By spurring Congress to immediately pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the president turned around that employment plunge and “kept our economy from swerving over the cliff,” according to Rebecca Thiess, a policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group.

Claims that the Bureau of Labor Statistics published phony numbers on employment last week are a bad joke, but some might want to know why the two pieces of the BLS picture didn’t appear to match. Lawrence Mishel goes through the numbers carefully, and shows why it happened.

For most households, the home part of the equation matters most, as only about half of all households own any stocks and just over 30 percent have holdings of $10,000 or more, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Research by Heidi Shierholz, an economist at EPI, has shown that “since 1989, the top fifth of households consistently held about 90 percent of stock wealth, leaving approximately 10 percent for the bottom four-fifths of households.”

The “fiscal cliff” is, at its heart, a collision between these two priorities. We can let the Bush tax cuts and the payroll tax cut expire, and we can let the automatic spending cuts hit, and the deficit problem is pretty much solved. Unfortunately, we will likely have thrown the economy back into recession.

Conversely, if we just kick everything down the road, that’s better for the recovery, but it means we’ve made no progress on the debt, and if you believe in the confidence fairy, she’s not coming because we haven’t given anyone any reason to be confident in our political system or the future shape of their tax burden.

EPI’s take on this is optimistic: The good news, they argue, is that if you look at the various components of the fiscal cliff separately, you’ll see that the parts that do the most for deficit reduction do the least for the recovery, and vice versa. This suggests an “a la carte” approach to the fiscal cliff, in which we extend the most stimulative policies and wave goodbye to the most costly policies.

At the end of 2011, white median wealth was 44.5 times higher than black median wealth, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

“We’re in a goddamn recession and it’s hurting people,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute.

Although technically our economy is no longer in a recession and is growing slowly, Mishel says the labor market is still dealing with its lasting and permanent impact.

“The weight of unemployment depresses wage and benefit growth for everybody. That has a much greater impact on low-income households and minorities,” said Mishel.

“The data suggest that at least we’re not shedding a lot of teacher jobs any more. That’s a really nice first step, but there’s still so much to make up,” said Heidi Shierholz, economist with the Economic Policy Institute.

Considering public schools were slashing jobs in the four years leading up to July, the recent gains are hardly enough to bridge the gap.

Over that time period, enrollment in public schools was projected to grow by about 377,000 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

To keep up, schools would have had to hire about 62,000 workers, Shierholz estimates. Instead, they laid off about 315,000.

“It’s a shock to hear that anybody can think that these numbers were manipulated,” say Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, in the accompanying interview with The Daily Ticker. “Having followed these numbers for 25 years and knowing the people who put them out it’s absolutely bizarre…It’s outrageous. The data is based on surveys of tens of thousands of employers and households every month.”

“Some of the decline in labor force participation – I would estimate about a third – since the beginning of the Great Recession would have happened anyway,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s structural.”

This is not the first time aspersions have been cast on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, according to Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington. In 1971, President Richard Nixon was angered when the BLS attributed a drop in the unemployment rate from 6.2 percent to 5.6 percent in a month to a statistical fluke, says the EPI website.

Economics reporter Jeff Madrick detailed how the lingering jobs crisis is decimating the middle class and compared the two presidential candidates’ proposals to address it.

Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson also used EPI’s research to delve into Romney’s economic plans.

And New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof bemoaned the nation’s staggering wealth disparity and ever-growing inequality. “Our wealth has become so skewed that the top 1 percent possesses a greater collective worth than the entire bottom 90 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington,” wrote Kristof.

Glamour magazine spoke to Elise Gould, EPI’s director of health policy research, to compare the candidates’ stances on health reform and its impact on women.

New York Times business reporter Annie Lowrey turned to EPI to emphasize the stimulative effects of the payroll tax cut, likely to end next year.

Is the system stacked against the bottom fifth earners? Elise Gould, Economic Policy Institute, and Nicholas Eberstadt, American Enterprise Institute, offer insight.

“There is a recovery. There are jobs. There is more income. There is some improvement,” said Lawrence Mishel, a labor market expert at and president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “But the improvement is obviously disappointing,” he added, a sentiment that many economists echoed.

The Economic Policy Institute has run the numbers and finds that President Obama’s budget would boost economic growth far more than Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s.

Obama’s plan would create 1.1 million jobs in 2013 and 280,000 jobs in 2014, while Romney’s budget would create 87,000 jobs in 2013 and lose 641,000 jobs in 2014, provided that his plans are deficit-financed, according to a new EPI study (pdf).

“Children from rich families have much greater access to higher education than children from low-income families, even when controlling for innate skills,” Economic Policy Institute researchers concluded in a recent report. “This educational barrier places profound limits on income mobility.” And in the tattered recovery from the Great Recession, wages even for college graduates have stagnated. Meritocracy is not only a solution to restoring upward mobility but also a way to fortify the bastions of privilege.

In 1955, at the height of union strength, the wealthiest 10 percent received 33 percent of the nation’s personal income. In 2007, they received 50 percent, Economic Policy Institute data show.

“Children from rich families have much greater access to higher education than children from low-income families, even when controlling for innate skills,” Economic Policy Institute researchers concluded in a recent report. “This educational barrier places profound limits on income mobility.”

It may be hard to imagine, but (we all hope, anyway) some day the recession and meager recovery period will come to an end. At that point, will the debates we’re having now about the economy become completely irrelevant? What will we have to fight about? Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal and EPI’s Josh Bivens took this question on in the latest Fireside Chats episode on Bloggingheads:

Extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich would would boost the economy by an almost negligible amount, according to a recent analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute — far less for GDP growth than continuing stimulus measures. Letting the tax cuts expire wouldn’t hurt job growth either, according to data from a University of California at Berkeley economist, cited by Mother Jones.

But separate surveys by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and Generation Opportunity found little evidence that young people were going back to school when unable to land a job.

One deterrent is the rising cost of education and record levels of student debt. About two-thirds of 2012 college graduates left school in debt, owing on average $28,700 in student loans, according to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org.

“Young people dropping out of the labor force to go back to school would be a silver lining if it were true,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior EPI economist, adding that enrollment had gradually been increasing for decades.

Social Security remains most boomers’ hope for retirement income. On average, U.S. workers are beginning to take their Social Security benefits at age 63.8. That average fell by more than five years between 1945 and 1970. After that, though, the average has stayed fairly stable, noted Monique Morrissey, an economist who wrote “The Myth of Early Retirement” last year.

But Morrissey cautions against measuring “retirement” by Social Security take-up rates alone. Forty-five percent of eligible Social Security households continue to earn money from a job or jobs.

“Who is expected to gain confidence from rising share prices? Presumably the dreaded one-percenters — the most likely group to personally own stocks. Or maybe we should expand that to the ten-percenters, who, according to the Economic Policy Institute, own 81 percent of our stock market.”

EPI health policy director Elise Gould explained to Kaiser Health News’s Phil Galewitz how health reform has been essential to reducing the uninsurance rate among young adults, as it allows them to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26. “I have no other explanation for that decline than the health law because the economy has not been particularly kind to that age group, and it’s not likely that they all got great jobs,” said Gould.

“Politicians of both parties have supported bills aimed at ending Chinese currency manipulation. The topic also could appeal to an electorate hurting for jobs. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimated earlier this month that the U.S. had lost more than 2.7 million jobs over 10 years as a result of its trade deficit with China.”

In a video segment for Reuters, EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey commended the United States for filing another trade case against China, with the latest complaint focused on China’s illegal subsidies to exporters of auto parts. “Waiting any longer [to take action] would have been bad for U.S. workers,” said Eisenbrey.