I had just gotten through my first trans-Atlantic flight about four years ago (my wife and I have always been road trip people) to attend an international academic conference on business ethics and public policy. I arrived at the conference site in Barcelona more than a little jet lagged. The opening session, which featured several prominent European officials and policy wonks, had just begun. I put on my translation head sets to hear what was being said. There was a German fellow talking about the European agenda for the 21st century. I then heard him utter the phrase that has forever since echoed in my head and haunted me: World Tax Organization.
I had hoped that this was just academic talk. There could never really be a World Tax Organization. Right?
Wrong. This past week, French President Jacques Chirac called on the international community to move toward a world tax to distribute wealth from rich countries to poor countries.
"'France is demanding an awareness and big step by the international community in the area of development aid,' Chirac was quoted by his spokesman as telling a cabinet meeting....The French leader underlined a goal of the United Nations fixed five years ago to cut global poverty in half by 2015.
"He said that, although France had greatly increased aid in the past two years, 'progress in public development aid in the world is far from satisfactory to allow the goal to be met', according to spokesman Jean-Francois Cope.
"To achieve the aim, 'the only way today is to manage to put in place a sort of international tax, as France has suggested', Chirac said."
What sort of international tax, you ask? Well Chirac has all kinds of ideas how to create a world level of taxation according to a report in WorldNetDaily.
1. Increase official aid or Overseas Development Assistance-ODA from its current 0.2 percent of GDP to the targeted 0.7 percent.
2. France supports the British proposal by Gordon Brown to set up an International Finance Facility which would float bonds in the international markets. All commitments by donor countries would go into the fund and bonds would be floated based on the annual payments. Chirac suggested that these loans would be reimbursed by "new resources, international taxes or levies, or voluntary contributions such as a small levy (tax) of $1 on the 3 billion plane tickets sold each year worldwide and a levy on the fuel used by air and/or sea transport.
3. Encourage large developed countries to set up coordinated tax incentives to stimulate and encourage private donations for development to help capture some of the $220 billion Americans give in charitable donations. Because only 3 percent goes outside America, he felt some laws should be changed to capture some of these monies.
4. A tax of 1/10,000 of a percent on international financial transactions which total $3 trillion per day.
5. Ask countries that "maintain bank secrecy to partially compensate for the consequences of world tax evasion through a levy of flows of foreign capital in and out of their territory to help the poor."
At the end of January, Chirac had also proposed a world tax to fund the fight of the AIDS epidemic.
"French President Jacques Chirac has proposed the creation of an international tax to help fight AIDS, saying such a measure could raise $10 billion (540 million pounds) each year."
How would this all be enforced?
Chirac has a plan for that as well, according to the New American.
"Chirac also espoused creating some sort of mechanism for monitoring 'world tax evasion.' This would undoubtedly require establishing a 'World Tax Court' empowered to punish violators of the international tax code. Such a tribunal would rely on UN resolutions for authority and would become a gargantuan bureaucracy of last resort without jurisdictional boundaries. Like the already-operational WTO and NAFTA courts, the proposed tax tribunal would operate completely without regard to any constitutional guarantee of trial by jury, due process, etc., and thus, with the aid of American power brokers, would make an effective end-run around the protections embedded in the Constitution."
Which Americans have come out in favor of this idea? None other than Bill Clinton and Bill Gates.
Be afraid...be very afraid!
