But there is always a large number of Americans who do not work and are not looking for work. It blows me away that people do not understand this.

There is a difference between being unemployed and not needing to work.

Was that not the case during previous periods?

That is not forced on anyone, that is their choice. If people continue to buy houses and things which they can't afford then there will continue to be a problem.

You can choose to live with in your means and have money set aside for bad times or you can live pay check to pay check working as a slave to pay for shit you can't afford.

Many (probably most) of them could afford the house when they were working and who's to say they didn't have enough money set aside to go a good many months sans paycheck. At some point that money runs out though and if the nearest decent job is hundreds of miles away they can't sell a place that's worth less than owe on it.

Some guys get around that by doing the weekly motel room rate thing where the job is while leaving the family in the house and others find someone to rent their house and make the mortgage payments that way. A friend of mine has had a tenet in his upside down house for the last four years. These things are not always doable however.

No matter how much better things are getting, Obama haters will still hate Obama, even if they don't understand why.

Basically, in GFY you guys need to look at:

(1) Who believes the figures.

(2) Who doesn't believe figures.

Then compare the two sets of people in each category. One set is likely to be more intelligent, more well informed, higher net worth and overall higher class than the other set.

Simply put, there is a reason why we still have zero % (crisis level) interest rates over six years since the crisis. That reason is that the financial crisis is not over, it has just been patched over with QE and is bobbing along nicely. However, there is not enough global growth so you have countries trying to steal each others growth through competitive devaluations. In this environment, the US is still probably in the best position in terms of the western economies but it's not a "great" economy right now.

When I bought my house I qualified for a much larger loan. I bought a five bedroom house for the three of us, and that was plenty. It was one of five model homes here. I surely wasn't living paycheck to paycheck; I was tucking away money into savings every month - and not small amounts either. When I was unemployed and the recession hit, I was fucked. My saving grace was the money we had put into savings.

On the other hand, I did have friends here in town who continued to re-fiance their house through the boom. Every time their house went up in value, they took more money out. they didn't make much money, maybe $75k combined. Yet he had a really nice brand new truck, a boat, a motorcycle, a jeep, jet skis, and ATVs. When the recession his he lost his job. They tried to sell everything, but during the recession no one was interested in paying a decent price for someone's used toys. They eventually lost their house.

I do not believe the crisis is over.

I've said this before - This is not a four or eight year problem. It's a ten to fifteen year problem. I am forty-six years old and I've never seen us brought to our knees like this. Everything just stopped.

Is it a "great economy"? For right now - yes, it is. Maybe not compared that what we considered a great economy ten years ago, but for right now it is the best we can do.