The Obama administration today announced that — as part of its new push to boost the economy using measures that don’t require congressional approval — it’s going to overhaul its mortgage refinancing program known as HARP. The program is aimed at helping people who are underwater on their mortgages, meaning they owe more on their mortgage than their house is currently worth.

Previously, the program was only open to those who were more than 25 percent underwater, but the administration is now opening the program to anyone with an underwater mortgage, “so long as they have made at least six consecutive monthly mortgage payments.” And more help for troubled homeowners is certainly a welcome development, as the administration’s signature foreclosure prevention program — the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) — has flopped.

In fact, as the Washington Post noted today, just 5 percent of the money dedicated to HAMP has even been spent:

President Obama pledged at the beginning of his term to boost the nation’s crippled housing market and help as many as 9 million homeowners avoid losing their homes to foreclosure.

Nearly three years later, it hasn’t worked out. Obama has spent just $2.4 billion of the $50 billion he promised. The initiatives he announced have helped 1.7 million people. Housing prices remain near a crisis low. Millions of people are deeply indebted, owing more than their properties are worth, and many have lost their homes to foreclosure or are likely to do so. Economists increasingly say that, as a result, Americans are too scared to spend money, depriving the economy of its traditional engine of growth.

HARP, meanwhile, which is the program that the administration overhauled, was supposed to help 5 million homeowners, but hasn’t even reached 1 million yet.

Refinancing mortgages is all well and good, and will be helpful to those homeowners who can take advantage of the program, but it still isn’t a big bold fix for housing. The administration is still reluctant to take on the big banks by finding a way to encourage writing down principal (literally eliminating outstanding mortgage debt), even though doing so could be a serious job creator. And there is, seemingly, plenty of money with which to start new programs, since the money dedicated to HAMP has yet to go out the door.

Florida’s “jobs” Gov. Rick Scott (R) started with a promise to create 700,000 jobs on top of projected job growth, but has opted for a new slogan: “I don’t have to create any jobs.” Instead, Scott is betting all his chips on corporations, pushing tax breaks for companies with the hope that they will create jobs in return. But, as the Orlando Sun-Sentinel reports, this is a losing bet.

According to Scott’s new Department of Economic Opportunity, taxpayers have paid out $754.2 million in more than 1,500 deals with companies since 1995. The deals were projected to create 224,286 new jobs over that past 16 years, but only one-third were actually created. Overall, the Sunshine State has pledged $1.7 billion of taxpayer money in 1,521 deals with companies. As the breakdown below shows, the majority of those deals “have yet to report any jobs“:

– A total of 33 were net losers. Awarded $24.3 million to create 5,696 jobs, the companies actually lost 1,550 jobs — but were still paid $10.8 million.

– A total of 293 produced some jobs. Awarded $288.7 million to create 60,397 jobs, these companies have so far created 32,747 jobs and been paid $135.7 million. Most of these contracts are still active and may produce more jobs going forward.

– An additional 224 deals produced more jobs than promised. Awarded $204.7 million to create 46,248 jobs, the companies produced 80,229 — and have been paid $167.9 million so far.

– The lion’s share of the awards — 971 — have yet to report any jobs. Some of these contracts have just been inked and haven’t had to report yet. But 192 date to the 1990s. Collectively, these companies were awarded $1.1 billion to create 168,497 jobs. And they’ve been paid $415.3 million.

In addition to these deals, Florida taxpayers “paid out at least $37.9 million to six unnamed companies for 3,600 jobs that never materialized.” Scott’s agency is refusing to disclose the companies, but said it is renegotiating their contracts “so that the incentive payments are in accordance with the company’s performance.”

Given greater leeway by the GOP-led legislature, Scott himself has awarded $98.6 million and paid $15.3 million to companies pledging to create more than 21,246 jobs. At the same time, he killed a high-speed rail project that promised 71,000 jobs, bragged about laying off 15,000 government employees, and rejected funds to create more than 60,000 jobs.

Scott’s aide even admitted that corporate breaks might not produce a single job. Given Florida’s last decade of history, the outlook definitely doesn’t look good.

Steve Forbes

After telling former pizza magnate Herman Cain — proponent of the 999 tax plan — that he’d be glad to “bump plans with you, brother,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) is set to release his own flat tax plan tomorrow. While many details of the plan are still unknown, it is expected to take similar form to the flat tax pushed by Steve Forbes, CEO of Forbes Media, when he ran for president in 1996. Forbes officially endorsed Perry today and helped draft Perry’s version of the flat tax.

The flat tax proposal will likely fall short of generating the same amount of government revenue as the current tax structure, as most all flat tax plans do. What it will do, however, is provide a huge windfall to wealthy individuals like Forbes, whose net worth is already about $430 million. In fact, Citizens for Tax Justice analyzed the plan Forbes’ proposed in 1995 and found that it would give him a total tax break worth $1.9 billion over 30 years:

Taking Forbes up on his suggestion, Citizens for Tax Justice, a non-partisan research group, has updated its earlier analysis of Forbes’s personal tax savings from his proposed 17% flat tax. CTJ’s new, more “dynamic” analysis looks not only at Forbes’s current annual savings from his flat tax, but also at his long-term tax savings. Over the long term, CTJ estimates that Forbes’s tax savings from his flat tax would total approximately $1.9 billion.

