The new chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), has already made quite the splash by announcing a whole slew of investigations that he wants to initiate. Amongst the things that Issa feels are ripe for examination is the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), the Obama administration’s signature foreclosure prevention effort.

“The reasons for the failure of HAMP are complex,” Issa wrote in a letter to the Oversight Committee’s ranking member, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). “I share your view that strong oversight is needed in order to help American homeowners and reduce the waste of taxpayer money.”

On the list of programs desperately in need of some accountability, HAMP has to be high on the list. It was supposed to help 3-4 million troubled borrowers stay in their homes, but is on pace to fall woefully short of its goals, while just a fraction of the money allocated to the program will be spent. More borrowers enroll in the program and then get dropped (after making a series of payments) than ultimately receive sustainable mortgage modifications.

But if Issa does launch a HAMP investigation, what is his ultimate aim? Back in March, Issa wrote that “the Obama administration needs to focus on helping families find ways to weather troubled times and stay in homes they can afford instead of finding ways to mask [HAMP's] failure,” which sounds moderately encouraging. However, in July, he advocated ending HAMP entirely, and leaving troubled homeowners to try and obtain substantively worse private loan modifications:

“It defies common sense that taxpayer money is being used to pay banks to modify loans that are likely to default anyway,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “In cases where loan changes could keep borrowers out of foreclosure, banks have a clear incentive to make changes without a need for public funds”…Issa and [Rep. Jim] Jordan (R-OH) argued that homeowners and taxpayers would be better off in private modification programs.

As Tim Fernholz pointed out, private modifications “don’t usually lower monthly payments enough to keep borrowers in their homes. Even the best industry modifications [only] attempt to make mortgage payments 38 percent of monthly income.” Diane Thompson, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, said that homeowners would be worse off 90 percent of the time if they were all forced into private modifications instead of public.

Meanwhile, solutions exist for turning HAMP into a more streamlined, effective program, that will actually keep borrowers in their homes, preventing all of the negative effects that a foreclosure has on the individual borrower and the community at-large. HAMP is not a program that should be abandoned, but one that needs to be reformed so that it achieves its stated goals. But Issa seems more inclined to use his HAMP investigation — and others inquiries into the causes of the financial crisis — to shill for the banking industry.

Back in September, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) guessed that his state was facing a $10-11 billion budget shortfall for its fiscal 2012-2013 budget, and refused to entertain reports that his budget gap might be larger until he received the state Comptroller’s official report. He even poo-pooed pronouncements from his 2010 election opponent, Houston Mayor Bill White, that Texas’ deficit may be twice what he was estimating. “If [White] wants to be the budget forecaster for the state of Texas, that’s a different job,” Perry said. “It’s called the comptroller.”

Well, the Comptroller released its report today, and Perry was on the wrong end of this one:

Texas is expected to collect $72.2 billion in taxes, fees and other general revenue during the 2012-13 budget, down from the $87 billion used in the current two-year budget, Comptroller Susan Combs announced Monday. That puts the shortfall at $27 billion given that maintaining services would run $99 billion for biennium.

Not only did Perry severely underestimate the depth of his state’s budget woes, but he has also spent the last few years lecturing Washington D.C. on its supposed fiscal improprieties, giving speech after speech in which he held up Texas as the economic model for the nation to follow. Just last week, he said that Congress needs to propose a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, or else “the hard work that Texas and states like ours have done to make prudent fiscal decisions will be washed away by Washington’s growing avalanche of excess”:

“I am convinced that a constitutional limit on Washington’s spending sprees and irresponsible borrowing is the only boundary they will understand and heed. Otherwise, the hard work that Texas and states like ours have done to make prudent fiscal decisions will be washed away by Washington’s growing avalanche of excess.” [1/7/11]

“Americans are growing ever more aware of this spending explosion, and increasingly interested in grabbing the throttle, so they can slow down Washington’s runaway train. I’m convinced that the hardworking citizens of our state and country simply want government to handle the basics, then get out of the way, as we have done here in Texas.” [1/15/10]

“I don’t suspect I’m the only person in this room who is concerned about a national debt that has blown past $11 trillion and a federal deficit that is well over $1 trillion… Fortunately, we have taken the opposite approach here in Texas.” [6/30/09]

“In Texas and South Carolina, we’ve focused on improving “soil conditions” for businesses by cutting taxes, reforming our legal system and our workers’ compensation system. We’d humbly suggest that Congress take a page from those playbooks by focusing on targeted tax relief paid for by cutting spending, not by borrowing.” [12/2/08]

Though it’s facing a budget mess of roughly the same magnitude as California, Texas has received far less attention, and at this point, there’s practically nothing left in the state’s budget to cut besides education and health care spending (while Texas already has some of the lowest per-pupil spending rates and the highest number of those without health insurance).

As Paul Krugman wrote, “Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting — the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending — has been implemented most completely. If the theory can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere.” And it seems the theory can’t make it there.

Last month, President Obama signed into law a tax deal preserving the Bush tax cuts for all Americans — including those for the wealthiest, which he personally opposed — in a deal with Republicans that also cut the payroll tax and extended unemployment benefits. When it was struck, a slew of corporate CEO’s claimed that the deal, and not the fact that corporations were seeing record profits and sitting on trillions in cash while the stock market climbed, proved the Obama administration was unveiling a new, pro-business attitude.

During an interview with Bloomberg News’ Al Hunt, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) took this absurd meme one step further, asserting that the tax deal — which wasn’t passed by Congress and signed into law until December 2010 — was actually the cause of all the excellent results corporate America saw throughout 2010:

HUNT: Let me talk about the Obama administration and business. Corporate profits are soaring. Goldman Sachs named 110 new partners. Bonuses are flowing. S&P has risen more than in any three-year period since the tech bubble. General Motors is — the IPO. This isn’t an anti-business administration, is it?

KYL: I would contend that, for the last two years, it’s been highly anti-business. Some of the results that you just talked about, I suspect, are coming from the fact that we extended tax rates that the president did not want to extend, but was willing to do so at the end of the year last year.

HUNT: But, of course, all these things happened before that.

KYL: No, all these things are, I think, partially a – a result of the knowledge now that taxes are not going to be raised in the next two years.

Watch it:

Kyl doesn’t deign to explain how a deal negotiated in the waning moments of a calendar year had any bearing on what occurred in that year’s first eleven months. All his comment does is show that conservatives are willing to go to great lengths in order to continue asserting, despite the evidence to the contrary, that Obama is anti-business.

In fact, since the Obama administration came into office, times have been very good for corporate America. Here is the New York Times in November, before the contours of the tax deal came into focus:

Corporate profits have been doing extremely well for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history. As a share of gross domestic product, corporate profits also have been increasing, and they now represent 11.2 percent of total output. That is the highest share since the fourth quarter of 2006, when they accounted for 11.7 percent of output.

So does Kyl think that the tax deal is also responsible for all of these numbers? Can we start claiming that the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law in July 2010 caused 2009′s corporate growth?