After almost six grueling years of recession, is our economy finally on the road to recovery? Supporters of President Barack Obama say that our unemployment rate is at 6.2 percent, Wall Street’s profits have soared and millions of jobs have been created, supposedly bringing opportunity to countless Americans. Unfortunately, these numbers tell us very little about the real economic conditions of the United States.

The first issue of concern is our incredibly misleading unemployment rate. It isn’t lower because of legitimate progress; it’s lower because Americans are not going back to work. They’re instead giving up the search for employment and leaving the workforce entirely, which means they are not counted into the unemployment rate. This can be seen in our 62.9 percent workforce participation rate, which is the lowest it’s been since 1978 under Jimmy Carter. His presidency featured a horrid stagflation crisis that resulted in one of the worst recessions in U.S. history. Today, more than 90 million Americans are completely out of the workforce according to zerohedge.com. If our economy is actually faring as badly as the Carter economy, it’s safe to say that our present-day economic problems are no closer to being solved.

 At the same time, our nation is experiencing income inequality; but contrary to public opinion, it’s not because of greedy one-percenters. Rather, rising taxes and regulatory policies have hurt middle and lower class Americans, the same people Obama promised to help during his two presidential campaigns. The facts on wages are undeniable—according to a 2014 report by the United States Conference of Mayors, jobs lost during the Great Recession paid $61,637 while jobs created in our “recovery” pay $47,171 annually. That’s a 23 percent plummet. The organization also found that overall, revenue in lost wages totaled $93 billion. Additionally, the most recent report released by Sentier Research, an organization that reports on income and demographics, shows that U.S. median household income has fallen five percent from the time the recovery officially started in July of 2009 to January 2014. In other words, under the Obama economy, average Americans have become poorer than they were prior to the 2008 recession.

The bad news doesn’t end there. Even more data confirms that increasingly people are earning less and living in poverty. The Washington Post reported that just this past June, the number of people who had part-time jobs rose by 1 million, bringing the total to 27 million people with part-time jobs. Additionally, the number of Americans at or below the poverty line in 2013 hit almost 50 million, a 50-year record, according to the Washington Times. Overall, the poverty rate has stood at 15 percent for three straight years under Obama. Under President George W. Bush in 2007, the poverty rate was 12.5 percent. I thought we had a president whose top priorities were to fight income inequality and help our society’s most vulnerable.

 I could rail off more statistics about why our economy is still underperforming and so rife with people falling through the cracks of the official economic narrative propagated by the Obama administration. However, the point is clear: America needs to get back to work. 

The only way to accomplish that is through a return to the free market—the same one that helped usher in the wild success of innovative companies like Facebook, Dropbox and Amazon on the unregulated, low-taxed Internet. This means lowering our corporate tax rate, which is the highest in the industrialized world, and repealing Obamacare, a law that has already increased costs for entrepreneurs and resulted in mass layoffs. Just look at Indiana University Health, a hospital that laid off 900 workers, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which eliminated 1,000 jobs in October 2013 as per USA Today, even though crucially important components of the law have been delayed time and time again. These and other liberal policies have constrained business and made it impossible to hire workers, increase wages and grow our economy. 

Whether we like it or not, the U.S. economy is still very much floundering because of big government run amuck. To add insult to injury, in 2013, the Federal Register added over 80,000 pages of new rules and regulations for businesses and entrepreneurs to follow. Our tax code is complex, confusing, overly burdensome, thousands upon thousands of pages long and enforced by an Internal Revenue Service that has targeted political opponents in the past. 

Congress and the president seem to care more about corporate welfare for failed green energy companies like Solyndra and taxpayer-funded crony capitalist ventures like the Export-Import Bank—known colloquially as “Boeing’s Bank”—that supports big, politically-connected businesses with armies of lobbyists at the expense of American competitors who don’t have the same connections. 

How can we have a sound economy when, for all intents and purposes, our economy is held hostage by liberal, Washington-style politics? For this we must blame our entrenched, out-of-touch politicians—both Republican and Democrat—and quite simply, vote the bums out.