Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Washington politicians have apparently taken him as their inspiration.

There are fewer Americans working than at any time since 1979. This finally adds urgency – political urgency – to a jobs crisis that is only getting deeper and more painful for Americans. The numbers of jobs added and the unemployment rate don't show the real picture of America's employment situation. The unemployment rate keeps dropping – it's currently at 7.6% – which gives the illusion of a better economy.

The real story is told by another number. Economists call it the "labor force participation rate". It tells us how many people are working, and how many are dropping out of the workforce because they can't find a single employer who could use their abilities, even for a few hours a day. The labor force participation rate is really a measure of potential that is lost: the intelligence and strength of Americans that goes idle because it cannot find a single profitable outlet.

While the unemployment rate is dropping, and the number of jobs goes up and down, the labor force participation rate has been steadily falling since the economy started weakening in 2007. Here is what the chart looks like:

This is the true story of the struggles of Americans. Around 496,000 people left the workforce in March alone; 350,000 of those were people who had been working part-time because it was the only work they could find. That means these people couldn't find either full-time or part-time work. This "is a sign that individuals left the workforce due to a general lack of employment opportunity," Bloomberg economist Joseph Brusuelas said in a report.

The jobs created during the boom of the 1990s and the 2000s are not coming back. Only 5.8m jobs have been added between 2010 and now. That comes nowhere near closing the gap with the 8.7m jobs that the US lost in the recession, between the end of 2007 and early 2010.

The poverty rate is also rising. In 2011, 6.6% of the population was living 50% below the poverty level, according to the US Census Bureau. That's the highest since 1993, when 6.2% of the population was living 50% below the poverty level.

Right now, for those who are employed, the economic pressure is no lighter. For people who held jobs in American businesses, earnings rose 1.8% – while inflation rose 2%. That means that income is not keeping up with inflation. Once paychecks arrive, Americans are having to stretch the money further just to afford food as expenses rise.

This situation is, economically, a catastrophe. It has existed for the past five years, and no lawmaker in Washington has done very much about it. Somehow, a small group of Republican lawmakers have hijacked the national conversation about financial matters to blather about deficits and long-term budgets. (Leave aside the fact that not a single lawmaker, of either party, seems capable of putting together any kind of practical budget at all.)

Most Democrats and the White House have gone along with this empty rhetoric, accepting that the current standard of wise budgeting is "discipline" and "long-term goals". It's not. The current standard for the creation of a reasonable budget should be "do something that encourages job creation". This task has gone too long unaddressed.

Republican House speaker John Boehner once claimed that Congress passed "more than 30 jobs bills". This is a major exaggeration. A weak stimulus bill in 2009 – hampered with pork – probably did some good. Since then, there have been a lot of knockoff bills – designed to look like they're focused on jobs, when, in fact, they're just another version of congressional pork for pet projects or special interests. In 2012, for example, Congress passed the JOBS Act, which stood for Jumpstart Our Business Startups, and primarily made it easier for smaller businesses in technology and biotech to do initial public offerings in near-secrecy.

Later that year, Obama signed a transportation bill that would pour part of $105bn into infrastructure and boost construction jobs. Terrific, great, well done … but infrastructure has barely budged and construction hasn't really needed the help. It was already growing when the bill was passed, largely because of a recovery in housing.

Instead, Congress – thanks, mostly, to Republicans, as it has turned out – has blocked batches of bills designed to create more jobs. That's including the bulk of President Obama's American Jobs Act; a bill that would have put more military veterans back to work; the Small Business Jobs Act that would have allowed community banks to lend more money to small businesses; the Bring Jobs Home Act, that would have taken away incentives for US companies to locate jobs overseas.

There are already at least three more pieces of legislation designed to protect or create American jobs; most are in committee, and so aren't in line for votes any time soon. Given the fortunes of their predecessors, it wouldn't make sense to hold out much hope, anyway.

Instead, when it comes to doing anything about the unemployment crisis, Congress has been, unfortunately, content to leave everything to the Federal Reserve. This has turned Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke into an unlikely Atlas, carrying the weight of the economy on his shoulders.

The Federal Reserve's job is to oversee the nation's money supply and to try to control inflation and keep employment stable. For the past four years, though, it has had another task: doing the work of a useless Congress that can't be bothered to acknowledge the jobs crisis. The Federal Reserve has done everything from dropping interest rates to zero to buying up bonds as a form of stimulus for lending. You don't have to be an expert in monetary policy to know that controlling interest rates can't convince thousands of companies to start hiring workers.

While Bernanke and the governors of the Federal Reserve wrack their brains for more that they can do to boost the economy, Congress is throwing tantrums over budget battles. The budget battles are actually one long war, which started in 2010 and has been restarted every few months as members of Congress proved themselves, time and again, more concerned with artificial crises like the fiscal cliff and the sequester.

The overall effect of Washington's chatter about the sequester has been myopic lawmaking, a distracted Congress focused on a blurry future – all while they're walking into a traffic accident right in front of them.

For those communities with empty storefronts, idle factories, and households under financial pressure to find a source of income, Congress has offered actual tribute of no time or attention. Yes, senators and representatives may tour around and shake hands and make speeches, but in the job these congressmen and women are paid, in part, to do – create jobs and foster a functioning economy – they are taking the salary and accomplishing nothing at all. They turn their eyes and ears to the chatter and cafeteria gossip of the Washington fights over the "sequester" and the fake crisis of long-term deficits, while a real, immediate disaster in their own constituencies has grown unchecked for five years.

The sequester, that benighted exercise in futility, will only add to the unemployment crisis. The point of the sequester is that it will result in more Americans out of work or furloughed because Congress can't agree on what parts of the government are necessary. Anyone out of a job or looking for one need not listen to the chatter out of Washington. Any signal coming from the nation's Capitol is completely drowned out by the noise of fiddling.