What's worse than making a stupid campaign promise?  The answer is doubling down on that promise.  (Can you say Obama promising to close Gitmo and end wars?)

As I've written before, a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border will actually help both countries.  It will establish U.S. sovereignty and make any future plan to legalize people here a lot easier and more likely.  It will help Mexico by making it more difficult for cartels to go south with cash and weapons.  

So go ahead and build the wall, and the Mexican political class will thank you privately.  They need it a lot more than we realize.  

So why does Mr. Trump keep talking about Mexico paying for the wall?  I don't get it!   

His latest idea is that he will put some kind of a charge on remittances.  The current estimate is that Mexicans in the U.S. send home about $25 billion. 

There are two problems here:

How do you stop Mexicans living legally in the U.S. from sending money to their families?  For that matter, how do you stop a U.S. citizen of Mexican ancestry from sending money to his grandmother?

Are we going to turn Western Union into an immigration office and call on customers to present documentation before they can wire funds?  The result of that will be to have millions of dollars in cash walking south every month and the crime that comes with that.  The cartels will quickly jump on that business and have something illegal to profit from.  

So here is a better idea: go ahead and build the wall.  Then-senators Obama and Clinton voted for one in 2006.  It passed the U.S. Senate 80-19!  

Let me paraphrase Presidente Vicente Fox, and let's build the "f-ing" wall!  Stop talking about Mexico paying for it, and move on to real issues like Iran, ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Putin in Ukraine, and a U.S. economy that no one is happy with.

P. S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.