A good example of how the U.S. economy is doing right now is the city of Elkhart, Indiana. One of Barack Obama's first trips as President was to Elkhart in Febuary 2009 because the unemployment rate there was so bad.
Source:
Obama visits job-starved Elkhart, Indiana - USATODAY.com
The unemployment rate there in March 2010 was 17.3%. However, there has been significant improvement. A year later, in March 2011, the rate is now 12.8%.
Source:
Indiana Metropolitan Unemployment
The economic criticism of Obama is basically, "It's not getting better fast enough", but there has been dramatic improvement since Obama has been President.
Most of those who indulged in home-buying misadventure of getting a sub-prime loan were encouraged to do so by the likes of Barney Frank and Chris Todd - Democrats - and were minorities. Would they vote for Obama seeing their house repossessed? Of course, they would! For exactly the same reason they voted for him in the first place.
I don't know what you mean by "encouraged to do so", but the usual target of this kind of criticism (the Community Reinvestment Act, the 1977 law meant to reduce discrimination against low income and middle class borrowers, and the Act's many amendments since 1977) has been completely exonerated. As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke put it:
"Our own experience with CRA over more than 30 years and recent analysis of available data, including data on subprime loan performance, runs counter to the charge that CRA was at the root of, or otherwise contributed in any substantive way to, the current mortgage difficulties."
Janet Yellen, Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, says, "
tudies have shown that the CRA has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households."
The mortgages to low-income borrowers that are covered by the CRA are not risky because they are highly regulated. It was unregulated subprime lows to more wealthy borrowers that caused the housing bubble.
