Tax Day
Penny Poll
Palmer Square Post Office
Tuesday, April 17
12:00 noon - 1:00 PM
The Princeton-based Coalition for Peace Action (CFPA) will conduct its annual “Penny Poll” on federal spending priorities on tax day, Tuesday, April 17, from 12 noon until 1 PM in front of the Palmer Square Post Office in downtown Princeton.
People approaching the post office, many to mail their tax returns by the deadline, will be handed 10 pennies and invited to distribute them among five tubes proportionate to how they would like to see their federal tax dollars spent. The five choices will include: Military, Environment, Education, Housing, and Health Care.
After distributing their pennies, participants will be handed a fact sheet describing how their federal tax dollar is actually spent. If their choices are dramatically different from those on the fact sheet, they will be urged to write a letter to their elected representatives urging change.
Interested readers are invited to participate in the Penny Poll and/or to help conduct it by coming to the Palmer Square Post Office in Princeton between 12 and 1. For further information, visit CFPA’s web site at www.peacecoalition.org or call the CFPA office at (609) 924-5022.
“For many years, the Penny Poll has had hundreds of participants throughout the region with strikingly similar results: the vast majority of respondents wanted the majority of their federal tax dollar spent on education and health care. Next came environment and housing. By a large margin, the least popular category of spending was for the military.
Yet in Bush Administration’s proposed Fiscal 2008 Federal Budget, 59% of the Discretionary Budget (which Congress can allocate how it wants, and thus excludes trust funds like Social Security) is for Current Military Spending, counting the Supplemental “Emergency” Appropriations for the war in Iraq; while only 5% went for Education, 3% for Housing, and 2% for Environment .
The only way these distorted budget priorities will change is if we, average citizens, put enough pressure on our elected officials to insist that it change,” said the Rev. Robert Moore, executive director of CFPA.
Statistics from the National Priorities Project, see link below. http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=277&Itemid=107
