Funny thing. Don Trump doesn’t smoke or drink alcohol, coffee or tea. But he seems determined to put ever more of our cash into the pockets of Mexican drug lords. Tax free as well. What, Publius wants to know, can the great man be thinking? As always with Don, Publius says, check the numbers.
Don says that he will wall in the United States to keep foreigners out. And that it will be the biggest and best wall ever, of course. He says that Mexico will pay for the Great Trump Wall along its border, the Wall’s shortest and cheapest section, by having U.S. authorities retain the remittances that Mexicans living here, citizens and noncitizens, documented and undocumented, send their families to keep them alive. And in Mexico.
As a businessman, Don can tell you that rather than pay him, people simply won’t send remittances. Don knows that these funds—some $24 billion a year according his calculations—will vanish overnight.
But, here is the key. Don can tell you that whether we retain remittances—Publius knows enough about banking to tell you that we can’t—or whether people here stop sending remittances altogether, all those Mexican recipients must replace this huge amount of cash quickly.
The simplest, cheapest, and most obvious way? Don will tell you in a second: Sell us another $24 billion in drugs to make up the difference. Actually, way more than $24 billion because the remittances go to the poorest and, he will tell you, the drug lords will take a huge markup on what the poor produce. Our drug enforcement costs—all taxpayer dollars—will go through the roof.
As for Don’s wall, El Chapo Guzman knows how to deal with that. When the Chapistas are not running drugs they will tunnel people fleeing to the U.S. to make up for their lost remittances. Great business. Pelo de elote will be the toast of the narco kings.
This raises one of the toughest questions Don faces. He’s a businessman and knows that drug prohibition sends at least a hundred billion dollars tax free to foreign drug lords every year. A rational person would ask why we do this. As businessman, Don would ask another, more penetrating, question: in whose interest is it for us to do this? The answer, as Don can tell you, is whoever is being paid.
Publius, who also knows a thing or two about business, has yet another question. If increasing the drug trade is as much in Don’s interest as it appears by his Great Trump Wall proclamations to be, how much is he being paid and by whom? Especially since he claims that he's very rich and doesn't need more money.
Which raises another question. How much are the prohibitionists in Congress being paid? Who is paying them? Where is their cash being stashed? If the Panama Papers don’t give us some insight, the only thing Publius can say is, these guys are good, real good.
One of the most bizarre things in Don’s March 31st wall financing memo to Robert Costa and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post is that to tell who is whom and therefore who can send money where, Don will require all those in the U.S. who want to send money out of the country to document their right to live and work here first. Everything from major financial transactions to Amazon purchases on line must come to an immediate halt until everyone sending money out of the country complies. Don’s compliance system means national ID for everyone who lives in the U.S. The gun lobby will go nuts.
Interestingly, a national ID system is the core of all Don's proposals. Everyone living here must be registered with the Feds. No exceptions. Indeed, Don insists that the heart of the world financial industry, his own New York, shut itself down until this is done.
As always with Don, there is a humorous side to his Great Trump Wall. It’s the portion that runs along the U.S. shoreline of the Great Lakes and their connecting rivers. At just under 5,000 miles, this section is 2.6X the length of the Mexican portion and almost as long as the entire Canada-U.S. border including Alaska. It will keep Americans off the Great Lakes and roll back American border security gains embedded for two centuries in the Treaty of Ghent. It will be absolutely spectacular as it cuts through Niagara Falls. But only for Canadians because the view from the U.S. will be obstructed. Indeed, for the tourist dollars alone, Canadians might pony up all the money needed for the Niagara section. And even encourage Don to put his name in bright lights on it all the way from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. Now we are talking.
Updates
September 1, 2016
Dumb Don© is getting the press someone of his caliber merits. Ron Nixon of the New York Times today made the simple and uncomplicated point that Publius made in July that the Chapistas will simply tunnel under Dumb Don's wall and make lots of money doing it.
January 26, 2017
What Publius showed six months ago is finally becoming obvious to the media: US taxpayers will foot the bill for Trump's wall. It is amazing how long it takes the media to get simple arithmetic. They would have saved us a lot of misery if they had shown this well before the election as Publius did. (See Publius' Learning to Count With Don Trump.) Even now, Dumb Don, whose inability to count is becoming more painfully clear by the day, doesn't get it. Largely because he can't. (See Publius' Illiterate Don and You.) For Don to admit that he can't count would be devastating. He can't go there. So he won't.