Cross ‘Too Expensive’ Off List of Wall Concerns

Democrats have fought President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall, in part, on grounds that it would be too expensive.
 
Yet, the partial government shutdown that the dispute triggered now threatens to cost more than the entire price tag of Trump’s fiscal year 2019 funding request for the wall.
 
That estimate comes courtesy of S&P Global Ratings, first reported by CNBC. The firm calculated that the cost to the economy from the shutdown hit $3.6 billion on Friday. That drag will exceed $6 billion if the shutdown lasts another two weeks. That is more than the $5.7 billion funding request for the wall for fiscal year 2019.
 
Democrats have offered a number of reasons for opposing the wall. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has called the idea “immoral,” even though plenty of prominent Democrats have voted for border barriers in the past, and even though Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) last year offered to fund the wall in exchange for amnesty for young adult illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children.
 
Critics also claim a wall would not work, even though border barriers have proven effective in the United States and other countries.
 
A third prominent argument has been that it simply costs too much, even though $5.6 billion represents about 0.1 percent of total federal spending in a year.
 
S&P Global based its estimate on a measurement of lost productivity by furloughed federal workers and a decline in income for contractors that sell goods and services to the federal government.
 
America now is in unchartered territory, with the shutdown length beating the prior record set in the 1990s during a dispute between then-President Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans.
 
Other experts also have pointed to economic losses resulting from the shutdown. CNBC reported that a shutdown in 2013, which lasted 16 days, cut economic growth by 0.4 percent in the fourth quarter by 0.4 percentage points. J.P Morgan and Bank of America Merrill Lynch both reduced their economic growth forecasts for the first three months of the year because of the shutdown.
 
To the extent that this budget impasse is really just about money, one has to ask at what point does the damage to the economy outweigh fiscal concerns about the expense of a wall. ​