Industrial decline in the Rust Belt. High unemployment. Despair. A vanishing middle class.

That’s a compelling portrait, and it’s been used to great effect by Republicans and Democrats alike this presidential campaign season. It was only natural that when the campaigns came to Indiana, the candidates would try to suck this state into the narrative.

Both Bernie Sanders, the economic populist of the left, and Donald Trump, the economic populist of the right, have thundered against the Carrier Corporation’s closing of Indiana factories and moving to Mexico, chopping 1,400 jobs in the process. The company must pay a consequence, Trump declared. Stop the greed! Sanders shouted.

That’s just protectionist, nationalist nonsense, of course, and it isn’t even the whole story. The New York Times, by talking to a few people, including a couple of good economists, discovered that Indiana “defies an easy picture of Rust Belt decline. By many measures, the state is humming economically, offering a contrarian reality to the gloomy scenario that the presidential candidates are presenting to motivate voters.”

With nearly one in five jobs in manufacturing, the highest share of any state, Indiana’s gross domestic product is accelerating faster than any of its Great Lakes neighbors.

Unemployment at the end of last year was 4.4 percent, below the national average of about 5 percent. Even though the figure has ticked up in 2016, economists attribute the increase to the large number of people returning to the work force, including job seekers moving to Indiana.

The Indianapolis region is growing faster than Chicago, Cleveland or Detroit, and personal income statewide rose 3.6 percent last year, faster than the national average.

Certainly there are pockets of weakness, such as our emptying rural counties. And we have some problems common to the nation as a whole, such as the wage stagnation of the kind that breeds insecurity.

But the state has been doing a lot of the right things by keeping regulations sensible, taxes low and the economic climate business friendly. Measured by the value of goods produced, manufacturing has never been stronger, and there’s no reason why it should not get even better.

If they’d stop yammering, those politicians who think they have something to teach us might just learn a thing or two.

This was distributed by Hoosier State Press Association. Send comments to [email protected].