The Wall... Not the Song... Nope Not the Great One... Yep that One

I’ve tried to keep these posts light-hearted and hopefully humorous but after the past week it’s been tough to find time to stay light-hearted. As Donald Trump signed executive order after executive order the mood of our entire country swung aggressively. Whether or not it is comfortable for you to think so, we are at a critical point in American history. Some people enjoy the luxury of being able to ignore this past week, myself included. If I’m completely honest none of the executive orders have had that much of an impact on my quality of living. But I can’t keep standing in silence during such a tumultuous time. If all this does is make me seem like an idiot or uninformed or a liberal shill brainwashed by mainstream media, whatever. I’m cool with that. But “a man who stands for nothing will fall for anything” and I’m not falling for this BS.

I’ve waited really as long as I could to hopefully formulate my thoughts and pose my biggest issues in a concise and factual way. But here’s the issue, facts have become subjective. Which is absolutely mind-blowing. There is no “my facts” and “your facts”, there’s just facts. Facts from which you can draw your conclusions and conclusions from which you can form opinions. These opinions I can respect, but when “your facts”, which are not facts at all, are the basis of your opinion I reserve the right to call you a fool.

In order to get my opinions down on paper I’ve chosen to examine some of the proposed executive orders and put forth my opinion. Again I’m doing my best to ground my conjecture in fact. I want my opinions to be as clear and as free from hypocrisy as possible so here I go, my first foray into something I supposedly took for 4 years in college...

The executive order that baffles me and should baffle literally anyone that’s taken macroeconomics is the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. At an estimated $14 billion, the U.S. would construct a wall soooo high and soooo wide that it can’t be scaled nor tunneled under for 2,000 miles.  First off that sounds like it’ll cost a lot more than $14 billion, but alas. “Wait, aren’t bad hombres going to pay for it, right?” Sorry to break it to you, but definitely not at first and probably not afterwards. The U.S. taxpayers will have to pay upfront for the cost according to Trump and trust him, Trump will impose tariffs on Mexican goods, sooo big, y’uge, y’uge tariffs. They’re gonna be great tariffs trust him. He’s a trustworthy guy.

For me, a simple cause and effect analysis of the wall is enough to really poo poo this idea. Just in purely economic forecasting you can see how this will detrimentally hurt the U.S. and most likely have a limited impact on immigration numbers. First off where is this $14 billion coming from? Let’s say that Mexico is going to pay, they’re not, who’s going to front the money? With tax cuts a crucial pillar in the Republican platform, you couldn’t raise taxes for it. I mean with how spineless some Republicans are being maybe, but most Reps would vehemently oppose tax increases and Democrats would oppose it because the wall is a stupid idea.

So let’s say you can’t raise taxes, where does the money come from? Most likely, it’ll come from the privatization of public land. Which is scary as hell! We will be severely compromising the lives of future generations in order to make the next 4 or god forbid 8 years seem like a success. The impact we have on this planet has been overwhelmingly negative for pretty much everything but ourselves. To strip any value left out of our National Parks and public land is our last “fuck you” to the earth and continue to hit the gas as we fly off a cliff.

This is most likely the plan to strip the public lands, but let’s say there’s another way and we go along with the plan to impose a tariff on Mexican goods coming into the U.S. We do have a trade deficit with them after all. They need us to buy stuff. While true we also need them to produce stuff. The basic, day one, macroeconomic effect of imposing a tariff (and especially one in the range of 30%) would cause the increase of prices for Mexican goods substantially. If I have to pay any more for my Jarritos I will be making some aggressive phone calls to my congressman. But really, the plan is to fuck over our 3rd biggest trade partner? Really?

“The tariffs imposed will raise the prices of imports, sure. But that’ll make us buy American made items, that’s good right?” Well for some people yes, but there’s a lot of reasons a country imports things and one of them is due to specialization. The U.S. has gotten really good at producing certain things and the same for Mexico. The price of production goes down the better you get, then you export to a country that doesn’t make it as well. Super simple fucking stuff. So if America has to create the means to manufacture things that we used to import, the cost goes up. Who pays for it? We do. The regular people. And you want to know the funny thing, even with the imposed tariff the Mexican product will likely STILL be cheaper and probably higher quality. But let’s be real if Trump voters were worried about quality and wanted to buy American made products they shouldn’t be shopping at Walmart now should they?  

So yes there’s more details that I probably don’t know. I definitely wasn’t an economics major. But these are really simple things that when used to examine building a $14 billion wall, make it look so batshit crazy I can’t fathom why we’re even having this discussion.

Yes there is a flaw in our immigration system. Yes undocumented immigrants could cause a societal burden (a discussion for later fo sho). The fact (like a fact, fact. Like one supported by other facts.) is that the U.S. blue-collar workers, the middle class, whatever stupid buzzword you want to fit in here will be paying for the wall...twice.

The only impenetrable wall that’s going to save America from sure destruction is around Trump tower with him in it.

BTW: Any reference to economic theory can be pretty easily verified by literally any introductory economics textbook. I also looked at USTR to get my head around our trade relationship with Mexico. If you were curious about my credentials, I don’t have any.