Thirty-two years later, the question is the same

With just a week left before the 1980 presidential election, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan asked Americans whether they were better off than they were four years earlier.

Upon reflection, voters decided that no, they weren’t better off, and they elected Reagan over the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter.

Recently, Mitt Romney asked Americans that same question, Are you better off now than you were four years ago? For the vast majority of Americans, especially the forgotten middle class, the answer is no.

The New York Times recently reported that, according to a new survey from the Federal Reserve, “The median American family’s net worth dropped by nearly 40 percent from 2007 to 2010, from $126,400 to $77,300 — wiping out 18 years’ worth of accumulated wealth.”

The median family income has declined from $49,600 in 2007 to $45,800 in 2010, levels that have not been seen since the mid- to late 1990s. President Obama would like to blame President Bush for these statistics, but during his presidency, the median household income has declined by 7.3 percent.

As Forbes Magazine pointed out, if you start from the end of the recession, in June 2009, the decline has been greater than it was during the recession. After three years of Obama “recovery,” the median family income had declined 5 percent by June 2012.

The Wall Street Journal pointed out that “For household income, the Obama recovery has been worse than the Bush recession.”

For those of you who believe Obama is a champion of the middle class, take a look at these numbers and then take a closer look at the recent August jobs reports. The U.S. economy added only 96,000 jobs in August, not even close to the number needed to make a dent in our unemployment numbers.

The unemployment rate still stands at over 8 percent. While it fell from 8.3 percent to 8.1 percent, 368,000 people have given up looking for work. That is a sorry state of affairs. More and more people are no longer trying to get a job.

At the Democratic National Convention, the campaign rhetoric focused on the middle class, but under the Obama administration, the middle class has been diminished more than at any other time since the Great Depression.