The House passed a $70 billion immigration enforcement funding package Tuesday. Speaker Johnson celebrated. Retail traders immediately googled "immigration stocks" and bought Lockheed Martin because the fighter jets will patrol the border now or something.
Seventy billion dollars. For context, that buys you roughly 280 billion shares of a penny stock that some guy on Reddit swears is the next Tesla. Or it funds the exact same enforcement apparatus that existed last year, which funded the exact same apparatus from the year before, which replaced the apparatus that didn't work the time before that.
The bill passed after months of debate. Months. Imagine spending months arguing about whether to light $70 billion on fire when you could have just lit it on fire in January and saved everyone the time. Speaker Johnson needed a win though. He got one. The market moved zero basis points because none of this matters and it never has.
Some trader in Wisconsin just put his kids' college fund into private prison REITs. He read the headline. He did the math. More enforcement means more beds means more dividends means his daughter goes to Northwestern. She's going to community college. The REITs will underperform the S&P by 40% over the next three years because the $70 billion gets spread across 47 different agencies that each hire 12 consultants who produce PowerPoints about synergy.
The bill allocates funds for technology, personnel, and infrastructure. Translation: cameras that don't work, agents who retire before training ends, and fences that fall over when someone looks at them hard. Your tax dollars at work. My tax dollars at work. Speaker Johnson's re-election campaign at work.
The Wisconsin trader just doubled down on margin.
Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash
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