Mitt Romney has said the housing market should have been allowed to 'hit bottom.' Obama hits Congress on mortgages

President Barack Obama is seeking to remind voters once again of the economic situation he inherited four years ago, focusing in his weekly address on the mortgage crisis and blaming Congress for not acting to help more homeowners recover.

“Back in February, I sent Congress a plan to give every responsible homeowner the chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgages by refinancing at lower rates,” the president said in the broadcast Saturday.


“It’s a plan that has the support of independent, nonpartisan economists and leaders across the housing industry. But Republicans in Congress worked to keep it from even getting to a vote. And here we are — seven months later — still waiting on Congress to act. This makes no sense. Last week, mortgage rates were at historic lows. But instead of helping more and more hardworking families take advantage of those rates, Congress was away on break. Instead of worrying about you, they’d already gone home to worry about their campaigns.”

Congress was not his only target. Obama also took aim at Mitt Romney, who has said the housing market should have been allowed to “hit bottom.”

“Now, I know there are some who think that the only option for homeowners is to just stand by and hope that the market has hit bottom,” Obama said. “I don’t agree with that. That’s why my administration teamed up with state attorneys general to investigate the terrible way many homeowners were treated, and secured a settlement from the nation’s biggest banks — banks that were bailed out with taxpayer dollars — to help families stay in their homes.”

Republicans, meanwhile, focused on the current state of the economy in their address, delivered by a candidate for a House seat in Arizona.

“Every day, when I go around asking folks for their vote, what they ask me most is what I’m going to do about jobs,” said Vernon Parker, a former mayor and councilmember of Paradise City, Ariz. “Here’s what I tell them: I tell them nothing is more important than getting the middle class back to work.

“The unemployment rate in our state is 8.3 percent, more than the national average and unacceptably high. That figure doesn’t take into account people who have given up looking for a job altogether. It doesn’t reflect the struggles of families trying to keep up with higher prices on everything from gas to groceries. I tell my neighbors it doesn’t have to be this way. We have employers who want to hire and workers who want to work, but government won’t get out of the way.”

Obama traced the beginnings of the crisis to lenders who gave mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, buyers who took them knowing they couldn’t afford them, speculators “looking to make a quick buck,” and banks “that packaged and sold those risky mortgages for phony profits.”

“When the party stopped, and the housing bubble burst, it pushed our entire economy into a historic recession — and left middle-class families holding the bag,” Obama said. “Four years later, the housing market is healing. Home sales and construction are up. Prices are beginning to rise. And more than a million families who began this year owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, are now back above water.

“We’re moving in the right direction. But we’re not there yet. There are still millions of Americans who are struggling with their mortgages, even at a time of historically low rates.”