I'm not sure if Dean Baker's idea is a good one (it certainly might be), but he's at least thinking along the right lines. We've got a situation where lots of people are losing their homes and especially given the fact that their mortgages have been packaged together and repurchased so there's no one for them to negotiate with, there really just aren't mechanisms in place to help them try to keep their homes.
Months ago I suggested Dems get in front of this stuff. Given the glacial pace of our vacationing Congress, except when Bush demands FISA law changes, the likelihood of presidential veto of anything sensible, and the likely shitty execution by the executive branch even if something sensible does get passed, one can't be optimistic that there will be anything done in a timely fashion.
More importantly, it shouldn't take "emergencies" for such things to happen. Anything which is good policy in situation like this is likely to be good policy all of the time. The fact that more people are finding themselves in trouble, or that this nebulous abstract called "the economy" might be having wider problems, doesn't so much call for new policies as force us to think about policies we should have had all along.
I'm not optimistic. Lots of Democrats thought the Bankruptcy Bill was a heavenly slice of awesomeness. There's an allergy to anything which reeks of "social safety net" in our political class, even for things which are common sense.
