rick newman, what about you? of course the president mentioning the unemployment rate. rates have been going down. let me just share with viewers the cnn/orc poll. 42% say economic conditions are good. you have the rich getting richer. 27 new billionaires on "forbes" most richest list this year. can you be real with me. how is the economy? >> the whole question compared to what? there are a lot of trends going in the right direction but there are millions of americans that are just still in a huge hole. i'll give you one number that captures this. household income for typical family is 5% lower than it was before the recession in 2007 and it's probably not going to get back to pre-recession levels until 2019. that's a 12-year hole a lot of families are climbing out of. they feel this in real terms in real lives through declining living standards and purchasing power less than it used to be. it's not going to change by the mid terms or by the 2016 presidential elections. this a political issue for a long time. >> brooke, if i could interject, that's one of the reasons wh

we have rick newman and our own steve liesman joining us. rick, as clumsy as the tactics have been by various states, it is clear. they're trying to reassure the public that they're on the case. but if the fear continues to spread, that can have an impact economically, can't it? >> right. and if it appears as if the leaders don't know what they're doing and appears like here. you know, the public is very fickle. we see that in consumer confidence coming to the economy all the time. what will it take for consumers just basically to stay home? what does it take for them to say, you know, this is too scary for me, i'm going to stay home whenever i can. and could be a situation similar to the bad weather we had for a couple of months last winter and led to minus 2% growth in gdp. >> do you agree, steve? >> i do. this is an enormous public policy challenge. you want people to take it seriously and not so seriously to do things like rick was talking about and perhaps crimp ing economic outcomes and no disagreement of economy and what is best from a

. >> so why does rick newman of yahoo! finance say the labor market stinks? he is here with senior economic reporter steve liesman to make that case. stinks? really? we are at -- oh, by the way, before you answer that question, we want to know what you folks at home think about this, as well. as you listen to your our conversation about this, is the labor market good or not? go to cnbc.com/vote right now and give us your thoughts. so, rick, tell us why you think it stinks here. >> well, job market is definitely better than it was a month ago and better than it was a year ago but if you go to before the recession, it's still a lot worse than it was right before the recession started in 2007 and in a lot of ways. we have about 4 million people additional people unemployed over underemployed. if the participation rate were the same now as then we would have an extra 7 million people working, that's people not earning incomes and spending that money and wages when you adjust them for inflation, average earnings gone up by twep by 20 cents for people who have jobs