The news universe is only so big, so I guess I can understand the minimalist coverage this story received in the mainstream media:
The Obama administration’s flagship effort to help people in danger of losing their homes is falling flat.
More than a third of the 1.24 million borrowers who have enrolled in the $75 billion mortgage modification program have dropped out. That exceeds the number of people who have managed to have their loan payments reduced to help them keep their homes.
Last month alone,155,000 borrowers left the program — bringing the total to 436,000 who have dropped out since it began in March 2009.
This has been an utter and complete failure of a program and reinforced just how obsessed the Obama Administration has been with kicking the can down the road and not facing problems head on.
The housing market, just like everything in a capitalist society, is about incentives, and these weren’t the incentives that were going to heal what ails us. Is it really a surprise that those who couldn’t keep up with their original loans were going to screw up their government subsidized loans? Of course not.
But we did it anyway.
