Job growth? You're looking at it.

Apparently labor experts and Wall Street economists are thinking it won't get much better than this:

The growing consensus that job creation is going to be weaker rather than stronger has become so widespread that the Bush administration's Council of Economic Advisers in December quietly cut its forecast for job growth this year to 175,000 jobs a month. Last year, in its forecast for 2004, the CEA had been forecasting about 300,000 new jobs a month. Job growth last year ended up at about 180,000 a month.

Many Wall Street economists are now in that ball park.

But Ed McKelvey, senior economist at Goldman Sachs, who's forecasting a pickup in job growth to about 200,000 a month this year, said he's less confident about the jobs forecast that he is about, say, the Fed continuing to raise interest rates.

It's not just sluggish job growth that has some economists worried.

The labor market's "participation rate" -- the portion of working folks with a job or looking for one -- slid last month to its lowest level since 1988, according to the latest numbers from the Labor Department. And the number of "discouraged" workers -- people who quit looking because they couldn't find jobs -- jumped 20 percent from January 2004.