If We End Up With a Border Wall, Taxpayers Will Foot the Bill
Unless Trump can convince Mexico to reimburse the US Government
“We’re going to build a big, beautiful wall and Mexico will pay for it!” President-elect Trump bragged while campaigning.
Mexico said they would definitely not pay for a wall, but it looks like we might.
Trump’s transition team indicated the border wall was a top priority and that the incoming administration hopes to have Congressional approval of funding by as early as April.
Earlier this morning, Trump tweeted, “The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!”
The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2017
From CNN:
New York Rep. Chris Collins said Friday that American taxpayers would front the cost for the wall but that he was confident Trump could negotiate getting the money back from Mexico.
“When you understand that Mexico’s economy is dependent upon US consumers, Donald Trump has all the cards he needs to play,” Collins, congressional liaison for the Trump transition team, told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on “New Day.” “On the trade negotiation side, I don’t think it’s that difficult for Donald Trump to convince Mexico that it’s in their best interest to reimburse us for building the wall.”
The Trump team argues it will have the authority through a Bush-era 2006 law to build the wall, lawmakers say, but it lacks the money to do so. Transition officials have told House GOP leaders in private meetings they’d like to pay for the wall in the funding bill, a senior House GOP source said.“It was not done in the Obama administration, so by funding the authorization that’s already happened a decade ago, we could start the process of meeting Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge to secure the border,” Indiana Republican Rep. Luke Messer said on Thursday.
Messer admitted it’s “big dollars, but it’s a question of priorities.” He pointed to a border security bill that Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul proposed last year that cost roughly $10 billion.
“Democrats may well find themselves in the position to shut down all of government to stop the buildout of a wall, or of a barrier, or of a fence,” Messer said.
Mexican leaders have repeatedly said they will not pay for the wall.
Obtaining funding approval from Congress will be no small task for the Trump Administration. Various forms of beefed up border enhancements included in funding bills have been repeatedly shot down over the past several years.
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Comments
That would be one thing I would pay for, build that sucker!
Soon as possible!
Take the cost out of our Foreign Aid to Mexico, or tax the remittances.
Dear RabidFox:
Exactly. There are a DOZEN ways to skin this cat and anyone who doesn’t see that, lacks imagination.
CTF
Hate to double post but…. Another thing we could do is ‘tax’ the Foreign Aid for each illegal here in the US, or based on costs of medical and welfare payments, etc.
Problem: Cost of wall by Trump’s estimate = $8 billion. Annual Foreign aid to Mexico = $200 million. If you took all of foreign aid to Mexico, it would take 40 years to pay for wall. Same problem exists for other billings or asset forfeitures – not enough to cover $8 billion.
Meant asset seizures, not forfeitures.
The USPS has been helping Mexicans send wire transfers home for years. The amount is limited to $1500 per day. See Dinero Seguro.
https://www.usps.com/international/money-transfers.htm
Removing annual foreign aid to Mexico is not part of Trump’s plan. Not even close.
I don’t like that answer. Throw the chicken bones again and this time throw ’em like you mean it!
Shake shake, rattle rattle… oh dear, I’ve made a mistake. Trump intends to raise foreign aid to Mexico to $8 billion per year, and then not pay it, spending Mexico’s money on the wall. F**king genius!
He could ask Hillary Clinton to give speeches as a condition of her pardon and raise the money within 30 days.
>> Userpen: That might have worked on November 7th.
How do these numbers measure up to our current attractants for illegal aliens, such as social benefits?
whatever happened to the money congress already appropriated back around 2006 or so?
Yeah. That’s what I’d like to know.
Probably went to Solyndra, the Clinton Foundation and other worthy causes.
Probably was a good share of bundled cash flown overseas to Iran earlier 2016.
I don’t think taxing remittances is practical; The illegals will just start sending cash or money orders or prepaid gift cards. Not only that, but the other name for taxing money leaving the Country is “capital controls”. Do we really want to act like a third-world dictatorship?
Well….we have lived 8 years under Obama so………..
Remittance seizure wouldn’t produce near enough money anyway.
Almost $25 billion per year? A 20% tax would pretty much cover the wall cost but I still don’t think it’s practical or just.
Dear SnoperCod:
You don’t think it’s “JUST” to tax remittances?
I AM TAXED EVERY DAY TO PAY FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS’ FOOD STAMPS,SCHOOLS, MEDICAL CARE, USE OF STREETS, ROADS AND BRIDGES, AND TOO MANY OTHER THINGS TO TALLY.
WHERE IS THE JUSTICE FOR ME????????????????
CTF
I guess I’m biased because I used to send remittances home to my wife in another state. We lived in California and I had a temporary job in Nevada. Every payday I would cash my check, buy a money order at the post office, and mail it home to her. Had the government slapped a tax on that process, I would have found some other way to transfer the money. The Mexicans will do the same.
