In 2008, President Obama received 66 percent of the youth vote. Young people were enthusiastic about his candidacy, increasing turnout across the country and helping to deliver key swing states for the President. But just three and half years later, young people are beginning to have buyer’s remorse. The promise of change was so hopeful, yet it turns out the President only made things dramatically worse.

During his first term, President Obama certainly has done some historical things. He oversaw the first ever downgrade of our credit rating. He is the first president to govern with trillion dollar deficits every single year of his term. He will add more than $6.2 trillion in new debt by November, more debt accumulated than all previous presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush combined. He will oversee the largest tax increase in American history at $5 trillion. He signed into law a government mandate of health care that forces young people to buy insurance or pay a $750 annual fine until you do. He is the first modern president to cut billions of dollars from Medicare. I can go on and on and on. Yet historical “accomplishments” such as these haven’t produced a stronger America. They have destroyed the American Dream for millions of Americans, suffocating economic opportunities for the next generation.

Just a few days ago, an April 22 piece by the Associated Press reported about the devastating results of Obama’s policies on our future. They found “A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed.” This means one out of every two college graduates will either not have a job or will resort to taking a part-time job to make ends meet. More specifically, “Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.” Literally the prospects of a strong start for our generation don’t exist. If one takes the “underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor’s degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.” Instead of more job opportunities for young people, there is less opportunity to be successful. After trillions of dollars in government spending, we are left with anemic economic growth, an unemployment rate above 8 percent for the last 40 months and more than 24 million Americans either unemployed, underemployed or discouraged from even looking for a job. Such statistics aren’t just mind-blowing on paper. They crush the spirit of hard work and the importance of getting a good education.

Yet the AP story isn’t the only one to take note. Last month, the Pew Research Center released a study showing “the share of Americans living in multigenerational family households is the highest it has been since the 1950s.” Young people simply cannot be self-sufficient without economic opportunities like a good job. With all of the big speeches and smiles from the President, the results of his policies show a very different, darker story. He is deceiving all of us, simply leaving us behind.

A lot of people can get caught up with his rhetoric and attacks. But all of it will be based on false premises and used to distract you from his clear failures. Our future is too important. We must not fall for such blatant tactics and somehow accept the idea that we will have a worse standard of living than our parents. We deserve to have the opportunity to be successful and reach our potential. We must never get used to such bleak prospects. We are better than this and we have had better times before. Our future can be prosperous if we embrace the right solutions that produce economic prosperity, not stagnation or bigger government control of our lives. The engine that powered us to the strongest economy in the world with the highest standard of living has been the free market, not massive government debt. No other system ever devised by man has provided more jobs, upward mobility or a stronger middle class than economic freedom. Yet all of this is under assault from the President. Regulation after regulation, mandate after mandate, new tax after new tax and debt and more debt have strangled our country and stood in the way of an American economic recovery.

For the sake of a prosperous future, we must reverse course. It begins this November. It begins with a new President of the United States of America.