I’d like to answer the question posed by the Republican candidate for President: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” in a way I keep hoping the Democratic candidate for President would respond but hasn’t; for a “real people/real lives” perspective:

• Ask the spouses of military personnel brought home from Iraq – they will say “yes”…
• Ask any GM or Chrysler employee, and the owners/employees of all the businesses fed by these companies – they will say “yes”…
• Ask someone like me who currently cannot get health insurance due to a pre-existing condition (in my case I want to expand my coverage from “catastrophic” to full, so doctor’s visits/meds, etc. are covered – I cannot, but will when this aspect of the ACA passed in 2010 takes effect in 2014) – we will say “yes”…
• Ask someone whose home/mortgage is “underwater” from the poorly regulated banking industry’s lending frenzy*, who now can keep their home with the new options available to them, and their neighbors who now won’t have a vacant, deteriorating property in their community – they will say “yes”…
• Ask a young adult, and his/her parents, who can now be covered by their parents’ health insurance – all will say “yes”…
• And while you’re at it, ask college students, and their parents, who almost lost Pell grants at a level that is actually helpful, but didn’t, and find student loans far more affordable now that the banks as middlemen have been removed from the equation, so they need not now cross off a college education – that will be a “yes”…
• Ask women who won’t lose their contraceptive benefits so they can plan their families well, who do not want the federal government in their bedroom – they will issue a grateful “yes”…
• Ask any Boomer – and our children – who understand that turning Medicare into a voucher system serves to keep insurance companies at the helm of our healthcare, and loses the clout Medicare currently has to influence prices, from procedures to prescriptions – we will say “yes”…
• Ask any woman who wants equal pay for equal work, of which she is now assured – she will say “yes”…
• Ask workers and business owners who are seeing jobs and production at last returning, only 3 years after the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, something that, at that time, took 15 years, a huge Public Works program, and a world war to achieve – “yes”…
• Ask Boomers, including me, who are seeing their retirement investments making a comeback, with the stock market close to pre-recession level in just 3 years (something that didn’t happen until long after the war was over after the Depression) – we will say “yes”…

This is just a partial list, but I hope a good start.

Because, clearly it depends on who you ask.

*Note: I do not exempt from personal responsibility anyone who took a home loan far greater than they could afford, bank permitted or not.  What matters here is the impact so many foreclosures have on our economy and neighborhoods; that letting their poor judgment impact the rest of us just to “teach them a lesson” is a “nose cutting/face-spiting” scenario.  Economists on both sides of the aisle agree.