1. Anyone willing to die for a cause can not be stopped. Strap sticks of dynamite to your chest and no amount of security, no amount of guards and check points is going to stop you from blowing yourself and everyone around you sky-high.
2. We have too many entry points to reasonably protect. You can walk into this country easily from the north or south, or via a little motor boat to some unpopulated strip of coastline. Can you, as a single person, be immediately aware of anyone crossing onto your property? How much does it cost to monitor just that small bit of land? Multiply that by millions and you have the beginnings of an idea of what it would cost to monitor our borders.
3. Our greatest danger is not from foreign terrorism... it's from the crazies in the mountains who think the black helicopters are out to get them. Standard farm, or even household materials can be made into powerful bombs. Should we start restricting the sale of bleach? How about propane tanks? Gasoline is combustable, how about that too? Why aren't we rounding up all the domestic dissenters?
4. How do we staff this? With ShadowWar's estimate of 83,333 hrs to inspect every shipping container at 20min each, that's 228 man years. But you have to be very quick about turning those around otherwise you choke trade. You need to be able to turn those around same-day... which means you need a LOT of workers just doing inspections. At 6m per year, that's 16,438 containers per day, which needs 228 guys working 24hrs to inspect them all the day they come in... but people can't work those hours, so you need 3 8hr shifts. At a minimum, assuming for no slow-downs, no errors, that's 685 people... but we have more ports than that in the US, so really you're looking at a number of workers in the thousands doing nothing but inspecting shipping containers 8hrs a day at 20min per container (which still isn't a reasonable number in many cases)
Lets say there are 500 ports in the US. Each port would get around 12,000 containers a day. At 20min a container, each port has 167 man days of work to do every day. So each port requires 3 shifts of 167 people, or about 500 people per port. That's 250,000 employees total.
Now, of course we have to pay them all good wages, since the government should compensate for any bad spending habits one may have by paying more. Lets say that with salary, and benefits, a single inspector costs the govt $50,000 a year (probably a low number in the long-run). Ready for the total, just in low-end wages?
Really ready?
$12,500,000,000
$12.5 BILLION... and that doesn't include equipment, safety measures etc... and it assumes no delays, no container taking more than 20min to inspect and clear (or quarantine). Take all the other associated costs, and expand the time estimate out just a tad to a full hour per container and you're jumping several orders of magnitude.
Just doubling the inspection time jumps the cost to 25,000,000,000... or 25 billion.
If they passed that appropriations bill you'd be having a fit over the defecit instead.
