Meh

Once again, we have a jobs report that is only a bit better than treading water:

Employers are hiring at a more aggressive pace again after a winter cold snap, but the pace of job gains is only slowly making up for years of lost ground in the labor market.

Nearly five years after the end of the Great Recession, the total number of private sector jobs is finally back to where it was as the downturn began in early 2008, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

But that level is still far below what is needed to fully accommodate the millions of people who have joined the work force since then, or relieve the backlog of jobless workers anytime soon.

Still, the addition of 192,000 jobs last month, all from private employers, represented an uptick from the anemic rate of job creation recorded at the turn of the year. That encouraged optimists, who foresee a slight strengthening as the wintry weather in many parts of the country in late 2013 and early 2014 yields to a more inviting spring.

In addition, while the unemployment rate remained flat at 6.7 percent in March, an increase in the number of Americans looking for work also offered up some modest hope that better times could lie ahead in 2014. So too did an upward revision in the number of jobs that government statisticians estimate were added in January and February.

At the current rate, we will have a pre-Great Recession workforce participation rate sometime in the 2^nd half of this century.