Deliberately conflating cause & effect is a classic politician’s move. It doesn’t even have to be a reversal of the two: it’s probably even more frequent when they cite one part of a positive feedback loop as the unambiguous cause and the other as the clear effect.

The classic example of the later are the politicians who rant “if only these people would get married and stay married, they wouldn’t be so poor” and neglect to consider that impoverished communities create the conditions for rampant single motherhood. The desire to raise children does not magically vanish merely because there are exactly zero worthwhile men in your community that aren’t your father’s age.