you can help. guard your medicare card. don't give out your card number over the phone. call to report any suspected fraud. we're cracking down on medicare fraud. let's make medicare stronger for all of us. our top story now, parts of the central gulf coast are on alert for flash flooding from tropical storm lee. louisiana and mississippi both under a state of emergency. some places could get up to 20 inches of rain. do you know what to do to recession-proof your family budget? that's at 2:00 p.m. eastern.

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. ♪

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if you have symptoms of a heart attack. dosing may be different if you have kidney problems. until you know how chantix affects you, use caution when driving or operating machinery. common side effects include nausea, trouble sleeping and unusual dreams. ♪ these are the reasons i quit smoking. [ 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.

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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-page report. the idea of cutting the tax rates, i love the idea of getting some of the regulations off business. just one little example that you mentioned, the shale gas revolution that's going on in this country. i was just in west virginia witnessing it firsthand. you want to talk about economic development in places like wheeling, west virginia, thousands of jobs being created without a penny of government

money, let's nurture that industry. we could become the saudi arabia of natural gas. >> when a reporter asked him about how he got support for all this, he didn't suggest this was the ultimate plan. he suggested this was an opening salvo -- i like candidates who can go in with the idea that things can change and evolve. bob s there anything that republicans are offering right now, say, for jon huntsman, is there anything that they are offering in terms of job creation that can be worked into part of a viable solution? >> i don't think so. i look at the huntsman plan, for example. it seems to me very similar to the policies that we had under the george w. bush administration which got us into this terrible fix or was a big component of getting us into this terrible fix in the first place. but i don't think either party has anything that they've proposed that will get us out of this because i think they're

missing the fundamental point. and that is that this economy does not appear to be capable anymore of creating enough jobs to put enough decent jobs, especially -- to put enough americans back to work to maintain a vast middle class standard of living. we need an interim jobs program to put some people to work and alleviate the suffering while we have a national conversation about what we need to do overall about the economy. >> when you say an interim jobs program, you mean a stimulus or something whereby the government puts unemployed workers back to work? >> yes. that's be primarily not to take care of the economic problem in the country but to bring relief to the millions of americans who are suffering as a result of joblessness or underemployment. >> i will give jon huntsman a big checkmark for putting something on the table to discuss. we'll have one from president obama next thursday. and we're expecting one from mitt romney as well. we'll have stuff to discuss.

>> we said in our piece, maybe huntsman should give the republican response to the president's jobs program. it's an interesting sharp contrast. i agree with you. there's he's putting ideas on the table. >> bob, stay where you are. it's labor day weekend, labor, are unions still relevant? we'll talk to the most powerful union voice in the country right after this. hey ! chocolate, vanilla or strawberry ? chocolate ! chocolate it is ! yeah, but i'm new, too. umm... he's new... er... than you. even kids know it's wrong to treat new friends better than old friends. at ally bank, we treat all our customers fairly, with no teaser rates and no minimum deposit to open. it's just the right thing to do. [ male ] using clean american fuel is just a pipe dream. ♪ [ female announcer ] we're rolling away misperceptions about energy independence. did you know that today about a quarter of all new transit buses

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a majority of americans give labor unions credit for improving wages and conditions for workers, according to a new harris poll. but they also question whether members get their money's worth for the dues they pay and think that labor unions are too involved in politics. take a look at that. richard trumki is the president of the aflcio and a member of

president obama's council on jobs and competitiveness. some people say the success in getting what unions wanted for their members ended up hurting america's competitiveness because we got unions manufacturing workers high workers great benefits and ended up not being as competitive with outsourcing that work overassets. what's your response to that? >> that's ridiculous. it was the labor movements that built the middle class and it was the middle class that made america great. we were very, very competitive and we spread the wealth around to everybody so that the main driver of our economy, consumer spending, people have money in their pockets to spend. we help create jobs and come to the table to create quality products. we train our members. next year we'll train 40,000 new members and retrain 100,000 members in the green economy to make them for competitive.

