciling differences are, great. If not, I think you should find a different report.

Note:

I want to point out that my "sanity check" of the CIS figure relied on their data and that of the HF, of which they approve, and that like the CIS is not a "friend" to immigration advocates.

​

RANT:

Several people have complained about the length of my posts. My posts wouldn't be so damned long if people would bother to do their own reasonable and reasoned analysis, "sanity checks," if you will, before they make claims. Were folks to do that, I could get away with saying a lot less. Since they often enough do not, I want folks to understand where I'm "coming from" and why when I say my piece.​

Yeah, I'll take the summary.

What? You think I'm going summarize the post above after you posted that folderol that caused me to write it? You got another think comin', buddy.

Very well, then you wrote it for nothing. Oh, and I'm incapable of giving those moments of your life back so don't ask.

I don't need them back. I will be sure not to so spend any past right now.

Seems you just did.

 

[JBond]

Even on his signature campaign promise -- buiding "2000-mile big beautiful wall", the prettiest one you've ever seen -- it's unlikely that is going to happen. DHS Secretary John Kelly has already begun, in testimony before Congress, referring to it as a "barrier," presumably as the first part of the "spin" campaign to alterTrumpkins' expectations of the government building a wall on the southern border.

• It's not likely to be a wall at all. At best, it'll be a fence. "After the experts convince Trump the wall will not work and it will be a fence, "the White House will just have to figure out a way to spin it [to the public.]...all but one of the more than two dozen sources ...agreed that a concrete wall is not a good idea."
  • Trump's promises and executive order:
    • "On the fence -- it's not a fence. It's a wall. We're going to build a wall."
    • "'Wall' shall mean a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier."
    • "It's going to be made of hardened concrete, and it's going to be made out of rebar, and steel,"
• It's not going to be uninterrupted.
• A wall is not even a good common sense idea.

Now I don't care what the heck he builds on the border. For me the question is whether there is a positive and material cost-benefit case for building anything more, and supplementing it with more personnel, mechanized surveillance, and support personnel, administration and infrastructure. I have yet to see any such cost-benefit analysis. Is there any that's credible?

What I do care about, what I cared about during the election season, is that the stupidity of building a wall was not foreseen by Trump or Trumpkins PRIOR to his making the proposal. Literally tens of thousands of people all over the country hollered, "Build that wall." At the same time, experts all over said that's a ridiculous idea, and neither Trump nor his sycophantic Trumpkins would listen to them.

Now, the Trump Admin., and border physical-security experts have to, among other things, (1) undertake the process of convincing Trump that a fence is better and (2) "spinning" a fence, something that wastes resources and that really wouldn't have to happen had Trump in the first place actually been knowledgeable about border security and immigration, before he started on about a damned wall.

Were he just a little bit knowledgable, what might he have used as a mantra? Something as simple as "good fences make good neighbors," or something similar that at least aligns with what makes some damn sense to actually build on the border, would have done just fine. Of course, Trump was more focused on his greatness and his conviction that he knows more than everyone else and that he's infallible. In his mind, it should be a wall.

What concerns me is that during the campaign it was profoundly obvious that of nearly everything that man spoke about, he didn't at all know the subject well, and he wouldn't listen to people who did. Neither would the Trumpkins. Quite simply, knowing what you're talking about before you start talking about it is not a liberal or conservative "thing." It's just a behavior broadly intelligent people exhibit, and it's a trait Trump rarely exhibits. If that means they can't talk about something until they do know it well, well, then it just does, and they just don't.

(I write "rarely" only to allow for the off chance that he may have spoken about something on which he's highly knowledgeable.)

Is it better than what we have now?

Go ahead and be part of the rhetorically partisan "echo chamber." I don't see you advancing the merit of your own position on the matter by putting forth:

• A cost-benefit analysis that shows how Trump's wall will be worth it.
• Any metrics that show how Trump's wall will yield greater border security than will a fence.
• Anything that indicates Trump knew what he was talking about by insisting on a wall rather than a fence.
• Anything showing that it's not a waste of resources to realign people's expectations re: the wall.

All I see is your asking an absurd rhetorical question that asks in the present tense about the qualitative superiority of an object that has yet to be built. In other words, all I see from you is incoherence.

I agree ANALYSIS: Border Wall Only Needs To Stop 9-12% Of Illegal Crossings To Pay For Itself

Okay. TY. [There is a rant at the end of this post.]

Let's take a look and see where that document takes us.....I'm writing as I go along -- largely because just looking at the 9-12% figure and doing "head" math with widely shared metric, something seems amiss -- so bear with me....

So far, I have only looked quickly at the CIS document and I've downloaded the NAS study on which they say it's based, except for the bit about illegal immigrants, which is instead based on a Heritage Foundation report (HFR/HF) one can find here.

Let's take a quick look at the HF report....I'm just going for a "sniff test" level of analysis....I'm doing this because the NAS study is huge and doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants, much less Mexican legals vs. illegals. So really, I just want to see if the HF figures, thus whatever is in the CIS report you referenced, pass a quick sanity check.

Looking at the HFR, I see that among all U.S. households (Year - 2013):

• Well-educated households tend to be net tax contributors, contributing a fiscal surplus of $29,250 that government used to finance benefits for other households. (Not sure how useful this is to our discussion, but let's capture it here for now...)
  
• Other households are net tax consumers, creating an average fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $35,113 per household. These households receive ~$46K in benefits and pay ~$11K in taxes. (I guess these are the Trumpkins who think immigrants are taking something from them....)
  
• Illegal immigrants receive ~$24K/household in benefits and pay ~$10 in taxes thereby costing ~$14K/household. One sees illegals pay taxes at double the rate of citizens and legal residents. (The HF assume that illegal immigrants are, for the most part, not well educated. Okay.)
• Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.

Let's collect some data so we can do some simple math:

1. Premise: 11M illegal immigrants in the U.S.
2. Premise: $54B of deficit per year for them all.
3. Premise: Illegal immigrants live with at least one other illegal immigrants.
   • Why? Humans are social creatures. I just don't see "Miguel" just hauling across the desert/river alone to arrive in a foreign place where he doesn't speak the language and has no money of note. I'm sure some must, but I don't see that as the norm. I'm going with 80% of illegal Mexico-crossing live with another Mexico-crossing illegal.
4. Premise: 56% of the total population of illegal immigrants are from Mexico.
   • 11M x 0.56 x 0.80 = 4.92M illegal Mexico-crossing individuals in the U.S. Let's call it 5M.
5. Premise: 170K people illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border without being apprehended
6. Premise: 400K people try to illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border, but are caught.
7. Premise: Trump estimates his wall will cost ~$10B - $12B.

Now, let's see if the HF's figures "tie":

1. $54B/11M ≈ $4909 is what should be the cost per illegal immigrant per year.
   • Let's apply that back to the assumption about how many illegals live together to see if the assumption matches this.
     $14K/4.9K ≈ 2.8. That suggest I should probably go with 75% instead of 80%. Fine, but it's a difference that, for this level of analysis, obviously makes no difference.
2. $4909 x 5M ≈ $24.5B is the cost per year for existing Mexico-crossing illegal immigrants. The Wall isn't doing any good re: these people/costs.
3. $4909 x 170K ≈ $835M not spent each year assuming The Wall keeps out as many people as entered in 2015.
4. $835M/$10B ≈ 0.08 or 8%. AT that rate, it'd take over 10 years to pay for The Wall.

So now what does the CIS report say?

• "Based on the NAS data, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of approximately $74,722 during their lifetimes."

Excuse me? In their methodology, they also say:

• "Unfortunately, the NAS study has very little discussion of how legal and illegal immigrants differ in their fiscal impact."

Now let's consider the $75K figure. It's a lifetime figure. Well, working off the rough calculus I did above, that would suggest one of two things:

• Illegal immigrants only live 15 years after they arrive in the U.S., or
• After 15 years, they transition from being net consumers to net contributors.

Fifteen years of living or "suddenly" they're productive? That's quite a stretch...

Another thing to note is that I didn't adjust the $4909/illegal/year downward as have the CIS. Now one could come at the sanity check from a different direction -- taking the $75K and dividing it by an average life expectancy -- but that would produce a much lower per-year cost, thus making it take longer for the wall to pay for itself. You'll notice I've focused on the per-year costs. That's because we have to pay cash in current periods to build The Wall; we don't have people's lifetimes to pay for it.

There is also a related problem with the type of analysis we're -- the CIS, the HF and I, as a result of you offering that study -- doing: once you cut the illegal flow across the border to a sufficiently small number, The Wall isn't saving you anything. It's actually costing because we still have to maintain it. (I haven't even gotten to considering maintenance and support costs.)

We would have to leave gaps in The Wall so we have a then-current basis on which to say it's saving us money, and that basis must necessarily derive from assuming that given the number of folks who illegally get past The Wall must be some share of the quantity of people who otherwise would if it weren't there. Well, at that point, one is measuring pure hypotheticals. One might estimate that 1%, 10% , 40% or any other percent of people who want to cross actually get in; just pick the percent that fits the story one wants to tell.

But let's not leave gaps in The Wall. Well, okay, then there's still the problem of inflation and the time value of money. Once The Wall is built and unbroken, the only figures we'd have that're reliable as a basis for saying what The Wall is saving us are the number of illegals who entered in the most recent years prior to its completion. Well, you see it was ~170K in 2015. It should be lower still in 2017 and 2018, assuming Trump's Administration improves on Obama's results.

• The fewer that get in, the longer is the payoff time.
• The longer it takes to build The Wall, the more the cost to build it. (That doesn't have to be true, but we both know the U.S. gov't hasn't established a sinking fund to use current dollars and the accrued interest on them to pay for future costs.)
• The longer the payoff time, the more The Wall ends up costing due to the combined effects of inflation and increasing interdiction success.

Given the above, I don't buy the 9% to 12% estimate the CIS have provided because no matter from which direction I've sought to validate the figure nothing lines up, not even roughly. If you'd like to take a look at their report and the HFR too see where the reconciling differences are, great. If not, I think you should find a different report.

Note:

I want to point out that my "sanity check" of the CIS figure relied on their data and that of the HF, of which they approve, and that like the CIS is not a "friend" to immigration advocates.

​

RANT:

Several people have complained about the length of my posts. My posts wouldn't be so damned long if people would bother to do their own reasonable and reasoned analysis, "sanity checks," if you will, before they make claims. Were folks to do that, I could get away with saying a lot less. Since they often enough do not, I want folks to understand where I'm "coming from" and why when I say my piece.​

Thanks, maybe? Appreciate the effort. I have not attempted to run a detailed cost-analysis, but I do have some concerns regarding your assumptions used to reach your results. We need more information to nail it down.

 

[Wiskers Von Pussyboots]

Even on his signature campaign promise -- buiding "2000-mile big beautiful wall", the prettiest one you've ever seen -- it's unlikely that is going to happen. DHS Secretary John Kelly has already begun, in testimony before Congress, referring to it as a "barrier," presumably as the first part of the "spin" campaign to alterTrumpkins' expectations of the government building a wall on the southern border.

• It's not likely to be a wall at all. At best, it'll be a fence. "After the experts convince Trump the wall will not work and it will be a fence, "the White House will just have to figure out a way to spin it [to the public.]...all but one of the more than two dozen sources ...agreed that a concrete wall is not a good idea."
  • Trump's promises and executive order:
    • "On the fence -- it's not a fence. It's a wall. We're going to build a wall."
    • "'Wall' shall mean a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier."
    • "It's going to be made of hardened concrete, and it's going to be made out of rebar, and steel,"
• It's not going to be uninterrupted.
• A wall is not even a good common sense idea.

Now I don't care what the heck he builds on the border. For me the question is whether there is a positive and material cost-benefit case for building anything more, and supplementing it with more personnel, mechanized surveillance, and support personnel, administration and infrastructure. I have yet to see any such cost-benefit analysis. Is there any that's credible?

What I do care about, what I cared about during the election season, is that the stupidity of building a wall was not foreseen by Trump or Trumpkins PRIOR to his making the proposal. Literally tens of thousands of people all over the country hollered, "Build that wall." At the same time, experts all over said that's a ridiculous idea, and neither Trump nor his sycophantic Trumpkins would listen to them.

Now, the Trump Admin., and border physical-security experts have to, among other things, (1) undertake the process of convincing Trump that a fence is better and (2) "spinning" a fence, something that wastes resources and that really wouldn't have to happen had Trump in the first place actually been knowledgeable about border security and immigration, before he started on about a damned wall.

Were he just a little bit knowledgable, what might he have used as a mantra? Something as simple as "good fences make good neighbors," or something similar that at least aligns with what makes some damn sense to actually build on the border, would have done just fine. Of course, Trump was more focused on his greatness and his conviction that he knows more than everyone else and that he's infallible. In his mind, it should be a wall.

What concerns me is that during the campaign it was profoundly obvious that of nearly everything that man spoke about, he didn't at all know the subject well, and he wouldn't listen to people who did. Neither would the Trumpkins. Quite simply, knowing what you're talking about before you start talking about it is not a liberal or conservative "thing." It's just a behavior broadly intelligent people exhibit, and it's a trait Trump rarely exhibits. If that means they can't talk about something until they do know it well, well, then it just does, and they just don't.

(I write "rarely" only to allow for the off chance that he may have spoken about something on which he's highly knowledgeable.)

Is it better than what we have now?

