JimLur is seriously mistaken. Those Texans are not going to let Trump come in and seize their land at a price the government sets. Let the lawsuits begin.
Most U.S. border land east of El Paso, Tex., is privately owned. To the west, most of the land is owned by the federal government.
What the Hell Is the 'Military Version of Eminent Domain'? Whatever it is, it can’t be good. Joe Setyon|Jan. 4, 2019 4:22 pm
President Donald Trump says he's willing to use "the military version of eminent domain" to build his proposed wall on the U.S.–Mexico border. It's not exactly clear what he means by that.
Addressing reporters from the Rose Garden today, Trump kept pushing for his ill-advised border wall. But what if Congress refuses to acquiesce to his demand for $5 billion in funding? Why, he'd declare a national emergency "and build [the wall] very quickly," he said.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that he can do that, he'd run into another problem right away: The federal government owns less than one-third of the land on the southern border. The rest belongs to other entities, including states, Native American tribes, and private individuals. Most of the border land in Texas is private property.
Not a problem, said Trump: "You have to use eminent domain," he declared. That's when the government forces a property owner to sell, at a price set by the government. "If we had one person that wouldn't sell us...then we wouldn't be able to build proper border security because we'd have that big opening."
Also: Trump's $25 billion wall would be nearly impossible to build, according to architects
"...These repairs and replacements have been scheduled for years. Trump had nothing to do with it. He can't build one single foot of new fencing."
Leanna Garfield Jan. 14, 2017, 8:55 AM
[...]
The cost will be huge.
As CityLab points out, Trump is pledging to construct the largest infrastructure project since the US highway system and the Erie Canal. He has shared few logistic details about how it will be built, except that Mexico will eventually pay for it (though, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said his country refuses to foot the estimated $25 billion construction cost), after the US starts the construction.
This giant price tag makes the project immediately infeasible, Rosa Sheng, a senior architect at the San Francisco-based firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, tells Business Insider.
"The US [is] currently as a $19-plus trillion deficit. Rather than spending our country's resources on building a wall, we should be focusing our energy on building bridges — both literal and figurative," she says. This includes "infrastructure improvements and transportation in major cities that support interstate supply chains, and alternative green energy production that will address not only climate change, but also challenge our dependency on fossil fuels."
A boy looks at a fence that is part of a section of the U.S.-Mexico border wall at Sunland Park, U.S. opposite the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, September 9, 2016. Picture taken from the Mexico side of the U.S.-Mexico border. Reuters/Jose Luis Gonzalez
[...]
Building Trump's wall may require about 339 million cubic feet of concrete, or three times what was used to build the Hoover Dam, according to the IB Times.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
