Investors Business Daily channels its inner Ronald Reagan, who famously asked before the 1980 presidential election:

A Bloomberg poll out this week purports to find that “Americans say they’re better off since Obama took office.” Don’t believe it. Fact is that by most measures, Americans have fallen behind under Obama. …

Here are the facts:

More unemployed: As of May, there were almost 700,000 more people out of work than in January 2009, and the unemployment rate is higher — 8.2% vs. 7.8%. There are also 2.7 million more long-term unemployed — those who’ve been out of work for 27 weeks or more, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

More discouraged workers: The number of “discouraged workers” — people who believe no job is available — is still 100,000 bigger than when Obama took office. There are also more people working part-time because they can’t find full-time jobs, and millions more who aren’t in the labor force at all.

Lower weekly earnings: BLS data also show that real median weekly earnings have dropped 3% during Obama’s time in the White House.

Less household income: Aside from a few upward blips along the way, real median household income has declined steadily under Obama, and is almost 10% below where it stood in January 2009, according to the latest report from Sentier Research.

Lower home prices: The price of existing-home sales has dropped 2.5% in real terms, according to the National Association of Realtors.

More misery: This index — which combines inflation and unemployment — is up 26% under Obama.

Greater income inequality: Obama likes to talk endlessly about fairness and complain about the growing income gap. But to the extent that it matters, income inequality has gotten much worse under Obama. …

And this is to say nothing of the massive debt that Obama has piled up which, as we pointed out Wednesday, could hamper growth for years to come.

Now, of course, Obama likes to blame President Bush for these lousy results. But the truth is that the recession ended five short months after Obama was sworn in — and long before most of his “stimulus” had been spent.

Plus, if history is any guide, the deep 2007-09 recession should have been followed by an even more powerful recovery. Had Obama’s recovery been merely average, there would be millions more with jobs today.

The problem is that Obama’s growth-choking policies have produced the worst economic recovery on record. And the sluggish growth over the past three years hasn’t been enough to lift most people’s boats, but has caused them to sink even further.

The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger adds:

If for the next five months the president and Mitt Romney spoke of nothing other than economic growth—on the stump, in their debates, in their sleep—this election would be the best $2 billion “investment” of campaign funds that Citizens United ever enabled. Get the growth choice right, and we’ll be ok. Get it wrong and your kids will be talking Australia emigration.

Right now, with growth stuck below 2%, we’re toast. With strong growth at 3% or better, there will be jobs. With long-term growth, Medicare, debt and the rest of the horribles that keep worrywarts awake at night are solvable. With strong growth, the U.S. will not have to cede world leadership prematurely to whichever Chinese functionary slugs his way to the top of their heap. With strong growth, your college graduate can move out of the house. With normal American growth, Europe may be irrelevant but it won’t die, and a U.S. president won’t look oddly small talking to the Vladimir Putins of the world. …

Put differently, this is a substance election. It’s not about whether one “likes” Barack Obama or can’t warm to Mitt Romney. Voters have to pick two competing growth models, which means paying attention to what the candidates are saying about economic growth. …

It’s true the Obama Cleveland speech had many familiar rhetorical distortions. One of the most revealing, though, is that “Governor Romney and his allies in Congress believe deeply in the theory that . . . the best way to grow the economy is from the top down.”

Whatever that may mean, more interesting is the Obama counter-theory found here, what he calls “our North Star—an economy that’s built not from the top down, but from a growing middle class.”

There is no theory anywhere in non-Marxist economics that says growth’s primary engine is a social class. A middle class is the result of growth, not its cause. Barack Obama not only believes in class-based growth but has built his whole growth strategy around it.

One word appears nowhere in the 53-minute Obama speech on economic growth: “capital.” Human, financial, whatever. Capital dare not speak its name. …

If Mr. Romney hopes to win what Barack Obama is rightly calling a defining growth election, the governor will have to refute in detail the president’s notions of how growth happens and then explain to voters the real-economy alternative.

Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

Does this mean those who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and vote for him again in 2012 are insane? No. Only wrong.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R–Wisconsin) might suggest those who vote for Obama a second time are insane if they expect a different second term from his first:

After adding more than $5 trillion to the national debt, it would be refreshing for Obama just to admit the truth – it didn’t work – and that he will try a fresh approach to strengthen our economy and fix what’s broken in Washington. Instead, he insists on staying the course. Does America really want to double down on his policies and accept four more years mired in the economic doldrums?

When the president was inaugurated, he promised to cut the deficit in half. Instead, government has grown and the deficit has increased. The United States will add $5.3 trillion in debt during Obama’s four-year term, driving our debt to over $16 trillion. Every American’s share of that debt has ballooned from almost $33,000 in 2008 to over $50,000 today. The president calls these trillions of dollars in deficit spending an “investment.” It’s fair to ask what all this borrowing has bought us.

The Federal Reserve just reported that between 2007 and 2010, families’ median net worth fell by nearly 40%. This is a depressing reality. And the Obama administration has no plan to reverse these enormous losses. Unemployment is on the rise. And while the White House boasts of creating 4 million private-sector jobs, the working-age population has grown by 6 million. We’re losing ground. Hard-working Americans are being left behind.

The problem is not a reduction in government payrolls. The federal workforce has grown under this administration. Between 2007 and 2010, total federal wages and benefits increased by about 13%, while wages and benefits in the private sector fell by 6%. Nobody wants to underpay government workers for their efforts, but we simply cannot afford to overpay them. Governments at all levels need to benchmark public-sector compensation against that of the private sector.

My counterpart on Wisconsin Public Radio Friday suggested one reason for the slow recovery was a decrease in public-sector employment. With all due respect to the contributions of police, firefighters, teachers and other government employees, their contributions to the economy are set off by the costs that employing them takes out of the economy in taxes. The only way the economy will improve to a recognizable recovery and noticeable economic growth will be through the  private sector:

Wisconsin and America cannot afford another four years of increasing debt and growing government. Yet that is all Obama knows, and it is all he is able to offer. We need leadership to reduce the rate of growth of government spending and leadership that recognizes that growing government is not the solution; growing the private sector is.