>> maybe that's the issue, though, that you did all of those things -- unions did all those things at a time when we didn't have protections for workers in a lot of other areas. now it seems to be -- we seem to simplify this sighing, we can manufacture a widget overseas cheaper than we can in the united states. it is a charge we have to figure out a way to answer. >> germany's answered that. they have a high-wage economy. they continue to produce things that they can export around the world. what we've done here is we've given up in many instances. we have bad trade laws, we have tax laws that reward people for moving jobs overseas. if we'd focus on manufacturing here and all of us coming together, labor, government and business and business and labor all working together, we can compete with anybody in the world because if you don't compete, if you don't manufacture things, ali, you can't compete in the global economy. remember, where the manufacturing goes, so does the research and development. all the new cutting-edge

products will be moved overseas rather than here because they haven't focused on manufacturing. >> ultimately and we've seen that happen. what is it we're likely to manufacture here in the united states that can be made into products that can be sold competitively around the world? >> we can make anything here. we can compete against anybody in the world if you give us a level playing field. stop china from manipulating their currency. we're more than competitive. >> if you did that with china, you somehow figured a awway to t their currency to float and you got them to deal with child labor laws and issues like that, ultimate lis there are going to be places in the world by virtue of their time and development that can still do things cheaper than america. america may not be able to assemble and build an iphone as inexpensively as it can be done in asia, even with rules. >> thaet that's true. if we have a comparative

advantage, they ought to be able to get it. but they shouldn't be able to get the work because they manipulate their currency and cheat on all the rules. and we shouldn't reward them for moving jobs overseas, giving them tax breaks for doing it. there are things we can compete in around the world in manufacturing. we could put a lot of people back to work and be the leader again if we decide to do itment we haven't decided to do it right now because the lobby that you're dealing with -- and you actually portended or told your listeners that we're competing against china. you're really not. you're competing against the same companies and in china. >> in this economy with this jobs situation, which is very important to you as a labor leader, it's hard to convince people that in the short term, insisting on tougher trade deals and insisting on those places that manufacture the goods we by having higher standards, will end up costing us more for many

of the goods we buy, electronics, clothes, all the things we import. >> ali, 78% of american people agree with me. they think the trade laws we have have been bad and we really should change them. >> but it will increase costs. >> it doesn't have to increase cost. that's nonsense. it doesn't have to increase costs. we can compete with people. if they have a comparative advantage, they ought to be able to send products here that will help us. but if they're sending products here at a cheaper rate because they're cheating, it isn't cheaper. it lays americans off. taxpayers have to pay for the people that are laid off. we have to provide benefits for them. it's not cheaper. it's far more expensive. it's cheaper to have an economy that really is humming, producing things and sends products overseas, not jobs. >> so normally when i get a good discussion like this, i say to somebody, if you have the ear of the president. but you do have the ear of the

president. has anything happened with that council that you're a member of? >> not nearly enough. i think it needs to be for assertive. it needs to take positions on what needs to be done rather than what they think can be done. i think it needs to do more. yesterday we had a very productive session in dallas, texas, on infrastructure where everybody came together, where business, labor and government all said, infrastructure has to be done, it has to be done at a big scale to make us competitive. and even though everybody agrees, nothing seems to be getting done because of the radical political games that are being played in the house of representatives right now by the republicans. >> what's your answer? what do you think president obama can do next thursday that will have the greatest effect on creating jobs in america? >> several things. large-scale reauthorization of the surface transportation act. that's been a bipartisan issue for 40 years. all of a sudden, the republicans want to cut 30% from the

baseline that everybody knows is already half of what it should be. the faa reauthorize it, clean water act, reauthorize it. send some aid to state and local governments so they don't continue to lay off people and we can actually bring things together. target communities with high levels of unemployment with work. that would be the african-american communities, the latino communities and communities around the country where the level of unemployment is real high. and we have to increase the amount -- or to help fill the hole in consumer demand. we have to continue to extend unemployment benefits so that 3 million workers don't stop spending and drag the economy down into the ground. the last thing i would say is we have to regulate wall street to prevent them from going back to the things they did before that brought this economy down to begin with. >> richard, good to have you on the show. thanks for joining us. >> thanks, ali. stephen moore, bob herbert,

let's start with you, bob. unions, labor day, are unions still relevant? >> unions are more important and more needed than ever right now. i just believe in the fundamental right that workers have a right to be represented in the workplace to fight for the issues that are important to them and to give them some leverage when they're confronting their employers. >> what do you think, stephen? >> i'm interested in this idea of fundamental right because i agree with that. every worker should have the fundamental right to join a union. but every worker should also have a fundamental right not to join a union, not to associate with a union. we have half the states in this country that have forced unionism. that's not fair. i agreed with a lot of what richard said. if you cut me, i bleed red, white and blue. i don't want to see jobs sent overseas. we have to do something about competitiveness.

