One of the most frustrating things about having a two-party dominated political system, especially in the heat of an election, is that many important points get ignored if they don’t fit the partisan paradigm. One of the best examples is the impoverished debate about Obama’s record on the economy. The only arguments most people hear [...]

New documents obtained by ProPublica through the Freedom of Information Act provide new insights into what a complete disaster the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) has been.  HAMP was created with $50 billion from TARP funds and was supposed to facilitate mortgage modifications by reducing monthly payments for potentially millions of stressed homeowners.  But the [...]

I’ve found one of the saddest yet most common defenses of President Obama’s handling of his job to be the weird argument that it simply wasn’t possible for him to do a better job, or to do anything different from what he did. It always reminds me of the mantra of the misguided extreme optimist [...]

The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) has basically been a disaster since its start, and it remains one to this day. Roughly nine months ago, the Government Accountability Office examined the program, found many problems, and made several recommendations to improve it. Since then, the Treasury department has failed to make most of the needed [...]

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) has recently called on President Obama to fire Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers. Now I don’t know how Boehner’s mother raised him, but where I come from, that behavior would be considered downright rude. Where is the gratitude? I think John [...]