About that border wall....

As you may have heard the United States government is moving towards building a wall to keep out primarily Mexican rapists, by executive order although sooner or later congress will have to get involved not least in order to pay for it. While there are 1.5 million reasons why this may or may not be effective let’s just take a quick peek under the hood shall we?

Land ownership – there is this thing in the united states called private property, and for the most part pretty much everything belongs-legally-to someone, and the land the wall is going to be built upon  is currently consists of valuable useful stuff like ranches and farms.

Assuming that the landowners are interested in giving up the family farm in places like Arizona and Texas-which may not be a good bet-Texan’s are famous for being stubborn knuckleheads- it is unlikely that they will be fully recompensed for the full value of their land. The technical word for this is eminent domain. In 2015 the administration used it to seize land on the border. According to Tony Sedgwick, the co-owner and manager of Carmencita Ranch states that the land government seized at  for 3,000 dollars per acre was land valued at land valued at 10,000 per acre in what was a total overreach of power via executive order. There is actually quite the argument that government by executive order is just pure overreach no matter what the use.

Contractors- as always there is some concern over who will be doing the work. For example the steel is coming in from overseas and little if any American steel will be used. In a wall. Meant to keep out foreigners. Moving on.

Who’s paying for all this anyway? It seems like Miguel the guy that runs the taco truck in the parking lot at work is not going to have the 3 trillion dollars that building the wall will need. Nonsense you say, there’s no way that beautiful wall will cost three trillion dollars, that’s crazy talk, and it’s only going to be 400 billion. Which Miguel is also unlikely to have. Or even the current low end estimate (and contractors are always just so good at the low end estimate aren’t they?) of 15 billion. So far the forms of payment proposed by the super awesome very good executive fiat are 1. Congress, which means every American citizen. 2. A 20 % tariff on every product brought in from Mexico which makes perfect sense because that’s exactly how the free market works best with more regulation. On the first blush this sounds great-make someone else pay! Ha ha those suckers that buy stuff from those companies are sure gonna get screwed! Yeah you know customers of companies like Wal Mart, GM, Boeing, Coca Cola, Caterpillar and John Deere.  All of which would in all probability increase their prices by 20%, or possibly more. Let alone anyone that buys corn, watermelons, strawberries, tomatoes or gasoline because yes, mexico is the third largest supplier of oil to the united states only just behind saudi arabia by volume.. 3. A cross border tax. Which is another word for a tariff and is also another great free market idea. Except that it isn’t a great free market idea. It also would mean expanding the IRS beyond the capacity to drown it in a bathtub forever and also would make the IRS more powerful which is totally (not) a great plan.

The real problem with all these proposed ideas is that even if they just are proposals for negotiation- they are are in practical terms a tax increase no matter how it is worded. A tax increase without going through congress-which is the sole constitutional authority on taxation-not the president’s office. Kind of a dangerous precedent to set no matter how you feel about immigration.


http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/08/obamas-homeland-security-seizing-private-citizen-property-via-eminent-domain-along-mexico-border/

https://qz.com/895816/trump-wants-to-pay-for-border-wall-with-mexico-with-tariffs-on-trade/

http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/whos-going-pay-wall-congress

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38764079