The national mortgage industry estimates there will be 6,000 home foreclosures in Maine in 2008 and 2009. That's tiny compared to the projected 340,000 foreclosures in California, but in a state as small as ours, it's still a significant number.

Those numbers -- clinical and hard -- don't convey the human and economic toll of foreclosures.

For each of the families that will lose its home, a foreclosure is a tragedy. For the bank that provided the mortgage, a foreclosure represents lost income. For the neighbors who live next to an empty home that is allowed to deteriorate, a foreclosure represents a possible diminishment in their own home's value. For neighborhoods where home after home is emptied and shuttered, foreclosures represent a loss of community as well as an increased potential for crime and property-value loss.

For some, including Sheila Bair, the increasingly outspoken chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., it makes sense to help borrowers stave off foreclosure by modifying the interest rates or the pay-back periods on mortgages.

The inability of millions of borrowers to make mortgage payments is a crisis that has contributed to the collapse of major financial institutions in the last few months. Bair has emerged as a prominent spokesman for efforts to fix the crisis by dealing with the distressed mortgages at the root of it.

"As we lend and invest hundreds of billions of dollars to help institutions suffering leveraged losses from defaulting mortgages," Bair said Tuesday, "we must also devote some of that money to fixing the front-end problem: too many unaffordable home loans."

But for others, helping homeowners who got in over their heads in mortgages they can't afford feels unfair.

"I've been responsible and don't ask for any favors -- so why should those who haven't been responsible get special treatment?" goes this understandable line of thought. Understandable, that is, except in the cases of the many subprime mortgages from predatory lenders where brokers took excessive fees, used dubious numbers (included "stated income") to help borrowers qualify and failed to determine whether applicants really had the ability to make their monthly payments.

Given the inability of the country's financial system to right itself despite massive infusions of cash from the federal rescue program, we find ourselves reluctantly on the side of those who advocate for increased help to homeowners facing foreclosure.

The call for greater intervention to stem foreclosures is growing among members of Congress, too, but so far, the Bush administration has been largely immune to it. This week, the administration pulled back from plans to have the government help out a range of homeowners across the country at risk of foreclosure.

They limited assistance instead to only those mortgage holders whose loans were guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those homeowners number in the hundreds of thousands -- but millions more hold subprime mortgages from conventional lenders and won't be eligible for that help.

There are obstacles to modifying the terms on many loans -- including potential lawsuits by members of complex groups of investors who may have bought the mortgages. But the diabolical geniuses who devised those tangled packages of mortgage-backed securities should be able to find a way to untangle them, thus allowing the kind of relief necessary to keep borrowers current with their mortgages and in their homes.

Hundreds of billions in taxpayer money has already been spent to stabilize the country's financial system -- and it still continues to reel from the troubling effects of mortgages in default. It's time to stabilize those mortgages -- the rot at the center of our shaky economy.