Malkin earns Half True for unemployment claim

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.