Go ahead and be part of the rhetorically partisan "echo chamber." I don't see you advancing the merit of your own position on the matter by putting forth:

• A cost-benefit analysis that shows how Trump's wall will be worth it.
• Any metrics that show how Trump's wall will yield greater border security than will a fence.
• Anything that indicates Trump knew what he was talking about by insisting on a wall rather than a fence.
• Anything showing that it's not a waste of resources to realign people's expectations re: the wall.

All I see is your asking an absurd rhetorical question that asks in the present tense about the qualitative superiority of an object that has yet to be built. In other words, all I see from you is incoherence.

I agree ANALYSIS: Border Wall Only Needs To Stop 9-12% Of Illegal Crossings To Pay For Itself

Okay. TY. [There is a rant at the end of this post.]

Let's take a look and see where that document takes us.....I'm writing as I go along -- largely because just looking at the 9-12% figure and doing "head" math with widely shared metric, something seems amiss -- so bear with me....

So far, I have only looked quickly at the CIS document and I've downloaded the NAS study on which they say it's based, except for the bit about illegal immigrants, which is instead based on a Heritage Foundation report (HFR/HF) one can find here.

Let's take a quick look at the HF report....I'm just going for a "sniff test" level of analysis....I'm doing this because the NAS study is huge and doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants, much less Mexican legals vs. illegals. So really, I just want to see if the HF figures, thus whatever is in the CIS report you referenced, pass a quick sanity check.

Looking at the HFR, I see that among all U.S. households (Year - 2013):

• Well-educated households tend to be net tax contributors, contributing a fiscal surplus of $29,250 that government used to finance benefits for other households. (Not sure how useful this is to our discussion, but let's capture it here for now...)
  
• Other households are net tax consumers, creating an average fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $35,113 per household. These households receive ~$46K in benefits and pay ~$11K in taxes. (I guess these are the Trumpkins who think immigrants are taking something from them....)
  
• Illegal immigrants receive ~$24K/household in benefits and pay ~$10 in taxes thereby costing ~$14K/household. One sees illegals pay taxes at double the rate of citizens and legal residents. (The HF assume that illegal immigrants are, for the most part, not well educated. Okay.)
• Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.

Let's collect some data so we can do some simple math:

1. Premise: 11M illegal immigrants in the U.S.
2. Premise: $54B of deficit per year for them all.
3. Premise: Illegal immigrants live with at least one other illegal immigrants.
   • Why? Humans are social creatures. I just don't see "Miguel" just hauling across the desert/river alone to arrive in a foreign place where he doesn't speak the language and has no money of note. I'm sure some must, but I don't see that as the norm. I'm going with 80% of illegal Mexico-crossing live with another Mexico-crossing illegal.
4. Premise: 56% of the total population of illegal immigrants are from Mexico.
   • 11M x 0.56 x 0.80 = 4.92M illegal Mexico-crossing individuals in the U.S. Let's call it 5M.
5. Premise: 170K people illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border without being apprehended
6. Premise: 400K people try to illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border, but are caught.
7. Premise: Trump estimates his wall will cost ~$10B - $12B.

Now, let's see if the HF's figures "tie":

1. $54B/11M ≈ $4909 is what should be the cost per illegal immigrant per year.
   • Let's apply that back to the assumption about how many illegals live together to see if the assumption matches this.
     $14K/4.9K ≈ 2.8. That suggest I should probably go with 75% instead of 80%. Fine, but it's a difference that, for this level of analysis, obviously makes no difference.
2. $4909 x 5M ≈ $24.5B is the cost per year for existing Mexico-crossing illegal immigrants. The Wall isn't doing any good re: these people/costs.
3. $4909 x 170K ≈ $835M not spent each year assuming The Wall keeps out as many people as entered in 2015.
4. $835M/$10B ≈ 0.08 or 8%. AT that rate, it'd take over 10 years to pay for The Wall.

So now what does the CIS report say?

• "Based on the NAS data, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of approximately $74,722 during their lifetimes."

Excuse me? In their methodology, they also say:

• "Unfortunately, the NAS study has very little discussion of how legal and illegal immigrants differ in their fiscal impact."

Now let's consider the $75K figure. It's a lifetime figure. Well, working off the rough calculus I did above, that would suggest one of two things:

• Illegal immigrants only live 15 years after they arrive in the U.S., or
• After 15 years, they transition from being net consumers to net contributors.

Fifteen years of living or "suddenly" they're productive? That's quite a stretch...

Another thing to note is that I didn't adjust the $4909/illegal/year downward as have the CIS. Now one could come at the sanity check from a different direction -- taking the $75K and dividing it by an average life expectancy -- but that would produce a much lower per-year cost, thus making it take longer for the wall to pay for itself. You'll notice I've focused on the per-year costs. That's because we have to pay cash in current periods to build The Wall; we don't have people's lifetimes to pay for it.

There is also a related problem with the type of analysis we're -- the CIS, the HF and I, as a result of you offering that study -- doing: once you cut the illegal flow across the border to a sufficiently small number, The Wall isn't saving you anything. It's actually costing because we still have to maintain it. (I haven't even gotten to considering maintenance and support costs.)

We would have to leave gaps in The Wall so we have a then-current basis on which to say it's saving us money, and that basis must necessarily derive from assuming that given the number of folks who illegally get past The Wall must be some share of the quantity of people who otherwise would if it weren't there. Well, at that point, one is measuring pure hypotheticals. One might estimate that 1%, 10% , 40% or any other percent of people who want to cross actually get in; just pick the percent that fits the story one wants to tell.

But let's not leave gaps in The Wall. Well, okay, then there's still the problem of inflation and the time value of money. Once The Wall is built and unbroken, the only figures we'd have that're reliable as a basis for saying what The Wall is saving us are the number of illegals who entered in the most recent years prior to its completion. Well, you see it was ~170K in 2015. It should be lower still in 2017 and 2018, assuming Trump's Administration improves on Obama's results.

• The fewer that get in, the longer is the payoff time.
• The longer it takes to build The Wall, the more the cost to build it. (That doesn't have to be true, but we both know the U.S. gov't hasn't established a sinking fund to use current dollars and the accrued interest on them to pay for future costs.)
• The longer the payoff time, the more The Wall ends up costing due to the combined effects of inflation and increasing interdiction success.

Given the above, I don't buy the 9% to 12% estimate the CIS have provided because no matter from which direction I've sought to validate the figure nothing lines up, not even roughly. If you'd like to take a look at their report and the HFR too see where the reconciling differences are, great. If not, I think you should find a different report.

Note:

I want to point out that my "sanity check" of the CIS figure relied on their data and that of the HF, of which they approve, and that like the CIS is not a "friend" to immigration advocates.

​

RANT:

Several people have complained about the length of my posts. My posts wouldn't be so damned long if people would bother to do their own reasonable and reasoned analysis, "sanity checks," if you will, before they make claims. Were folks to do that, I could get away with saying a lot less. Since they often enough do not, I want folks to understand where I'm "coming from" and why when I say my piece.​

Thanks, maybe? Appreciate the effort. I have not attempted to run a detailed cost-analysis, but I do have some concerns regarding your assumptions used to reach your results. We need more information to nail it down.

