"The US economy is based on Americans selling houses to each other"

According to year old data 15% - more than 7.5 million American homeowners - spend half of their income or more on housing costs, including mortgages. What about you?

clipped from news.yahoo.com Ray is one of more than 7.5 million people — almost 15 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage — who are spending half of their income or more on housing costs, according to 2007 data released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau. That is up from nearly 7.1 million the year before. Traditionally, the government and most lenders consider a homeowner spending 30 percent or more of their income on housing costs to be financially burdened. But that definition now covers almost 38 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage — 19 million of them. Getting a loan during the boom was easy, Hanna knows. Too easy. "All you had to was massage the information enough to fit it into their round hole, and they gave us a mortgage," Hanna said. In San Francisco, more than one out of five homeowners with a mortgage spends half or more of their income on housing.