Just in Time for Election Year: Taxpayers Bailout Delinquent Homeowners

At CNBC’s Website, Reuters reports, “Delinquent Homeowners to Get Mortgage Aid from Government.” Of course as even Reuters notes in the body of the article, read “taxpayers” in the last sentence of that headline:

The Obama administration wants to help more struggling Americans stay in their homes by reducing the amount they owe on their troubled mortgages, a top Treasury official said Saturday.

“We are very definitely trying to facilitate more principal reductions,” said Timothy Massad, Treasury’s acting assistant secretary for financial stability. “It is a very important piece of the overall solution,” he said.

The administration is trying through taxpayer-funded programs to prevent homeowners from losing their homes. Nearly $50 billion has been set aside from the $700 billion bank bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, to help distressed homeowners.

Persistently high unemployment and a weak housing market pose a threat to President Obama’s re-election prospects next year. [You don’t say — Ed]

So far, one of the programs has helped some 670,000 distressed homeowners win lower mortgage payments. But that has done very little to help the overall housing market, which remains depressed even as other parts of the economy have started to recover.