let's compare china with the united states. china has about a 20% corporate tax rate. we're at 35%. that means every american company starts with a 15 percentage point disadvantage. it's not surprising we're outsourcing jobs. >> there's something odd in this world where stephen and richard are coming together. >> a little bit. >> listen, we have a lot of work to do, that much we can agree on. bob, good to see you. and stephen moore. when we come back, we'll tell you the single best way to insulate yourself against unemployment. [ doorbell rings ]

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welcome back to "your money." joining me now is christine romans, the host of cnn's "your bottom line" and pete dominick. education is so expensive these days. is it really worth it. there are so many people out there who are unemployed who even have ph.d.s. i brought in the big guns because i need to stamp that argument down. the best insulator against unemployment is a good education, why, christine? >> if you have an education, your unemployment rate is half what the rest of the world is. if off an average unemployment

rate, the unemployment rate for someone with a bachelor's degree is 4.3%. last year's full numbers, somebody with a professional degree or ph.d. their unemployment rate is 1.9%. think of that. when you look at the earnings of these people, too, last year, for example, somebody with a bachelor's degree, their earnings, $1,038 a week. how does that compare with someone with no degree? you can see, you're talking about 40%, 50% increase -- >> professional degree gets you almost four times -- three times -- more than three times what not having a high school diploma gets you. >> it is right to be concerned about college debt. tuition inflation, that tuition bubble that hasn't popped, but if you're making $400 more a week because off bachelor's degree -- >> over the course of your working life, you're going to more than pay for it. why do we have people with

professional degrees, engineering degrees, nursing degrees, accounting degrees that don't have work? >> but things have changed in this new world where we have technology and we have access to being educated on almost every single issue you can imagine and being educated formally and getting an online degree. i'm proof with an eighth-grade education, you can do pretty well. >> you stopped thinking in eighth grade? >> i kept reading and being distracted by shiny things and attractive women. but the bottom line is the data is correct. it tells the truth. but there's other ways around this. informal ways. so don't give up. >> you often make the point that you have seen some studies which indicate there are a lot of state schools where your rates are lower, where the placement rates and the success rates and the salaries are as high as they are at some private -- >> and this data was just put out showing the best return on

your investment is a public college education saying those liberal arts private schools are so expensive. you might earn a little bit more, but you're going to pay a little bit more. >> i got a football scholarship to the university of phoenix online. but i don't want to brag. >> one other statistic that's important for me to talk about here. the difference between 9.1% unemployment rate and a bachelor's degree at 4.3% unemployment rate. the black unemployment rate this month, 16.7%, the highest it's been since july 1984. >> and the male unemployment rate is higher than the female unemployment rate f. you're a black male in this country, your chances of being unemployed are incredibly higher. >> the question -- the statement i will make is in this economy, it's really working for some people. it's really not working for other people. >> the other argument, not to discount the fact that there are good trades out there that are quite lucrative these days. and the fact that some people

still can get by in this economy quite well on the strength of a liberal arts degree or an associate's degree and in some cases on no degree at all. we're just saying statistically it changes your game. >> you mentioned within important thing. you mentioned trades. we could invest if government would get together for infrastructure. i'm guessing a lot of those jobs would be held by people that have high school degrees, welders, pipefitters, you name it. >> agreed. >> but you have to have a plan. great to see both of you. thanks so much. next, are you brave enough to get in the car with me? it will be fine. i'll take you inside one of the most talked-about new cars of the year up next. i wasn't going. and i just decided i have more to offer than that. i put myself through nursing school, and then i decided to go get a doctorate degree. university of phoenix gave me the knowledge to make a difference in people's lives.

