The Cost of a Border Wall vs. the Cost of Illegal Immigration

The Wall would pay for itself if a small percentage of illegal immigration is prevented in the next decade. The D's who are great believers in pay as you go should be thrilled about this.

https://cis.org/Report/Cost-Border-Wall-vs-Cost-Illegal-Immigration

https://nypost.com/2018/03/10/cutting-welfare-to-illegal-aliens-would-pay-for-trumps-wall/

 

The cons deception of the wall is just like the tobacco companies lies about "smoking doesn't cause cancer." Eventually the cons will be exposed and thrown out of the government. The country is $20trillion in debt, and the voters are starting to realize it was a con job that did it. Raygun tripled the debt, Shrub daddy doubled it again in only four years, CLINTON BALANCED THE BUDGET, and Shrub Jr. destroyed the balanced budget in his first six months giving $3trillion in tax cut welfare to the rich, and doubled the debt yet again, adding more than all POTUS's put together. Cons down in flames again yesterday in Pennsylvania, in another election.

 

And then reality stepped in.

http://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/...y/benefits-of-immigration-outweigh-costs.html

 

Do you know the difference between illegal and legal immigrants ?? Apparently not.

 

Reagan's deficits were defense spending and a renege of the D's promise to cut spending if non income taxes were raised. 41 raised tax rates and caused a recession. Clinton was a supply sider and benefited from Reagan's defense spending by reducing defense spending after the Soviet Union imploded. 43 had 2 recessions - the from the dot.comstock market implosion and 9/11/01 and the second from low income housing policy and financial banking regulations acting in tragic way. Obama was an economic disaster - anemic growth and massive spending.

The wall will pay for itself and not increase the national debt. You should be very supportive of that, no ??

In PA Republicans received all the votes (that is if Conor Lamb is to be believed).

 

The OP is accurate but not complete.

WAGES and Jobs are primary concerns of stopping illegal immigration. A wall can prevent such crossings by virtue of existence. There will be other methods used as well, but illegals must be convinced it's fruitless to even try.

Currently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there are 27 MILLION legal and illegal immigrants in our workforce. That's 16.9-percent of the ENTIRE WORKFORCE. There is no justification for that many in our workforce coming out of a major recession. This was the primary rationale for immigration laws in the first place.

Steve

 

Yes, not included in the analysis is the depression of wages by illegal aliens in the US. The D's are basically campaigning on placing the welfare of those here illegally ahead of US citizens. Ironically it is the minority US citizens who are most regressively affected by this.

 

Thank god the Mexicans do not know how to build boats or ladders or dig tunnels ....

What's that?

Oh.

Never mind.

 

If you said that on a college campus you'd be expelled for triggering racist feelings via microagression not to mention bringing in religion.

 

The economic disaster happened under Shrub Jr. for deregulating real estate bank loans. Obama brought the country out of the worst recession since the 1929 economic collapse.

First you say that Mexico will pay for the wall, now you say it will pay for itself. You need hip waders for that B.S. Cons were all for tearing down the Soviet wall, now want to build their own. Here's a clue....the cartels are already digging under the wall in Tijuana. Every time they find a tunnel, ten more are being dug. The only thing a wall would do, is make American food more expensive, because farmers would have to pay lazy Americans eight to fifteen dollars an hour to pick their crops, instead of paying Mexicans four dollars an hour. Crops are already rotting in the fields all over this country.....
$13 million in crops rotted in Calif. because no one wanted to pick ...
http://www.politifact.com/punditfac...lion-crops-rotted-calif-because-no-one-wante/
Immigration Crackdown Expected To Increase Crops Left Unharvested ...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/immigrant-worker-unharvested-crops_us_59508a72e4b05c37bb774d89
Alabama immigration: crops rot as workers vanish to ...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigration-law-workers
The Law Of Unintended Consequences: Georgia's Immigration Law ...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realsp...rgias-immigration-law-backfires/#6674c13e492a

 

Your sarcasm meter seems to be broken.

 

The housing bubble started when Bill Clinton used the CRA to justify the requirement that 50% of home loans made by Fannie and Freddie be granted to low income buyers. Lending standards had to be lowered to meet this requirement. The Obama recovery was the worst on record.

You really think that border security means only a wall ??

Secure the border and then implement a guest worker program. Democrats are funny. Their heads explode over low wages and then argue for them ??

BTW it is useful to read your links. The data from Politifact is from 2015.

 

Obviously, dems aren't aware they have taken the PREVIOUS republican position of allowing illegal immigrants into the country to benefit corporations and big businesses with lower or stagnant wages.

Dems have been losing elections since 2010, why stop them now? lol

Steve

 

Didnt obama, the left handed messiah, add 10 trillion all by himself? More than all other presidents combined???

oh yeah, he did..... I wonder why you left that little tidbit out......

not really, I know why you left it out.

 

Yes, even their "win" in PA last night was a Republican. Had there been a D primary Lamb would have never been the candidate. The D's selected a moderate Republican member of the D party to run hoping to claim an anti Trump win. Lamb however is much closer to Trump than any D in the House right now. Hopefully he will have the integrity to vote according to his campaign promises.

