NinjaBill
Ask yourself WHY you are learning to fly.
If just as a personal challenge, or to prove to your mates down the pub that you can do it, go for a C150/C152 - it is perhaps the easiest plane to LAND due to the absence of ground effect (every plane is easy to FLY although some e.g. a Tomahawk are too unstable to mess about with a chart in the cockpit etc).
If you want to fly seriously afterwards though, then ask yourself what you might want to fly then. Look around at your local field for shares for sale, or even planes for sale. (I doubt you will do much flying on hourly-billed self fly hire; very few people do due to the huge cost of a decent trip somewhere and the impossibility of going away with it for a week etc)
If you think you can afford to buy into a PA28 group for example then (assuming the group plane is on a Public Transport CofA) buy into it now (**) and do your PPL in it. Same if you want to buy a plane - assuming you are reasonably intelligent the foregoing is IMHO true even if you want to fly something quite complex. The huge advantage of learning in what you will fly eventually is that when you've got your PPL you already have some 50-70 hours on type and you know it inside out.
(**) before buying into a group, ask around re any problems with existing members, and discreetly get an experienced pilot / engineer to give you a discreet view on the plane. Don't ask an instructor in your school for his view - OF COURSE he wants you to rent his by the hour.
I've been around this block well and truly....