But these remittaqnces will go off radar the minute they are taxed. Illegals ain’t stupid, nor is it likely they’ll obey tax laws. It’ll be a boon for the Mexican drug cartels, who will haul drugs over here, and bundled remittances back.
I don’t think there’s much danger of remittances simply being mailed home as cash, money orders, etc., if a tax is imposed.
If that was a plausible means of sending money home, people would be doing it now for a few pennies per dollar–versus the ten or fifteen percent the wire services charge.
Presumably, mail postmarked from the U.S. has a hard time showing up at the intended address in Mexico or Central America.
Actually, the cost is more like 1-2% See: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/best-ways-to-wire-money-internationally/#cost%20comparison
National Security and Sovereignty protections are Constitutional….no problem with my tax dollars going to this.
We have yet to see what will be the effects on Congressional resistance of Trump’s tweets directly to the people. This has not ever been used before, to directly pressure the legislators.
Trump will have to be careful not to wear it out by overuse, but it promises to be a unique and powerful new means of political communication.
ope. Previous Presidents have never used modern technology to bypass Congress and talk to the people directly. Those fireside chats FDR held are just a figment of everyone’s imagination. Teddy Roosevelt, who created the term “bully pulpit”, never went to the people to cajole Congress to get what he wanted.
Nope. No precedent all.
You sound college educated. Harvard or Yale?
I’ll chip in…Build it!
The Israelis have a rather efficient-looking fence/barrier system along their border with Egypt that certainly looks doable here. The Jordanians have an even more elaborate and expensive, hi-tech border fence, also doable here. We don’t lack the technology, money, or manpower to get it done. What we currently lack is leadership with the will to succeed. At anything.
Merlin you are a powerful wizard. Plus you know what you’re talking about.
Probably the best thing we could possibly buy that Will have a huge return on investment.
Which means Mexico will pay for it, in terms of fewer illegals we have to pay for, fewer violent crimes, etc.
How much does each illegal cost us in welfare, free medical, free education, free college, etc. $20 to 50K EACH YEAR. At least. And not even including the cost of all the crimes.
If the wall only stopped a few thousand illegals each year, it would pay for itself in no time.
Even Mexico has a wall on their southern border.
President Obama, having declared that walls don’t work, is currently having a brick wall laid around his new mansion.
We all knew that any wall built would have to be initially paid for by the US taxpayers. This is obvious. But there are many ways to extract a tax on Mexico that will go towards the wall’s cost. Recently Ford announced that it will no longer build a 1.8 billion dollar plant there and now Trump is hitting on Honda and Toyota to stop their production there too. Imagine if he told them that he would allow them to stay in Mexico if they paid a tax on every vehicle imported into the US and it went towards the wall. Also, any NAFTA-related commerce could also be hit up for tax money for the wall. Then he could institute a “Crossing the border” tax on anyone, legal or illegal, going either way to pay a tax. He could put up one of those big donation billboards that shows how much has been collected towards the wall’s cost and it would rise like a thermometer every month.
Respectfully, this is one of the stupider headlines I have seen on Legal Insurrection.
We are going to build the wall; no ifs about it. Trump understands that failing to build the wall would be a gaffe equivalent to Bush the elder’s raising taxes after his “read my lips” promise.
And, Mexico will, in one form or another, wind up paying for it. Some combination of taxes or tariffs, but it will happen. For exactly the same reason.
Link to a quite interesting and thought provoking article at Conservative Treehouse on the Mexico problem:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/01/06/its-beginning-economic-micro-riots-erupt-in-mexico/#more-126722
I know where we could find some cheap labor to build it.
Massachusetts sheriff offers prison inmates to build Trump’s wall http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-inmates-idUSKBN14P1N7
Can you imagine the security costs of securing inmates working outside without walls or fences? Inmates armed with all the usual construction tools?
…within a few yards of Mexico…???
What could possibly go wrong?
I have to laugh!
It would relieve the Massachussetts sheriff of his responsibility (and cost) of keeping those inmates.
So, what’s the problem?
Not building the wall will be far more expensive than building it. So stop looking for excuses (“Ooh! Ooh! Mexico is dragging its feet and won’t pay!!!”) and get to work.
If Congress gets squirrelly about the money, Trump could set up a GoFundMe page. I’ll bet he’d raise eight billion in less than a week.
There are several ways that the wall will pay for itself. The first is in the reduction of illegal immigrants who will enter the US. As a significant number of these people end up on welfare and other forms of public assistance, this would represent a significant savings to the American people. Reducing the number of illegals and curtailing smuggling, will also reduce the amount of money which those people ship out of the US, further reducing costs to US citizens. Placing a tariff on Mexican imports will also allow for the cost of the wall to be offset, as well as increasing jobs in the US.
