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Opinion | Obama's play on words, not real numbers about economy, will cost him youth

Catalina Lauf, laufcf@muohio.edu

With the Democratic National Convention in full swing this week in North Carolina, opening speakers such as the eloquent Castro brothers, and the First Lady Mrs. Obama herself, seem to be highlighting a main theme - "Obama needs four more years."

But between the many liberal deliveries that sentence in particular should resonate to voters as they ask themselves, are you better off than you were four years ago?

The reality is, we are not. This continued occurrence of Obama's spending habits like that of a college girl with a maxed out credit card, has left the United States with a staggering $16 trillion deficit, with an unemployment rate of 8.2 percent and 46 million Americans on food stamps - all at the expense of taxpayer money.

You don't have to be an economics major to see these numbers and know that there is an apparent problem. No matter the lack of interest college students may have in the political scene, and despite what the MUPD thinks, we aren't stupid.

According to the U.S Federal Government Spending analysis, President Obama has racked up a bill of $5.3 trillion in his first term as President, significantly higher than that of the two term 4.9 increase from the Bush Administration. What will happen if we give him another year?

But anyone who researched Barack Obama during his time in Congress could have seen this coming. As senator of Illinois, he co-sponsored the restructuring of a bill, adding his signature on a welfare plan that uses approximately $20.5 billion dollars of taxpayer money.

On the contrary, his opponent Mitt Romney, created stores such as Staples and Sports Authority helping employment and the overall economy during his time at Bain Capital. As governor of Massachusetts, he cut spending, which resulted in an elimination of $1.5 billion from the state deficit.

In hard economic times such as these, it seems as though it's a no-brainer who is more qualified or rather, willing to, practice fiscal responsibility and turn the country around.

So, as college students, we can take the facts, the numbers and the data, and then ask our selves, are we really better off than we were four years ago?

If there are qualified professionals out there that have been in the "real world" with a college degree AND years of resume work that can't even find a job, what makes us think we can?

Simple. Under President Obama, we can't. Under President Obama, we won't.

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But as a whopping 23 million Americans are currently unemployed, Mitt Romney's experience seems to restore hope. He increased job growth and changed the unemployment rate from 5.6 percent to four percent during his term as governor of Massachusetts.

The youth vote is important to the presidency.

In a time when our overall economic health is incredibly ill, why would we assist the re-election of a President whose only presented budget plan for 2013 was shot down by the Congressional Budget Office?

This non-partisan entity claims that if it were used, the United States economy would "probably be considered a recession."

Why would we re-elect someone that hasn't significantly increased jobs for the working class American and has 46 million mouths on food stamps?

Does being jobless and food-rationed sound like the American dream to you?

President Obama's play on words may have worked for the 68 percent amount of college-aged students who bought the "Hope and Change" gimmick.

But as he spends more money America doesn't have, and with the job market feeble for recent college grads, it's time we looked at the facts presented to us in statistics, rather than the fiction presented to us in the President's rhetoric.