WASHINGTON — With the government reporting the third consecutive month of job losses Friday and wages lagging inflation, the problems that originally centered on housing and financial markets now appear to have spread through almost every segment of the economy.

The unemployment rate hit 5.1 percent in March, up from 4.8 percent in February and the highest level since the wholesale job losses that followed Hurricane Katrina in September 2005. Employers reported that nonfarm payrolls shrank by 80,000 jobs, the sharpest drop in five years.

The combination of contracting payrolls and stagnating wages — on top of falling home values and tighter credit — makes an economic downturn almost certain, economists said, because consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. It also raises the possibility that recovery could be slow and painful.

"With the consumer's only source of support for spending coming from job-related income growth, a rapidly weakening labor market is the worst possible news for the economy," Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist for MFR Inc., wrote in an e-mail to the New York forecasting company's clients.

"Until government checks start flowing sometime in May, the consumer is going to be a major handicap for the economy," he said, referring to rebates the government is issuing to most taxpayers as part of an economic stimulus plan.

The scope of the March job losses was more disturbing than the size of the decline, some said. Among the sectors hit were factories, construction companies, retailers, banks, real-estate businesses, mortgage brokers, hotels, airlines and architecture and engineering companies.

"It was a broad-based decline. It wasn't just housing and Wall Street. The problems in the housing market have now affected the rest of the economy," Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com, said.

March's job losses followed declines of 76,000 jobs each in January and February, for a total contraction of 232,000 jobs over three months.

Meantime, average hourly earnings rose by 3.6 percent and monthly earnings by 3.3 percent for the previous 12 months. Neither kept pace with the 4 percent consumer inflation rate.

All together, the Labor department said, 914,000 workers have lost jobs over the last 12 months and 7.8 million are out of work. To keep pace with normal rate of population growth, the economy needs to create more than 100,000 a month, economists say.

"In a practical sense, there's not really a debate any more that we are in a recession," said Zandi. That is commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of decline in gross domestic product.

Some economists saw worrisome signs in the details of the government data. Alan Krueger, a former chief economist for the Labor Department who now teaches at Princeton University, noted that temporary jobs — a harbinger for the labor market as a whole — fell off sharply in March, suggesting the labor market is unlikely to recover soon.

"Temporary help is one of the first places companies cut when things are bad and one of the first places they add when things begin to get better. But they are still cutting," Krueger said. "This report strikes me as ominous."

Politicians seized on Friday's news, with Democrats blaming Republicans for not doing enough to forestall an economic slowdown and Republicans warning that the Democrats would do even worse if they win the White House in November.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats argued that Congress should work quickly to extend unemployment benefits as part of a second economic stimulus package. A proposed extension was stripped from the stimulus legislation passed in January.

"If anyone still doubts the need to act swiftly and decisively to reverse the impact of Bush Republicans' economic policies, look no further than today's unemployment numbers that show the third straight month of job losses for American workers and businesses," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "This distressing trend tells us everything we need to know about the dangers of Republicans' 'wait-and-see' approach to the economy."