WASHINGTON – US Congressman Lou Barletta (R-11th, Hazleton) believes he has the solution to help pay for President Donald Trump’s promised Mexico border wall.
Barletta explained how the Border Wall Funding Act of 2017, which he co-sponsored, will work, “About $54-billion goes out of the United States each year through wire transfers and other means, which they call remittances. By putting a modest two percent fee on all remittances headed south of the border, it can bring in anywhere from $900-million to well over a billion dollars a year.”
Barletta explained how the tax will be imposed, “Nearly half of that money goes to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. So it’s people here in the United States, who are wire-transferring money back to their countries. So this would collect from people who are here legally and illegally across the board. It would be one way that we could pay for the border wall.”
And he says this is one tax he can get behind, “Taking this amount of money out of our economy and sending it to another country, who are trying to steal our jobs many times, you know we are watching American companies leave the United States and go to Mexico or other places, when we are asking the taxpayers to come up with a way to pay for a wall along the southern border, this seems like a logical step.”
You can hear more from Congressman Barletta from WKOK’s Friday On The Mark program online at WKOK.com. (Ali Stevens)
