It might be more accurate to say "these politicians subsidized home ownership and cars at the expense of those who don't choose or can't afford to partake".

It's hard to express in the space of a HN comment, but American society is built to encourage suburban sprawl and car dependence in almost every way imaginable.

* The mortgage interest tax deduction taxes renters to give that money to buyers

* Roads, once supposedly funded by fuel taxes, are now mostly funded by general revenue, meaning that they're an all you can buffet (so why not use all you can? Somebody else is going to, after all)

* Drivers who kill cyclists and pedestrians virtually never face any serious consequences for their actions

* Cities force amenities, jobs, and homes to be ridiculously - comically - far apart from each other through zoning. How the hell does central Dublin have tens of thousands of people, hundreds of pubs, and thousands upon thousands upon thousands of jobs all within a couple miles of each other, while people in Mountain View are pissed off their neighbors might want to put a duplex on land that they own because hey, that's too many people!

* We make it ILLEGAL to build homes and businesses without ridiculous excesses of parking, meaning you have to pay for parking whether you like it or not

* The cost of parking is rolled in to the cost of goods and services. A grocery store's land is easily 70% parking. That land costs a lot of money. Why do I have to pay for everyone else's parking when I walk to the store?

* Auto companies normalized the idea that streets are only for cars with campaigns to popularize terms like Jaywalking. I mean, think about it - for all of human civilization streets were where kids played, vendors sold, people chatted, and horses, carts, and people moved. Then the car showed up, quite literally started killing everyone in its way, and we decided everyone else can just deal with it

* Safety standards in the US tend to worry about the safety of the vehicle's occupants without regard to those struck by the vehicles. That's almost as dumb as imposing safety standards on guns based on the threat to the firearm operator.

Edit:I should have said "based solely on the threat". Obviously it's important that guns don't blow up in their user's face. And I conflate safety standards with licensing, though the comparison to cars there is fairly apt.

* Carbon emissions are likely to cause trillions of dollars in economic damage and kill millions of people through increased disease, decreased food security, and increased drought, among numerous other things. The people who will bear most of this cost are not the ones who are causing it. Gasoline should be taxed at the rate necessary to remove its carbon from the air via proven means. This would probably make it around $15 a gallon, which much to the surprise of most in the US, isn't THAT much. Very healthy societies function fine with $10/gallon fuel. In those places it is not wasted so profligately.

* There's more, but I need to get back to other stuff.

tl;dr - if you live in the US, you're going to pay the huge, tragic cost of auto dependency whether you like it or not, so you better get with it and just buy one already.