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http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020320-167972.htmhttp://www.washtimes.com/world/20020320-167972.htm
U.S. spurns renewed calls for world tax
Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published 3/20/2002
Calls for a world tax to help fight poverty have surfaced anew at
a Mexico summit on development that President Bush will attend
tomorrow and were immediately rebuffed by the White House.
Global tax proposals have called for the United Nations or other
international institutions to tax activities such as airline travel,
currency transfers and carbon emissions — with the receipts going to
either pay the U.N. budget or to fund international development
projects in the Third World.
Britain, Germany and two other European countries led efforts to
insert the global tax concept into the draft declaration that the
International Conference on Financing for Development is expected
to adopt this week.
U.S. officials said they managed — with the help of Japan and
other donor nations — to remove the global tax plan from the final
draft.
But yesterday the host of the summit, Mexican President Vicente
Fox, revived the plan with a call for global taxes to fight poverty — a
plan swiftly rejected by the Bush administration.
The Mexican president, embraced as a friendly neighbor by Mr.
Bush, said in a newspaper column that "global taxes such as the one
proposed on carbon emissions could be ... providing money for
development and also a more efficient use of scarce resources."
The global tax proposed by Mr. Fox yesterday in an opinion
column in The Washington Post, "was a non-starter — the United
States would never go for such a tax," said Patrick Cronin, assistant
administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
"You can't put the cart before the horse and tax wealthy countries
and then figure out how to use it," Mr. Cronin said.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, "The U.S.
government has seen these kind of [global tax] proposals from time
to time in the past and going over many administrations, and I don't
remember any of them that the U.S. government supported, frankly."
Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1996
proposed similar taxes on airline tickets and international currency
transactions.
The plan so irked then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole,
Kansas Republican, that he proposed a bill mandating a U.S. pullout
from the United Nations if such a tax was approved or even
discussed.
Mr. Dole's bill died in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
but U.S. opposition to global taxes remained strong and contributed
to Mr. Boutros-Ghali's being denied a second U.N. term.
In September, global tax plans were inserted into the draft
declaration for this week's Monterrey, Mexico, conference.
A U.S. official speaking on the condition of anonymity said the
plan was pushed by four development ministers: Claire Short from
Britain and ministers from Germany and two Nordic countries.
But objections by the United States and other wealthy nations
stripped out the global tax provision, said Mr. Cronin. By January,
the third and final preparatory committee meeting issued its final
16-page draft without any mention of a global tax.
The Nobel laureate and Yale economics professor James Tobin
first proposed a global tax on currency transactions to fund
development of poor countries, although before his recent death he
said he had abandoned the concept.
Mr. Fox proposed a tax on carbon emissions "to finance global
public goods."
These would include access to global health care information or
systems that transcend state boundaries such as trade standards, said
Mr. Cronin.
Mr. Fox is the first Mexican president in 70 years not from the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and he has toned down the
traditional anti-American and anti-capitalist rhetoric always popular
in Mexico.
He also called for open U.S. borders for Mexican migrant
laborers and strong measures to protect the human rights of illegal
Mexican immigrants in the United States.
Mr. Fox is also a leader in the developing world, where the idea
of a global tax on wealthy countries is quite popular.
Mr. Cronin said the goal of the Monterrey conference is to put in
place standards to assure current foreign assistance is effective.
"The first priority is, 'What do you want to spend money on?' " he
said. "Instead, some people are saying, 'Let's tax the wealthy and say
later how to spend it.'"
Mr. Cronin said that "in the right time, there could be a serious
discussion" about global taxes.
"We live in a small planet that is not getting bigger while we are
getting more numerous," he said.
He said that global taxes already exist in the form of U.N. dues
and fees for running the World Trade Organization and other
international groups.
Last week, Mr. Bush pledged a $5 billion increase in U.S. foreign
aid in each of the next three years and suggested the money be given
as grants to countries with relatively stable financial and political
systems.
Copyright © 2002 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
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