President Obama has been in office for about three years and six days, which begs the question: Do you feel better off now than you were three years ago?
A cursory review of the statistics suggests that the country is not. Unemployment is higher. The national debt has increased by nearly 43% or $5 trillion dollars, and the number of Americans on food stamps has increased by 45% or 14 million people.
Source: BLS, USDA, US Treasury
What do you think?
Are you better off today than you were three years ago?
Reflections of a Rational Republican 
Great point! It’s not for nothing Gingrich calls him the food-stamp president.
Did you see the infographic from Ace of Spades a while ago? Similar idea—simple, stark comparisons of the numbers, then and now—but more of them, and helpfully juxtaposed with related remarks from the president himself. I think some of the numbers are a lot more his fault than others—he can’t be blamed for 100% of all of them just because he’s president—but taken together, they paint a damning picture, especially because he claimed to be able to guarantee that some of these numbers wouldn’t get this bad.
(Bonus: See the ubiquitous Ben Hoffman picking a fight on that entry, too!)
That video was very entertaining, as was your exchange with Mr. Hoffman. 😉
Sean,
The Obama supporters have shifted the question away from, are you better off now than three years ago, because most Americans are not . They have shifted it to, are you better off than you would have been without us . Whether President Obama is reelected depends on whether his propagandists can convince America that things would have been much worse without him . They need to sell that down is up, left is right, and red ink is beautiful .
We have to hope that IQs are higher now than in 2008 .
Right, I sympathize with them when they appeal to the limits of human knowledge and say that I can’t really know that things wouldn’t have been even worse without Obama and his policies. But at that point, either they’ve conceded that they are equally unable to know that he’s helped much—or helped at all, or not done enormous harm—or they’ve admitted that they’re using circular logic: We assume Obama’s policies helped because we assume Obama’s policies helped.
I also noticed that they started counting employment numbers at the official end date of the recession in June 2009.
How convenient.
On a Liberal blog I used that circular logic, as you call it, to prove that George Bush saved millions of lives by invading Iraq. Basically comparing the situation to 1930s Germany . I was not popular with that reasoning .