My letter to my MoCs re: the wall and its cost

Aargh. For some reason I decided to spend my time writing my MoCs instead of doing something more pleasant. Here's what I just sent my three MoCs. Feel free to copy and re-send if you want.

And yes, I did include a salutation.

Now that the “wall vs. shutdown” battle has become even more interesting, I think it’s time that the American public be made aware of the realities. The figure the White House keeps repeating, and that we keep seeing in the mainstream media, is $5.7 billion. But, as I’m sure you know, that’s not the price: that’s just a down payment. A piece in Fortune magazine, from January 2018, includes the following:

“Estimates range from as low as $8 billion to as much as $67 billion or more, depending on whom you ask and the number of miles of wall that get built. Based on Trump’s 2017 budget request for $2.6 billion to plan, design and build 75 miles of wall, Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill’s office estimated the per-mile cost would be about $37 million, or nearly $67 billion for the entire 2,000-mile border. Congressional Republicans have said they expect a wall to cost from $12 billion to $15 billion, based on the cost to rebuild existing border fencing covering a third of that distance. These projections, however, don’t include the cost of land acquisition.”

Once more, history gives us a clue as to reality: This is not much different than President Bush’s insistence that the Iraq war would cost “so much,” where it actually cost “a heckuva lot more.”

Since the mainstream media has apparently chosen, for some reason, to keep repeating the $5.7 billion figure, I believe Congressional Democrats should take the initiative to bring out the truth about the estimated cost of that wall. Maybe it’ll help some non-Democrats understand that things aren’t always what they seem, and hopefully reconsider their support of this administration.

Therefore, I urge you and your fellow Members of Congress to get out there and tell it like it is: $5.7 billion is a down payment, and, once the Oval Office has a new occupant and Congress decides to stop the project, that money will have been wasted.

Best regards, and keep up the good work.