I resent feeling as if I need to take out a loan every time I go grocery shopping.

In the early 1960’s, when I was born, butter was 63 cents a pound. I’ve seen prices for a pound of butter hover near $4 today.

And the thing is, no matter how much research I’ve done on the rising cost of nearly everything, I never get a satisfying answer. In fact, I’ve come to believe there is no satisfying answer that the field of economics can provide.

It insults my intelligence.

My husband, who prescribes to the idea that pricing is always determined by supply and demand has given up on me. He sees nothing sinister in the fact that the average price of a vacation for two is nearly $5,000, or that it’s likely our own children might not be able to buy a house until they’re 40, rather than in their late 20s as it used to be, or that so many kids are saddled with astronomical college loans that they must take refuge in their parent’s basement for a decade longer than he did.

And I understand his complacency, in a way. The average American doesn’t perceive that their quality of life has changed dramatically over the past ten years because it happened subtly over the course of their adulthood and they just sort of accepted the “new normal.”

The “new normal.”

For me, that’s the buzz word that holds all of the answers to our economic strife.

During the Obama years, when growth was stuck at 2 percent for eight years, was when this new normal began.

“This is the best we can do now,” our president told us. “You’re going to have to get used to it.”

That was after the Great Recession that began in 2006, even though the historical pattern is that the worse the recession, the stronger the recovery. And that recession wiped out people’s assets, their retirement savings, and many lost their homes and were forced to start completely over, lest we forget.

Love him or hate him, there is no denying that Obama’s policies were documented to produce the worst economic recovery from a recession since the Great Depression, in terms of unemployment, economic growth, wage growth, income growth, poverty, even inequality, according to the Washington Times.

Us average folks have good questions because we’re the ones that actually live through the consequences of economic policy and labor to pay $4.00 for that pound of butter. And we deserve to know the reason for Obama’s economic stagnation over the course of eight years that fundamentally transformed America and the way American’s live.

And if we’re not asking ourselves big questions like that, why not? Because most people believe it’s out of their range of expertise. It’s too complicated and has to do with market forces they don’t understand.

And I say hogwash to that. It’s less about math and more about putting the pieces of a puzzle together. We need to trust our instincts and speak up when things don’t add up.

We need to be cognizant of and admit that the labor participation rate was at a 40-year low during the Obama years, and that we were nearly $20 trillion in debt, and with 46 million people living in poverty — with 50 million living on food stamps. His administration saw a record number of home foreclosures, and our country’s credit rating downturned for the first time ever.

Perhaps, the worst of it is this: “America’s reputation as the freest, strongest, noblest, most prosperous nation in history was replaced by a vision of ourselves that we, nor any other nation on earth, did not recognize,” as one reporter so earnestly said.

These are big numbers, big questions and the “why” deserves to be answered.

Because, I’ll tell you honestly, that since 2006, my family’s quality of life has suffered. We vacation less, worry about food costs more, and cringe when we see retirement looming in front of us. We, just as many others, were greatly effected by the recession.

I do the research and I come at my husband with theories and statistics and question the reason we had a “Great Recession” at all. But that’s another column in itself. It’s a complicated mix of subprime mortgages and real estate bubbles that some say should have been prevented.

What I urge my friends and family to do is to stop being complacent, and to stop accepting the often lame excuses offered to us as to why things are the way they are.

My goal here is not to be political, or to favor a political party, but to urge Americans to start participating again in the details that make up our lives both big and small and how those details often pertain to government.

It’s about starting to care again how much a pound of butter costs. Or how the cost of education will effect your children’s lives until they’ve turned old and gray.