Power of Analogies

I have no idea whether the attribution of causation holds any water, but it's certainly a well-crafted piece of rhetoric.

“I told Boyden: ‘Imagine you just fired up the government printing presses and dumped an endless stream of money into the system. You’d have no way of controlling the money supply,’ ” Mr. Dudek said. “He understood totally and intuitively the importance of maintaining the cap, the key ingredient in our acid rain policy.” A month later, the Bush White House sent Congress a cap-and-trade plan...

They also seem to me to be particularly useful in situations involving repugnant transactions. Perhaps an example of cognitive appraisal?