I’m talking about the $75,000,000,000 mortgage bailout. You may be shocked to hear how unexpectedly poorly this program is doing.

Nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration’s flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out.
…
Approximately 630,000 people who had tried to get their monthly mortgage payments lowered through the government program have been cut loose through July, according to the Treasury report. That’s about 48 percent of the those who had enrolled since March 2009. And it is up from more than 40 percent through June.

Okay, so that $37B off the top that has been flushed down the toilet, throwing our good money after someone else’s bad money. And it’s getting worse. Great.

Another 421,804, or roughly 32 percent of those who started the program, have received permanent loan modifications and are making their payments on time.

It’s failed for 1/2 and worked out okay (so far) for 1/3. The other 1/5? Who knows?

RealtyTrac reported that the number of U.S. homes lost to foreclosure surged in July to 92,858 properties, up 9 percent from June. The pace of repossessions has been increasing and the nation is now on track to having more than 1 million homes lost to foreclosure by the end of the year. That would eclipse the more than 900,000 homes repossessed in 2009, the firm says.

Lenders have historically taken over about 100,000 homes a year, according to RealtyTrac.

As was noted earlier, things are getting worse. After all the “help” from Obama and the Democrats, there are now as many foreclosures in a month as there have historically been in a year. Please! No more help!!

Zandi [Moody’s analyst] said the government effort will likely end up helping only about 500,000 homeowners lower their monthly payments on a permanent basis. That’s a small percentage of the number of people who have already lost their homes to foreclosure or distressed sales like short sales—when lenders let homeowners sell for less than they owe on their mortgages.

Zandi predicts another 1.5 million foreclosures or short sales in 2011.

“We still have a lot more foreclosures to come and further home price declines,” Zandi said. He said home prices, which have already fallen 30 percent since the peak of the housing boom, would drop by another 5 percent by next spring.

So things are going to get even worse, but let’s do some math.

$75B for the program / 500K people it helped get load mods = $150K per person helped.

Call me crazy, but if we had just figured out the 500K who were worth helping, bought their houses, and given them as freebies back to the people, wouldn’t we have spent less money than we did?

Many borrowers have complained that the government program is a bureaucratic nightmare.

This is such shocking news that I can’t bring myself to read the rest of the article.