So, there are a number of ways that the citizenry of Old Mexico can end up “paying” for the construction of the wall.
Trump promised to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it. Trump knows the second part is not gonna happen. He also knows his supporters will immediately make excuses for not making Mexico pay for it. And that is already happening.
I’m not a Trump supporter — far from it. I didn’t vote for him, and I have very low expectations for his presidency. I’m also smart enough to know that campaign promises are frequently not kept.
However, if the US government pays for the wall NOW, and Mexico pays for it LATER — by any of the methods described above — then Trump can say that his promise was kept.
‘If’ is the biggest word in any language, as in, “IF Henry starts training now he could make the next Olympics.”
No Henry, you’ll not make the Olympics.
The wall will get built. Accounting for how exactly Mexico paid for it will be like all accounting tricks.
Years ago there were many mental hospitals across the land. And as you can imagine most were filled to capacity and there was a need to constantly let people out. As the story goes, they had developed a way to easily determine if the patient was sane enough to leave the institution.
They would stop up the sink in the laundry room and turn on the faucet until the water was running over onto the floor. Then would tell the patient to go in and clean up the mess. If the patient immediately started mopping before turning off the faucet, they were not ready to leave. It is insane to keep mopping with the faucet on.
The motto to this story is there is no need to run to and fro in a frantic attempt to deal with the millions of illegals who are here you until we turn off the faucet and stop letting more come in.
We finally have a president who intends to turn off the faucet.
I worked in mental hospitals for over 30 years, specifically determining whether discharge was appropriate for a given patient. I don’t seem to recall this laundry room trick……
“I don’t seem to recall this laundry room trick.”
That’s because it’s just a story, Henry. Did you not read where I wrote, “…as the story goes..”
If you had thrown your chicken bones first it would have cleared that right up. Shake, shake, rattle, roll. The bones say, “It’s just a story.”
Just keepin’ ya honest. ;o)
Thank you, Henry.
Actually, there are a couple of these old chestnuts laying around. They’re not really used for determining if someone is ready to leave a mental institution, but they CAN be useful as “back of the envelope” diagnostic tools for us lawyer types that deal with clients that may have mental health issues to identify if someone has a mental capacity issue without having all the formal training (and to know if we need to ask for a specialist for evaluation purposes).
The one I happen to like is this:
You tell the client that one of the former people you represented had feet so large that he couldn’t put on his pants, so he tried to put them on by putting them over his head.
If the client laughs, they recognize the absurdity of trying to put pants on over your head.
If the client starts to rationalize something about “well, if you can’t put the pants on over the feet, then you’d have to put them on over the head” then you know that the client has a pre-frontal cortex or frontal cortex information processing problem.
Chuck, I worked a long time in what they here call a diversion ER, specifically for mental health/substance abuse emergencies. Patients came from medical ERs, typically after suicide attemtps, or directly from street patrol LEOs, often strapped to restraint boards. As you might imagine, it was one wild-ass unit. I had a uniformed armed city officer who did nothing but shadow me the whole shift.
Anyway, cutting through the crap and saving time where possible was critical. The question I used most often was this: “Do helicopters eat their young?” If their faces screwed up and they went “huh? Wtf?” I was already 90% sure they weren’t commitable as non compos mentis and only had to settle the question of suicide/homicide. And if they regarded the question seriously, well…
“Do helicopters eat their young?”
I like that. It’s short, succinct and to the point, and just absurd enough that the person SHOULD look at me like I’ve lost my marbles for asking the question.
I can think of two individuals that I’ve represented in Criminal matters that would have regarded it as an actual question. Both of which are now pre-trial confined to criminal mental institutions, technically not “permanently” as they have to be re-reviewed every 90 days to see if they improve sufficiently to be ready for trial, but as they’re never going to improve from where they are mentally now, they’re effectively permanently institutionalized.
The benefit that I usually have with my individuals is that I usually don’t have to make a snap decision with immediate life-or-death consequences if my clients are nuts. Usually I’ve got someone like you to do the stabilization, and then I read your notes, sometimes talk to you in person, and then have time to see if they’re nuts because they’re nuts, or if they’re nuts because they’ve got something in their system that is MAKING them nuts that will metabolize out, hopefully without having caused a separate permanent psychosis in the process.
“I worked in mental hospitals for over 30 years…”
There’s a joke in there Henry 🙂
Well, I got committed back in ’83, picked up a broom and got mistaken for an employee, worked my up to headshrinker.
That’s very similar to how Obama got his first job. While visiting Chicago he went to a protest rally, but instead of protesting he just stood around with his hands in his pockets and got mistaken for a community organizer.
A tax on remittances. That’s what’s coming.
And watch the hornets’ nest.
Dear TheDuchessofKitty:
Yes, won’t it be beautiful?
