Please, every time you hear somebody say that Trump’s idiotic dream wall across the entire Southern Border would cost $5 billion or even $25 billion, push back. If he got his $5 billion and declared victory, all that proves is that he does not want the wall, but wants only the campaign issue.
His latest version, steel slats with spikes on the top, would cost far more. Let’s start with the cost of the steel, which is the easiest to calculate based on some ballpark assumptions. Then consider getting the steel from the foundaries to the sites, the cost of acquisition of the land, the cost of construction and engineering and technology, and more.
The steel alone would cost $39 billion, not including the billions that it would cost to get the steel from the foundary to the construction site (in most cases in the wilderness, far from any road). Here’s the calculation:
Based on the above illustration, let’s assume there is one slat every foot-and-a-half, with a six inch space between the slats. That comes to 3,520 slats per mile. The Southern Border is 2,000 miles long. That comes to 7,040,000 fucking slats. Let’s further assume that each slat has a footprint of one square foot, and that each slat needs to be 25 feet high to pile into the ground and still leave a height of 18 feet. That means each slat is 25 cubic feet of steel. Steel weighs 489 pounds per cubic foot. That means each slat would weigh 12,225 lbs. for 7,040,000 slats, that’s a total weight of 86,064,000,000 lbs., or 43,032,000 net tons. The latest price quoted price of steel in the United States is $767 per net ton. steelbenchmarker.com/… That comes to $33.0 billion dollars, just for the steel, but the steel is still sitting at the mill in the Upper Midwest.
But if we start ordering steel in these quantities, the price is going to go up just based on laws of supply and demand, which Trump cannot repeal by executive order. It is thus fair to assume that the price would average out at the 2018 high of $912 per net ton. steelbenchmarker.com/… (It would probably go much higher, but let’s just assume.) At that price, the cost of the steel alone would be $39.2 billion. You might quibble with the assumptions, but this is largely directionally correct.
But it gets worse. There is a world market for steel, and Trump’s 25% steel tarriffs, will drive the costs higher even for US consumption of steel made in a US foundary. That additional price pressure is not even in this calculation.
The foundaries for raw steel and pig iron in the United States are largely in the upper Midwest. en.wikipedia.org/… In much of the mileage along the Southern Border, the border is not near a road. www.businessinsider.com/… It is hard to imagine that last 10 miles of a 1,200 mile journey with a truckload of steel from, say, Gary, Indiana to wilderness land in Texas, somewhere on the 900 miles of border between El Paso and Laredo. How do you economically get the steel to the site in the mountains or in the desert or along a Rio Grande riverbank? Now the assumptions become guesses, but the freight, including that complicated last 10 miles, conservatively adds 20% to the cost of the steel as delivered. We are now up to almost $47 billion, cost of steel FOB the border, and we have not even bought the land yet.
While much of the western boundary is on public land, much of the Texas boundary is on private land. www.washingtonpost.com/… Under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, the government cannot take private land for public use without paying just compensation. The federal government can try to make deals with private owners, and failing that, take the land, tender what it regards as just compensation, and litigate in court what the land was really worth, and then pay what the court decides plus in many cases pre-judgment interest (and this last ain’t hay). Let’s just guess that 1,000 miles of border requires acquisition one half-mile deep. That’s 500 square miles, or 320,000 acres. Some of that is wilderness but some is at or near developable land. When George W. Bush tried to build a little fencing along the border, he (the US) had to pay an owner named Eloisa Tamez $56,000 for a quarter-acre tract after a seven-year legal fight. www.washingtonpost.com/… So let’s assume an average of $100,000 per acre, including the unimaginable legal costs. That’s $32 billion for the cost of the land.
That gets us to $79 billion, and we haven’t even begun construction yet. (Think of the special problem of pile-driving these steel slats with those pointy-ass points on the top.) Okay, I’m out of reasonable assumptions, so I will make a wild-ass guess that construction, engineering, technology, and labor across this vast border will add another $20 billion to the costs. Now we are at $99 billion plus incalculables — how much will the tarriffs add to the costs of steel? — how much to maintain this wall for the first five years? — how much cost to place additional instruments around the wall for surveilance (any 18-foot wall can be cleared by ladder or otherwise if nobody is watching)?
That’s $100 billion for something totally ineffective; as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY 8th CD) aptly put it, it’s “a Fifth Century solution to a Twenty-First Century problem.”
In 1914, in the opening lines of one of his most famous poems, Mending Wall, Robert Frost foresaw an inevitable problem:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
Yes, “and makes gaps even two can pass abreast.” After you spent $100 billion, you racist moron.