 

. . . and dems have been losing elections SINCE 2010 while their power levels have reached the levels of power NOT SEEN SINCE 1929. They've lost well over a 1000+ seats ACROSS THE BOARD, at local, state, and federal levels.

That's 89 YEARS of power change in less than a decade. It's pre-Roosevelt!

Steve

 

0

Not mine - it's now the standard on college campuses to vilify through bullying anyone who makes any inadvertent remark which could trigger a negative response in anyone. Intent is irrelevant and the standard for outrage is set by each individual. Offend anyone and you will be in trouble. It's getting so bad in the UK that conservatives who wish to travel there are being refused entry due to hate speech because they oppose same sex marriage but UK citizens who fought for ISIS are returning with no questions asked.

 

Your sources appear to make the very false assumption that all illegal aliens cross the border on land from Mexico. The percentages appear to try to credit against the other reports of "total cost" of illegal immigrants within a year.

 

I have no problem with a border wall. It will cost a tiny fraction of the military budget for one year and should last for generations.

And what does it hurt?

Surely, it will stop at least a few hundred/thousand people from illegally entering America each year. And there is NOTHING wrong with that.

And even if it costs $25 billion? So what? That is only 165'th of the entire federal budget for 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_States_federal_budget

I honestly do not see the big deal about this wall.

 

How so ??

 

When you get back to reality, you'll understand that the $6 trillion Obama added, was digging this country out of the hole Shrub Jr. and his republican congress put us in. Obama added less than Shrub percent. And all of Obama's spending is because of Shrub destroying the whole U.S. economy.

Donald Trump (as projected in FY 2019 budget): Plans to add $8.282 trillion, a 41 percent increase from the $20.245 trillion debt at the end of Obama's last budget, FY 2017. If he spends as he hopes, Trump will add the second-highest dollar amount in history. More important, he will add almost as much in his first term as Obama did in two terms.

Barack Obama: Added $8.588 trillion, a 74 percent increase from the $11.657 trillion debt at the end of Bush’s last budget, FY 2009.

George W. Bush: Added $5.849 trillion, a 101 percent increase from the $5.8 trillion debt at the end of Clinton's last budget, FY 2001.

https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by-president-by-dollar-and-percent-3306296

 

Obama dug the country out of the hole created by D policies ?? His economy was pathetic and his spending was astronomical.

I guess I have to use it again. Here is the truth about the housing bubble and financial crisis:


The housing bubble and financial crisis are actually two different things although the collapse of the housing bubble resulted in the financial crisis. The housing bubble was caused by the lowering of lending standards due to the HUD requirement that Fannie and Freddie make a set percentage of loans to low income borrowers. This policy was initiated by Bill Clinton and was based on an interpretation of the Community Reinvestment Act. At the end of Clinton's term that percentage was 50%. This was increased to 55% by the Bush administration. The lowering of the lending standards was used by unscrupulous mortgage lending firms like Countrywide and New Century to make many other high risk loans. Adding to the housing bubble was the easy money policy of the Fed which made loans easier to afford due to low interest rates. The housing bubble suddenly burst in 2008. This was similar to the dot.com bubble which burst in 2001 and recovered from by 2003 but why was the financial industry so terribly affected this time.


The financial crisis triggered by the housing bubble collapse was the result of a combination of financial and banking regulations going back to 1936 (See the list below). Mortgage backed securities have been around for years before the 00's. They are securities formed by conglomerating home mortgages and are a way for investors to earn a return through the housing market. They have historically been very safe investments. The HUD housing policies however resulted in a portion of the MBS's created in the 90's and 00's to consist of the subprime and other low standard loans. The Basel rules were based on the assumption that securities consisting of home mortgages were of very low risk. Therefore the reserve requirements for MBS's were set at a very low rate of 5%. This meant that for every $50K of MBS's that a commercial or investment bank had it could make loans totaling $1M. Since banks make money from loans they would use the investment vehicles with the lowest reserve requirement. And very many of them did. They bought AAA rated MBS's (the ratings were determined by the National Ratings Agencies - Fitch, Moodys, and Standard and Poors). This was required by gov regulation. But the ratings agencies were not doing due diligence on the make up of the MBS' which was unknown to the banks involved who trusted the ratings and Basel guidelines. Collapse of the housing bubble caused foreclosures in the subprime mortgages especially. This created fear and uncertainty in the value of the MBS's even though they were still paying ~ 90% of their returns. The market price dropped (in some cases a price could not be determined because no one was interested in buying). This is where the mark to market rule came in resulting large paper and consequently the banks reserves falling below the already low 5%. The bailout from the gov started out as TARP which was passed to buy up all these MBS's which had now large paper losses due to mark to market. It was quickly changed however to give money directly to the banks so that they could bring their reserves up to the 5% level. Bear Stearns was bailed out but Lehman was allowed to fail. This resulted in uncertainty and the credit markets froze (none of the banks wanted to lend to other banks who might not be bailed out). Some commercial banks like WaMu also had MBS's in reserve and ended up being taken over.



