JP Morgan Chase accepted a “crisis management” award at an event Thursday night that rewarded the bank for the way it handled the London Whale trading crisis that cost the bank at least $6 billion. The trade set the financial world ablaze when the firm’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, announced it, considering JP Morgan had been the strongest megabank throughout the financial crisis and Dimon often bragged of its “fortress balance sheet.”

But the firm handled the crisis with flying colors, at least according to award presenters, the Wall Street Journal reports:

“J.P. Morgan Chase is winning for its handling of the $6.2 billion trading loss by the London Whale last year,” the event’s host, CNN anchor Ali Velshi, said. “I would say that’s what you call making lemonade out of lemons.”

Kathy Hu, an executive director in J.P. Morgan’s investor relations department, accepted the award and quipped: “Can I just say, ‘Crisis? What crisis?’”

The United States Senate took a slightly different view. In a bipartisan report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued last week, senators blasted the bank for misleading regulators and sidestepping regulations that should have banned the type of trades that kept the loss from occurring.

JP Morgan has been among the fiercest lobbyists against regulations like the Volcker Rule, which was meant to keep financial institutions that have the backing of taxpayers from engaging in risky forms of trading that result in large losses that could pose a risk to the overall economy. As U.S. News and World Report’s Pat Garofalo explained, this should have been a lesson in why the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and the rules it contains should be strengthened. Instead, it won JP Morgan an award.

Florida’s Senate Banking and Insurance Committee this week approved legislation that would speed up the state’s foreclosure process, a move that would remove some protections for homeowners and could increase the likelihood of bank fraud. The committee, which passed the bill 8-2, passed similar legislation in 2012 that did not advance farther.

The bill is an effort to clear Florida’s backlog of foreclosures that piled up as a result of the financial crisis, but as we pointed out when it was introduced in February, it is likely to have unintended consequences that make it easier for banks to deceive homeowners or process unlawful foreclosures. Banks’ past efforts to speed up the process led to fraudulent techniques like robo-signing, and banks foreclosed on homes they didn’t own, homeowners that were seeking to modify their loans, or because of minor clerical errors the banks themselves had made.

While Florida does have a lengthy backlog of foreclosures, its process is not atypically long. The average Florida foreclosure takes more than 600 days to process, about the same length of time it takes the average home nationally to enter foreclosure.

Consumer advocates have pointed out many problems with the foreclosure bill. In addition to potentially inviting fraud, the bill would remove homeowners’ right to reclaim their property after an improper foreclosure. Instead, they would only be eligible for compensation.

Homeless youth in Washington D.C. are being turned away in droves from shelters after the city slashed its budget for homeless children’s services.

In its latest budget, the city enjoys a $417 million budget surplus, yet they cut funding for youth homeless shelters by $700,000 and overall homeless services by $7 million. Mayor Vincent Gray has announced he will keep the surplus in the city’s savings account, which will now total $1.5 billion.

D.C.’s budget cuts are having a disastrous impact on the city’s homeless. As the Washington Post details, many youth are being turned away from shelters who no longer have the budget to accomodate them.

Counselors at one of the city’s largest shelters for homeless youths have had to turn away more than 80 unaccompanied children — some as young as 12 or 13 — who came to them for help in the past six weeks after the city cut more than $700,000 from the shelter’s budget. [...]

For workers on the ground, the effect of lost — or redirected — money has been clear and immediate. One counselor at Sasha Bruce House recalled trying to counsel a sobbing teen seeking a place to sleep after her mother lost the family apartment, and being able to do little to help.

“To not be able to help somebody and know there is not any other option for them — it’s heartbreaking, it’s awful,” said Gina Bulett, the primary counselor. The program now just has five emergency beds, down from 16 last year, but houses dozens more in apartments.

The city’s cuts to homeless services come at a particular inopportune time as the number of people living on the streets continues to increase. A survey last year found 6,954 homeless people in our nation’s capital, a 6 percent increase from the year prior. It’s no surprise then, with increased demand and less funding for shelter beds, that the end result is scores of homeless individuals being turned away from shelters. One notable exception was two months ago when D.C. kept its shelters open throughout inauguration weekend, perhaps in an attempt to hide its homeless population from hundreds of thousands of revelers in town.

Charles M., a soft-spoken middle-aged man living in Washington D.C., was troubled by the budget cuts. “The daily struggle to get rest supersedes schooling, work, and even most health concerns,” he told ThinkProgress. Charles would know. When he was a young man, he founded a homeless shelter in Rhode Island. Now, decades later, Charles, who fell on hard times during the recent financial crisis, finds himself presently homeless. “Without a safe place to sleep,” he notes, “most other needs cannot be addressed, either by service providers or by the homeless person themselves.”

When money’s tight, services for homeless people are often the first items axed from a city’s budget. So what’s D.C.’s excuse now that times are good?

Over the past three years, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has repeatedly introduced budget resolutions that contain draconian spending cuts in an effort to stave off the debt crisis he says is right around the corner if it isn’t addressed immediately. Ryan’s plans, all three of which have passed the House of Representatives, would almost surely add to the debt instead of decreasing it, but his main view is that America’s current level of debt is weighing down the economy, a claim he repeated to Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren Thursday night.