Indeed we do, perhaps a cost benefit analysis on the benifits of loading non-English speaking students into our schools. Or the cost benefit analysis of legalizing 12 million poor immigrants and granting them access to our welfare state. Or perhaps the cost benefit analysis of preventing drugs from crossing our boarder. Or a cost benefit analysis of billions of US dollars getting electronically wired to Latin/South America adding to our national debt. Or we should simply build the fucking wall. How bout that?

 

[Spare_change]

Even on his signature campaign promise -- buiding "2000-mile big beautiful wall", the prettiest one you've ever seen -- it's unlikely that is going to happen. DHS Secretary John Kelly has already begun, in testimony before Congress, referring to it as a "barrier," presumably as the first part of the "spin" campaign to alterTrumpkins' expectations of the government building a wall on the southern border.

• It's not likely to be a wall at all. At best, it'll be a fence. "After the experts convince Trump the wall will not work and it will be a fence, "the White House will just have to figure out a way to spin it [to the public.]...all but one of the more than two dozen sources ...agreed that a concrete wall is not a good idea."
  • Trump's promises and executive order:
    • "On the fence -- it's not a fence. It's a wall. We're going to build a wall."
    • "'Wall' shall mean a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier."
    • "It's going to be made of hardened concrete, and it's going to be made out of rebar, and steel,"
• It's not going to be uninterrupted.
• A wall is not even a good common sense idea.

Now I don't care what the heck he builds on the border. For me the question is whether there is a positive and material cost-benefit case for building anything more, and supplementing it with more personnel, mechanized surveillance, and support personnel, administration and infrastructure. I have yet to see any such cost-benefit analysis. Is there any that's credible?

What I do care about, what I cared about during the election season, is that the stupidity of building a wall was not foreseen by Trump or Trumpkins PRIOR to his making the proposal. Literally tens of thousands of people all over the country hollered, "Build that wall." At the same time, experts all over said that's a ridiculous idea, and neither Trump nor his sycophantic Trumpkins would listen to them.

Now, the Trump Admin., and border physical-security experts have to, among other things, (1) undertake the process of convincing Trump that a fence is better and (2) "spinning" a fence, something that wastes resources and that really wouldn't have to happen had Trump in the first place actually been knowledgeable about border security and immigration, before he started on about a damned wall.

Were he just a little bit knowledgable, what might he have used as a mantra? Something as simple as "good fences make good neighbors," or something similar that at least aligns with what makes some damn sense to actually build on the border, would have done just fine. Of course, Trump was more focused on his greatness and his conviction that he knows more than everyone else and that he's infallible. In his mind, it should be a wall.

What concerns me is that during the campaign it was profoundly obvious that of nearly everything that man spoke about, he didn't at all know the subject well, and he wouldn't listen to people who did. Neither would the Trumpkins. Quite simply, knowing what you're talking about before you start talking about it is not a liberal or conservative "thing." It's just a behavior broadly intelligent people exhibit, and it's a trait Trump rarely exhibits. If that means they can't talk about something until they do know it well, well, then it just does, and they just don't.

(I write "rarely" only to allow for the off chance that he may have spoken about something on which he's highly knowledgeable.)

LOL ---- you liberals crack me up!!!

Can you explain to all of us the difference between a fence, a barrier, and a wall? Feel free to use the dictionary, if you like ....

Man, you guys are SO desperate.

If there is one thing Trump knows, it's construction .... you need to get your head out of your ass.

 

[JBond]

Is it better than what we have now?

Go ahead and be part of the rhetorically partisan "echo chamber." I don't see you advancing the merit of your own position on the matter by putting forth:

• A cost-benefit analysis that shows how Trump's wall will be worth it.
• Any metrics that show how Trump's wall will yield greater border security than will a fence.
• Anything that indicates Trump knew what he was talking about by insisting on a wall rather than a fence.
• Anything showing that it's not a waste of resources to realign people's expectations re: the wall.

All I see is your asking an absurd rhetorical question that asks in the present tense about the qualitative superiority of an object that has yet to be built. In other words, all I see from you is incoherence.

I agree ANALYSIS: Border Wall Only Needs To Stop 9-12% Of Illegal Crossings To Pay For Itself

Okay. TY. [There is a rant at the end of this post.]

Let's take a look and see where that document takes us.....I'm writing as I go along -- largely because just looking at the 9-12% figure and doing "head" math with widely shared metric, something seems amiss -- so bear with me....

So far, I have only looked quickly at the CIS document and I've downloaded the NAS study on which they say it's based, except for the bit about illegal immigrants, which is instead based on a Heritage Foundation report (HFR/HF) one can find here.

Let's take a quick look at the HF report....I'm just going for a "sniff test" level of analysis....I'm doing this because the NAS study is huge and doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants, much less Mexican legals vs. illegals. So really, I just want to see if the HF figures, thus whatever is in the CIS report you referenced, pass a quick sanity check.

Looking at the HFR, I see that among all U.S. households (Year - 2013):

• Well-educated households tend to be net tax contributors, contributing a fiscal surplus of $29,250 that government used to finance benefits for other households. (Not sure how useful this is to our discussion, but let's capture it here for now...)
  
• Other households are net tax consumers, creating an average fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $35,113 per household. These households receive ~$46K in benefits and pay ~$11K in taxes. (I guess these are the Trumpkins who think immigrants are taking something from them....)
  
• Illegal immigrants receive ~$24K/household in benefits and pay ~$10 in taxes thereby costing ~$14K/household. One sees illegals pay taxes at double the rate of citizens and legal residents. (The HF assume that illegal immigrants are, for the most part, not well educated. Okay.)
• Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.

Let's collect some data so we can do some simple math:

1. Premise: 11M illegal immigrants in the U.S.
2. Premise: $54B of deficit per year for them all.
3. Premise: Illegal immigrants live with at least one other illegal immigrants.
   • Why? Humans are social creatures. I just don't see "Miguel" just hauling across the desert/river alone to arrive in a foreign place where he doesn't speak the language and has no money of note. I'm sure some must, but I don't see that as the norm. I'm going with 80% of illegal Mexico-crossing live with another Mexico-crossing illegal.
4. Premise: 56% of the total population of illegal immigrants are from Mexico.
   • 11M x 0.56 x 0.80 = 4.92M illegal Mexico-crossing individuals in the U.S. Let's call it 5M.
5. Premise: 170K people illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border without being apprehended
6. Premise: 400K people try to illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border, but are caught.
7. Premise: Trump estimates his wall will cost ~$10B - $12B.

