Open thread for night owls: More advice on answering 'Are you better off than you were ...'

Monday, I highlighted Dean Baker's acerbic response to the are-you-better-off-than-you-were-four-years-ago question. Tonight it's Tim Noah's turn. If you read beyond the excerpt here, you'll see the details of Noah's disagreement with Baker and others who've given unsolicited advice on how Team Obama should reply to this question. It's apparent the Republicans and media are going to keep asking it as long they get mileage from doing so. Noah writes:

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have caught the Obama campaign completely unawares by posing the most basic question any presidential challenger can raise: Whether Americans are better off today than they were four years ago. (So much for the cruel efficiency of Obama's  'Chicago-style' politics.) Now the economists Dean Baker and Paul Krugman say it's a stupid question (it isn't), while the lead story in today's New York Times reports that the Chicago pros have found a way to answer in the affirmative (they haven't). [...]

Vice President Joe Biden's instincts have proven better on this point than Obama's. He is answering the question, with his signature line that Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. But that answer is insufficient. What I'd like to hear Obama say is that Americans are better off because after nearly a century of trying, the federal government has finally found a way to guarantee health care for virtually all its citizens. 'I have achieved this,'' Obama can say, 'in the face of unified opposition from the Republicans, including Romney, who for purely political reasons has gone from supporting precisely this type of reform'he instituted it in Massachusetts, for Pete's sake!'to vigorously and cynically opposing it. You are also better off because I have begun the work, with passage of Dodd-Frank, of curbing the reckless abuses that wrecked our economy in 2008. These abuses, which built up over a generation, contributed substantially to our 30-year run-up in income inequality. Romney would repeal Dodd-Frank, too, and he doesn't even want to discuss income inequality. One of Romney's former Bain partners recently published a book arguing that more income inequality would be good for America, and I don't hear the Republican nominee disagreeing!

'We are on an admittedly slow path to economic recovery. It would be a faster recovery if Republicans didn't oppose at every turn every common-sense policy to assist the sluggish economy. But we are making progress, and if you re-elect me you will experience that progress in ways that, unfortunately, you are not today. In the meantime, you can stop worrying about not being able to get health insurance and you can stop worrying about Wall Street running roughshod over U.S. regulators as they have for decades.'

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