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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday January 07 2018, @07:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the numbers-don't-lie dept.

Fred Reed's mathematical analysis of Trump's Wall proves that Trump is insincere, proves that Trump is mathematically incompetent, and earns Fred Reed an honorary nerd card:

https://fredoneverything.org/the-wall-the-sound-and-the-fury-and-not-much-else/

More math!

~childo


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 07 2018, @01:48PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday January 07 2018, @01:48PM (#619133)

    Political accounting will back up whatever the speaker wants to say...

    Truth is, nobody knows the net economic impact of illegal immigrants - not really. They can tally up the cost of police actions against them, but what amount of that was a sunk cost that would have been spent anyway with, or without illegals? Is Trump really trying to put all those law enforcement officers out of work? When they are out of work, will they themselves turn to petty crimes to feed their family? Or, maybe they can retrain to work in road and wall maintenance? Somehow, I doubt they would have gone into law enforcement in the first place if they would rather have been working construction.

    It's like building a road? Yes, yes indeed, the cost is similar, but inevitably higher - there will have to be some sort of road built just to get the construction crews and materials to and from the site, and the road will have to be maintained so crews can maintain and patrol the wall. The difference about this road is that it serves no other purpose, so its construction and maintenance is a 100% sunk cost with no ROI other than more effective blockade of border crossings on that frontier. Clue: if people and goods can't cross there, they will cross elsewhere, so any arguments about interdiction cannot use the entire number of crossings along the wall frontier, because a significant portion of those crossings will happen elsewhere after the wall is built.

    Maybe that border road can be built up to highway standards and used like other highways to move goods - increasing commerce, building up the economies of the border towns? Oh, wait - what will the net impact of more and bigger border towns be on immigration control?

    I think of it like GWII, WMDs be damned, winning, losing, who cares... do we want to be the assholes invading another country bringing mayhem, chaos and death, or not? Similarly with "the wall" - are we that afraid of Mexico that we need to build the next Great Wall of China to repel the invading hordes? It's not an image of strength in my mind.

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