Today's Washington Post reports on the government's oh-so-helpful efforts that have fueled today's housing debacle:

In 2004, as regulators warned that subprime lenders were saddling borrowers with mortgages they could not afford, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development helped fuel more of that risky lending.

Eager to put more low-income and minority families into their own homes, the agency required that two government-chartered mortgage finance firms purchase far more "affordable" loans made to these borrowers. HUD stuck with an outdated policy that allowed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to count billions of dollars they invested in subprime loans as a public good that would foster affordable housing...

Today, 3 million to 4 million families are expected to lose their homes to foreclosure because they cannot afford their high-interest subprime loans. Lower-income and minority home buyers--those who were supposed to benefit from HUD's actions--are falling into default at a rate at least three times that of other borrowers.

Michael Barr, a University of Michigan law professor who is advising Congress, calls the HUD/Fannie/Freddie snafu "irresponsible" and "an abject failure to regulate." It's also yet another example of the sometimes disastrous consequences of the government's taxpayer-funded good intentions.

Speaking of which, the Wall Street Journal poses another interesting question: Why is Bush Helping Saudi Arabia Build Nukes?