Do we have a solid economic recovery underway?

The evidence will leave you whipsawed. Everywhere you turn, it seems, there is an economic contradiction. The experts – economists – fall back on the math of their profession. They have been shrugging that the data is "noisy", that there are flaws in the way the data is calculated. If pushed, they'll say it's a recovery, but a weak one.

Even if you're not an economist, it's hard to know which indicators matter, and what they're telling us.

Housing is up, but gross domestic product was sharply down in December, almost to recessionary territory. The economy has lost 3.2m jobs since 2007, but 5.2m have been created since 2009. Even so, the number of unemployed far outpaces the number of jobs. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities offered this chilling fact about the ratio of workers to job openings:

"In November 2012, 12 million workers were unemployed but there were only 3.7m job openings. That is about 10 unemployed workers for every three available positions – in other words, even if every available job were filled by an unemployed individual, about seven of every 10 unemployed workers would still be unemployed."

The jobless rate keeps dropping, but we have roughly the same ratio of employed-to-unemployed people that we had last year. The economy gained 181,000 jobs a month last year, but the percentage of people who have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks has stayed relatively steady.

People are working more hours, but productivity is falling. And economic output has almost ground to a halt, growing by 0.1% in December.

Households are becoming less indebted, which is a welcome development, but that's mostly because they are defaulting on their debt. Disposable personal income is rising, tentatively, which should indicate at least a modest amount of economic advancement, but income segregation is also on the rise, which indicates that the middle class is shrinking and more economic inequality is taking root.

It doesn't really look like a weak, uneven recovery; it looks like a manic one. Instead of a good, square meal, we get table scraps. Fine. We'll still eat. But even those table scraps may run out soon.

In roughly three weeks, Congress has another chance to torpedo whatever modest economic progress we've made.

Their tool will be the sequester: the package of punitive budget cuts is designed to slash at least $85.3bn from the federal budget this year, and by around $1.2tn in a decade. The cuts will reduce the national deficit, but they worry those who believe that the economy is not strong enough yet to start slashing costs – which also means slashing government jobs. The CBO predicted this week that the sequester would go into effect as soon as 1 March.

One of the strange features of this recovery is that a lot of levers over economic growth are not in the hands of private companies; they are in the hands of Washington. The Congressional Budget Office, which is the non-partisan dungeon-master of all economic numbers, started its report this week with this heavy hint about Congress's power to boost or kill the recovery:

"Economic growth will remain slow this year, CBO anticipates, as gradual improvement in many of the forces that drive the economy is offset by the effects of budgetary changes that are scheduled to occur under current law."

Shakespeare it's not, but the message there is clear: the CBO believes that the economy is at the mercy of the sequester. Republicans will love the CBO's conclusion that budget cuts will reduce the deficit to less than $1tn for the first time in Obama's presidency. But it's hard to get excited about the CBO's other major conclusion: that the economy will grow at a sickly 1.4% this year.

These two things are related: big budget cuts will reduce economic growth. The CBO makes it clear that budget cuts now will hurt the economy, which is already weak.

This is not just an intellectual debate over numbers. Households will feel this, the fourth year of what is being called a recovery but still feels like a recession. The reduction of economic growth means it is will be harder, again, to have these things this year: better jobs, more valuable houses, better access to loans and growing personal income.

The sequester was never designed as a reality; it was created as a package of budget cuts that started as economic self-sabotage – the cuts would be so deep, so extreme, so that no reasonable lawmaker would ever let them pass. Yet, as the date of the sequester draws near, Congress still hasn't acted. In the worst case, this will be another pointless, failed negotiation that will go into the 11th hour and take the economy on a rollercoaster ride with it.

This again? It seems that at least one major indicator has not changed by much over the past few years: reasonable lawmakers are still in short supply.