President Trump Mandated Concrete Border Wall Financing and Construction
President Trump’s campaign promise mandated a concrete border wall to stop illegal immigration from Mexico. Mexicans must finance and build the concrete structure. We the People must create a mutual agreement with Mexico for financing and construction to fulfill the Presidents promise. Usable Silica Sand is the Key.
First, think of a skyscraper like a Trump Tower. Skyscrapers worldwide are made of concrete. The main ingredient of concrete is Silica sand with a cement binder. The beautiful glass façade on buildings like the Trump tower are made of sand processed at twenty-three hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The foundations, driveways and sidewalks, basements and garages of single family homes are made of usable sand and cement. The ribbon of highways, bridges and tunnels connecting the world all have Silica sand as the main ingredient.
Usable Silica sand is the longtail keyword here. There is a worldwide shortage of the product. The desperate scarcity doesn’t end with building construction in the U.S.
From Jim Hightower’s Lowdown Newsletter we learn that within four years, from 2012 to 2016, China consumed more sand for construction than the US did between 1900 and 2000. And, the city of Shanghai has built more skyscrapers in just the past ten years than there are in New York City.
Wait a minute, you say. While the EPA was still functioning, we were told that deserts are growing worldwide at a disquieting pace. How can there be a shortage of sand? Unfortunately, desert sand is not suitable for construction. The granules are too small and round with below minimum compression ratio for building or fracking.
That’s right, fracking. Companies like ExxonMobil and Halliburton use sand to fracture underground shale deposits to find fuel trapped in those rock formations in states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota.
Big oil companies in Wisconsin, known as the mother of all frackers, are drilling wells nearly two miles deep. The mother-frackers blast ten million pounds of prized sand into the rock, attempting to suck the last miserable drops of peak oil from the earth. There are already one hundred fracture wells in the United States. America will use one hundred twenty million tons of fracking sand this year increasing thirty percent each year.
Fortunately, for Mexico’s Border Wall construction, the President has been successful in reversing Obama’s land policies in places like the scenic Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. Thanks to President Trump’s rollback of mining regulations in these remote, environmentally sensitive alluvial deposit areas along creeks and riverbeds, silica sand availability will increase. Not to worry, habitat protections for endangered species will also be rolled back despite opposition from the tourism and conservation lobby and some Democratic lawmakers.
Governments worldwide including China and Indonesia have made efforts to curtail sand mining. The government of Mexico stopped legitimate sand mining businesses from operating when they found that not only was it destroying their environment the sand was being used in the United States.
Cemex, a small Mexican sand mining corporation with fourteen billion in yearly sales, extract three hundred thousand cubic yards of beautiful Monterey Bay, CA sand each year. They are exempt from federal regulations protecting our beaches. Their stock rose significantly when Trump was elected on the promise of a border wall.
OK, let’s get to it. Here are the nuts and bolts of the plan to build Mexico’s border wall.
It will take two years to acquire the property and complete the design. Not part of the building plan, American taxpayers will pay that portion. With the easing of Dodd-Frank, US banks will help recoup the entire amount with this plan, as will be explained here.
Thanks to automation in the construction industry, it will take two years with only two hundred nonskilled workers to build the wall. The workers could be chosen from a pool of incarcerated illegals. The Justice Department will offer repatriation in Mexico and early release for their participation in the construction workforce.
Next, the Government secures a twenty-five billion-dollar, thirty-year construction bond or capital improvement bond from a Mexican bank as the funding mechanism. The President’s minions estimate twenty-five billion dollars as the cost of the wall. Banamex, Mexico, a subsidiary of Citigroup, or the largest bank in Mexico, Banco do Brasil with five hundred fifty billion in assets are likely choices. With the backing of the US Congress the bank can be confident of repayment starting the second year of construction.
Congress can establish a public-private enterprise to license sixteen Mexican sand mining corporations to extract sand at locations throughout the US. Give those Mexican corporations guarantees for ten years, with the expectation of twenty billion dollars gross resale of the precious cost and price-controlled commodity per year, per corporation.
The taxing authority is the US Congress who will levy a sand mining excise tax of three percent, equaling a minimum ten billion per year in the aggregate, of sand gross resale, as the repayment instrument.
Goldman Sachs can serve as the debt service administrator for accounts receivable turnover, and assigned holder of tax revenue deposits. Per bond contract, they retain the deposits, interest free, for one year. GS legally leverages that amount to one hundred billion per ten billion, for new building construction unrelated to the Wall. Remember, GS retains the tax revenue for one year before repayment starts.
After the first year, Goldman Sachs begins repayment, with Mexican sand mining excise taxes, towards repayment of the bond. GS makes a substantial, taxable profit during the thirty-year maturation of the bond from leveraged loans. The US Government profits from tax revenue. The Mexicans have gleefully built and paid for the wall.
