Let’s contrast two lawmakers from the Upper Midwest and their reactions to the still-without-terms foreclosure fraud settlement. Al Franken has a video out toeing the party line on the settlement, really just informing borrowers that, over the next 6-9 months, they may be contacted if they’re eligible for a cash payment from a wrongful foreclosure [...]

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had to go before Congress today and defend the $614 billion proposed budget for the military in the coming fiscal year. Not because that’s a staggering amount, especially with spending caps all over the government. Because it’s too small for [...]

It’s fairly impossible to follow Administration math on the HAMP program, which is part of the TARP authorization. I’ve seen HAMP alternately described as a $75 billion, $50 billion, $45.6 billion and $29 billion program. And the White House has carved money out of HAMP for other housing programs like the Hardest Hit Fund. So [...]

You can now add Maine to the roster of states planning to use at least some of the money distributed by the five leading banks as part of the foreclosure fraud settlement for the purposes of patching up its budget rather than helping homeowners. In an interesting story by Bill Nemitz of the Portland Press-Herald [...]

The Administration’s FY 2013 budget predicts a large shortfall for the Federal Housing Administration, which has predictably suffered during the housing crisis. But the FHA’s Acting Director (what a surprise, an acting director at a key regulatory agency) says that shortfall has been wiped away by the foreclosure fraud settlement deus ex machina: A budget [...]

I’m loath to dive into the numbers of the Administration’s FY 2013 budget, because it won’t be used as anyone’s baseline, and to the extent that it will, that was baked into the cake by the debt limit deal. If you want the hard numbers, the surprisingly best source I’ve found comes from the Guardian. [...]

Lots of people were angered by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s announcement that he would use money gained from the foreclosure fraud settlement to plug his budget hole. I suspected that a lot of states with a budget gap would go this route. And that apparently includes Missouri, a state with a Democratic Governor and a [...]

The FY 2013 budget that the Administration will release today is, in the long run, a meaningless document in substantive terms, so I don’t want to spend that much time on it. But I was a little surprised with the pushback I received about my assessment that it reflects a shift in tone rather than [...]

Noam Scheiber has an excerpt of his new book on Obama’s economic policy in The New Republic. It focuses on 2011 and the series of bruising negotiations with Republicans over the deficit. And it includes the now-familiar internal White House struggles between deficit reduction and economic stimulus, with deficit reduction winning out through 2010 and [...]

House Republicans have decided against using savings from war funding to offset a permanent “doc fix,” which means that Medicare doctors could see their reimbursement rates fall as much as 27% by the end of the month. In addition, this only extends the cost of a permanent doc fix over time, because the cost of [...]

Six Republican Senators unveiled their legislation yesterday to roll back the defense trigger from the debt limit deal, replacing the $600 billion in savings with other cuts. However, this is not a $600 billion deal; in fact, the Senators, led by John McCain, only delayed the first year of defense cuts at a cost of [...]