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Andrew Rosenkranz says at least two or three times a week, he finds himself sitting across from an employee at his market research firm near Seattle, listening to some complicated personal problem.

Just last week, an employee described how her daughter and baby granddaughter were assaulted by a boyfriend. The daughter wanted to come back to Washington state but didn't have money for a plane ticket. And so, Rosenkranz says, the employee "was coming to ask, 'Hey, is there anything you can do to help us here?' "

A lot of conversations like that one have made Rosenkranz think his employees need more than just an advance on the next paycheck. Over and over, he says, he's seen the people who work at his company make financial choices that were likely to have bad consequences.

His employees borrow at punishing interest rates. They fail to enroll in the company's 401(k) despite the fact that the firm matches employee contributions. This actually saves Rosenkranz money; he doesn't have to make matching contributions when employees don't contribute. But, he says, he wishes more of his employees would take his money and sign up for retirement plans, because it's such a sensible move.

So Rosenkranz recently started offering his staff some time with a financial adviser. These days, this isn't so rare; a quarter of companies now offer one-on-one financial counseling, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. And more than half offer one-on-one investment advice, up from 38 percent four years ago.

Rosenkranz contracted with a credit union called Neighborhood Trust, a group that has also provided financial counseling to staff at a burger chain, stylists at a hair salon and employees of a home care cooperative in the Bronx.

Jose Robles, the maintenance supervisor at the home care cooperative, has been struggling with debt for years, taking out loan after loan. A judge recently allowed one of his creditors to deduct $71 from Robles' paycheck.

Robles recently met with a financial adviser from Neighborhood Trust, who helped him make a spreadsheet to show what he was earning and what he was spending. Robles thought he was working his way out of debt. But when he added up all the numbers in the spreadsheet, he realized he was wrong: He was actually going deeper and deeper into debt.

"You look at those numbers and you wonder, Whoa, wait a minute, I'm spending more than I'm actually bringing in," he says. "I thought I had it under control, and I didn't."

Now Robles is trying to cut back everywhere he can, from bowling less with his kids to eating out less often. He's hoping to save a chunk of money big enough to negotiate a lump sum deal with the debt collector.

The mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got hit so hard by the housing crisis that they required a massive federal rescue. Now lawmakers are looking to scale back the two entities' role — and the government's — in the mortgage market.

The Senate Banking Committee is expected to vote Thursday on President Obama's nominee to head the agency that oversees Fannie and Freddie.

The government took them over during the worst of the housing crisis, at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $200 billion. Now that the housing market is recovering, the companies have turned profitable, and they are sending money back to the Treasury.

But many lawmakers remain worried about the government's outsize role in the mortgage market, and they're looking to make a change.

Before Fannie and Freddie were taken over by the government in 2008, they operated in a kind of legal limbo. They were for-profit companies, helping to funnel money into the housing market. But they had an implicit guarantee that if they got into trouble, the government would bail them out.

Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker says that has always been a problem. He says "almost everybody would say" that it's not appropriate to have "private gain and public losses."

"This implicit guarantee is incredibly inappropriate," he says.

New Approaches

Corker, a Republican, and Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia have crafted a plan to gradually do away with Fannie and Freddie, while handing one of their functions over to a new government agency. That agency would guarantee mortgage-backed securities, to keep money flowing into the housing market. But unlike Fannie and Freddie, the new agency would collect a fee for the government's backing.

The plan includes a number of other safeguards designed to protect taxpayers: Homebuyers would have to make a 5 percent down payment. And the companies issuing mortgage-backed securities would have to hold at least 10 percent capital in reserve. Corker says that's twice as much capital as Fannie and Freddie would have needed to weather the housing crisis without a government bailout.

"If Fannie and Freddie had had 5 percent capital, there would have been no taxpayer contributions," he says.

The Obama administration says it welcomes the bipartisan Senate approach.

Meanwhile, House Republicans, led by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, have crafted an alternative bill. It would move the government even further out of the mortgage market, leaving only a limited role for the Federal Housing Administration to help first-time homebuyers and low-income families.

But Warner told a gathering at the Bipartisan Policy Center on Wednesday that the House approach is a political nonstarter. He said Hensarling's bill is an "ideologically pure exercise which will never have a single Democrat ever support it."

What Change Could Mean For Homebuyers

Economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics says either bill would result in slightly higher interest rates on home loans.

