Before you cast your vote for congressional candidates on Nov. 8, I ask that you mull over the following:

President Joe Biden recently told us that the national economy is “strong as hell.” Do you honestly believe that?

The stock market is down over 20% this year. Individual Retirement Accounts and 401(k)s have cratered. Corporate giants are restructuring and laying off workers. Mortgage interest rates have jumped from 3% to 7%.

Then there is the soaring inflation that is wrecking family budgets and wiping out wage gains.

Larry Summers, a leading Democratic economist, cautioned in 2021 that reckless federal spending would unleash the worst inflation in decades. Ignoring his warning, Biden and congressional leaders approved a $1.9 trillion-dollar stimulus spending bill.

The result: in the past year coffee has gone up 18.7%, bread 16.1%, chicken 14.9% and eggs 39.8%. Overall groceries have gone up 13.5%.

In 2021 it cost about $832 a month to feed a family of four. It now costs $1,400.

Biden’s energy policies—canceling domestic pipeline construction and a moratorium on new oil leases of public land—have been a disaster.

In addition to the surge in prices at the gas pump, home-heating fuel will be up over 17% this winter. The average household will have to shell out an extra $1,200 to stay warm.

These facts do not translate into an economy that is “strong as hell.” Instead, they indicate the nation is heading toward a severe recession.

Next, there is the ridiculous claim made ad nauseam by President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris that our Southern border is secure.

It is impossible to reconcile their position with the fact that after rolling back Trump administration border policies, a record-breaking 2.7 million migrants crossed our border between Oct. 1, 2021 and Sept. 30, 2022.

In September alone Customs and Border Protection reported 227,000 people crossing the border: up 18.5% vs. September 2021.

Since Biden took office over 4 million migrants have jumped the border.

By the way, those of you who are angry about migrants being shipped to New York, the fact is about 75% of them arrived via air, courtesy of the Biden-Harris administration.

Thanks to teacher union-driven COVID school policies, 38% of eighth grade students performed below the basic achievement levels in math.

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education said, “These mathematics results are historic… [They are] the largest decline in mathematics we have observed in the entire history of this assessment.”

That’s not the only bad news on the education front. ACT test scores, which are used for college admission, have been a disaster.

The national average ACT score for the high school class of 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported, “fell to 19.8 out of 36, down from 20.3.” Over 40% of seniors did not hit any of ACT’s benchmarks.

Commenting on these dismal results, Janet Godwin, the CEO of ACT, said there are “a rapidly growing number of seniors leaving high school without meeting the college-readiness benchmark in any of the subjects we measure.”

So much for Zoom classes.

There is much to criticize, and sadly, those who dare to disagree publicly with the president he dismisses as “semi-fascists.” So much for Biden’s pledge to unify Americans.

Here is something else to contemplate before entering the polling booth: the Progressive mindset.

The noted Democratic analyst, Ruy Teixeira, made this trenchant observation in an essay he penned for substack.com: “Let’s face it, today’s Democrats have a bit of a problem with patriotism. It’s kind of hard to strike up the band on patriotism when you’ve been endorsing the view that America was born in slavery, marinated in racism and remains a white supremacist society, shot through with multiple, intersecting levels of injustice that make everybody either oppressed or oppressor on a daily basis… Hmm. This doesn’t seem like a very inspirational approach….”

Public opinion surveys indicate this Progressive attitude is not clicking with many Americans, particularly minorities.

While 66% of Progressive activists are not proud of America, 62% of Asians, 70% of Blacks and 76% of Hispanics disagree. They are proud to be Americans.

These statistics help explain why many minorities are deserting the Democratic Party and moving into the Republican camp.

I, for one, have had enough of the policies and demeanor of Joe Biden and his band of Washington radical Progressives. And to check their destructive power, on Election Day I intend to cast my vote for Republican-Conservative congressional candidates.

I recommend you do the same.