Here’s what the US economy looks like seven months before a presidential election:

So we went from anemic to pathetic.

The Federal Reserve likes to blame trouble overseas for this paltry growth. But the US economy since 2008 has had its weakest-ever expansion after a recession — so can it really all be someone else’s fault?

With last Friday’s announcement that 215,000 jobs were created in March, US payrolls now number 143,774,000 million. That’s almost 5.5 million more jobs than there were at the pre-recession peak in late 2007.

But before you get out of your seat to cheer, consider this: It took nine years to get those extra 5.5 million jobs. And economists believe that nearly 2 million new jobs are needed each year just to absorb new people entering the workforce.

Do the math — 18 million jobs would be needed just to get new people working. Millions more would be necessary to get former workers back onto payrolls.

And, of course, not all of those 5.5 million new jobs are equal to the ones that were lost. It’s clear that many of the newly created positions are lower-paying, temporary or contract jobs. When jobs don’t pay as much, people are apt to need more than one. That leaves someone else left out of the workforce.

That’s one of the reasons — a big one — folks aren’t very happy these days and feel sold out by Washington. The cackle of happy talk coming from our elected officials and Fed appointees — transmitted through the media — is getting tiring for folks who are simply trying to earn a living without needing multiple jobs.

So what’s going to happen between now and Election Day? A lot.

Job growth over the next three months or so should accelerate. Or at least, that’s what the numbers will show.

That’s because the Labor Department, over the next few months, will make some very optimistic assumptions about the number of jobs it believes have been created — but can’t prove were actually filled.

Those assumptions, however, are highly questionable, especially in an economy that — by the Fed’s own calculation — was only growing at a 0.7 percent annual rate at the end of March.

Job growth should weaken during the summer when Labor eases off these assumptions. That’ll be just in time to propel more voter anger.

Back in December, I predicted, based on these assumptions and the weather-related poor growth of the past two winters, that economic statistics in the first quarter of 2016 would look exceptionally good.

That was easy enough to understand. The prior two years were so bad that the government’s computers would think that kind of very weak growth was common. So when the winter of 2016 became more normal because of better weather, the computers would be tricked into thinking this was an uncommonly good year.

And that’s exactly what happened. And various government agencies have spent the last few weeks revising lower their original data for early 2016, realizing now that their computers were tricked.

Now the opposite could happen.

Let’s take 2015 as an example to make this simpler. The slow winter of 2015 led to a very nice pickup in economic activity in the second quarter of last year.

GDP in the second quarter of 2015 was 3.9 percentage points higher on an annualized rate compared with the paltry gain of 0.6 percent in the first three months of that year. It was clear what happened: A lot of business activity was delayed by the rough winter and got pushed ahead into the second quarter.

So what could happen now?

Those same computers that were fooled by faulty seasonal adjustments early this year could make the opposite mistake. When you compare this year’s economic activity with the data that went into the 3.9 percent GDP growth last year, this quarter’s numbers could look depressed.

And they will continue to look depressed until upward revisions are made in the months ahead. So expect good, yet deceiving, job growth over the next few months, even as other economic indicators look like death.

It’s going to be interesting.

And now here is some bad news for the job market.

The Federal Reserve’s Labor Market Conditions Index (LMCI) dropped to a negative 2.4 percent in March from the previous month.

Levels like this occurred right before the last two recessions.

The Kansas City Fed’s unique LMCI, which I wrote about last week, will probably be out Wednesday. And unlike the one that just dropped 2.4 percent, Kansas City’s index includes the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) that is so important to Fed Chair Janet Yellen.

Kansas City’s survey showed unemployment really about 0.9 percentage point higher than the official rate of 5 percent. If KC’s report also comes out weak, the chances for a rate hike in March become nearly nonexistent.