Now, let's see if the HF's figures "tie":

1. $54B/11M ≈ $4909 is what should be the cost per illegal immigrant per year.
   • Let's apply that back to the assumption about how many illegals live together to see if the assumption matches this.
     $14K/4.9K ≈ 2.8. That suggest I should probably go with 75% instead of 80%. Fine, but it's a difference that, for this level of analysis, obviously makes no difference.
2. $4909 x 5M ≈ $24.5B is the cost per year for existing Mexico-crossing illegal immigrants. The Wall isn't doing any good re: these people/costs.
3. $4909 x 170K ≈ $835M not spent each year assuming The Wall keeps out as many people as entered in 2015.
4. $835M/$10B ≈ 0.08 or 8%. AT that rate, it'd take over 10 years to pay for The Wall.

So now what does the CIS report say?

• "Based on the NAS data, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of approximately $74,722 during their lifetimes."

Excuse me? In their methodology, they also say:

• "Unfortunately, the NAS study has very little discussion of how legal and illegal immigrants differ in their fiscal impact."

Now let's consider the $75K figure. It's a lifetime figure. Well, working off the rough calculus I did above, that would suggest one of two things:

• Illegal immigrants only live 15 years after they arrive in the U.S., or
• After 15 years, they transition from being net consumers to net contributors.

Fifteen years of living or "suddenly" they're productive? That's quite a stretch...

Another thing to note is that I didn't adjust the $4909/illegal/year downward as have the CIS. Now one could come at the sanity check from a different direction -- taking the $75K and dividing it by an average life expectancy -- but that would produce a much lower per-year cost, thus making it take longer for the wall to pay for itself. You'll notice I've focused on the per-year costs. That's because we have to pay cash in current periods to build The Wall; we don't have people's lifetimes to pay for it.

There is also a related problem with the type of analysis we're -- the CIS, the HF and I, as a result of you offering that study -- doing: once you cut the illegal flow across the border to a sufficiently small number, The Wall isn't saving you anything. It's actually costing because we still have to maintain it. (I haven't even gotten to considering maintenance and support costs.)

We would have to leave gaps in The Wall so we have a then-current basis on which to say it's saving us money, and that basis must necessarily derive from assuming that given the number of folks who illegally get past The Wall must be some share of the quantity of people who otherwise would if it weren't there. Well, at that point, one is measuring pure hypotheticals. One might estimate that 1%, 10% , 40% or any other percent of people who want to cross actually get in; just pick the percent that fits the story one wants to tell.

But let's not leave gaps in The Wall. Well, okay, then there's still the problem of inflation and the time value of money. Once The Wall is built and unbroken, the only figures we'd have that're reliable as a basis for saying what The Wall is saving us are the number of illegals who entered in the most recent years prior to its completion. Well, you see it was ~170K in 2015. It should be lower still in 2017 and 2018, assuming Trump's Administration improves on Obama's results.

• The fewer that get in, the longer is the payoff time.
• The longer it takes to build The Wall, the more the cost to build it. (That doesn't have to be true, but we both know the U.S. gov't hasn't established a sinking fund to use current dollars and the accrued interest on them to pay for future costs.)
• The longer the payoff time, the more The Wall ends up costing due to the combined effects of inflation and increasing interdiction success.

Given the above, I don't buy the 9% to 12% estimate the CIS have provided because no matter from which direction I've sought to validate the figure nothing lines up, not even roughly. If you'd like to take a look at their report and the HFR too see where the reconciling differences are, great. If not, I think you should find a different report.

Note:

I want to point out that my "sanity check" of the CIS figure relied on their data and that of the HF, of which they approve, and that like the CIS is not a "friend" to immigration advocates.

​

RANT:

Several people have complained about the length of my posts. My posts wouldn't be so damned long if people would bother to do their own reasonable and reasoned analysis, "sanity checks," if you will, before they make claims. Were folks to do that, I could get away with saying a lot less. Since they often enough do not, I want folks to understand where I'm "coming from" and why when I say my piece.​

Thanks, maybe? Appreciate the effort. I have not attempted to run a detailed cost-analysis, but I do have some concerns regarding your assumptions used to reach your results. We need more information to nail it down.

Indeed we do, perhaps a cost benefit analysis on the benifits of loading non-English speaking students into our schools. Or the cost benefit analysis of legalizing 12 million poor immigrants and granting them access to our welfare state. Or perhaps the cost benefit analysis of preventing drugs from crossing our boarder. Or a cost benefit analysis of billions of US dollars getting electronically wired to Latin/South America adding to our national debt. Or we should simply build the fucking wall. How bout that?

Calm down. There are a ton of things we need to consider. I'm not against the wall. In fact, I am in favor. The country club republicans get mad at me all the time when I advocate for enforcement at the hiring levels. I fight against rinos every day. They have a distinct advantage. They are eager to save a buck. I overspend on employees.

 

[Spare_change]

Is it better than what we have now?

Go ahead and be part of the rhetorically partisan "echo chamber." I don't see you advancing the merit of your own position on the matter by putting forth:

• A cost-benefit analysis that shows how Trump's wall will be worth it.
• Any metrics that show how Trump's wall will yield greater border security than will a fence.
• Anything that indicates Trump knew what he was talking about by insisting on a wall rather than a fence.
• Anything showing that it's not a waste of resources to realign people's expectations re: the wall.

All I see is your asking an absurd rhetorical question that asks in the present tense about the qualitative superiority of an object that has yet to be built. In other words, all I see from you is incoherence.

I agree ANALYSIS: Border Wall Only Needs To Stop 9-12% Of Illegal Crossings To Pay For Itself

Okay. TY. [There is a rant at the end of this post.]

Let's take a look and see where that document takes us.....I'm writing as I go along -- largely because just looking at the 9-12% figure and doing "head" math with widely shared metric, something seems amiss -- so bear with me....

So far, I have only looked quickly at the CIS document and I've downloaded the NAS study on which they say it's based, except for the bit about illegal immigrants, which is instead based on a Heritage Foundation report (HFR/HF) one can find here.

Let's take a quick look at the HF report....I'm just going for a "sniff test" level of analysis....I'm doing this because the NAS study is huge and doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants, much less Mexican legals vs. illegals. So really, I just want to see if the HF figures, thus whatever is in the CIS report you referenced, pass a quick sanity check.

Looking at the HFR, I see that among all U.S. households (Year - 2013):

• Well-educated households tend to be net tax contributors, contributing a fiscal surplus of $29,250 that government used to finance benefits for other households. (Not sure how useful this is to our discussion, but let's capture it here for now...)
  
• Other households are net tax consumers, creating an average fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $35,113 per household. These households receive ~$46K in benefits and pay ~$11K in taxes. (I guess these are the Trumpkins who think immigrants are taking something from them....)
  
• Illegal immigrants receive ~$24K/household in benefits and pay ~$10 in taxes thereby costing ~$14K/household. One sees illegals pay taxes at double the rate of citizens and legal residents. (The HF assume that illegal immigrants are, for the most part, not well educated. Okay.)
• Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.

