Even if the economy does not contract, the projected growth rate is so slow it will not be enough to absorb new people entering the labor market, much less the unemployed.

“We have virtually the same number of jobs as we did in January 2000,” said Patrick J. O’Keefe, the director of economic research at J. H. Cohn, an accounting firm. “Were jobs to continue to grow at the 2011 monthly average, it would take more than four years to return to the prerecession employment level.”

In August, the private sector added 17,000 jobs, a number depressed by the Verizon strike. Some 45,000 Verizon workers were off the payroll when the survey was taken. They will reappear in next month’s total. But even adding those workers back to the total, the gain would have been the smallest since May of last year.

The problem is less that companies are laying people off than that they are not hiring. Consumers and employers alike seem almost frozen in place, with many economists saying that they seemed paralyzed by uncertainty about the future after the brinksmanship of the debt ceiling debate, the ensuing cut in the United States credit rating by Standard & Poor’s, stock market whiplash and more bad news from Europe.

“There is really a darkening cloud that seems to hover over the U.S. economy because of the lack of progress being made,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief economist at the Economic Outlook Group. “There is extreme frustration with Congress and the administration not working together to address the fiscal issues.”

Much of the movement that did appear in the jobs report went in the wrong direction. Revised numbers showed that job growth in June and July was smaller than previously indicated. In August, wages fell and the average number of hours worked inched down — a sign that businesses had less for employees to do.