America's rising job numbers aren't going to last, according to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and president of the American Action Forum.
"I hope it's not a new reality for very long because the labor market is seriously underperforming and you can look at it from any number of dimensions," Holtz-Eakin said Friday on the "Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
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"We hear a lot of chatter about creating jobs and how we're doing so well in that, but we are not creating full-time, full-year jobs. There are 2.8 million fewer or those now than there were before the recession.
"The labor force participation is a big problem. We're doing 3.3 percentage points since before the recession and it's driven by some amazingly depressing dynamics," Holtz-Eakin said.
He believes the deadly Ebola virus has the potential to hurt the nation's economy should it worsen.
"These kinds of pandemics, whether it's an avian flu or an Ebola outbreak, have two big impacts on the economy. One is, people get sick and some die and that means you're less productive because you're in the end only as good as your workers, and that hurts you in a permanent way," he said.
"Then there's the issue that people self-quarantine. They don't want to go to a theater, restaurant, or get on an airplane. You see those kinds of sectors in the economy go down quickly and sharply. Not everything does, but there's some real negative impact there."
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