In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, at least 1.1 million incarcerated criminals were given checks for COVID stimulus money as a result of Joe Biden’s stimulus bill, with the final total amounting to about $1.3 billion.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, this failure was revealed in new internal data provided by the IRS. Of the 1.1 million criminals who were given money under the provisions of the “American Rescue Plan,” about 163,000 who received stimulus checks are currently serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, meaning they will never even get to retrieve and use such funds in the first place.
Life sentences without parole are most often given to those who are convicted of either murder or rape. Responding to criticism regarding this particular fact, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said that the agency does not yet know how many of these lifelong prisoners are also on Death Row.
“The American Rescue Plan was reckless in the amount of massive spending with no off-sets,” said Congressman Don Bacon (R-Neb.) in response to the revelation. “Giving stimulus checks to death row inmates is a glaring example. This bill triggered the worst inflation in 41 years, costing the average family $500 a month. The poor suffer the most.”
Bacon, as well as Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), had previously warned that Biden’s stimulus bill, which cost nearly $2 trillion in total, did not have oversight measures in place to avoid such discrepancies, unlike the first two bills passed by President Donald Trump. After Biden’s bill was signed into law, a $1,400 stimulus check was sent to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon Bomber, who is still in prison and is facing the death penalty.
In addition to payments to criminals, the bill also led to at least $80 billion being awarded to false businesses, with former U.S. Attorney Matthew Schneider calling it “the biggest fraud in a generation.”
Biden’s stimulus bill is also largely blamed for the historic rates of inflation from which the country is still suffering, having reached 40-year highs. As a result, the prices of virtually all goods, from groceries to gasoline, have gone up significantly. This led to two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, thus putting the U.S. economy into a recession.