What is it about owning a home?

Oh, right – the American Dream.

President Obama has announced another executive maneuver meant to make it easier for first-time buyers and those on the cusp of qualifying for a mortgage to become home owners. The Federal Housing Administration will reduce the annual cost of mortgage insurance for people receiving subsidized FHA loans from 1.35% of the borrowed amount to 0.85%. That cut should save the typical borrower about $900 per year, according to the White House.

The FHA move comes on top of other measures meant to make home ownership easier for middle- and low-income borrowers, such as recent moves by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to allow lower down payments for some borrowers and to ease standards for lenders, which ought to make mortgages easier to get.

The housing recovery has been a notable weak spot in an otherwise improving economy, with home values still about 10% below peak values from 2006. Tough lending standards, meanwhile, have kept many potential buyers on the sidelines. The cut in FHA insurance costs, Obama said at a speech in Arizona, “should help further accelerate growth in the housing market and stabilize prices.”

There’s a big problem, however: Owning a home these days may be a much bigger impediment to career success than it ever was in the past. Yet politicians and their allies in the real-estate business are still preaching the old gospel about home ownership, as if it’s the same path to prosperity it always was. It isn’t, and anybody considering buying a home needs to think doubly hard about the liabilities that come with such a big commitment, as well as the benefits.

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Home ownership is obviously a big commitment of money, but it’s also a commitment of time: Out-of-pocket transaction costs that typically run in the thousands essentially lock you in place for at least five years, unless you’re willing to take a sizeable loss in the event you have to sell sooner than expected. In the past, that wasn’t necessarily a problem. Widespread prosperity meant there were many opportunities in most places, so you could move from job to job or even career to career while living in the same house. And modest but healthy appreciation of real-estate values made home ownership a solid investment over time.

The tenets of the past don’t necessarily apply any more, even if politicians are still reading from the old, outdated playbook that pays homage to the American Dream — owning your own home — no matter what. Economic growth is much patchier now and tends to be concentrated in regions driven by technology or energy, as the Milken Institute’s latest list of top-performing cities reveals. Many areas of the nation are stagnant and likely to remain that way. The remaking of the U.S. economy makes mobility a prerequisite for career success.  More than any time during the last 60 years, people need to be able to go where the jobs and opportunities are, because opportunity is less and less likely to come looking for you.

Besides, the home ownership rate isn’t exactly heading for historic lows, as this chart generated by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank shows: