Trump's steel-wall for $5.7 billion? The raw-materials alone would cost at least $33 billion.

[DetlefK]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/1/6/1824075/-Trump-s-Steel-Slats-Wall-Would-Cost-100-Billion-Steel-is-39-Bil-FOB-the-Mill-Land-Over-32-Bil?utm_campaign=spotlight

Based on the above illustration, let’s assume there is one slat every foot-and-a-half, with a six inch space between the slats. That comes to 3,520 slats per mile. The Southern Border is 2,000 miles long. That comes to 7,040,000 fucking slats. Let’s further assume that each slat has a footprint of one square foot, and that each slat needs to be 25 feet high to pile into the ground and still leave a height of 18 feet. That means each slat is 25 cubic feet of steel. Steel weighs 489 pounds per cubic foot. That means each slat would weigh 12,225 lbs. for 7,040,000 slats, that’s a total weight of 86,064,000,000 lbs., or 43,032,000 net tons. The latest price quoted price of steel in the United States is $767 per net ton. steelbenchmarker.com/… That comes to $33.0 billion dollars, just for the steel, but the steel is still sitting at the mill in the Upper Midwest.

...

That gets us to $79 billion, and we haven’t even begun construction yet.

[C_U_L8R]

1. What a con job.

[gratuitous]

2. Trump wants to set $5 billion on fire

Because nobody else, except for the Joker in The Dark Knight has done that, and Trump wants to top that.

Hey, it makes as much sense as anything in Camp Runamok.

[Blue Owl]

3. It's all bullshit

Why are ABCNNBCBS/FOX even giving this insanity a platform? It's beyond ridiculous...

[dalton99a]

4. Yeah, let's put a steel wall right in the middle

[exboyfil]

5. At least all steel means that

it might be converted back to something useful someday.

[hunter]

6. Build it with chicken wire and paper mache...

... a hollow useless television prop, just like Trump himself.

[genxlib]

7. Have these people ever heard of pipe?

This analysis is stupid.

Even if the slats were the size they guessed, they wouldn't be solid. At most, they would be filled with something else like concrete. Chances are that those slats would be pipe with something like a 1/2" wall (at most).