But Zandi says the increase would be bigger under the House Republicans' bill because the measure would lack a government guarantee.

"More importantly for most Americans, there probably would be very few 30-year, fixed-rate loans out there — at least not for the typical homebuyer," Zandi says. "And the other thing to consider is that in really bad times, if the government really didn't step in, it would be pretty tough to get a mortgage loan for anybody at any time."

House Republicans insist their bill would not end 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages. They note such loans are already available for high-priced homes that are too expensive to qualify for a government guarantee.

But Zandi says the experience in other countries suggests that without a government backstop, long-term fixed-rate mortgages would not be widely available. He also says it's unrealistic to pretend the government would stay out of the mortgage market altogether.

"The reality is that when push comes to shove, if things are really bad, the government will step in," he says. "So it's important that we all understand that, make that explicit, price for it to make sure that taxpayers don't pay for it in the future."

These days, it's Fannie and Freddie who are paying taxpayers. The companies have returned $131 billion in dividends to the Treasury so far.

Corker argues that's one more reason the government should move quickly to wind down the mortgage giants — before lawmakers become too attached to that money, and it becomes harder than ever to cut the cord.

Watch C-SPAN long enough, and you'll see members of Congress using visual aids: big, brightly colored poster boards, known on Capitol Hill as floor charts.

They've become an essential part of congressional messaging.

Almost every day the House of Representatives is in session, lawmakers line up to give what are known as one-minute speeches. Florida Democrat Frederica Wilson is always there.

And she always has her floor chart with her. It displays the number of days since Wilson came to Congress and the number of Americans unemployed.

"When you are in the minority, you have to find ways to get your message across because there's no other way. You don't have a bill that they're going to hear. There's no committee that will receive your suggestions," Wilson says.

She's been reusing the same chart since February, just swapping out the number of days in red type. Some members have dozens of them, ready to go at a moment's notice. Indiana Republican Rep. Todd Rokita has a whole stack of charts in his office, leftover from a lengthy presentation he gave back in April on the national debt. Back then, he offered a bar chart showing budget deficits through the years, with pictures of presidents on top of each bar. If you had seen it on C-SPAN, occasionally you'd see a hand come into the shot, switching to the next chart. That is Zach Zagar, Rokita's communications director.

"I was Vanna White on the House floor, one beautiful night this spring," Zagar says.

So how exactly do these things get made?

First the content: These are actually just PowerPoint slides from a presentation Rokita often gives when he's back home in his district — printed real big for use on the House floor.

"The House doesn't quite have a PowerPoint projector on the floor," says Zagar. "So this is what we get."

There are a couple of nice ones, made expertly and mounted by the House graphics office. But most in this stack are just printed on giant sheets of paper, then wrapped around and taped onto previously used poster boards. Zagar says the House Republican Conference has a big printer, which makes these charts cheap to make, if not aesthetically perfect up close.

"Sometimes you get the backend of a weird leftover presentation. Sometimes you get a poster board with a giant wedge taken out of it, so yeah, it varies," he says. "The presentation via television is barely noticeable."

A little secret about Congress that may not be obvious watching on TV: Often when members give these speeches, the room is virtually empty. But that doesn't really matter, because C-SPAN's cameras are always rolling.

Bill Gray is a producer at C-SPAN, and a man so obsessed with floor charts he's created a blog to catalog their use.

"Budget and deficit and deficit reduction and anything that has to do with hard numbers, those are the most popular because if you show a giant red line going from low to high, then it's going to draw the number, and it's just very simple — this number is higher than it used to be, here we go," Gray says.

But perhaps the most popular floor chart of all time (though, admittedly, this is hard to gauge) was used by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa back in 2009.

Here's how he described that chart at the time: "the rising cost of health care as a massive fire-breathing debt and deficit dragon."

That's right. The debt and deficit dragon — a gray fire-breathing dragon, labeled with yellow Olde English-style print on a blue background. It got a lot of attention, which is exactly what Grassley says he's going for.

"I think they're very beneficial, probably more to the public at large than they are to our colleagues," Grassley says.

At this point, a taxpayer might wonder how much these charts cost. In reality it varies, from an estimated $10 for the giant-printer-used-poster-board method to, well, no one would say how much it costs to get one of the fancy charts made by the House and Senate graphics offices. Something comparable made by a national printing chain would cost $129 per chart. But everyone insists they aren't spending that much.