and at 3:00, we'll talk to general russell honore. plus fredricka's interview with tiger woods. i'm alina cho. see you in one hour. "your money" starts right now. i'm ali velshi. no economic issue is more important to americans than jobs. here is the latest. we had a jobs report come out for the month of august, no new jobs were created in america in august. the unemployment rate, which was 9.1% before we got into this remains at 9.1%. stubbornly high. the number of unemployed people in america officially is 14 million people. the situation is getting dire. but i want to give you a bigger perspective. it's hard to live in the moment and make decisions. let's go back to the beginning of 2009. that's when president obama first took office. we were losing in excess of 700,000 jobs in the month that he first took office. through 2009, things looked to get substantially better. according to experts, the recession ended in 2009. 2010, boy, we were building in the beginning of the year and then started to lose jobs again. and then we started to get the shaky job creation record at the end of 2010 and into 2011. look at august. there's supposed to be a bar, either a yellow one that said we created jobs or a red one that said we lost jobs. but there's nothing there because we had zero jobs created. ken rogoff joins us now. what does this mean? have we stagnated? >> clearly we're stagnating. the employment numbers have been getting weaker fer for a while. the recession never ended. we're not close on employment. we're still very much crawling our way out of the recession. and right now, nothing. >> gloria borger is our chief political analyst. gloria, we're going to get in a moment to find out about whether or not we are still in a recession or danger into getting into another one. but a cnn poll shows 37% of americans approve of how president obama is handling unemployment, or the employment situation. on thursday night, the president gives his jobs speech. politically, what could he possibly say to convince american that is his administration at least has some idea or answer to fixing this chronic, dire unemployment situation? >> well, he's got to go out there and tell the american people that he's got proposals to try and fix this unemployment problem. so you're probably going to hear some things from him that people will like, such as pay cut extension for employees, maybe for employers, tax credits for employers who hire new employees, those kinds of things that he believes that republicans will sign on to. the question is, how big is this package going to be because if it's too big, you know republicans will not go for it. so he's got a decision he's got to make. and he's got to get something passed. but he also has an election coming up, right? so he's got to say, i tried to get us in the right direction. and if they didn't follow me, they're pushing us in the wrong direction. >> so that's the political prescription. this is a managing director of the economic cycle of research institute. you predict these economic cycles and sometimes you say it's not about what government does, it is an economic cycle. let me ask you this, are we in a recession? >> no. the recession did end, i would respectfully disagree. the recession ended in the summer of '09. and since then, we've had cycles in the growth rate. so we've been growing. the economy's been growing. but we've had speed-ups and slowdowns. speed-up coming out of the recession. we had a slowdown in 2010. we're in a new slowdown now. every time you slow down, the risk of a new recession goes up, by definition, because you're going in the wrong direction. and here and now, i think we're skating on very thin ice. the chance of a new recession in front of us is quite high. but when you get into what could we do, what could have been done or what should we do now, i think there's a presumption that you can do something like you're saying, that we can do something and it will change the contours of the business cycle and it won't. >> you don't think so? >> it won't. in fact, prior to this recession, the '07 to '09 great recession, prior to that, we were already seeing a decades-long pattern of weaker and weaker expansions including jobs growth that was very, very evident, it had been happening since the mid '70s. the expectation that we should have a vigorous expansion completely flies in the face of it. >> so the fact that we'd like to see 200,000 jobs a month, it's not mathematically on the horizon. ken, we would love to think this is all about washington and that the president can say or do something. how much of this has to do with what's going on in the rest of the world? >> i think a lot of it has to do with what's going on in the rest of the world. there's also a lot of weakness in europe. but i think above all, we never exited what happened in 2007-2008. sure, a recession, as we thought of them after world war ii, ends when you start growing. but if you've gone way down and you're crawling back up, that's not the usual aftermath. calling this a great recession is like saying you have a bad flu when you really have pneumonia. >> wow. take all this in, gloria. how do you put into a mix that the president does anything about? at this point, if i were the president, i'd regret that i had a spat with john boehner about scheduling this speech. maybe it should never have been scheduled in the first place. >> first of all, it's very difficult, if not impossible, for the president to go to the american people and say, you know what? there's not really anything i can do about this, right? he's got to make it seem, even if he can't in the real world -- fix this, he's got to make it seem that he's trying to fix this. so the question out there is, will he do the big plan or the little plan? i think what he's going to do is a jobs package, some kind of stimulus package, although that's become a dirty word, that can get passed through the congress. the republicans will have some things in it that they want that maybe he'll add in. and then in the long term what you're going to see is a larger effort from the president to really throw the longball on the question of