So, Hair Furor is making a big show of his deportation actions and yet outside of a segment I saw on Rachel Maddow’s show Monday I’ve seen very little about what a waste of money this is. You would think this wasteful outrage would have Elonia on TV and on line everywhere, putting his power and influence into full gear to stop this blatant government waste and abuse! Or not.
I’ve seen a lot of news clips this week of military planes filled with immigrants taking off for central america, but I’ve not seen much media talk of what it costs to do it this way. It is also something that, because tRump declared this a “national emergency” the military is paying little attention to how much they spend on the effort.
This is the estimated costs of operating these planes according to DOD websites and the googly thing:
C-17 $21,000/hr.
C-130 $68,00-71,000/hr.
Boeing 727 (DHS charter rate) $8577/hr.
So that would mean that on average a typical deportation flight like DHS currently does runs about $102,924 for a 12 hour round trip. Put those same people on a C-17 and it jumps to $252,000. So every time one of those is used for a photo op they’re wasting (at a minimum) about $149,000 of your tax money to do it. And that’s using the more efficient of the aircraft at their disposal. A C-130 runs a minimum of $713,000 more.
And that’s the per-flight cost. What about per passenger? The planes the military uses are mainly designed to carry heavy loads, like tanks and supplies on pallets. These are the passenger loads these planes are designed for:
C-17 158
C-130 92
Boeing 727 85-230 (depending on configuration)
So the per-person cost would be $1595 (C-17), $8869 (C-130), and $447 (727). And that’s assuming each flight goes out fully loaded, which is not what seems to be happening so far. So it would be cheaper to book them a first class ticket on a commercial flight for less than any of the military options.
This is not good use of our money. This is not a good use of our military personnel. This is not a good use of our military equipment. And it’s just for show (for one asshole’s precious ego). And these costs are just for the flights, not the costs of rounding people up to get them on the planes in the first place.
The worst part of this show pony is this will never achieve the maladministration’s stated goal of removing all illegals in his term. To do that he would have to ramp up the deportation rate to over 7,500 a day for four years to remove the minimal estimate of 11,000,000 who are here illegally. Total cost of the flights alone would exceed (using just 727’s) $4.9 billion. Use the military flights exclusively and the minimum is $17.5 TRILLION! Plus you are unlikely to ever see enough manpower in place to do it, not to mention how much THAT would cost.
So far, the best daily total they’ve managed to round up is 1,200. Which means at the current rate we’ll have them all out by 2050, or at the end of POTUS’ current term, if he had his way.