Investing

US Government Sends Stimulus Checks To Prisoners

Not a great deal has gone right so far with the government’s $787 billion stimulus package. There is no evidence that it has reached it primary goal of saving or creating as many as 3.5 million jobs. Perhaps that will…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published August 27, 2009, 5:43am ET · 1 min read

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Not a great deal has gone right so far with the government’s $787 billion stimulus package. There is no evidence that it has reached it primary goal of saving or creating as many as 3.5 million jobs. Perhaps that will come next year when more stimulus money reaches further into the employment market.

The goal of building broadband and energy grid infrastructure does not appear to have begun in earnest. No one has given a clear time table for when those things will happen.

Stimulus checks have begun to go out to millions of Americans. The amount of the check is $250. They have been earmarked for Social Security recipients, people receiving Supplemental Security Income, and several other needy groups which total over 50 million people.

The other beneficiaries of the government’s largess is people in prisons. About 3,900 citizens who are locked up received their payments recently. That money can probably be used to buy cigarettes and cakes with files in them.

The government has goofed again. The number of prisoners who got the checks is small, but the fact that they got them at all is an embarrassment.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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