deficit reduction, which is a separate issue. and he will talk about things like reforming the tax code and tax increases, letting the bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy, which he's already said he's going to do. so you're going to see sort of a two-pronged approach from the president. and if congress doesn't cooperate, he's going to run against a do-nothing congress. >> within the confines of washington, of the presidency, the white house, the administration and congress, what can they do that doesn't look like stimulus because either they are going to spend money or they're going to cut taxes? either of which qualify as stimulus. >> exactly. there's going to be a lot of semantics about what they're doing. but t a end of the day, if we go into a new recession -- and we have a difference here, every recession is a contraction. if we go into a new recession, i don't think it's unlinked from your deficit and your debt debate because every new recession, you have a spike in the unemployment rate and a plunge in tax receipts and a big spike in expenditures automatically. so all this stuff is very closely tied to each other. but the policy challenge here is the odds of a new recession happening before we're ready are extremely high. >> the only problem we've got is that a brand-new cnn orc poll, i hate how accurate these things are, does say that 8 out of 10 americans think we're in a recession, which may, ten, speak more to the fact that we are in a remarkably bifurcated economy. there are some people in america for whom 2008 wasn't really a recession and this isn't. and there are some people who, as you say, have not recovered. this is more the sign of a developing economy than one as sophisticated and developed as the united states. >> that's for sure. i think most people are not feeling very good. they've seen their home price go down. even if they have a job, they're worried about their job. their pay is not going up very fast. hours aren't going up or they're going down. and there's a small percentage of americans who have still done very well. but i think for most people, this is a memorably rough time. >> i think we can agree on that. hang on a second, gloria. we need to try and square the circle to figure out how we take what we know and turn it into something that creates jobs. when it comes to how the president is handling the economy, americans are particularly tough graders right now. what a low mark in economics could mean for the president's chance at reelection. we'll talk about that when we come back. ♪ [ male announcer ] they'll see you...before you see them. cops are cracking down on drinking and riding. drive sober, or get pulled over. that's not how successful investing is done. at e-trade it's harnessing some of the most powerful yet easy to use trading tools on the planet to help diversify, identify opportunities, take action. it's using professional grade research and your brain to seek maximum returns to reach your goals. it's investing with intelligence and cold hard conviction. you made the money. you should have everything you need to invest it. e-trade. investing unleashed. i'm a dad, coach, and i was a longtime smoker. in my heart i knew for the longest time that did not want to be a smoker. and the fact that i failed before. i think i was discouraged for a very long time. ♪ knowing that i could smoke during the first week was really important to me. 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[ male announcer ] ask your doctor about chantix. over 7 million people have gotten a prescription. learn how you can save money and get terms and conditions at chantix.com. i'm ali velshi. your back with "your money." it's been an unsatisfying jobs report that's making us all think that this economy is stagnating. jobs are really the number one issue. but, again, i want to broaden this out and show you a little bit more about the economy. in fact, the broadest measure we tend to use of an economy is gross domestic product or gdp. i've brought this back out to show you the first quarter, the first three months of 2009, when president barack obama took office. look at the drop in gdp. 6.7%. that's bad news. but look at where we've gone since then. we've seen some improvement. and then we started to see a bit of a slowdown. in the second quarter, those are the latest numbers we have, we had 1% growth. that's not particularly strong. that's one measure. most of you don't care about gdp on a day-to-day basis. you probably do care about your home prices. let's take a look at home prices over the last little while. right now the median price of a single family existing home, the type in which most people live, an existing home is basically a used home, is $175,000. that is relatively inexpensive. we've seen a very big drop since 2006. but here's the key thing. not only is it a good deal. look at that mortgage rate. for a 30-year fixed mortgage, if you can put 20% down and you have good credit, you can get a mortgage for 4.3%. there's a sale on houses and yet people are not going and snapping them up in the way that you'd think they would. finally, for those of you who have 401(k)s or i.r.a.s, let's take a look at your investments on how they've dean. this is the s&p 500. you probably have mutual funds that reflect this. what a strong year it's been until the end of july, august, this thing came apart at the seams. but the market had done fairly well over the last year. and still is up 11.5% over where it was last year. that's not a bad return in a year on the marks. i want to go back to ken rogoff, what grade would you give the economy looking at that whole picture? >> it's hard to give it better than a "d." this is the worst financial crisis, recession, contraction, whatever you want to call it, since the great depression. and we're not coming out of it quickly. there's a danger it could get even worse. we're in a very rough patch. >> i know you track this well and your company's been doing this for decades. here's what i hear from some people, that it may not be terrible. it is just long and slow to get out of this. how do you look at this economy? >> oh, i'm very