{"id":329178,"date":"2017-10-05T20:32:49","date_gmt":"2017-10-05T19:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/trump-wants-1-6-billion-for-the-border-wall-that-covers-just-74-miles\/"},"modified":"2017-10-05T20:32:49","modified_gmt":"2017-10-05T19:32:49","slug":"trump-wants-1-6-billion-for-the-border-wall-that-covers-just-74-miles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/trump-wants-1-6-billion-for-the-border-wall-that-covers-just-74-miles\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Wants $1.6 Billion for the Border Wall. That Covers Just 74 Miles."},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"pf-content\">\n<p>How much of your money does Donald Trump want to pour into his xenophobic fantasy of erecting an impenetrable wall on our Mexican border?<\/p>\n<p>The big-businessman-turned-president insists he doesn&#8217;t care about costs \u2014 just build it! That seems to be a very un-businesslike approach, but then, it&#8217;s not his money, is it?<\/p>\n<p>For those of you who do care, one measure of what the total tab might be is that he&#8217;s demanding $1.6 billion from Congress to start construction. How much wall will that buy? <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dallasnews.com\/news\/politics\/2017\/05\/23\/trump-budgets-16-billion-build-74-miles-border-wall-promised\">Seventy-four miles<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Now, how long is that U.S.-Mexican border he wants to seal off? One thousand, nine-hundred miles long.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_30195\" style=\"width: 598px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-30195\" src=\"http:\/\/otherwords.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/16866860767_09880ccc22_k-600x378.jpg\" alt=\"U.S.-US-Mexico-border-crossing-fence-wall\" width=\"588\" height=\"370\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tony Webster \/ Flickr<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>So, $1.6 billion down \u2014 and only 1,826 miles to go.<\/p>\n<p>And let&#8217;s not even get into the cost overruns, fraudulent billings, shoddy materials, and other scams that the army of corporate contractors will add to the sticker price of Donald&#8217;s boondoggle on the border.<\/p>\n<p>All of this for a 1,900-mile divider of both physical and symbolic ugliness that only <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/fact-tank\/2017\/02\/24\/most-americans-continue-to-oppose-u-s-border-wall-doubt-mexico-would-pay-for-it\/\">an extremist minority of Americans<\/a> support. Besides being wildly expensive, this Trumpian folly isn&#8217;t needed and won&#8217;t work. It stifles the border economy, tramples on property rights, destroys sensitive environments, and autocratically separates millions of families and communities.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s an insult not only to the people of Mexico, but also to our own people&#8217;s democratic values.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>This piece was reprinted from <a href=\"http:\/\/otherwords.org\/trump-wants-1-6-billion-for-the-border-wall-that-covers-just-74-miles\/\">Other Words<\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\">RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How much of your money does Donald Trump want to pour into his xenophobic fantasy of erecting an impenetrable wall on our Mexican border? The big-businessman-turned-president insists he doesn&#8217;t care about costs \u2014 just build it! That seems to be a very un-businesslike approach, but then, it&#8217;s not his money, is it? For those of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2523,"featured_media":216494,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-329178","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2523"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}