Here’s How Many Avocados It Would Really Take To Build Donald Trump’s Wall
Donald Trump has had an incredibly busy first week of his presidency, with business ranging from Cabinet confirmations to deadly storms. He’s definitely begun making good on a ton of his campaign promises as well.
One of the most infamous campaign promises that the President began to fulfill this week was the construction of a massive wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. While President Trump has insisted Mexico will pay for it, Mexico has strongly denied that claim time and time again. The President’s latest proposal to ensure that “Mexico” would pay for the wall was to slap a 20% tariff on Mexican imports.
One of Mexico’s most popular imports into the United States is avocados. America imports about 85 percent of the 4 billion avocados it consumes every year, according to the Washington Post. Assuming that all of those come from Mexico, that’s 3.4 billion avocados that come in from Mexico every year. A massive tax increase would raise the cost of those dramatically.
With that in mind, the Washington Post came up with some calculations to see how many avocados it would take to pay for the cost of Donald Trump’s wall. Using $3 as the average price of an avocado and $12-$15 billion as the estimated cost of the wall, they determined that after the 20% import tariff, it would take nearly 20-25 BILLION avocados to pay for the wall — if you were just using avocados.
However, we think the Washington Post is “slightly” off on that mark. The average retail price for an avocado, according to the Hass Avocado Board, is actually $1 each, not $3. That 20% import tariff would only net the US 20 extra cents per avocado to pay for the wall, not the 60 cents that the Post used to estimate their cost. With that in mind, it would actually take up to as many as 75 billion avocados to pay for the wall.
That means that instead of taking up to 7 years to pay back the wall, if we were to pay for the wall using just the extra tax money made from avocados, it would take as many as TWENTY-FIVE YEARS to pay for the cost of it. Thank God that’s actually not how the wall would be paid and that this is all hypothetical.
The import tax would also likely cause the price of avocados to increase as is, meaning that fewer of us could enjoy guac and all of the other awesome dishes that avocado is a part of.
Fortunately, the Trump administration has announced they’ll be looking into other ways to pay for the wall than the 20% tariff, so our precious avocados — and wallets — are safe for now.