“The debt is crushing our economy, it’s slowing us down, and it’s guaranteeing the next generation has a diminished future,” Ryan said. “And we believe we have a moral obligation to balance this budget to get a healthier economy and create jobs.”

The source of those claims is a paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that shows that economies grow more slowly when their debt-to-GDP ratios are in excess of 90 percent. But as Bloomberg reports, there is no economic consensus around those findings, especially when it comes to large economies like the United States:

“The argument that heavy debt loads slow economic growth doesn’t hold a lot of water,” says Guy LeBas, chief fixed- income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia who oversees $12 billion. “It suffers from a mix-up of cause and effect: When weak economic conditions arise, it tends to encourage deficit spending, which is what has led to more U.S. debt being issued, and not the other way around.” [...]

“The Rogoff-Reinhart 90 percent is really quite a fragile number,” says Joseph Gagnon, a former economist in the Fed’s monetary affairs division. “There is no threshold like that for countries that have control of the currency they borrow in.”

Moreover, there is no evidence that the debt is threatening the United States in the short-term. Borrowing costs are at historic lows — as Bloomberg notes, the cost of paying off the debt is lower today than it was when Ronald Reagan was president and financial markets are “begging” the U.S. to borrow. Instead, there is plenty of evidence that the focus on debt and deficit reduction has slowed the economic recovery. Government spending has plateaued since the 2009 stimulus effort that kickstarted the recovery, so while government spending traditionally pulls the economy out of recessions, spending cuts hampered efforts to boost the economy this time.

Investments to help the economic recovery now would fuel growth that reduces deficits and, thus, improve America’s long-term debt outlook as well. The current crisis facing the U.S. isn’t a debt crisis, but rather an unemployment crisis that is being exacerbated by lawmakers who focus too much on the debt.

On Thursday, Congress voted against allowing the U.S. Postal Service to cut its delivery down to five days a week, forcing the organization to keep delivering mail on Saturdays. This will drive the USPS into looming bankruptcy — already foisted upon the USPS by Congress itself — even faster.

In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, mandating that the USPS front the money for 75 years of employee retirement benefits — a requirement no other public or private institution faces.

In trying to scrape up money for the health care benefits of kids who haven’t even graduated high school yet, the USPS has spiraled into near-bankruptcy. Without the benefit requirement, a July 2012 analysis showed, the USPS would have a $1.5 billion surplus. Instead, it’s billions of dollars in the red.

Dropping Saturday delivery was supposed to be its way of trying to fight these congressionally-imposed deficits. But yesterday, Congress rejected the five-day proposal, roundly agreeing that the USPS must keep its service at six days a week, even though it can hardly afford to do so.

Now, the USPS is looking for a workaround to see if it can cut back on first-class mail, magazine, and direct mail delivery while still meeting Congress’s six-day mandate.

Though the Postal Service is an independent agency, a legal opinion by the Government Accountability Office found that it needs Congressional approval to change its budget or delivery schedule.

Congress has apparently not considered that postal access matters, particularly to rural Americans. Members of Congress seem content to let the USPS flounder, despite the fact that it would take just one simple step to fix the USPS’s budget problems: repealing the benefit requirement. It doesn’t look like Congress will let that happen any time soon.

The automatic budget cuts that went into effect on March 1 are already having a devastating impact on education and health services on American Indian reservations, where poverty and unemployment rates are already sky-high and high drug addiction and school dropout rates make education an even bigger necessity than it is in other parts of the U.S.

The federal government provides roughly 60 percent of the funding for reservation schools, according to the Washington Post, and on reservations like Montana’s Fort Peck that have already faced budget cuts are now cutting Head Start and summer school, saving money by not filling vacant jobs, and cutting health care services, the Post reports:

The superintendent can’t hire a reading teacher in an elementary school where more than half the students do not read or write at grade level. Summer school, which feeds children and offers them an alternative to hanging around the reservation’s trash-strewn yards, may be trimmed or canceled. [...]

The school system — for which federal funding already had been reduced before the sequester — is looking for $1.2 million in additional cuts, partly by not filling jobs that go vacant. The Indian Health Service, the reservation’s main source for health care, will also be cut by 8 percent, and Head Start, which serves 240 toddlers, will be cut by 5 percent, officials said.

“Instead of trying to cut, we should be adding,” said Kent Hoffman, the vice principal at the high school, who is also filling in as athletic director, another job that will not be filled. “To me, this is insane.”

States across America are kicking kids out of preschool programs because of sequestration. Indiana is using a lottery to randomly remove kids from Head Start, Tennessee is ending bus service (which could reduce enrollment), and Washington is ending food programs in an effort to keep from removing kids from the program, though officials say that too is “simply unavoidable.”

But the effects of budget cuts are even bigger for reservations, which do not have private property to tax and thus rely on federal education funds more than typical school districts. So Fort Peck will no longer fund a vocational training program, leaving students on a reservation where the unemployment rate tops 50 percent unable to take advantage of the booming oil and gas industry across the state line in North Dakota. Children won’t get preschool. Teachers will lose jobs. People who need medical assistance won’t get it. All thanks to budget cuts the United States doesn’t need.