The employment rate is the key measure of Main Street’s economic health and the Labor Department’s April 5 report was weak and discouraging at best. After adding more than 200,000 jobs per month since last November, American employers added only a paltry 88,000 jobs in March, less than one-third the number created during February.

The country needs about 250,000 new jobs each month for five years just to get back to the headline unemployment rate we had in 2007. What’s more, this recent report found stagnant wage growth. We are not exactly witnessing a revival of breadwinners’ jobs.

Job creation was at its slowest pace since last June, totaling less than half the number economists had expected. The headline unemployment rate stands at 7.6 percent, shockingly high for a recovery that is nearly fours years old. This is not even remotely close to the pre-recession 4.7 percent rate in 2007.

Unemployment would be even higher if not for the large numbers of working-age people who have simply dropped out of the job market. Nearly 500,000 people just plain gave up looking for work and are no longer counted in the official employment numbers. Where they have disappeared to is anyone’s guess.

As a result, the labor participation rate fell to 63.3 percent, the lowest since 1979, which was before women entered the labor force in large numbers. If you count this exodus of Americans from the labor force as well as those still counted as unemployed and the involuntary part-timers, the true, actual joblessness rate is closer to 13.8 percent. Our friends in Washington, D.C., are stuck in the tar sands of an old paradigm continuing to focus on the “official” unemployment rate, but this masks the true crisis in the labor market.

Last December 12, Ben Bemanke, the fourteenth chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve system, said the Fed would keep running the printing presses and thereby keep interest rates ultra-low for as long as the unemployment rate remained above 6.5 percent as long as its official forecast for inflation does not surpass 2.5 percent.

A jobless rate that low is not valid if it is predicated on a shrinking labor force. By only counting people who actually tried to find work within the previous four weeks, the unemployment rate ignores the millions of Americans who have stopped looking. The result? A falling official unemployment rate is not always a good economic omen.

We want the unemployment rate to go down because more people are getting jobs, not because they are giving up. During an economic recovery, an expanding economy usually brings people back into the labor market. This time, many are staying on the sidelines and more are joining them.

What happens if the real world economy regains its footing and starts to show signs of life? Many of these discouraged workers will probably resume their job searches.

But this will actually increase the size of the active labor force and cause the official unemployment rate to increase as well. This is good news hidden behind seemingly worst statistics. But it is really an admission of how bad things have been all along.

Alternatively, if the  conomy is facing a long twilight of no growth, maybe the Federal Reserve believes these people who have stopped looking for work will never return to the hunt; in this case, the headline unemployment rate will continue to decline as American workers remain on the sidelines.

Of course, this will result in the continuing growth of transfer payments such as unemployment benefits and food stamps, with the average worker leaning on government for relief, and flirting with poverty. They wouldn’t have far to go.

originally posted: April 27, 2013