Governor: We Cut Unemployment Benefits To Stop People From Moving To North Carolina

Gov. Pat McCrory (R-NC) claimed this weekend that gutting the state’s unemployment benefits has sent people back to where “they came from,” presumably because they moved to the state only to collect “very generous benefits” for unemployment.

Asked by NC Spin why North Carolina’s employment numbers have dropped dramatically since signing the unemployment bill, McCrory pointed to the state disqualifying itself from long-term federal benefits for the unemployed last year:

We had the ninth most generous unemployment compensation in the country and we were having a lot of people move here, frankly, especially in urban areas to get unemployment and then work other sectors and survive. So,people were moving here because of our very generous benefits, and then of course, we had more debt. So I think, personally, more people got off unemployment and either got jobs or moved back to where they were going or came from and quit the migration as much because of unemployment. We’ve seen this in other states where the benefits are very high, it could draw people from outside the state.