At the time of CTJ’s analysis, Forbes earned about $1.6 million annually, and his flat tax plan would have cut his annual tax liability by more than half. But the bulk of Forbes’ savings would have come from investments., as the Forbes plan exempted interest, dividends, and capital gains from taxation. Meanwhile, the 17 percent flat tax Forbes proposed would have blown a $200 billion hole in the federal budget, and its benefits wouldn’t have been shared by low- and middle-income Americans — two-thirds of its proposed tax reductions would have gone to those earning more than $200,000 a year. In order to avoid adding to the deficit, the Forbes plan would have had to include a massive tax hike on the poor.

Perry’s plan won’t come out until tomorrow, but if it is similar to the Forbes plan, the implications are clear: it will be yet another Republican plan that requires poor and middle-class Americans to shoulder the cost of a humongous tax cut for the rich.

Since he’s attempting to run on his record as a job creator in Texas (even though he thinks government can’t create jobs), GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry (R-TX) has repeatedly pointed to a jobs fund that he administered as proof he knows how government can help the business sector. Perry’s jobs fund — known as the Texas Enterprise Fund — not only hasn’t created the number of jobs that Perry says it has, but is basically a slush fund for him to dole out money to companies that donated to his campaigns.

But that wasn’t the only fund that Perry ran during his time in Texas politics. As agriculture commissioner in the 1990s, Perry oversaw a loan guarantee program meant to spur agribusiness. As the Austin American-Statesman noted, the program was so woefully mismanaged that it had to be bailed out…by Perry himself, once he assumed the governor’s office:

Over his eight years as Texas’ farmer-in-chief, Perry oversaw a loan guarantee program with so many defaults that the state had to stop guaranteeing bank loans to startups in agribusiness and eventually bailed out the program with taxpayer money. [...]

By 2002, Perry’s successor, Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs, a Republican, stopped making loans as the percentage of bad loans neared 30 percent.

By 2009, her successor, Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples, also a Republican, asked the Legislature to pay off the loan guarantees with a $14.7 million appropriation. The finance authority could no longer afford the $541,000 to cover the annual interest on the bad debts, almost all of which dated back to Perry’s tenure…In effect, Perry, as governor, signed his own government bailout when he approved the 2009 appropriations bill.

Eventually, “twenty-nine of 102 guaranteed loans defaulted,” and “the majority of the original $25 million [in loan guarantees] — $14.7 million — was bad debt.” And this is hardly the only instance of fiscal mismanagement under Perry’s tenure. After all, he doubled Texas’ debt and then balanced its budget through accounting gimmicks for the current budget cycle (after using stimulus money last cycle).

One of the key reforms included in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law is the Volcker rule, which is aimed at preventing banks from making risky investments with funds that are backed by the federal government. As we wrote when the rule was being debated in Congress, “the overarching goal [of the Volcker rule] would be to ensure that federally backstopped institutions stick to core banking practices such as lending and deposit taking while removing the federal safety net from riskier activities that are divorced from customer services.”

The rule is named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, one of the foremost proponents of strong financial regulation aimed at preventing a replay of the 2008 financial crisis. When the Volcker rule first became law, Volcker himself was reportedly disappointed in how weak Congress had made it. Now that regulators have officially released a draft version of the rule, the verdict is in — Volcker isn’t on board with the rule:

“I don’t like it, but there it is,” Mr. Volcker told me in his first public comments on the sprawling proposal.

“I’d write a much simpler bill. I’d love to see a four-page bill that bans proprietary trading and makes the board and chief executive responsible for compliance. And I’d have strong regulators. If the banks didn’t comply with the spirit of the bill, they’d go after them.”

As former Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE), who was one of the loudest advocates of a strong Volcker rule, put it, “Here’s the key word in the rules: ‘exemption’…Let me tell you, as soon as you see that, it’s pronounced ‘loophole.’ That’s what it means in English.” The law does indeed include wide exemptions and poses hundreds of questions for regulators to consider moving forward (which the banking lobby surely would be happy to provide answers to).

Thanks to the handiwork of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), the Volcker rule was watered down before it even got out of the gate. And now it seems like the banking industry is succeeding in turning it into a piece of Swiss cheese that won’t end Wall Street treating federally backed money like chips in a casino.

As former pizza magnate Herman Cain has risen to the top of Republican presidential primary polls, his “999″ tax plan has faced increasing scrutiny from Republicans, Democrats, and the media alike. Cain’s plan, in effect, would explode federal deficits while raising taxes on the poor, forcing America’s lowest income-earners to shoulder the cost of huge tax breaks for the rich.

Cain’s plan ends several of the current taxes that help fund federal government programs, including the payroll tax that finances Social Security — one of the most popular government programs there is. That would seem like a political loser, given that Americans of all political stripes oppose cuts to the program. But Sunday, Steve Forbes, a former presidential candidate and long-time proponent of the flat tax, praised Cain’s 999 plan specifically for not funding Social Security and Medicare in an editorial published in the New York Post:

The Cain plan would rid us of not only the federal income tax, but also the Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes.

For someone like Forbes, whose net worth is upwards of $430 million, Social Security and Medicare might not be a necessity. For elderly Americans with much less money, however, the programs are vital. Social Security kept 14 million seniors out of poverty in 2010, after many lost most or all of their retirement savings in the 2008 financial crisis. Since it passed in 1965, meanwhile, Medicare has increased the number of seniors with health coverage, improved life expectancy rates, and reduced poverty among the elderly.

As Congress and presidential candidates have focused on spending cuts over the last two years, Americans continue to oppose cuts to both Social Security and Medicare. Apparently, though, ensuring that those programs can’t be funded is something to be celebrated in the Republican presidential primary.