worried right now because we are already slowing, as your graphic was showing, again this year. and every time you are in a slowdown, as we are, the risk of a new recession spikes and given the most recent data, we are on very, very thin ice, looking for the forward-looking indicators, they haven't looked up yet. in terms of grading this economy, i agree with the professor. it gets a very, very low grade. >> professor borger, i'm going to ask you next. there are only a few ways to feel prosperous in an economy, right? the value of your home is increasing, the value of your investments are increasing or your wage is increasing. i think you can live without a home. you can rent. you don't have to own one. you can get away for a while without investments. but you can't live without a wage. let's see what the american people are talking about, how they're rating the economy. they're rating the president, a cnn orc poll shows that only one-third approve of the way the president is handling the economy. two-thirds disapprove. even white house budget experts announced this week they are less optimistic about economic growth and job creation. they've said it will be 2017 before we get down to 5% unemployment which is where we were before the recession started. i hand this to you, professor borger. >> well, they're trying to lower expectations. i don't know how much lower the expectations can get. this is a terrible problem for the president, not only do people disapprove of the way the economy is going and the way he's handling it, but they are "voters are pessimistic about whether things in the country are on the right track or the wrong track. that's not exactly the kind of environment you want to be heading into an election with. and there was a retreat of senior white house advisers organized by the white house chief of staff bill daildaley w they called in a historian and asked, has there been any precedent for a president being reelected in this kind of situation? and he said, yes. fdr and reagan both managed to do it. but in reagan's case, the unemployment rate was heading down. and right now in barack obama's case, it looks like it's stabilizing and could potentially head up. and that's a very, very difficult case for a president to make. what he's got to say is the other guys will make it even worse. and i don't know if that has resonance with vote zblerz it's a good question. gloria, thank you for that evaluation. ken, great to see you as always. thank you for breaking the baldness of the operation, gloria. the pressure builds on president obama as he waits to deliver his long-awaited jobs plan in a speech on thursday. but at least one republican contender has a plan of his own, which is gaining some steam. we'll take a look when we come back. on our car insurance. great! at progressive, you can compare rates side by side, so you get the same coverage, often for less. wow! that is huge! 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[♪...] >> male announcer: now, for a limited time, your companion flies free, plus save up to 65%. call 1-800-sandals. conditions apply. employers added no jobs in august. the problem is clear even to the most optimistic observers. but what do you do about it? economist diane swonk likes to tell us if there were a silver bullet, someone would have fired it already. this thursday night, the president will lay out his plan to put millions of americans back to work. bob herbert is a distinguished senior fellow. bob, specifically, what would you like to hear from the president on thursday? >> the president needs a big program that will inspire the american people. if we're talking about creating millions of jobs, it means it would have to be an enormous infrastructure program. but i think even that would not be enough. we would need a direct government jobs proposal. this, i think, is necessary in the economy that we've got now. but i don't expect anything on that scale. >> i didn't ask you just to stay that to get under stephen moore's skin. but stephen moore is with us. i couldn't have set you up better for that. you say you want the president to end job-killing regulations. i can imagine that you're not thinking of a massive stimulus infrastructure program as the answer you want to hear out of the president on thursday? >> no. in fact, it's interesting, what bob is saying and my sentiments really reflect the division right now between the two parties in washington where i think that the democrats and president obama will probably come up with something pretty big and in the direction of what bob wants. and it's also true, as bob said, that republicans are going to say "hell, no" to that. that our spending is out of control and harken back to what ronald reagan said back in 1981, which is that government isn't the solution, government is the problem. that's the big difference between the two parties. >> we are all desperate for a solution. and one republican presidential candidate, jon huntsman, is drawing some praise for the organization you work for, stephen, "the wall street journal," for his jobs plan. let me run it through here for our viewers. he says he wants to lower taxes on individuals and corporations, bringing corporate taxation down to 25%. he wants three tax categories, basically, three levels of taxation. he wants to eliminate a number of regulations including repealing president obama's health care reform plan, reducing environmental protection agency rules directed at energy companies. in fact, he specifically cited energy independence, shale gas as part of his plan, getting more oil from the oil sands in canada. he also wants to prioritize free trade. you guys over at "the wall street journal" like this plan. why are you endorsing it? >> the first question is, who the hell is jon huntsman? most people -- he's 1% at the polls. and some people say he's probably running in the wrong primary. a lot of my conservative friends think he's too liberal. but for the last three or four months on this show, we've talked about it over and over again. you ask me, what do we do to get out of this recession? i think there are a lot of very good ideas in that 12-