Sharron Angle, the Republican trying to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, made herself an easy political target when she told an interviewer that cutting unemployment benefits was the right thing to do:

RALSTON: How would you have voted on that bill to extend unemployment benefits?

ANGLE: I would have voted no, because the truth about it is that they keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does. And what we really need to do is put people back to work.

To be fair, though, Angle isn’t the first conservative to make this suggestion. And her argument has a certain intuitive appeal: Wouldn’t generous unemployment benefits discourage people from finding work?

In fact, a 1990 study of unemployment benefits by Lawrence Katz and David Bruce Meyer suggested as much: They found a significant link between how long people could receive payments and how long people stayed unemployed. (For each five to six weeks of extra benefits, people would stay unemployed one additional week.) Katz and Meyer also noticed that people stopped being unemployed at the same time as their benefits ran out—proof, it would seem, the more generous benefits encourage people to stay jobless.

But subsequent research showed otherwise. A 2007 study from David Card, Raj Chetty, and Andrea Weber took a closer look at what happens to people when their unemployment benefits run out. They don’t magically find jobs, it turns out. Rather, they simply stop submitting the information that would cause the government to count them as unemployed.

Remember, to be officially “unemployed,” you have to be seeking work. And unemployment benefits are only available to people who declare they are hunting for a job. Once the benefits run out, people no longer bother to make that declaration. (Why go to the trouble, if you can’t get the benefits anyway?) So the statistics stop counting them as jobless even though, as the researchers found, only a tiny fraction of workers return to the workforce right when benefits run out.