How Would You Spend $3.5 Billion Dollars?

If you had a choice would you spend $3.5 billion dollars to provide 2,515,196 homes with renewable electricity or build 41,714 affordable housing units? Would you spend it to build 352 new Elementary Schools or provide 73,260 Elementary School Teachers? Which would be more important to spend $3.5 billion dollars on: providing 883,869 people with health care or providing 524,443 Head Start places for children? Just how would you spend $3.5 billion dollars if the choice were yours to make?

According to the "National Priorities Project" website, taxpayers in Louisiana will pay $3.5 billion dollars in taxes that will fund the cost of the war in Iraq through the end of the year 2007. Taxpayers in California will be contributing $57.8 billion dollars for the same cause which might have built 172,908 affordable housing units. Tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of the population amount to $56.5 billion dollars this year. That amount of money could have paid for 9,331,868 scholarships for University students or provided 24,108,697 children with health care.

The "National Priorities Project" site's logo is "Turning Data Into Action". NPP explains, on it's "Notes and Sources" page, how they derived the data that is used to calculate how much overall taxes will be paid by citizens. There are many sources that were used to calculate the cost of expenditures. As an example, the maximum amount for a Pell Grant is $4,050. dollars. The purpose is to illustrate how our tax dollars are used and how the money might be better spent. Perhaps taxpayers in Louisiana would rather tax dollars be used to provide homes for the people who lost them due to Hurricane Katrina than to pay for ballistic missiles to be used for war.

NPP provides an easy to use search to find "Federal Budget Tradeoffs" or "Quick Reports" about hunger, poverty and energy. You can choose a state or Congressional District as well as the entire United States or American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. You can choose from 6 Federal programs and 11 tradeoffs such as the examples given in this article.

Our elected officials get to decide how to spend our tax dollars. The Internet makes it easy to visit your city, state and federal representatives to read about how they are choosing to spend those tax dollars. A simple email expressing your concerns about city, state and federal budgets could be just what they need to know about how the citizens they choose to serve would spend $35 billion dollars if the choice were theirs to make. Visit the NPP website to find trade offs in your area.