Let's collect some data so we can do some simple math:

1. Premise: 11M illegal immigrants in the U.S.
2. Premise: $54B of deficit per year for them all.
3. Premise: Illegal immigrants live with at least one other illegal immigrants.
   • Why? Humans are social creatures. I just don't see "Miguel" just hauling across the desert/river alone to arrive in a foreign place where he doesn't speak the language and has no money of note. I'm sure some must, but I don't see that as the norm. I'm going with 80% of illegal Mexico-crossing live with another Mexico-crossing illegal.
4. Premise: 56% of the total population of illegal immigrants are from Mexico.
   • 11M x 0.56 x 0.80 = 4.92M illegal Mexico-crossing individuals in the U.S. Let's call it 5M.
5. Premise: 170K people illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border without being apprehended
6. Premise: 400K people try to illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border, but are caught.
7. Premise: Trump estimates his wall will cost ~$10B - $12B.

Now, let's see if the HF's figures "tie":

1. $54B/11M ≈ $4909 is what should be the cost per illegal immigrant per year.
   • Let's apply that back to the assumption about how many illegals live together to see if the assumption matches this.
     $14K/4.9K ≈ 2.8. That suggest I should probably go with 75% instead of 80%. Fine, but it's a difference that, for this level of analysis, obviously makes no difference.
2. $4909 x 5M ≈ $24.5B is the cost per year for existing Mexico-crossing illegal immigrants. The Wall isn't doing any good re: these people/costs.
3. $4909 x 170K ≈ $835M not spent each year assuming The Wall keeps out as many people as entered in 2015.
4. $835M/$10B ≈ 0.08 or 8%. AT that rate, it'd take over 10 years to pay for The Wall.

So now what does the CIS report say?

• "Based on the NAS data, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of approximately $74,722 during their lifetimes."

Excuse me? In their methodology, they also say:

• "Unfortunately, the NAS study has very little discussion of how legal and illegal immigrants differ in their fiscal impact."

Now let's consider the $75K figure. It's a lifetime figure. Well, working off the rough calculus I did above, that would suggest one of two things:

• Illegal immigrants only live 15 years after they arrive in the U.S., or
• After 15 years, they transition from being net consumers to net contributors.

Fifteen years of living or "suddenly" they're productive? That's quite a stretch...

Another thing to note is that I didn't adjust the $4909/illegal/year downward as have the CIS. Now one could come at the sanity check from a different direction -- taking the $75K and dividing it by an average life expectancy -- but that would produce a much lower per-year cost, thus making it take longer for the wall to pay for itself. You'll notice I've focused on the per-year costs. That's because we have to pay cash in current periods to build The Wall; we don't have people's lifetimes to pay for it.

There is also a related problem with the type of analysis we're -- the CIS, the HF and I, as a result of you offering that study -- doing: once you cut the illegal flow across the border to a sufficiently small number, The Wall isn't saving you anything. It's actually costing because we still have to maintain it. (I haven't even gotten to considering maintenance and support costs.)

We would have to leave gaps in The Wall so we have a then-current basis on which to say it's saving us money, and that basis must necessarily derive from assuming that given the number of folks who illegally get past The Wall must be some share of the quantity of people who otherwise would if it weren't there. Well, at that point, one is measuring pure hypotheticals. One might estimate that 1%, 10% , 40% or any other percent of people who want to cross actually get in; just pick the percent that fits the story one wants to tell.

But let's not leave gaps in The Wall. Well, okay, then there's still the problem of inflation and the time value of money. Once The Wall is built and unbroken, the only figures we'd have that're reliable as a basis for saying what The Wall is saving us are the number of illegals who entered in the most recent years prior to its completion. Well, you see it was ~170K in 2015. It should be lower still in 2017 and 2018, assuming Trump's Administration improves on Obama's results.

• The fewer that get in, the longer is the payoff time.
• The longer it takes to build The Wall, the more the cost to build it. (That doesn't have to be true, but we both know the U.S. gov't hasn't established a sinking fund to use current dollars and the accrued interest on them to pay for future costs.)
• The longer the payoff time, the more The Wall ends up costing due to the combined effects of inflation and increasing interdiction success.

Given the above, I don't buy the 9% to 12% estimate the CIS have provided because no matter from which direction I've sought to validate the figure nothing lines up, not even roughly. If you'd like to take a look at their report and the HFR too see where the reconciling differences are, great. If not, I think you should find a different report.

Note:

I want to point out that my "sanity check" of the CIS figure relied on their data and that of the HF, of which they approve, and that like the CIS is not a "friend" to immigration advocates.

​

RANT:

Several people have complained about the length of my posts. My posts wouldn't be so damned long if people would bother to do their own reasonable and reasoned analysis, "sanity checks," if you will, before they make claims. Were folks to do that, I could get away with saying a lot less. Since they often enough do not, I want folks to understand where I'm "coming from" and why when I say my piece.​

Thanks, maybe? Appreciate the effort. I have not attempted to run a detailed cost-analysis, but I do have some concerns regarding your assumptions used to reach your results. We need more information to nail it down.

Indeed we do, perhaps a cost benefit analysis on the benifits of loading non-English speaking students into our schools. Or the cost benefit analysis of legalizing 12 million poor immigrants and granting them access to our welfare state. Or perhaps the cost benefit analysis of preventing drugs from crossing our boarder. Or a cost benefit analysis of billions of US dollars getting electronically wired to Latin/South America adding to our national debt. Or we should simply build the fucking wall. How bout that?

Well, since you asked.... Border Wall Could Save 4-5 Times Its Cost Over 10 Years

 

[frigidweirdo]

Even on his signature campaign promise -- buiding "2000-mile big beautiful wall", the prettiest one you've ever seen -- it's unlikely that is going to happen. DHS Secretary John Kelly has already begun, in testimony before Congress, referring to it as a "barrier," presumably as the first part of the "spin" campaign to alterTrumpkins' expectations of the government building a wall on the southern border.

• It's not likely to be a wall at all. At best, it'll be a fence. "After the experts convince Trump the wall will not work and it will be a fence, "the White House will just have to figure out a way to spin it [to the public.]...all but one of the more than two dozen sources ...agreed that a concrete wall is not a good idea."
  • Trump's promises and executive order:
    • "On the fence -- it's not a fence. It's a wall. We're going to build a wall."
    • "'Wall' shall mean a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier."
    • "It's going to be made of hardened concrete, and it's going to be made out of rebar, and steel,"
• It's not going to be uninterrupted.
• A wall is not even a good common sense idea.

Now I don't care what the heck he builds on the border. For me the question is whether there is a positive and material cost-benefit case for building anything more, and supplementing it with more personnel, mechanized surveillance, and support personnel, administration and infrastructure. I have yet to see any such cost-benefit analysis. Is there any that's credible?

What I do care about, what I cared about during the election season, is that the stupidity of building a wall was not foreseen by Trump or Trumpkins PRIOR to his making the proposal. Literally tens of thousands of people all over the country hollered, "Build that wall." At the same time, experts all over said that's a ridiculous idea, and neither Trump nor his sycophantic Trumpkins would listen to them.

Now, the Trump Admin., and border physical-security experts have to, among other things, (1) undertake the process of convincing Trump that a fence is better and (2) "spinning" a fence, something that wastes resources and that really wouldn't have to happen had Trump in the first place actually been knowledgeable about border security and immigration, before he started on about a damned wall.

Were he just a little bit knowledgable, what might he have used as a mantra? Something as simple as "good fences make good neighbors," or something similar that at least aligns with what makes some damn sense to actually build on the border, would have done just fine. Of course, Trump was more focused on his greatness and his conviction that he knows more than everyone else and that he's infallible. In his mind, it should be a wall.

What concerns me is that during the campaign it was profoundly obvious that of nearly everything that man spoke about, he didn't at all know the subject well, and he wouldn't listen to people who did. Neither would the Trumpkins. Quite simply, knowing what you're talking about before you start talking about it is not a liberal or conservative "thing." It's just a behavior broadly intelligent people exhibit, and it's a trait Trump rarely exhibits. If that means they can't talk about something until they do know it well, well, then it just does, and they just don't.

(I write "rarely" only to allow for the off chance that he may have spoken about something on which he's highly knowledgeable.)

Yeah, well, we knew this when he said it, and we know it now. But others are living in la la land.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Just to clue you in, most conservatives do not expect a 40ft concrete wall that is over 2000 miles long. What we do except is that border security will be taken seriously and current law will be enforced.

Okay. As goes The Wall, I'm less concerned about what anyone expects and more concerned about what that man articulated as what it is he wanted to do. Rather than saying something that makes some damn sense, something like what you wrote, which makes sense and is reasonable, Trump went down the "rabbit hole" of "we're gonna build a wall; it's gonna be 'all this, that and the other....'"

People, most especially politicians, that spout off with absurd, grandiose, and on the face of it ridiculous ideas and then don't back them up with serious data and reasoning just don't give me any way to trust them. I can't back someone who'll say "anything" just to advance a personal objective. I have to know whether I can take someone at their word.

It was fine when Trump got on his rants initially, but he never got to the place where he attenuated that foolishness he shouted at rally after rally; he never converted into something rational/sane like what you wrote. A year and a half is enough time for him to have done that. Put another way, a year and a half is enough time for him to turn into a grown up so the rest of us who are can tell for sure that he is too.

I'll give him his due when I find he deserves it, but in the main, I don't trust that I can rely on him to make well informed and well considered decisions and be honest. That ship's sailed, and it's never coming back for me.

We know neither would have happened under the globalist Clinton agenda

Y'all do. I don't. The thing is I don't think immigration is our highest priority problem. They pay into Soc. Security and we desperately need that if that system is to be kept solvent past 2035. That or a massive breeding phenomenon or significant FICA tax increases. I don't know about you, but I don't think most folks want to have 3+ kids and I know they don't want to pay more in FICA (or alternatively have benefit payouts lowered and retirement ages increased)

I do have some concerns regarding your assumptions used to reach your results.

Okay. Which ones and what are your concerns?

LOL ---- you liberals crack me up!!!

You, specifically, bore me. I can't recall ever, in the time I've been here, seeing you have a single substantive thing to say in response any post that makes an effort to address a matter from a mature and objective standpoint.

JBond seems like someone with whom I can agree or disagree and he'll say something adult-like. You, on the other hand, respond like a child. I have no interest in that or you. So, have a good life.

 

[westwall]

Just to clue you in, most conservatives do not expect a 40ft concrete wall that is over 2000 miles long. What we do except is that border security will be taken seriously and current law will be enforced.

Okay. As goes The Wall, I'm less concerned about what anyone expects and more concerned about what that man articulated as what it is he wanted to do. Rather than saying something that makes some damn sense, something like what you wrote, which makes sense and is reasonable, Trump went down the "rabbit hole" of "we're gonna build a wall; it's gonna be 'all this, that and the other....'"

People, most especially politicians, that spout off with absurd, grandiose, and on the face of it ridiculous ideas and then don't back them up with serious data and reasoning just don't give me any way to trust them. I can't back someone who'll say "anything" just to advance a personal objective. I have to know whether I can take someone at their word.

It was fine when Trump got on his rants initially, but he never got to the place where he attenuated that foolishness he shouted at rally after rally; he never converted into something rational/sane like what you wrote. A year and a half is enough time for him to have done that. Put another way, a year and a half is enough time for him to turn into a grown up so the rest of us who are can tell for sure that he is too.

I'll give him his due when I find he deserves it, but in the main, I don't trust that I can rely on him to make well informed and well considered decisions and be honest. That ship's sailed, and it's never coming back for me.

We know neither would have happened under the globalist Clinton agenda

Y'all do. I don't. The thing is I don't think immigration is our highest priority problem. They pay into Soc. Security and we desperately need that if that system is to be kept solvent past 2035. That or a massive breeding phenomenon or significant FICA tax increases. I don't know about you, but I don't think most folks want to have 3+ kids and I know they don't want to pay more in FICA (or alternatively have benefit payouts lowered and retirement ages increased)

I do have some concerns regarding your assumptions used to reach your results.

Okay. Which ones and what are your concerns?

LOL ---- you liberals crack me up!!!

You, specifically, bore me. I can't recall ever, in the time I've been here, seeing you have a single substantive thing to say in response any post that makes an effort to address a matter from a mature and objective standpoint.

JBond seems like someone with whom I can agree or disagree and he'll say something adult-like. You, on the other hand, respond like a child. I have no interest in that or you. So, have a good life.

What's funny is you demand that he, or anybody, for that matter, do EXACTLY as they said while engaged in a fast moving campaign stop. It's a phrase, it is not meant to be taken literally. obummer claimed we were going to get to keep our doctors and pay less for our health insurance. I don't notice you attacking obummer for his lie. And it WAS a lie.

The trumpster is KNOWN for his hyperbolic statements. As was stated earlier, what is important is he is going to actually pay attention to our borders. You don't need to build a Great Wall of China to do that. He knows that, and more importantly, so do we.

 

[BluesLegend]

Trump needs to let us buy bricks for the wall, mine will be polished granite with the 2nd Amendment engraved into it.

 

[BluesLegend]

Just to clue you in, most conservatives do not expect a 40ft concrete wall that is over 2000 miles long. What we do except is that border security will be taken seriously and current law will be enforced.

