Posted on 02/10/2017 10:28:38 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Twelve billion here, fifteen billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. Put them together, though, and it comes close to the actual projected cost of the border wall. Reuters reports that the Department of Homeland Security’s proposal runs far ahead of the funds that Republicans in Congress planned to allocate:
President Donald Trump’s “wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border would be a series of fences and walls that would cost as much as $21.6 billion, and take more than three years to construct, based on a U.S. Department of Homeland Security internal report seen by Reuters on Thursday.
The report’s estimated price-tag is much higher than a $12-billion figure cited by Trump in his campaign and estimates as high as $15 billion from Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The report is expected to be presented to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary John Kelly in coming days, although the administration will not necessarily take actions it recommends.
The plan lays out what it would take to seal the border in three phases of construction of fences and walls covering just over 1,250 miles (2,000 km) by the end of 2020.
It’s not the only variance from first projections. The new DHS study projects that the wall will be completed by late 2020, assuming Congress begins allocating the funds by May, presumably in the upcoming omnibus bill. That’s longer than the two-year estimate Kelly gave Congress just a week ago, which will certainly raise questions about his preparation for that testimony.
It also makes the issue of funding a little more fraught. Initially, Ryan indicated that the House would pursue the funding in the fall, as part of the FY2018 budget process. A two-year completion schedule at that point would have meant that the wall could be completed by late 2019, enough ahead of the presidential primaries to claim victory on a long-made promise from Republicans. A three-year-plus schedule suggests that the wall may not be complete until midway through an election year — and that gives Democrats plenty of reason to start blocking the funding, starting in two months during the omnibus FY2017 negotiations.
The time difference matters a lot more than the cash difference, though the latter is not exactly a few coins in the cushion. A nine-billion-dollar miss might seem like the lunch budget for the federal government, but it would actually be about 0.1% of all discretionary spending projected for FY2017 (although the appropriation will probably stretch out over the three-year period, too). At DHS, it’s more significant; the proposed FY2017 appropriation was $48 billion, so a $9 billion miss is rather big. Republicans might feel pressure from their conservative ranks to find the money by cutting other spending, and that will no doubt fuel opposition from Democrats.
It’s still probably better to have this fight earlier rather than later. If Ryan and McConnell wait until fall, the momentum for the project could stall, and Trump’s electoral mandate might have dissipated. Kelly better deliver it on time, and on budget, if Republicans want to reap political benefit from it. Besides, if they wait any longer, the bill’s just going to keep getting bigger and bigger.
-PJ
A tariff on Mexican goods will result in lower and slower sales of their goods.
They will then be forced to accept they are paying, one way or the other....
Be faster to write a check and be done with it....
Less than 1/3 the cost of the California Train To Nowhere, and for that you actually get something for your money!
Yeah but what are the annual costs per year for illegal aliens? I say even if it were 50 billion there would be a savings in the long term.
At 1,250 miles, that works out to $3,182 per linear foot. I don’t know how high or wide they are going to build it, but that sounds expensive when you consider the “volume discount” that should be factored in to a job like this.
Maybe some FReepers with concrete construction experience can chime in...
Being a Federal Project I’m not sure they could compel the Federal Government to employ only union labor workers.
Throw in another billion.... let’s paint it gold!
WORTH EVERY LAST CENT!!!!
Obama wasted 100’s of billions on Green Energy/Jobs with absolutely nothing to show for it
Does that include the mine field, or is that extra? Either way, it is cheap.
A young woman is helping me with filing legal papers. She had been recently employed in admissions by our large hospital system in our city and speaks good Spanish. She quit because she said the people coming in were just crazy, probably 90% of them were not paying!
I don’t care if it’s $200B. Mexico pays. 200 feet high, embedded 30 feet into bedrock (I don’t care if we have to dig down 100 feet before we hit bedrock), gun towers every 50 yards, 30 feet thick of reinforced concrete, the best there is. LOL! I don’t know what I’m talking about, but you get the idea. I want the Bradley tank of Cadillac walls!
Wow. That’s sad.
Money well spent - should’ve spent it years ago....
That’s a big “IF”. IF Mexico folds and writes a check. Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. They certainly don’t have to. Unless and until that happens, American consumers will be writing the checks if they want to buy goods from Mexico. Demand will go down, but SOMEBODY has figured out that there will still be enough demand and sales to American consumers to pigeonhole $21 billion from the tariffs to build the wall.
I like Trump but he’s not being forthright about this and that kind of pisses me off.
Worth every penny!
I think it should be about 20 feet wide with jail cells through-out. Go ahead and spend 100bil.
After the corrupt MSM cheered Obama for wasting nearly a trillion dollars for mythical shovel-ready jobs, suddenly there is manufactured concern over spending $21 billion on an actual physical asset that will provide jobs and protect the country.
Once again, liberals deploy their selective outrage and concern.
That’s $17.3 million per mile. That’s just some Obama aparatchik blowing smoke.
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