Noting Ronald Reagan's famous question -- “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” -- from 1980, USA Today manufactured evidence to claim that President Obama has acknowledged the economy has not improved during his time in office:

Obama caused a stir when he told ABC News that he believes Americans aren't better off in his presidency.

That statement is demonstrably false. In fact, it's proved false by the very next sentence in the USA Today post:

“They're not better off than they were before Lehman collapsed, before the financial crisis, before this extraordinary recession that we're going through,” Obama said in October.

Those anchors Obama cited -- the financial crisis, Lehman's collapse, and the recession -- are critical. Each predates Obama's presidency. Those anchors make clear that Obama is saying that the economy has not returned to its pre-recession level -- not that the economy has not improved from where it was in January 2009, when Obama's presidency actually began.

Obama was in fact referring to the economic situation in 2007, long before his presidency. The recession began in December 2007. Lehman collapsed in September 2008.

That “four years ago” question has two components: where the economy is today, and where it was four years ago. That latter component -- where the economy was -- will be particularly important to explain during the 2012 election.

In the months between the 2008 election and Obama's inauguration alone, 2 million jobs were lost. The economy shrunk by 9 percent during the final three months of 2008 -- the fastest rate of economic contraction in 50 years.

During a recent 60 Minutes interview, Obama laid out the economic timeline, making clear that while the economy has not returned to its pre-recession level, the economy has improved substantially since his economic policies have gone into effect:

KROFT: With the unemployment [rate at] 8.6 [percent], you still got soft consumer demand. You've got no business investment, there's still a fairly steady downturn in housing prices. Do you know something that these 29% don't know? I mean, do you see some hope? Do you think that things are gonna get better? Do you think that you might have the unemployment rate down to 8% by the time the election rolls around?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I think it's possible. But, you know, I'm not in the job of prognosticating on the economy. I'm in the job of putting in place the tools that allow the economy to thrive and Americans to succeed. And keep in mind that when I came into office, it turns out that in the three months before I was sworn in, the economy had contracted by 9%. Almost unprecedented, certainly since the 1930s. We lost four million jobs before I was sworn in and another four million jobs in three months after I was sworn in, but before any of our economic policies had a chance to take effect. Eight million jobs were gone. And things were cratering.

Six months later, the economy was growing again. And we've now had nine consecutive quarters, two and a half years, in which the economy's grown. About nine months later, we were creating jobs again. And we've had 21 consecutive months of private sector job growth. So, does that make people feel better? No. You know, we did all the right things to prevent a great depression and to get the economy growing again and to get job creation going again.

But it hasn't made up for the hole that was created in those six, nine, 12 months before my economic policies took effect. Now the second challenge, though, is a set of structural problems in the economy that date back ten years, 15 years -- where wages and incomes haven't been going up -- that were papered over because the housing bubble was going on and people could borrow from their homes and use credit cards.