Okay. As goes The Wall, I'm less concerned about what anyone expects and more concerned about what that man articulated as what it is he wanted to do. Rather than saying something that makes some damn sense, something like what you wrote, which makes sense and is reasonable, Trump went down the "rabbit hole" of "we're gonna build a wall; it's gonna be 'all this, that and the other....'"

People, most especially politicians, that spout off with absurd, grandiose, and on the face of it ridiculous ideas and then don't back them up with serious data and reasoning just don't give me any way to trust them. I can't back someone who'll say "anything" just to advance a personal objective. I have to know whether I can take someone at their word.

It was fine when Trump got on his rants initially, but he never got to the place where he attenuated that foolishness he shouted at rally after rally; he never converted into something rational/sane like what you wrote. A year and a half is enough time for him to have done that. Put another way, a year and a half is enough time for him to turn into a grown up so the rest of us who are can tell for sure that he is too.

I'll give him his due when I find he deserves it, but in the main, I don't trust that I can rely on him to make well informed and well considered decisions and be honest. That ship's sailed, and it's never coming back for me.

We know neither would have happened under the globalist Clinton agenda

Y'all do. I don't. The thing is I don't think immigration is our highest priority problem. They pay into Soc. Security and we desperately need that if that system is to be kept solvent past 2035. That or a massive breeding phenomenon or significant FICA tax increases. I don't know about you, but I don't think most folks want to have 3+ kids and I know they don't want to pay more in FICA (or alternatively have benefit payouts lowered and retirement ages increased)

I do have some concerns regarding your assumptions used to reach your results.

Okay. Which ones and what are your concerns?

LOL ---- you liberals crack me up!!!

You, specifically, bore me. I can't recall ever, in the time I've been here, seeing you have a single substantive thing to say in response any post that makes an effort to address a matter from a mature and objective standpoint.

JBond seems like someone with whom I can agree or disagree and he'll say something adult-like. You, on the other hand, respond like a child. I have no interest in that or you. So, have a good life.

What's funny is you demand that he, or anybody, for that matter, do EXACTLY as they said while engaged in a fast moving campaign stop. It's a phrase, it is not meant to be taken literally. obummer claimed we were going to get to keep our doctors and pay less for our health insurance. I don't notice you attacking obummer for his lie. And it WAS a lie.

The trumpster is KNOWN for his hyperbolic statements. As was stated earlier, what is important is he is going to actually pay attention to our borders. You don't need to build a Great Wall of China to do that. He knows that, and more importantly, so do we.

Obama said I was going to save $2,500 on my health insurance...I'm still waiting. I'm beginning to suspect he lied

 

[BluesLegend]

We'll need one of those internet counters for the wall to display the number of illegals blocked, or maybe a screen saver that would be epic!

 

[Kat]

This one is not long. But, it doesn't need or have to be, to easily get the point across..

 

[usmbguest5318]

Even on his signature campaign promise -- buiding "2000-mile big beautiful wall", the prettiest one you've ever seen -- it's unlikely that is going to happen. DHS Secretary John Kelly has already begun, in testimony before Congress, referring to it as a "barrier," presumably as the first part of the "spin" campaign to alterTrumpkins' expectations of the government building a wall on the southern border.

• It's not likely to be a wall at all. At best, it'll be a fence. "After the experts convince Trump the wall will not work and it will be a fence, "the White House will just have to figure out a way to spin it [to the public.]...all but one of the more than two dozen sources ...agreed that a concrete wall is not a good idea."
  • Trump's promises and executive order:
    • "On the fence -- it's not a fence. It's a wall. We're going to build a wall."
    • "'Wall' shall mean a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier."
    • "It's going to be made of hardened concrete, and it's going to be made out of rebar, and steel,"
• It's not going to be uninterrupted.
• A wall is not even a good common sense idea.

Now I don't care what the heck he builds on the border. For me the question is whether there is a positive and material cost-benefit case for building anything more, and supplementing it with more personnel, mechanized surveillance, and support personnel, administration and infrastructure. I have yet to see any such cost-benefit analysis. Is there any that's credible?

What I do care about, what I cared about during the election season, is that the stupidity of building a wall was not foreseen by Trump or Trumpkins PRIOR to his making the proposal. Literally tens of thousands of people all over the country hollered, "Build that wall." At the same time, experts all over said that's a ridiculous idea, and neither Trump nor his sycophantic Trumpkins would listen to them.

Now, the Trump Admin., and border physical-security experts have to, among other things, (1) undertake the process of convincing Trump that a fence is better and (2) "spinning" a fence, something that wastes resources and that really wouldn't have to happen had Trump in the first place actually been knowledgeable about border security and immigration, before he started on about a damned wall.

Were he just a little bit knowledgable, what might he have used as a mantra? Something as simple as "good fences make good neighbors," or something similar that at least aligns with what makes some damn sense to actually build on the border, would have done just fine. Of course, Trump was more focused on his greatness and his conviction that he knows more than everyone else and that he's infallible. In his mind, it should be a wall.

What concerns me is that during the campaign it was profoundly obvious that of nearly everything that man spoke about, he didn't at all know the subject well, and he wouldn't listen to people who did. Neither would the Trumpkins. Quite simply, knowing what you're talking about before you start talking about it is not a liberal or conservative "thing." It's just a behavior broadly intelligent people exhibit, and it's a trait Trump rarely exhibits. If that means they can't talk about something until they do know it well, well, then it just does, and they just don't.

(I write "rarely" only to allow for the off chance that he may have spoken about something on which he's highly knowledgeable.)

Yeah, well, we knew this when he said it, and we know it now. But others are living in la la land.

Well, as I just wrote to another member....The man had a year and a half to convert his position into something responsible and thoughtful, but he never did. He stuck with his "eighth grader's" approach to handling illegal immigration. He stuck with childish approaches and behaviors all over the place really. That more than anything is what set me against him; there's no way I'll vote for someone who deliberately presents themselves as a post-adolescent 70 year-old.

I remember last summer I went sailing with some friends. We'd just finished a hard day's sail and found an quiet cove off the Bay and dropped anchor. After we ate, the conversation turned to the election. At the time I was very unsure about for whom I'd vote and not liking the choices anyway.

Two of the guys on the boat started talking Trump. Both of them had considered bidding to work on the Old Post office renovation. The thing that really stuck with me was that both of them had different contacts outside of D.C. who'd each worked with Trump on a project. Both of them said they decided not to bid the job because of their associates advising them not to. They said he slow-pays and/or invents reasons for dissatisfaction and then tries to renegotiate the deal or sues. That was when I knew for a fact that I would not vote for Trump.

In the early fall, I was playing tennis with one of the same friends, and another guy whom I didn't know quite as well was part of our quartet. After the game, we went to lunch and the "new guy" had a similar story. I just can't back someone whom I believe lacks honor. And the thing is that those guys are normally dyed in the wool Republicans...the old school type...think Bush, Buckley, Bush I, Eisenhower, Will, Bundy and the like.