There is no need to spin or dodge the "Better Off" question

Last edited Tue Sep 4, 2012, 12:24 PM - Edit history (6)

There's no need for nuance, or "if you look at it this way." It's a very simple question. I don't understand why this is proving at all challenging... I guess it's because Pols fear sounding like they are saying everything is fine, which it is not, but that's not the question.


Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Yes. Of course. Four years ago every single economic metric was rocketing downward.

The stock market was collapsing. People were being laid off at a rate of about a million people a month. Home sales had all but stopped and prices were in free fall.

Everything was getting worse, every day.

And today all of those things have turned around. Everything is moving in the right direction.


The Romney team is going with this because polling shows that twice as many Americans say they are worse off than better off. But that is a changeable perception. Not every public attitude is changeable, but that that one is.

But to change it we must focus on how things were four years ago.

The S&P 500 has gone from 683 to over 1400. The single number most relevant to the average American 401K retirement account has more than Doubled.

More... than... Doubled.

Four years ago things were getting Worse.

Today things are not getting worse and most things are getting Better.



That very lowest point is right after Obama was sworn in.

Ronald Reagan won 49 states with a high unemployment rate because he argued that things were moving in the right direction... that we had turned the corner and the worst was behind us. And that was turning the corner from a recession that occured entirely on Reagan's watch! Not better from Carter, better from Reagan.

But better. Things were getting better instead of getting worse.

The Republicans trot out a retread Reagan line from 1980 of "Are you better off?" But this isn't 1980, it is 1984. The right Reagan retread is "Morning in America." Because things are, in fact, getting better than they were getting four years ago.

Is your house more valuable than it was four years ago? Depends where you live. Is your house losing 10%, 15%, 20% of value every year? No, house prices nationally are stable, not collapsing. Stable is much better than collapsing.

Romney's promise of 12 million new jobs in the next four years is the Fed and CBO estimate of the number of jobs that will be created in a second Obama administration. We are on path to create 12 million next jobs in the next four years, with Obama as president.

Four years ago we were not on path to create squat.

If the question was one year ago or seven years ago there might be something to talk about, but four years ago this month the economy of the USA collapsed under George W. Bush.