Fact Check: Moving to NC to collect unemployment?
Gov. McCrory claimed that people were moving to North Carolina for unemployment benefits. Economic data and the state's unemployment insurance rules indicate that's false.
Posted — Updated"We had the ninth-most-generous unemployment compensation in the country," McCrory said. "We were having a lot of people move here, frankly, from other areas to get unemployment ... People were moving here because of our very generous benefits, and then, of course, we had more debt."
What's new about his statement on NC Spin is that McCrory implied a significant portion of those new claims came from people moving to North Carolina from elsewhere. WRAL News asked McCrory spokeswoman Kim Genardo where McCrory got the information regarding benefits.
"The governor was referring to personal stories he’s heard," she said.
Although there are exceptions, the easiest way to think about this is someone would have had to work in the state for around six of the last 15 months in order to be eligible for benefits. The amount of someone's benefit is governed by how long they worked and how much they made. Although the recently passed unemployment insurance reform bill changed the amount of benefits paid, it did not significantly change the five-quarter base period definition.
Workers who move from other states but haven't worked in North Carolina can tap their former state's unemployment insurance, but those payments come from the state where they earned their wages.
"People are a little bit more likely to stay in place and suffer the slings and arrows of an outrageous recession," Brod said.
He said it's important to keep in mind that not everyone who is moving is moving across state lines. Some people will just move to the neighboring county or across the state.
Can he rule out people moving to a state because its safety net is better?
"No, it could be a phenomenon," he said. "But it's numerically so small there's no way it's affecting the kind of traction that North Carolina gets on its economic policies."
Given that McCrory can offer scant evidence for his claim, it would be hard not to rate his statement as false.
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