WASHINGTON — For all the campaign rhetoric we heard in Florida, there was not a single serious proposal advanced by the GOP candidates to fix the housing mortgage crisis. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich hammered away at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-backed lenders that conservatives love to hate, even though both of them have invested in these tainted institutions.

Florida has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, and nationwide, a quarter of all homeowners are under water, meaning they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. The housing situation is far worse in terms of the pain inflicted on huge numbers of people than it was during the Great Depression when home ownership wasn’t as widespread.

Today a person’s home is typically the biggest single source of wealth and well-being, and when its value takes a nosedive, the result is devastating on the individual, and on the broader housing market. President Obama is trying once again to beef up his administration’s mortgage refinancing program. Instead of an anticipated four million homeowners obtaining relief, only a million people were able to access the program and refinance their mortgages to make them more affordable.

Congress is unlikely to sign off on the president’s latest proposal, not with the likely Republican nominee arguing that the housing market should be allowed to “hit bottom.” Republicans overall oppose government intervention and believe that the market will right itself. Well, it’s been three years since the bottom fell out, and it’s becoming more and more obvious that the only way to fix the housing crisis is for the government to step in and buy foreclosed homes, and either rent them or sell them at a price that preserves the market value of the neighborhood.

Obama’s solution is to allow homeowners who are underwater to refinance their loans at a lower interest rate. Sounds good, but the problem with that is if you owe $140,000 on a home that is now worth $100,000, you won’t be too happy paying back that loan even if your interest rate is reduced to 3.25 percent. The administration’s plan has other problems as well, a cap of some $729,000 on eligible properties, which appears to be a grand sum but is the equivalent of a starter home in high-end urban areas like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Applicants also must be current on their payments, a very high bar in this economy.

The only real solution is debt forgiveness, and that’s where the banks come in. They’re the ones who could and should do it. If there’s a culprit in the housing mess, it’s the banks. They made a lot of money writing up loans they knew would not be repaid, and they bundled up those mortgages and passed them along a chain of phony paper until nobody bore any responsibility except the hapless borrower whose home got foreclosed.

The banks got us into the financial mess, and then they got bailed out and held onto the money. They should do the responsible thing, which is to reduce the principal owed by people who saw the value of their homes drop. People would be more inclined to pay a higher interest rate on a lower principal, than a lower interest rate on a higher mortgage than their houses are worth.

Getting the banks to carry their weight in cleaning up the housing market would be a good deal for the banks and for homeowners. The banks wouldn’t lose money; they could make up the difference with the higher interest rate. And more homeowners could avoid foreclosure, which destroys neighborhoods for a generation.

U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.