(TheRedAlertNews.com) – President Joe Biden’s administration has handed out a combined total of $1.3 billion in taxpayer money to prison inmates through COVID-19 stimulus checks, a report has revealed.
A total of 1.1 million prisoners across the United States received the handouts from the Internal Revenue Service, according to a report by The Washington Free Beacon as cited by The Daily Caller.
The report is based on data provided by the IRS in a letter to Republican US Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska. The letter was obtained by the news outlet.
The $1.3 billion for pandemic relief of incarcerated individuals came from Biden’s $1.9 billion American Rescue Plan, which was adopted in March 2021.
Among the 1.1 million prison beneficiaries of Biden’s coronavirus, there were a total of 163,000 prisoners serving life sentences without parole, the IRS letter disclosed.
“Democrats had every opportunity to stop taxpayer dollars from going to convicted criminals,” commented Mike Palicz, federal affairs manager for Americans for Tax Reform, a nonprofit trying to lower federal spending.
“Instead, Democrats blocked a Republican amendment that would’ve prevented inmates from receiving stimulus payments and sent up to $1,400 checks to more than one million incarcerated criminals,” Palicz stressed.
The report notes it is unclear why inmates facing the death penalty also received stimulus checks and how many of them benefited from Biden’s relief plan.
“Individuals were not denied Economic Impact Payments solely because they were incarcerated,” the IRS declared on its website in a section with frequently asked questions about The American Rescue Plan.
It added that prisoners may have received COVID-19 money if they filed tax returns for 2019 and 2020.
IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told the Free Beacon he does not have on the inmate beneficiaries with death sentences. An IRS spokesman told The Daily Caller that the tax agency “does not track the information related to incarcerated individual’s sentences.”
In 2021, GOP US Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas objected to the plan to give prisoners COVID-19 relief money, pointing out that even terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber, would be entitled to it.
Indeed, in January 2022, The Boston Herald reported that Tsarnaev raked in $1,400 of US taxpayer money as part of Biden’s coronavirus package.
“The Democratic Party is drunk with power, and their reckless billions in spending continue to funnel out of the United States Treasury with little to no guidance,” Republican Florida Rep. Byron Donalds told The Daily Caller as he learned of the $1.3 billion in payments in prisoners.
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