What is the job market really doing?

That’ll be the main question for the Federal Reserve when it meets to discuss interest rates next week.

Last Friday, the Labor Department reported what, on the surface at least, was a stunningly optimistic view of the employment situation in February.

That report tied the Federal Reserve’s hands. The financial markets have already sent interest rates higher and stocks lower. Wall Street now expects the Fed to get on board the rate-hike hype.

Just so you know, I’m in favor of rate hikes. American savers have been subsidizing the rescue of US financial institutions and Wall Street speculators ever since the Fed began its quantitative easing experiment.

On the other hand, when the time comes, I think Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen will have to delay raising rates. Why? Because it will become apparent in a short while that the economy isn’t as rosy as the jobs report suggests.

There are grave risks in rate hikes, which is another reason Yellen and the Fed will be hesitant when it comes time to act. The stock market has already weighed in with a thumbs-down, and Washington will soon be moaning over the higher costs it will incur to finance the nation’s deficit.

But the biggest problem is this: If the Fed raises rates and the economy isn’t ready for higher borrowing costs, the US could find itself worse off than it has been in years.

As I mentioned in Tuesday’s column, the Fed’s internal research is not nearly as optimistic as the Labor Department’s view of the economy. In fact, the Atlanta Fed’s real-time monitor of US gross domestic product shows that the economy has slowed considerably over the past two months.

Even University of Pennsylvania business professor Jeremy Siegel, aka the “Wizard of Wharton,” expressed public puzzlement as to why people think the labor market is strong when that view isn’t confirmed by what the GDP and other economic gauges are showing.

The Labor Department reported that the economy gained 295,000 new jobs in February after its raw data were seasonally adjusted. The gain before seasonal adjustment was 903,000 jobs.

But there are always big job gains in February as the nation pulls out of the winter doldrums. Seasonal adjustments are intended to smooth out the bumps in the data. The adjustments turned a huge decline in jobs in January into a nice increase.

The question is: Are the seasonal adjustments adjusting fairly? You tell me. The 903,000 unadjusted gain this February was turned into a 295,000 job gain after adjustment for seasonal factors.

In February 2012, there was an even bigger 954,000 gain before the adjustment. But that raw data gain was turned into a smaller 227,000 jump in jobs after adjustment — later revised up to 247,000.

If last Friday’s headline number had been closer to 227,000, or even 247,000, the financial market would not have panicked over the prospect of a sooner-rather-than-later rate increase.

Then there’s the issue of the unemployment rate, which dropped to 5.5 percent in February from 5.7 percent in January. The jobless rate is an unreliable gauge because of the carelessness and fraud with which it is compiled by the Census Bureau, and because it doesn’t really measure what people think it does.

Once again in February, the unemployment rate dropped mostly because people gave up looking for jobs.

The civilian workforce declined by another 178,000 people in February, which accounted for most of the unemployment rate drop.

In the Census Bureau’s American Household Survey, which is used to calculate the unemployment rate, there were only 96,000 new jobs reported in February. That was below the 215,000 expected. The labor participation rate continued to decline, this time by 0.1 percentage point, to 62.8 percent.

By definition, the Labor Department doesn’t consider someone unemployed if that person is not actively looking for work — even if that’s because he or she has become too discouraged to try to find a job.

Economist Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington says 3.8 million people between the ages of 25 and 54 have dropped out of the labor force since the Great Recession.

If these people were still looking for work, the Labor Department’s main unemployment rate would be 7.9 percent.

A less closely followed gauge of unemployment — also put out by the Labor Department — showed the jobless rate at 11 percent in February. This gauge, called U-6, measures all the people counted in the regular unemployment rate plus people who can only find part-time jobs but want full-time employment.

John Williams, the founder of Shadow Government Statistics, thinks the unemployment rate would be 23.1 percent if it included everyone who is out of work, working only part-time or too discouraged to job-hunt.

There were a lot of other questionable things in the latest jobs report that the Fed will have to address. Among them: Wage growth was weak in February after a nice gain in January.

The Labor Department’s collection methods and assumptions are giving a misleading picture of the economy. Next week, Yellen will need to look at that picture and determine whether it’s realistic or simply abstract art.