It is hardly a secret that the Obama administration’s programs to bolster the housing market and help struggling homeowners have failed to meet expectations — Obama admitted so himself last year, when he said his administration was “going back to the drawing board” to expand those programs. The slow progress in housing, as the New York Times detailed today, has “remained a millstone” around the economy’s neck, even though the programs have helped millions of homeowners: the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) and Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) have helped more than 3.6 million people refinance or modify existing loans.

More homeowners have received assistance through reforms and changes made to the private modification and refinancing process, and even more are sure to benefit from the $25-billion mortgage settlement between large banks and the federal government and state attorneys generals reached this year. But even as the housing market has begun to show signs of life in recent months, there are ways in which Congress and the administration could help boost the housing market right now:

Pay for principal reductions: Edward DeMarco, the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, recently turned down an offer from the Obama administration to help pay for principal reductions on loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. DeMarco’s primary concern is price; his agency has approved principal reductions in the past when someone other than Fannie and Freddie fronted the whole bill. So the Treasury Department can bypass this hangup by offering to pay for certain principal reductions in full, as the Center for American Progress’ John Griffith has written. This could help hundreds of thousands of underwater homeowners avoid foreclosure and would not require any new funding, thanks to unspent funds from HAMP and the Treasury’s Hardest Hit Fund.

Streamline existing refinancing programs: Streamlining and better utilizing two programs already in existence — the Home Affordable Refinancing Program and the Federal Housing Administration’s Short Refinance program — could further aid the housing market. Small changes that, again, would not cost taxpayers more money could be made to HARP and the Short Refi program to make refinancings available to more homeowners, helping some of the millions of underwater homeowners that are locked in at above-market rates by reducing their mortgage payments by an average of $2,600 a year.

Seek new ways to increase refinancings: Roughly 3.2 million underwater homeowners are current on their monthly payments but cannot refinance to today’s historically low rates, simply because their loans are ineligible for current government programs. Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) have each proposed new programs that seek to help these borrowers refinance, and the Obama administration has indicated that it would consider both proposals. President Obama proposed a program similar to Feinstein’s in his three-pronged refinancing plan earlier this year, while Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that he’d like to work with Merkley to test the proposal through a pilot program, assuming they have the legal authority to do so.

While Obama’s programs haven’t succeeded the way he hoped, he hasn’t received much help from congressional Republicans, who have consistently and repeatedly blocked efforts to address the housing crisis. Obama, at least, has attempted to help the housing market, something House Republicans can’t say: their budget, in fact, would derail the recent progress the housing market has made. The nation’s biggest banks haven’t helped either, using predatory and often illegal practices to foreclose on a countless number of homeowners, prolonging the pain the housing crisis has caused.

Our guest blogger is Melissa Boteach, director of Poverty to Prosperity at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

To distract the public from their plans to funnel additional tax cuts to the wealthiest one percent, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan — the GOP’s presidential ticket — are engaging in one of the oldest and most cynical forms of class warfare: using a manufactured welfare fight as an wedge issue to foster resentment among voters.

The Romney campaign has spent the past several weeks hammering the airwaves with an ad that claims that “President Obama Ended Work Requirements For Welfare” telling voters that he just wants to “hand them a check.” The implication? That while you’re working hard to make ends meet, Obama wants to enable freeloading and give lazy people your tax dollars. We’d be naïve to ignore the racial implications of such an argument.

The claim is blatantly false. The Obama administration has actually proposed to strengthen work requirements by empowering states to innovate on strategies to move 20 percent more of the caseload into sustainable employment. It’s also silly — both Republican and Democratic governors have requested such an action from the administration because the current system is not leading to sustainable jobs for struggling families. Providing greater room for states to experiment with bipartisan ideas could help move the debate in the right direction by providing more information on what strategies work and should be replicated. In fact, as governor of Massachusetts, Romney himself requested similar flexibility and Ryan has worked for similar reforms as a member of Congress.

Unfortunately, the Romney/Ryan campaign appears to have made the calculation that rather than have a debate on the merits about how to expand economic opportunity for our most vulnerable citizens, they would be better served by using false welfare ads as a distraction from the fact that the policies championed by the ticket would provide greater tax cuts to the top 1 percent while slamming the middle-class and increasing poverty.

Our country desperately needs a substantive debate on how to create good jobs and how to better connect the most disadvantaged workers to them. Many low-income workers on TANF are unable to access the child care they need to make work possible and ultimately end up spending nearly half their income on care for their children. Low-wage workers are constantly facing the threat of a layoff because more than 80 percent lack access to a single paid sick day to take care of themselves, a sick kid, or an elderly relative.

Romney and Ryan have been silent on these issues, in part because the budget plan they champion would gut the work supports, such as childcare, job training, and Head Start, that provide greater economic opportunity for working and middle class voters alike. Contrasting these proposed cuts to their tax cuts for the wealthy is not a debate they want to have with the public. Insert shiny (and false) welfare ad as a distraction.

The public should see this strategy for what it is – a crass political tactic to distract voters from Romney’s plans to provide additional tax cuts to the wealthy and dodge the real debate we need to be having about how to create jobs and move struggling families into the middle-class.