Over Twenty-Five Million

In 2008 the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA announced that 92% of Americans had read no poetry in the previous twelve months. Some people repeated this fact as if to suggest that poetry was no longer a vital cultural force.
8% of the US population amounts to twenty-five and a half million people - over four times the number of Jews eliminated in the Holocaust.
If the Tea Party had its way all the tax dollars paid to facilitate the making and reading of poetry would be with-held. These people think nothing of creating a cultural holocaust and would dismiss the dozens of millions of people who think otherwise as an historical irrelevance.