Malkin earns Half True for unemployment claim

By Louis Jacobson
Published on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 6:25 p.m.

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A former Clinton administration official and other economists agree that "if you keep extending these temporary unemployment benefits, you're just going to extend joblessness even more."

Michelle Malkin, Sunday, August 2nd, 2009.

Ruling: Half-True | Details

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On This Week, columnist Michelle Malkin claimed a former Clinton administration had said unemployment benefits can extend unemployment.

It's a conundrum of compassion: If you provide someone with unemployment benefits, do they lose their incentive to find a job?

On the Aug. 2, 2009, edition of ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin asserted that even a liberal economist believes that unemployment benefits have a negative impact on joblessness because those benefits discourage people from taking jobs.

“It was Larry Katz, who was the chief labor economist under the Clinton Labor Department, who came out with a study, and there are a lot of these smart economists who say this – that if you keep extending these temporary unemployment benefits, you're just going to extend joblessness even more,” she said.

We checked her claim and rated it Half True.