Our guest blogger is Ed Paisley, Vice President for Editorial at the Center for American Progress.

The Bush Administration and its conservative allies in Congress, including presumptive presidential nominee John McCain (R-AZ), continue to insist that the best way to resolve the ever-worsening U.S. housing crisis is for homeowners at risk of foreclosure to negotiate individually with their mortgage service companies for financial relief. A new report by the State Foreclosure Working Group, which includes bank regulators and attorneys general from 11 states, details why this approach simply doesn’t work.

The problem faced by the mortgage servicers is this: the number of delinquent mortgage loans is on the rise even as more homeowners already facing foreclosure attempt to renegotiate the terms of their loans. The Bush Administration’s failed effort to get mortgage lenders, servicers and investors to voluntarily renegotiate borrowing terms with individual lenders — known as the Hope Now Alliance — was evident even before this most recent report, given the rising number of delinquencies over the past year.

Now, those government officials closest to the crisis at at the state level have detailed exactly why individual and voluntary negotiations between at-risk borrowers and mortgage servicers is clearly not working. As New York Superintendent of Banks Richard Neiman explained to The Wall Street Journal, mortgage servicers need to treat borrowers in bulk “in order to move the process in a more efficient manner.”

A new, more forceful approach, is needed now. The Center for American Progress Action Fund and some of its allies on housing issues support two proposals now before Congress to help troubled homeowners refinance mortgages in bulk, and to help communities hit especially hard by foreclosures cope with the consequences. The Federal government needs these tools to stem the U.S. housing crisis and help the faltering U.S. economy.

Among other odd comments in his National Review article, Douglas Holtz-Eakin on Wednesday declared that the Concord Coalition, whose director had criticized McCain’s agenda, had “largely lost relevancy.”

Funny that Holtz-Eakin should pick out the Concord Coalition, a national bipartisan organization dedicated to fiscal responsibility. The co-founder and chairman of the Concord Coalition is Pete Peterson, an old friend of Senator McCain, an early supporter of his 2008 run and a member of the McCain campaign economic strategy team. When asked this January, during a GOP presidential debate, how he would make economic policy, McCain responded:

I as president, as every other president, [would] rely primarily on my secretary of the Treasury, on my Council of Economic Advisers, on the head of that. I would rely on the circle that I have developed over many years of people like… Pete Peterson and the Concord group.

Just four years ago, Peterson bestowed upon John McCain the Coalition’s annual Economic Patriot Award at an event sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Peterson explained why he had set up the “Concord Coalition devoted to long-term fiscal responsibility and generational equity.” McCain in turn thanked Peterson for his “continued crusade for fiscal sanity and stability on behalf of our children and grandchildren.”

So has the Concord Coalition become largely irrelevant? Or have its principles and goals become largely irrelevant to Senator McCain’s newfound agenda of deficit-financed tax cuts and unbalanced budgets?

Our guest blogger is James Kvaal, Domestic Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The story so far: Senator John McCain has proposed $300 billion a year in tax cuts, but – as The Economist wrote – “the savings in government spending he promises will not come anywhere close to paying for the tax cuts.”

Yesterday, McCain economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin defended his McCain budgeting over at the National Review, arguing that McCain’s proposals will restrain spending and promote economic growth.

But, as Ruth Marcus pointed out, two years ago Holtz-Eakin sounded very different. He said then that, realistically, “government will not be getting any smaller” due to widespread public support for government’s activities. Even a “tremendous effort” by Congress to eliminate wasteful spending totaled less than 0.07 percent of the economy. (McCain’s $300 billion tax cut equals approximately 2 percent of the economy.)

Maybe that is why Holtz-Eakin’s new argument focuses on McCain’s cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. But McCain has already proposed cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits to restore those programs’ solvency. Does he really want even more cuts — hundreds of billions of dollars more — to pay for his tax cuts, as Angry Bear wonders?

It seems more likely that Holtz-Eakin is changing the subject, preferring to discuss the long-run entitlement problem rather than the short-run deficit problem. But adding hundreds of billions, even trillions, to the debt now will only make our long-run problems worse.

Our guest blogger is Adam Jentleson, the Communications and Outreach Director for the Hyde Park Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

John McCain wants to double the Bush tax cuts. But how does this erstwhile fiscal conservative plan to pay for it? An excellent question – and one his campaign has so far failed to answer.

McCain’s tax plan would cost a whopping $300 billion (to put that in perspective, we spend about $200 billion a year on the war in Iraq). According to our accounting, McCain has so far managed to offset a grand total of $33 billion, or 11% of his tax cut.

As we have chronicled on this blog, the other savings McCain claims are bogus. So where will this former budget hawk come up with the more than $250 billion he needs to pay for his plan?

In an effort to hold McCain accountable, The Wonk Room is introducing the Tax Cut Cost-o-Meter, which documents the gap between McCain’s tax cuts and the offsets he proposes to pay for them.

We’ll be updating our new thermometer as the McCain campaign finds ways to pay for its tax cuts — or doesn’t, as the case may be.