The analysis of what happened is contained in the book by Friedman and Kraus – “Engineering the Financial Crisis” – 2011. As can be seen these rules were issued over the years with no analysis on how they might conspire together to set up a catastrophic house of cards situation due to the homogenization of asset mix held by many of these investment houses. Collapse of the housing bubble which affected these assets including MBS’s (whose contained loans were still paying at ~ 80%) then lost value due to the market price dropping way below value triggering large paper losses due to mark to market accounting rules. This reduced the capital and lending capacity of the banks due to Basel I and the Recourse Rule (an adoption in the U.S. of part of what later became Basel II), which specify those capital requirements. The conflation of all of this resulted in the financial (really the banking) crisis. The authors also show that the repeal of Glass Steagal had nothing to do with the financial crisis. Glass Steagal prevented the mixing of private deposits with investments and that was not a factor. Here are the set of regulations:




1. SEC Regulations from 1936 requiring mandated minimum ratings for a growing number of institutional investments.


2. SEC decision in 1975 to confer NRSRO on the big three ratings agencies.


3. Basel 1 from 1978 which established favorable risk weighting for mortgages and GSE issued MBS’s.


4. Mark to market accounting established by FAS 115 in 1993 and refined by FAS 157 in 2006.


5. HUD targets for mortgages to low-income families in the late 1990’s resulting in reduction of down payment requirements for the GSE’s.


6. Recourse Rule issued by the FED, FDIC, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision.






Here are some excerpts from an editorial from the WSJ:



Tim Geithner, then head of the New York Fed, opined that "financial market data" gave off no sign of trouble. Kevin Warsh, a fellow Fed governor, agreed: "Capital markets are probably more profitable and more robust . . . than they have perhaps ever been." What idiots. And yet they were right. Jobs, consumption and stock prices were holding up smartly despite the well-recognized turn in housing markets. Then came the financial panic. Did the housing bubble cause the panic—or was the panic somehow separate, making everything worse, including the housing crunch? Good question


Gratifying, then, is the attention showered on a recent book by Jeffrey Friedman and Wladimir Kraus, "Engineering the Financial Crisis." Their work is refreshing for many reasons: It does not assume the housing bubble is the whole story. It allows that honest ignorance (especially about the interaction of complex regulations) might explain the behavior of bankers and regulators. It asks especially interesting questions about the triple-A mortgage derivatives at the heart of the financial meltdown


Basel tried to make banks safer by prescribing capital levels, and by steering them toward "safe" assets. Experience had shown that mortgage-backed securities were among the safest, safer than business and consumer loans and even whole mortgages. So the Basel rules strongly favored mortgage-backed securities. Alas, this became an incentive to over-produce these assets until they became very dangerous indeed to the entire financial system (a formula also implicated in Europe's sovereign debt crisis).


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204468004577166723093578272.html


Google – The Meltdown Remains a Whodunit

 

You ignore this because you can't deal with the reality....
The economic disaster happened under Shrub Jr. for deregulating real estate bank loans. Obama brought the country out of the worst recession since the 1929 economic collapse.

First you say that Mexico will pay for the wall, now you say it will pay for itself. You need hip waders for that B.S. Cons were all for tearing down the Soviet wall, now want to build their own. Here's a clue....the cartels are already digging under the wall in Tijuana. Every time they find a tunnel, ten more are being dug. The only thing a wall would do, is make American food more expensive, because farmers would have to pay lazy Americans eight to fifteen dollars an hour to pick their crops, instead of paying Mexicans four dollars an hour. Crops are already rotting in the fields all over this country.....
$13 million in crops rotted in Calif. because no one wanted to pick ...
http://www.politifact.com/punditfac...lion-crops-rotted-calif-because-no-one-wante/
Immigration Crackdown Expected To Increase Crops Left Unharvested ...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/immigrant-worker-unharvested-crops_us_59508a72e4b05c37bb774d89
Alabama immigration: crops rot as workers vanish to ...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigration-law-workers
The Law Of Unintended Consequences: Georgia's Immigration Law ...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realsp...rgias-immigration-law-backfires/#6674c13e492a

 

No, it wouldn't. Most economists estimate that illegal immigrants are a net boon for the economy or flat, not a net cost. Which is probably why your links don't spend too much time looking at total, net costs. And I have a feeling if we dig further they are vastly lowballing the cost of the wall by excluding maintenance, manning and eminent domain legal costs.

 

Well - not true is why he left that out ...

According to the US Treasury Department -

Obama presided over a $8.5 trillion increase in the debt. An 74% increase.

Bush II presided over a $5.8 trillion dollar increase. A 101% increase.

Clinton added about $1.4 trillion do the debt. A 32% increase.

Bush I added 1.6 trillion. A 54% increase.

Reagan added $1.8 trillion. A 186% increase.

So we see that your claim that Obama increased the debt by more than all other Presidents combined is an oft repeated lie.
You can truthfully say that Obama had the largest increase in debt in dollars, but not as a percentage of previous debt.


Trump has added $1.2 trillion in his first Fiscal Year and is projected to add about the same in his second.