the wall will come later. you heard it. big, beautiful wall. and then today, it s going to come later and now it s about a renovation. is the wall ever going to happen? we were going to have the rolls royce of a big, beautiful wall. the first section of that is inspiring to me to hear that, erin. the second part kind of says that the rolls royce is going to be an overhauled gilapi. there was a time when i made concession to that and it could mean a fence, could mean vibration sensors or infrared cameras and could be drones or a balloon. the president articulated it beautifully. the cheapest thing we can do is build that wall and build the support mechanisms and the technology on it and around it and man it and maintain it.
i m not saying none. this is about the facts. to say you build a wall and we ll be fine, that is not really agreed with by many people in the border security business as i m sure you know. they re not saying they don t need a wall, they re saying the wall is not the answer. i d say this, the wall is the central intrastructural component that we need to build, and then the rest of it are things we need to add on as vibration sensors, sensors in the urban areas where they are tunnelling. out in the open desert they re not tunnelling like they do in the urban areas. they have to have ways to get rid of the dirt. we d see that happen. we need cameras, night vision equipment, sensors. if we don t build a wall, they will continue coming across the desert and that s the way they bring in people that are criminals and are terrorists. you have those coming here that want a job in america. that s part of it, too. if we don t build a wall, we ll have the mess we have today.
grate in the. jon: i want to believe the government s getting smarter, but if we ve spent a billion bucks to cover 53 miles of a 2,000-mile border and that billion dollars didn t get us a system that works, that sounds a little nuts. there are, there have been problems with the system, jon, and you have to keep it in the context too. unfortunately, this is not that unusual when you talk about major technology programs by the government. you look at something like i just looked at fox news for an old article this morning where for 13 years the army invested over $6 billion in the crusader artillery system which never fielded a single system, and that was all sunk money. this by comparison isn t as bad, but it still hurts. we spent a lot of money with boeing and didn t get what the government wanted in rush. jon: all right. thad, thanks for your insights. sure. thanks, jon. jenna: this election season we ve heard lots of talks about tax cuts and that being a way to
on and on. and instead of, you know, really attacking those problems well, we ve had this sort of infantile and toxic debate about it in washington where we get half measures. so, peter, i agree with what you re say, but i think you have a glaring omission in your analysis, and that s the structural reform that s needed. well, i want we need structural reform maybe more than tax cuts. we need tax reform. the problems we had in the housing market were the result of the government trying to micromanage the economy through the tax code. what we really need to do is move away from an income tax-based system to a consumption tax system where the government doesn t interfere and distort the economy and create these disincentives and mall investments. the reason i was able to forecast all these problems was because i understood how the government was creating them with their subsidies and regulations and mandates. we need to move away from that. you know, i did try to be a politician, i r
that s why the agency s doing the right thing by saying, hey, this works. we re going to let the agents use it and learn from it in this area, but we re not going forward with deploying a tower-based system, a one size fits all solution across the whole border, and we re certainly not going to do it with one company and only their technology. jon: but you could hire an awful lot of border patrol agents for a billion dollars, couldn t you? is. you can, jon, and they have. it s important to know that the agent increases have gone along with this as well as building of the physical fence. and a lot of other technology that s out there from night vision goggles to predator uavs were never part of this program but have been deployed throughout these same years. it is disappointing, i m sure it s particularly disappointing to boeing, but it doesn t mean we re going to stop putting technology on the border. i think the government has gotten a lot smarter about it, and they ll have a lot mor