During an interview on ABC’s This Week, Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions fell apart and admitted that Mexico isn’t paying for the wall, but that Trump will get the money, “one way or another.”
Video:
Transcript via ABC’s This Week:
STEPHANOPOULOS: You sound quite confident right there.
Do you have any evidence that Mexico is going to pay for it?
SESSIONS: Well, we’re going to get paid for it one way or the other. I know there’s $4 billion a year in excess payments, according to the Department of the Treasury’s own inspector general several years ago that are going to payments to people — tax credits that they shouldn’t get.
Now, these are mostly Mexicans.
And those kind of things add up — $4 billion a year for 10 years is $40 billion. There are a lot of ways we can find money to help pay for this. But in the long run…
STEPHANOPOULOS: How are you going to…
SESSIONS: — they’ve lost those…
STEPHANOPOULOS: — account for that money?
SESSIONS: What’s that?
STEPHANOPOULOS: How are you going to account for…
SESSIONS: Well, we just…
STEPHANOPOULOS: — that money?
SESSIONS: The Department of Treasury, several years ago, under the Obama administration, said that if you change the regulations and enforced it properly, you would save up to $4 billion a year.
There are other things that we can do at the border to create revenue that would pay for the wall. There’s no doubt about that.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But in your discussions with your counterparts in Mexico, they have given no indication at all that the Mexican government is prepared to pay a single cent for this wall (INAUDIBLE)?
SESSIONS: Well, I don’t expect the Mexican government to appropriate money for it. But there are ways that we can deal with our trade situation to create the revenue for it. No doubt about it.
Attorney General Sessions was lying about the math. Taking away the taking the tax credits to people who are working here illegally would not save $4 billion a year.
According to FactCheck.org, the actual savings would be $7.6 billion over 10 years, “It’s true that it wouldn’t save $4.2 billion a year, the figure cited by the IG, at least by official scoring of congressional tax experts. The nonpartisan staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation projected that the proposal would reduce federal outlays by $1 billion in 2014, and $7.6 billion over 10 years.”
The estimated cost of Trump’s wall is $21.6 billion, according to an internal report from the Department of Homeland Security, so taking away the tax credits would only pay for roughly one-third of the wall.
The Trump administration has come a long way from the promise that Mexico will pay for the wall to trying to ransom Democrats into paying for the wall to using inaccurate math to claim that immigrants will pay for the wall.
The reality is that Trump promised that Mexico would pay for the wall, and Jeff Sessions just admitted that Mexico isn’t paying.
Mexico is going pay for the wall is turning out to be another Trump campaign promise that was a lie.
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