The 2017 version of Rep. Don Young left no doubt about his views on spending billions for President Trump’s border wall. He said a wall would never work and the federal government had no business promoting it.

It was a sensible position to take.

“I’m not going to spend 18, 20, 100 billion dollars to build something that not’s going to work,” Young said, a statement he liked so much he repeated it in a press release.

Unfortunately, the 2018 version of Don Young claims that he didn’t know what he was talking about.

“The wall itself has to be built, unless we come up with another way and I don’t know what that’s gonna be,” Young, 85, said Friday in a statewide televised debate with challenger Alyse Galvin. “We can’t afford that mass illegal migration into the United States and be America.”

Young also appears to have backed away from the good idea he had about paying for it—allowing people who support the wall to finance it. This remains a better idea than Trump’s claim that Mexico will pay for it.

“I want to sell ‘Wall Bonds.’ Think about this a minute. It’s a play off of War Bonds,” Young said in March 2017 to a group reviewing ocean policies.

“We’ll put them out, give them 2.5 percent interest – that’s what we did in WWII to finance the war. But the decision will be up to you whether we want to build the wall or not. It won’t work… I’m a big Coast Guard guy, always have been… but we got to look at these things as we go through this and say, OK this makes no sense. You want to build a wall, then sell ‘Wall Bonds.’”

What the 2018 version of Young doesn’t realize is that it still makes no sense to spend 18, 20, 100 billion dollars to build something that’s not going to work.