As we stagger out of a Great Recession borne by unfunded wars, bailed-out banks, tax cuts for the wealthy and the ongoing predilection of Congress to avoid hard choices in favor of a credit card, the pertinent question on Election Day is as current as ever:

Are we better off than we were four years ago?

Think about it.

The housing crash handed us by an unregulated banking industry rife with fraud — and resulting crashes in the job and stock markets — devastated our economy in 2008. In the ensuing chaos, virtually every American lost a home, a job, a retirement account, or all three.

Today, there are more private sector jobs in the economy than when President Obama took office. At the same point in President Bush’s first term, the total number of private sector jobs had actually declined 1.7 percent — despite all those tax cuts.

Wall Street loves Obama — or should. Banks are whole. The stock market is up 90 percent during his term — one of the best four-year performances in U.S. history.

Builders and brokers agree: The housing market is in recovery.

On the whole, we feel wealthier, because we are.

In 2008, we were street fighting in Baghdad and bogged down along the Afghan frontier.

Today, the Iraq war — a costly misadventure yielding no strategic or economic benefit — is complete, at sickening cost; and the Afghan war is winding down, providing hope for an American peace dividend.

Thanks to the president’s leadership, Osama bin Laden met his demise without a single drop of American bloodshed.

Obama’s detractors say he’s an unbridled socialist whose spending is out of control.

When people criticize Obama’s solutions as socialist, they display a staggering ignorance of American history that forgets Social Security, Medicare, the interstate highway system, the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration, rural electrification, the Internet, NASA’s moon landing and more — all examples of government investment that spurred massive private sector growth.

We can’t cut our way to prosperity. Nor can we sit back and hope tax cuts will trickle into jobs, or that the private sector will produce jobs if unregulated, or that we are the world’s policeman.

These academic arguments don’t reflect reality. If these policies had been in place in 2008, banks would have collapsed, the auto industry would have gone under and we may still be fighting in Iraq — and perhaps Iran.

Mitt Romney has an intriguing background. He took on the Herculean task of managing the Olympics, ran a Democratic state as a Republican and has a well-documented history of success in business. Furthermore, he’s now run for president twice, exhibiting real patriotism in the process. All of these are qualities worthy of consideration.

Unfortunately, to the extent we can pin down what he would actually do as president, Romney — the “Etch-a-Sketch” candidate — is a ticket back to 2008 and beyond.

His tax cuts add $5 trillion to the deficit without mention of how to pay for them.

His military worldview is one of conflict and unilateralism, offering more of the costly thinking that made Iraq an expensive boondoggle.

And though Obama inherited a far worse economy than Romney did in the Bay State, private sector jobs have grown 1.6 percent since Obama took office, compared with 1.3 percent during Romney’s term — ranking his state 48th out of 50.

Simply put, we are on the right road. Let’s not go back to what did not work.

It’s been slow going. All is not well. Tough choices lay ahead. But a second Obama term could end the childish stalemate in Congress, where GOP leaders openly stated their goal was to limit Obama to one term.

We know the best way to provide jobs and security is to focus on unmet domestic needs and to grow the economy from the middle out, not the top down. The president has proven he’s up to that job.