The Wall

There’s been a lot of talk about President Donald Trump’s Wall that he’s refusing to fund part of the government over. I thought I give my two cents: I don’t really care.

A $5.7 billion appropriation, while bigger then the USDA and EPA staff appropriations, really is small turkey in the grand scheme of things. Heck, that’s like building two Empire State Plazas at $2.3 billion a piece. Congress allocated $98.5 billion for the Iraq War in 2007, a similarly dubious initiative pushed by President George Bush. in other words, you could with inflation build 20 walls for a year, for the price of one year of the Iraq War.

I am about as skeptical of Trump’s wall as the Bush’s Iraq War. I doubt it will work. Most of the country where they propose to build the wall is pretty remote and formidable to anybody would would try to cross, and people have saws, cutting torches, and can tear down walls. But presidents and politicians more generally have their own stupid predilections, and sometimesΒ it’s better to appease rather then fight.

Like most ambitious projects, we all know most of the wall will never be built, due to a lack of funding and willpower on the behalf of congress. It’s quite possible that it will be decided in years to come that the wall was a stupid waste of time and materials, but being that it’s a steel wall it’s likely to have a lot of valuable scrap metal, that can be melted down for future uses — which will be all the more important to have in reserve as natural resources get used up.

Fawn Lake Retaining Wall

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