World
UN's World Health Organization Eyeing Global Tax on Banking, Internet
FOX News
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The World Health Organization is considering a plan to ask governments to impose a global consumer tax on such things as Internet activity or everyday financial transactions like paying bills online.
Such a scheme could raise "tens of billions of dollars" on behalf of the United Nations' public health arm from a broad base of consumers, which would then be used to transfer drug-making research, development and manufacturing capabilities, among other things, to the developing world.
The multibillion-dollar "indirect consumer tax" is only one of a "suite of proposals" for financing the rapid transformation of the global medical industry that will go before WHO's 34-member supervisory Executive Board at its biannual meeting in Geneva.
The idea is the most lucrative — and probably the most controversial — of a number of schemes proposed by a 25-member panel of medical experts, academics and health care bureaucrats who have been working for the past 14 months at WHO's behest on "new and innovative sources of funding" to accomplish major shifts in the production of medical R&D.
WHO's so-called Expert Working Group has also suggested asking rich countries to set aside fixed portions of their gross domestic product to finance the shift in worldwide research and development, as well as asking cash-rich developing nations like China, India or Venezuela to pony up more of the money.
These would also add billions in additional funds to international health care for the future — as much as $7.4 billion yearly from rich countries, and as much as $12.1 billion from low- and middle-income nations.
But the taxation ideas draw the most interest. The expert panel cites a number of possible examples. Among them: a 10 per cent tax on the international arms trade, "which might net about $5 billion per annum"; a "digital tax or 'hit' tax." The report says the levy "could yield tens of billions of U.S. dollars from a broad base of users"; a financial transaction tax. The report approvingly cites a levy in Brazil that charged 0.38 percent on bills paid online and on unspecified "major withdrawals." The report says the Brazilian tax was raising an estimated $20 billion per year until it was cancelled for unspecified reasons.
The panel concludes that "taxes would provide greater certainty once in place than voluntary contributions," even as the report urges WHO's executive board to promote all of the alternatives, and more, to support creation of a "global health research and innovation coordination and funding mechanism" for the planned revolution in medical research, development and distribution.
The WHO scheme to transfer impressive amounts of money, technology, patents and manufacturing ability to the developing world in a global battle to conquer disease looks similar in many respects to the calls for huge transfers of wealth and technology that were at the heart of the just-failed UN-sponsored conference on lowering greenhouse gas emissions at Copenhagen.Indeed, the volume of revenues that the experts foresee from their global indirect tax — if it should ever be approved by enough national governments — might well come close to the $30 billion annual wealth transfer that rich nations approved at Copenhagen to hand over to poor countries until 2012.
Editor's Note: The most dangerous thing in the headlines for quite awhile. At issue here is nothing less than our sovereignty as a nation. Should the precedent be set that the United States would allow a foreign entity to "tax" it's people -- through whatever mechanism -- then the US Constitution and the Charters of Freedom would be rendered mere "suggestions" and our guaranteed rights would mean nothing. No foreign entity can ever -- ever -- be allowed to directly or indirectly tax a sovereign nation, no matter which nation that may be. The United Nations (originally created as a forum in which all nation states -- and no, not special interest groups like the Palestinians -- had an avenue for dialogue in order to avoid armed conflict) and all of her bastard children organizations have been over-stepping their authority for decades while bleeding the West, and especially the United States, dry. It is time to neuter -- permanently -- the UN.
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Its for the children so it must be ok right?