Happiness, that is restoring America.
There aren’t nearly enough remittances to pay for an $8 billion wall even if you taxed them at 50%. Besides, the minute the tax begins, the remittances will go off government/banking radar.
Really? How much money do you think flows from the US to Mexico each year? Citation, please.
Remittances from the US to Mexico (and such remittances are only a small fraction of the total outflow from US to Mexico) alone substantially exceeded $20 billion dollars last year.
http://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/remittances-totaled-oil-income/
Tax only those remittances at 5%, and Trump will have had Mexico pay for an 8 billion dollar wall before he leaves office.
But don’t let little things like facts get in the way of your anti-Trump prejudices.
I’d far prefer bias that doesn’t exist over your abject stupidity.
Do you honestly think illegal aliens who care absolutely nothing for our laws are going to keep sending remittances back to Mexico once they become taxed? Before legislation or EO can set the taxes, the remittances will go underground. Jesus, what an idiot.
The big, beautiful Wall will be built and Mexico will pay for it!
“Unless Trump can convince Mexico to reimburse the US Government”
Trump excels at convincing people!:)
Make America great again!!
Bush didn’t want a wall so he didn’t build it. Instead, he went the high tech route which was a complete failure.
No Trump has to build the wall and if it is to be our wall, then we we’ll have to pony up the money necessary to build an effective wall.
Mexico will pay for the wall, just not all of it.
The “wall”/fence/mountains/”rather vicious rivers” will cost considerably LESS than the “wall” Der Donald sold his dupes.
Watch and see.
About the ONLY thing you can really rely on…???
It WILL have big, beautiful doors for returning “touch-backers”.
As Hawkins and I…along with others…told you over 1.5 years ago. Now even Sessions is down widdit.
Heh…!!!
This thread alone is proof that Trump can ignore his promise to make Mexico pay for it and his supporters will twist like pretzels to cover him.
I’m sympathetic to Mexico, but I’m in favor of building the wall — ASAP, even if US taxpayers have to pay for it — because Mexico is falling apart. Corrupt governments at all levels in that country have robbed the people blind, and have colluded with regional criminal gangs to leave the people defenseless. The Mexican people are becoming desperate. The disorder that’s sure to follow (and has already begun) will spill over into the US, along with Islamic terrorists who already have a presence in Mexico, unless the wall is built, and sufficiently staffed.
I hate the idea of doing what I propose, but I don’t see any alternative.
Trump should host a reality show where people tweet him guesses as to how he plans to fulfill his campaign promises and he could respond with comments like “Are you serious? You’re an idiot”.
Oh wait, he’s already doing that right now…
Yeah, I’m not going to play that game. If he has a coherent, realistic policy, he can put it on the table for discussion, and if he doesn’t, I’ll just assume he has nothing.
I like the “Go Fund Me” comment. I give it a week. Make it Tax deductible… Better yet, a tax credit.
How to pay for the wall:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/politics/memo-explains-how-donald-trump-plans-to-pay-for-border-wall/2007/?nbsp&tid=a_inl
So…. how many of the folks in this room have an actual international border wall as the southern boundary of your property?
Okay, that would just be me.
Before that wall was installed (and I admit, I thought it was a shaky idea at best); foot traffic of illegal aliens – both immigrants seeking work and drug mules – numbered about 1000 or so per week crossing several miles of our property to reach the nearest Interstate Highway. On a weekly basis, crops were destroyed, trees were damaged, equipment was stolen and burned and livestock and pets were killed. On a weekly basis, Border Patrol spent several hundred hours pursuing them across our property.
Over the years, the drug traffickers became much more brazen and aggressive. Threatening our workers if they called tips into law enforcement. We’ve had our families and the employees families threatened.
Since the fence went in across our southern boundary, the foot traffic has decreased to nearly zero (yes, that traffic did move to where the fence stopped and now that property owner must deal with increased traffic). We still deal with threats and intimidation, but at least is has decreased.
The day of the “humble immigrant” has passed many years ago. 98% of the illegal activity is human trafficking and drug trafficking. You’ll never get those numbers to zero, but you can make it less attractive to take those risks. Currently, there is nearly zero risk to at least try.
I am 100% behind a robust guest worker program and an overall to the immigration application procedure that doesn’t leave honest people in limbo for years. But none of that happens until you get some type of real and meaningful enforcement.
And yes….. the Remittances Program is a very ripe target for gaining Mexico’s cooperation. Mexico is completely dependent on those monies coming in from the US to support their economy. End those resources and the Mexican people are going to become less complacent about their corrupt government.
Disclaimer – We sold out and left 3 years ago because despite having roots on the border for 150 years and 5 generations. We loved the food, the land, the people and the culture but we decided we just couldn’t continue living in an environment of lawlessness. Once our children have finished college/military service, they won’t be going back either.