Govt wants more in the middle-class, so....

Instapundit had an analysis that seems dead-on. (I've edited it a bit):

The government wants to increase the number of folks in the middle-class. How? By giving the poor the things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own a home we’ll have more middle-class people, right?

But home ownership and college don’t cause people to be middle-class. Rather, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, good work habits, the ability to defer gratification, etc.—that let you enter-- and stay in-- the middle class.

Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce those key traits. If anything, it undermines them.

The founding fathers seemed to understand this key point. Unfortunately, today's politicians and bureaucrats don't.

The idea that deadbeats and crack-heads could be turned into solid, mortgage-paying citizens simply by forcing banks to give them a mortgage loan should be seen as the utter delusion that it clearly is. Unfortunately the Democrats--the people who devised and ramrodded this insane notion into law--have almost succeeded in burying their culpability.

If we forget the lesson, we'll simply doom ourselves to repeat it again a couple of decades from now.

Perhaps November will see the public throwing ignorant, misguided pols out of office wholesale.