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when fiat acquired chrysler, the hope was to bring the almost bankrupt american brand into the 2 6r9 century with european styles like the fiat 500. now, currently fiat sold a little over 11,000 cars in the united states this year. that's according to its latest numbers. so is this fiat 500, it is going to change the face and the buyer of the chrysler brand and moreover is it worth all the hype? i went to consumer reports test track in connecticut where the review all the latest cars on the market for consumers like you and me and i put it to the test with david champion, senior director of the automotive test center. we have seen what this car can do if you want to drive it that way. most people are probably not going to drive it that way. this is where david will hand the car over to me. let's see what it handles like when we're driving around like regular folk. >> let's go. >> i would say it qualifies as

easy to drive. >> yeah. >> what is your sense of it? what is your sense of this car? >> it is an okay car. >> right. >> it looks cute. it is fun to drive. but would i want to live with it on a day to day basis? >> is this a big part of the comeback strategy for chrysler? will it work? >> i think it will bring a young demographic in. i think it will bring somebody that wasn't looking at a chrysler to actually come into a chrysler showroom. from that point of view, it is going to be a little halo car, will bring a different consume near chrysler. >> bouncing a little bit on this road. this doesn't score as well as something else in this price category, other cars in this category. do you think it is likely to improve or this is the car they're offering? >> no, a lot of the factors that make it score poorly is the rear seat room, the ride that isn't particularly good and also, you know, the overall fuel economy

is not brilliant for its size. >> what kind of mileage does this get? >> this gets 34 to the gallon. >> okay. >> which is okay. >> what is your evaluation of this from a safety per spective? >> it comes with all the safety features, side air bags, front air bags, electronic stability control. it does well in crash tests we have seen so far. this is a relatively small karch and a bigger, heavier car will impact mar of its energy into a smaller car. so i would have certain concerns about the overall safety. >> for the price you can pay for this car, what are you competing against? >> the 500 is pretty highly priced. $18,000. you can buy an awful lot more. you can look at the other sort of budget cars which are in this area, such as the honda fit, the mini, hyundai accent and ford fiesta. >> your overall view of this car? >> it is a cute little car. it might be difficult to live with. it is like a pair of high heels. you look good in them, they're cute, but a bit uncomfortable

and you wouldn't want to live in those for a day to day baseis. >> dave, thanks very much. >> thank you, ali. >> a little fun. back to business. if congress and the president insist on waiting until the last minute to accomplish anything, then i say it is time to set a jobs deadline. my xyz is next. [ male announcer ] they'll see you...before you see them. cops are cracking down on drinking and riding. drive sober, or get pulled over. cops are cracking down on drinking and riding. [ female announcer ] there's no right way or wrong way. every baby plays by his own rules. and they need a diaper that lets them do it. new pampers cruisers with 3-way fit adapt at the waist, legs and bottom ♪ with up to 12 hours of protection for all the freedom to play their way. pampers. it's time to play. at exxon and mobil, we engineer smart gasoline

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time now for the xyz of it. news that the u.s. economy created no jobs in august has driven home a point that most of you already know. we're stagnating. we're at risk of another recession and the jobs crisis in this country is bigger, more serious, and more authentic than the debt crisis ever was. as you listen to me, president obama and his team are readying what so many hope will be an assault on this seemingly stubborn unmoveable economy. i'm addressing this week's xyz directly to the president and the hopes that he is still open to some ideas. first, mr. president, put your ideas in. we already know there is a

contingent that will stay in the way of anything you try to do. i'm beginning to believe there are skeptics that would prefer the economy not recover. but like those who stood in the way of the debt ceiling increase, they're playing with fire, with the livelihoods of tens of millions of out of work americans and with the shapes and contours of the american dream for decades to come. congress has not led on jobs, they have ignored them. this situation is now desperate. the weakened patient that is the u.s. economy cannot withstand another blow. what you need to do will fly in the face of those who think government is the problem. sure, your opponents will embrace the tax incentives that will create jobs that you're likely to announce but we need to go big, finding ways to put the unemployed to work now and ways to really retrain millions of americans who are trained for the wrong jobs for the future. manufacturing in america will not return to its hay day, regardless of how many more

trade agreements we sign. ultimately business does need to crea create jobs. until they do, we need to extend the safety net for the unemployed in this country, the 99ers that neither you nor republicans adequately acknowledge. we need to retrain workers for the long-term and protect them in the short-term and go big, mr. president. there are those calling for you to do nothing at all or better yet to undo the very policies which are seen to be interfering with business doing what it does best. just cite economics 101. demand drives business in hiring. americans are not spending money because they're frightened about their economic prospects. you articulated a vision of a strong and vibrant america. that vision seems distant to some americans as their personal situations mirror those of people who live in far less developed nations than the united states. go into that store of inspiration that you have and tell americaow