Day 650: Trump’s latest political stunt could cost over $3 billion

Donald Trump remains focused on a caravan that is made up primarily of women and children who are walking from various Central American countries in an effort to gain asylum in the U.S. Their numbers are dwindling by the day, and they remain many hundreds of miles from the U.S. border.

Trump claims there are more members of the caravan — not based on science or empirical data — because he can visually estimate crowd sizes from limited photographs better than others.

So Trump’s newest plan is to deploy up to 15,000 members of the military to the southern border. By way of comparison, there are less than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.

From a logistics standpoint, it’s a nightmare to reconfigure that many troops, which involves pulling them off pertinent work and uprooting them for no real reason other than political gain. Rather than training to fight terrorists, they’ll be standing at the southern border for what veterans acknowledge is a stunt designed to scare Republicans to vote.

From an economic standpoint, the cost will be substantial. When George W. Bush sent 6,000 members of the National Guard to the border, the cost was $1.2 billion. Simply extrapolating that figure — without even factoring in things like inflation — a 15,000 troop presence at the border would cost the government an additional $3 billion of taxpayer money.

With a little over 140 million taxpayers in the U.S., the cost to each for Trump’s folly is over $21 per taxpayer. Each taxpayer is forfeiting a half tank’s worth of gas so Trump can fear-monger for political gain.

Instead of troops getting better at jobs they’re actually needed for, Trump’s plan is to move them at an outrageous cost to ward off women and children from lawfully seeking asylum.

650 days in, 812 to go

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