In 2017, 39.7 million Americans lived below the federally established poverty level of an annual income of $24,600 for a family or four. Of these, 19 million live in deep poverty, meaning that their total family income is less than one-half of the poverty threshold. These people don't have enough resources to secure basic life necessities. For most of them the inane discussion about the economics behind Donald Trump's $5.7 billion demand for support of his border wall, which forced 800,000 government employees to survive without a paycheck during the recent government shutdown, must have come across as incomprehensible and moronically insensitive.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a wannabe billionaire (a contested $200 million shy of that goal), responding to reports that some government workers were relying on charity, homeless shelters and food banks, said: "I know they are, and I don't understand why." He suggested that those affected should be able to take out a loan, entirely missing the point when he rambled on: "We've had shutdowns, albeit for not such a long period as we've been thus far, but put it in the perspective: You're talking about 800,000 workers, if they never got their pay - which is not the case, they will eventually get it - but if they never got it, you're talking about a third of a percent on our GDP." (Quoted in "Real Clear Politics," Jan. 24, 2019.) Not to be outdone, Donald Trump, referencing an unsubstantiated annual price tag for illegal immigration of $250 billion, chimed in: "The $5 billion dollars ... is such a small amount compared to the level of the problem. It is insignificant compared to what we are talking about."
For the many wage earners who transitioned from viewing our national pastime of political infighting from the sidelines to confronting significant bread and butter issues for themselves and their families, this incredulously insensitive interchange between our national leaders must have come off as incomprehensible. Discounting the dollar value of the disputed wall, and reducing it to an "insignificant" percentage of GDP, should have disturbed everyone impacted by the shutdown. A billion dollars is $1,000 million dollars. If you have one billion, and spend $1,000 per day, you would be spending 2,740 years before going broke. You would need to pend $40 million per year - more than $3 million per month - to spend it all in 25 years. Considering that President Trump is demanding $5.7 billion as a down payment for a wall which ultimately is estimated to cost close to $25 billion, these number become difficult to make sense of for most of us.
Another way to understand the magnitude of the $5.7 billion price tag is to correlate it with more digestible expenditures. For instance, it equates to $17 per U.S. citizen, $40. per U.S. tax payer, about $18,750. for each one of the 304,000 apprehended undocumented immigrants during fiscal 2017, or $57,555. for each person requesting asylum in 2018. (The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 26, 2019). The eventual total estimated expenditure for this wall would virtually cover the cost of two of the navy's newest and most expensive "Gerald R. Ford-class" aircraft carriers, at $12.9 billion a piece.
Journalist and political commentator Nicholas Kristoff calculated that for $5.7 billion we could: "Send 100,000 at risk kids to a high quality pre-school for a year, AND provide Pell grants for 100,000 students to attend college for a full four years, PLUS provide comprehensive treatment to 115,000 Americans struggling with opioid addiction." (N.Y. Times, Jan. 15, 2019).
Our leaders may downplay the amount requested to erect this controversial monument to our president, reducing it to 0.03% of GDP, or, alternatively, discounting it to "only" 0.13% of our projected 2019 federal budget of $4.5 trillion, this is still a huge amount of money. We could probably use it more productively elsewhere.
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