The Affordable Care Act may be a factor at play in the recent Labor Department report showing that job openings in the United States continue to stay at record high levels, economist Diana Furtchgott-Roth tells
Newsmax TV.
The Labor Department reported on Tuesday that were 4.67 million jobs available across the country in July. Job openings have increased 22 percent in the last year.
"What's really interesting is that the job opening rate has risen over the past year from 2.7 percent to 3.3 percent, but the hiring rate has only risen from 3.3 percent to 3.5 percent," Furtchgott-Roth told Ed Berliner on "MidPoint" Thursday.
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She explained that there is "an increase in job openings, but not a commensurate increase in hires and it's really interesting to see why."
"Some people such as Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago has suggested that the increase in entitlements and more recently Obamacare has meant that people are not rushing to fill these jobs and in fact, the labor force participation rate is 62.8 percent, that's at 1978 levels," the director of the Manhattan Institute Economics 21 Center said.
"So we still have many discouraged workers who have not yet rejoined the labor force even though we have 4.7 million job openings," she added.