As you head to the polls next week, ask yourself that quintessential political question: are you better off today than you were 2, 4, or 6 years ago? Hell, are you better off today than you were last year?

For the overwhelming majority of Americans the answer is a resounding no.

Though the administration likes to highlight good economic news (remember Recovery Summer) they can only do so by carefully choosing benchmarks against some unique point in the past. When you look at Obama’s overall stewardship of the American economy — let’s not even talk about foreign policy where he has reduced decades of carefully cultivated alliances into a steaming shambles — it has been little short of disastrous. In fact, it is so bad that even the Brits have noticed. From a Telegraph article titled Life under Obama sucks. And these numbers prove it, here are the high points:

The administration has been doing the chicken dance in the endzone over the reduction of the unemployment rate and first time applications for unemployment benefits. This as been primarily accomplished by squeezing millions of Americans outh of the labor market. If you reduce the number of people working to a sufficiently low number you can achieve full unemployment.

While labor force participation rates were declining, so, too, were wages for the bottom 75% of Americans (which is a family income under $67,000/year) have decreased by at least 5%, with the hardest hit segment being families earning less than $25,000 per year. Not only have wages fallen but so has wealth. The only beneficiaries of the Obama economy have been those who were already wealthy:

And inevitably, poverty follows decreases in employment, wages, and wealth:

Right now our economy is being managed and manipulated to benefit major Democrat political donors. Billions are spent on fly-by-night schemes for electric cars, windmills, solar panels, high speed rail, and all manner of nonsense. Regulations stifle competition and deter new companies from entering markets. Energy costs and food costs are kept artificially high by federal regulations and mandates. The working man is taxed out the wazoo, companies who can flee the US are, cheap labor is being imported — to the benefit of major corportations — to depress wages. The structural barriers to efficiency in the economy that this administration had erected are simply a marvel that can scarcely be comprehended.

The immediate task of Congress, assuming a GOP majority in the Senate, it to begin unraveling the skein of obstruction that is destroying the economy and putting average Americans in a no-win economic situation.