Today, BusinessWeek correspondent Keith Epstein explained that the banking industry is lobbying the Senate to narrow the scope of proposed mortgage “cram-downs” — a bankruptcy reform that would allow judges to “cram-down” mortgage payments for troubled homeowners:

There still is activity right now, as we speak, really focused in some ways on the Senate and on moderate Democrats, such as Evan Bayh in the Senate, to try to lessen the impact of what’s coming. The industry pretty much accepts that cram-down is coming…The work is now focused on trying to limit the number of people whose loans will be eligible for that.

Watch it:

This is an important development, because mortgage cram-downs will potentially be a key part of a new housing plan that President Barack Obama will announce tomorrow. As The Wonk Room has noted before, cram-downs are essential to addressing the foreclosure crisis, because they help to get around the problems caused by securitization — the fact that mortgages have been chopped up and sold to investors around the world.

Rampant securitizing means that “the creditors are split into mind-bewildering tranches of differently securitized investors who have no way, or desire, to reach an agreement” to prevent a foreclosure. As US bankruptcy judge Samuel Bufford said, “there’s nobody on the lender side to do the deal unless you [get permission] from investors, and that’s impossible.”

Cram-downs enable judges to cut through all the junk and renegotiate mortgage payments, hopefully enabling more owners to stay in their homes. This — and not banks’ worries about potential losses — should be foremost in the minds of those in Congress that the banking industry is targeting.

To many economists, one of the “worst” pieces of the Senate’s proposed economic recovery bill was an ineffective $15,000 tax credit for home buyers. (It was reduced to $8,000 in the final compromise legislation.) Dean Baker called it a “house flipper tax credit” and Paul Krugman concluded that it would have “cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.”

Not surprisingly, the housing industry heavily pushed the tax credit. For example, e.politics spotted an ad the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) placed in Roll Call on Friday:

The ad quotes the laudatory statements on the importance of the credit in the Wall Street Journal and U.S. News, among other major publications. However, in minuscule text at the bottom of the ad, NAHB qualifies these endorsements with:

All quotes are reader responses to online articles about the proposed $15,000 home buyer tax credit.

ThinkProgress received a response to the NAHB ad from U.S. News editor Brian Kelly:

The quote is misleading as it does not reflect the editorial views of U.S. News & World Report. We have not taken a position on the issue. The quote is from a reader comment left on our website. That fact should have been more prominently noted.

We also attempted to contact editors at the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but have not yet received responses.

It’s not entirely surprising that the NAHB couldn’t find any legitimate experts to back up its defense of the home buyer tax credit. After all, as CAP’s Andrew Jakabovics noted, the previous $7,500 credit would have only saved “the average buyer the equivalent of a latte a month, which is not likely to incentivize anyone who is not already planning to buy a home, thus making it a poor use of taxpayer resources.”

Back in November, when aid to the American auto industry was initially being debated in Congress, Fox News took to characterizing the auto industry’s troubles as solely the fault of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union. “You retire and you get health care for life? Since when? I mean, no wonder the Big Three are broke,” Fox News anchor Gregg Jarrett scoffed.

With the auto makers plans for viability due to Congress today, Fox is back at it, arguing that if the UAW doesn’t make more concessions, then the companies’ plans should be rejected. Anchor Steve Doocy asked “if the United Auto Workers union does not make substantial concessions, should we continue to give the auto companies all that dough?” Watch a compilation:

The notion that the UAW hasn’t made any concessions is as absurd now as it was in November. The UAW has already agreed to suspend its Jobs Bank, delay automaker payments to a retiree health care fund, and the union has implemented a plan to permanently shift retiree health costs into a UAW trust fund in 2010.

The union also initiated a two-tier wage system, under which “new hires receive $14 an hour, about half the wage of current workers, as well as less-extensive benefits.” Part of the restructuring plan is offering buyouts to older workers, in order to hire more “tier two workers” at a lower cost.

Simply put, there is very little left that the union can feasibly cut. As David Madland wrote in the LA Times, “labor costs are less than 10% of the cost of a car; the other 90% goes toward research and development of new product lines, parts, advertising, marketing and management overhead”:

Surely this 90% is more likely to be a source of poor competitiveness, especially because, according to data from the latest Harbour Report, an annual study of manufacturing efficiency, nine out of the 10 most efficient auto assembly plants in North America are union plants, represented by either the UAW or the Canadian Auto Workers.

Obviously, the auto companies need to address some of the long-term problems in their outdated business models. However, the answer does not lie with the solutions prescribed by Fox, which seems to think that “there is something unholy about workers realizing some of the profits they help create.”