Just when you thought it might be safe for the Fed to begin to think about taking its foot off the accelerator, along comes a jobs report that makes the employment picture look much less rosy than we had thought.

The most distressing part of the report came from the household survey. It found that 206,000 fewer people were working in March than during the previous month. That would make it the worst month in more than a year.

The household survey also found the labor force participation rate – the proportion of people at least 16 years of age who were working or looking for work – fell to 63.3 percent, the lowest rate since 1979.

That fuels the narrative that the unemployment rate is coming down not because the economy is getting better, but because people are giving up looking for jobs. It raises the specter that the Washington follies are having a more serious impact than we had thought. Raising taxes on the least well-off working people – through the payroll tax increase that took effect at the beginning of the year – might have been a poor idea.

The idea that a lot of men in their prime working years are becoming discouraged and giving up looking for work would be profoundly troubling. Let’s hope next month will produce evidence that what we have here stems more from sampling errors than from reality.

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