What Atrios Said

Duncan Black on the failed foreclosure relief program:

I think there's a giant issue that political reporters, though not other reporters, have completely ignored, and that's the complete failure of the HAMP program. Here was a program which was supposed to help people. It in theory might have helped some, but for many more it either didn't help or prolonged the agony. They had an interaction with a "government program" which was poorly designed, complicated, and ultimately unhelpful.

To prove that government should be allowed to help people in the future and to expand that capability through legislation, you first have to prove that you can make the government work at the current level.  Unfortunately, the HAMP program was a complete disaster and has directly contributed to more foreclosures, not fewer.  We got proof of those results today: record home foreclosures in the second quarter.

HAMP is a program that failed miserably and because of it, millions of Americans have even less confidence in the government than before and they are right to think so.

Of course, we wouldn't have needed the HAMP program if cramdown legislation had been passed by the Dems back in early 2009 to allow bankruptcy judges to directly change mortgage rates in foreclosure cases to offer effective foreclosure relief.  It was killed in the Senate in April 2009 and again in the House in December when it was voted out of the Wall Street reform bill that passed.  The administration then resorted to HAMP to fix the foreclosure problem.

The Obama administration has done a lot of things well.  But when it comes to fixing arguably the fundamental root cause problem of our economic woes, the housing collapse, this administration has failed miserably.

Now we're all going to pay for it.