Affordable Porsches

I’ve been looking for a good example to illustrate the poor cause-and-effect thinking that led politicians to push for home ownership by lowering lending standards.  In this post, I pointed out:

They [politicians] thought that home ownership led to responsible behavior.  In reality, responsible behavior leads to home ownership.

Fellow blogger, Speedmaster at The Pretense of Knowledge, provides an excellent analogy to illustrate this:

It would be like noting that nearly everyone with a Porsche was very well-off, then deciding that buying everyone a Porsche with taxpayer money would make us successful.