ARE YOU BETTER OFF NOW THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?
- Sean Hannity and other conservative media pundits are asking that question these days, so let's see:

* Around this time in 2020, Covid 19 had reached pandemic levels

* Lockdowns had begun in countries around the world, including the U.S.

* People were fighting over toilet paper

* Schools were closing, in some cases for the rest of the school year.

* Unemployment was skyrocketing; the stock market was plunging

* Hospitals were desperately short on N95 masks

* New York City was beginning to evidence many Covid cases; by April 15 their average deaths/day for the previous two weeks was over 900.

* Trump was telling us it would all go away soon. In a few weeks, he would say that ingesting bleach was a powerful antidote. As mask-wearing became recommended, he chose to never wear one and set example. Consequently, his MAGA followers eschewed masks and a higher percentage died than the population at large.

___________

The list could go on, but, you get the point. We're definitely better off today than four years ago -- in so many ways it's impossible to list them all. Primarily, we've moved beyond the Covid pandemic, but we did lose around 1.2 million citizens to the disease.

- Think about that: in a bad flu season, around 50,000 die from it. Covid has killed around 10 X more than influenza since 2020, but we have moved beyond the worst of it. Inflation and other problems hung around as the economy re-booted, but that has gotten much better as well.

Give me 2024 in the U.S. over 2020 any day, thanks in no small part to President Biden's policies and leadership.

Yes, there were scary moments at the start of the plague. But I'm seeing news stories from several countries (Canada, Australia) saying that low-to-middle income earners can no longer find affordable housing. This is something that's been developing for years -- not directly related to the plague or to individual politicians.