Today, the Economic Policy Institute provided 10 facts about the economy during the recovery. Here they are:

    1.  The real gap in the labor market is now around 11 million jobs.

    2.  Job growth this recovery outpaces that following the 2001 recession, but is still too slow.

    3.  The loss of public-sector jobs is a huge obstacle to growth in this recovery.

    4.  Most of the improvement seen this recovery consists of a decline in layoffs, not an increase in hiring.

    5.  The current problem is not that we lack the right workers, it’s that we lack enough job openings.

    6.  The share of the working-age population with a job has not yet improved.

    7.  “Underemployment” has also improved very little in the recovery.

    8.  Unemployed workers continue to face near-record spells of unemployment.

    9.  Racial and ethnic minorities have fared worse than whites in both the recession and the recovery.

    10.  Wage growth remains extremely low.

(source)

Number 2 seems to be a big positive. Numbers 3 and 5 seems easy to deal with except for the fact that Republicans hold so much power on the state level and in the House. Number 9 is central: racial inequalities were at the heart of the causes of the recession in the first place and remain a huge obstacle to a faster paced recovery.