Obama Fought The Law..

[GMDino]

For giggles:

Quote:The Great Wall of China has been measured at 13,173 miles, about 6.7 times the size of the fence that would be required to seal the U.S. Mexican border, which is 1,969 miles long.

http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2013/03/12/great-wall-china-times-length-usmexican-border/

Quote:According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the length of the International Boundary line of the U.S.-Canadian border, excluding Alaska, is approximately 3,987 miles, while the length of the U.S.-Mexican border is estimated at 1,933 miles. The length of the Alaska-Canada border alone is 1,538 miles. Nov 9, 2006

All the borders (have to be really safe, ya know) = approx 7458 miles.

So what would it cost to build a wall like China?


(admittedly old data...I'm sure costs have risen in the last 7 years)
http://www.quora.com/How-much-money-would-it-cost-today-to-build-something-like-the-Great-Wall-of-China-in-the-U-S

Quote:Regarding cost:

"DHS's U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) contractor, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), had completed about 73 miles of primary SBI fencing costing approximately $198 million as of September 30, 2007, and about 215 miles of fencing costing about $625 million as of October 31, 2008. Seventy-one of the miles completed as of September 30, 2007, were pedestrian fencing completed at costs ranging from $400,000 to $4.8 million per mile and averaging $2.8 million per mile. CBP had also finished about 2 miles of vehicle fencing at a cost of $2.8 million. Pedestrian fencing accounted for 140 of the miles that CBP had completed as of October 31, 2008, with costs ranging from $400,000 to $15.1 million per mile for an average of $3.9 million per mile. Seventy-five of the miles were vehicle fencing and costs ranged from $200,000 to $1.8 million per mile, averaging $1.0 million per mile. The per mile costs to build the fencing varied considerably because of the type of fencing, topography, materials used, land acquisition costs, and labor costs, among other things."
(source: US-Mexico Border Fence / Great Wall of Mexico)

The costs vary greatly but it's safe to say the per mile cost is somewhere between 1 - 5 million dollars / mile.

That applied to the entire length of the Chinese Wall:
13,170 miles x 1 million dollars = $13 billion to $65 billion.

The individual income tax paid in the US is 2012 was a total of 1,359 billion dollars. (source: 2013 United States federal budget). So if you put 5 cents out of every dollar income tax paid in 2012 toward that ambitious goal, you could erect an up-to-date defensive wall of the same length as the Chinese Great Wall in the US (assuming you already own the 13,170 miles strip of land of course).

Better cut the food stamp program...again.