Although I disagree with you on the wall and to some extent the military, there's one path that makes a lot more sense to me than what is going on right now. We have a fairly large standing active military, reserve military, and national guard, and it's probably not going away; so why not put it to good use? Example: my wife was a Navy Reserve nurse, and one summer spent her active duty time in Alaska supporting a military construction crew building a road on Indian land - had something to do with a road promised for a land swap as I recall. We have all kinds of military support units - medical, construction, etc - why do make work projects for training or put them to use in foreign countries when they could be actively doing stuff here. Military medical services during emergencies, for example, make a lot of sense - erect and man field hospitals where there's an emergency. Let the military build a border - keeps training up and does something positive (at least some of us think so).
The other thought is the combat troops. Why not patrol our borders for readiness instead of playing in someone else's sandbox? I'm not talking police and I'm not talking lethal action - unless you get to drug smugglers who want to make an issue. I don't know why we get hung up on the Posse Comitatus thing when we are talking defense and not our citizens. Turning people around at a border shouldn't be considered police work in the first place; planes flying air defense fly out of the US as border stoppers - same concept but more personal. A lot of that land is not so different from test ranges in the first place - just patrol a buffer zone 24/7 with the new toys and see how they do. We're going to buy them regardless.
I get what you and hog (and others) are saying about de-incentivizing things, and it makes sense, but we've got at least two camps, and one is always going to undo or reverse policies of the other, so good luck with any lasting disincentives. The way we run a nation is no way to run anything. Personally, I think congress should have to get used to people charging the gates - they might get the idea that instead of dividing people for personal gain that dividing people just might be hazardous to their own wellbeing. Perhaps they'd get the concept of working for the people for a change - weird thought, but couldn't be any worse than what's going on now. Besides politician wannabes are a dime a dozen, so if we lose a few here and there - good riddance - they were smelling bad anyway.
