Donald's fence and the Berlin Wall aren't analogous. One kept people in, the other is supposed to keep people out.* *for now
The reason no wall can be built is not only because of the insane cost, but also because it offers only negative value. The reasons to build a wall can only be political. The GDR bore a huge economic cost for its creation of the border zone and the building and maintenance of its fortifications. The zone consumed around 6,900 square kilometres (2,700 sq mi) – more than six per cent of the East's territory,[43] within which economic activity was severely curtailed or ceased entirely. The actual cost of the border system was a closely guarded secret, and even today it is uncertain exactly how much it cost to build and maintain. The BT-9 watchtowers each cost around 65,000 East German marks to build and the expanded metal fences cost around 151,800 marks per kilometre. The implementation of the "modern frontier" in the 1970s led to a major increase in personnel costs. The total annual expenditure on GDR border troops rose from 600 million marks per annum in 1970 to nearly 1 billion by 1983. In early 1989, East German economists calculated that each arrest cost the equivalent of 2.1 million marks, three times the average "value" to the state of each working person.[44] So basically it is far cheaper for the US not to build a wall.
JS said a wall couldn't be realistically built. You shouldn't have answered him with information about fencing and fortifications since that is not what JS was posting about.
Surely allocating 50,000 troops, vast amounts of money and 6% of your land area to a fence is something to aspire to?
I did, and that answer is obvious. But I think there's still a question of whether or not the wall actually CAN be built, realistically speaking, from funding to manpower to maintenance. If we had an emperor who could conscript unwilling subjects to do it, then yeah, sure. Or maybe that's what we can do with the illegal aliens after rounding them up, force them into labor to build our wall, that'll be some karmic payback!
Like Trump, Berlusconi consistently seemed too absurd to be true. And yet he was. He won elections again, and again, and again, thriving off any and all attention. People didn’t take him or what he said seriously. Then one day we woke up to find our government overrun by criminals, our economy destroyed, and our cultural mores perverted to the extent that the objectification of women was commonplace. There was no more laughing left to do. http://qz.com/624065/a-tip-to-ameri...d-again-and-again-and-again/?utm_source=atlfb
A friend of mine who is a construction manager calculated a cost north of $30 billion for the wall. According to him: Just for a 30ft wall to thwart a 24ft extension ladder and low figure of 25 bucks per square foot it would cost $8.3B (12" thick double rebar curtain concrete fascia is going for these days). A freestanding 30ft wall would be much more than that, even precast.)
And I assume that's just for materials? Now factor in labor (including temporary housing) for constructing that wall across hundreds of miles of harsh desert terrain. Sounds like a plan and a half! Oh, and I'm sure there would be some kind of measure in place to secure the wall deep enough along the entire length that it couldn't be tunneled under, right?
That is just start Its interesting to research east germany - they had to create entire restricted zones in layers up to 5km deep Otherwise people just tunnel underneath it. The problems are immense, and are really only realistic for a totalitarian regime that is sufficiently motivated
Yup. That figure was for the total construction cost of a basic starter wall. He did go on to say that indeed the maintenance, repair (holes made by dynamite and whatever else), surveillance etc would be astronomical as well.
It'd be hard to find a more presidential pair to represent America, the American people and to live in the white house. As President and first Lady. NSFW
what if that was Bernie Sanders wife? Would you hold that against him? Of all the reasons to not vote for Trump his wife's former job is not top 100.