Free Republic

At least United Nations officials are transparent about their goals to redistribute wealth on a global scale. According to several U.N. leaders, health care, education, housing, water and sanitation, among other services, are basic human rights, equivalent to the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” To ensure these rights, these U.N. higher-ups want to institute a global tax. The Deseret News reports: Inside the U.N., another group of civil society leaders demanded a basic level of social security as they promoted a “social protection floor” at a preparatory forum for the Commission on Social Development, which began...

The first beneficiaries of an international tax on air travel to help the world's poor will be 250,000 children suffering from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said Monday. Douste-Blazy, who was appointed to head the agency overseeing the funds, UNITAID, said 19 countries have started taking steps to implement the levy. It is expected to raise about EUR 50 million this year and EUR 300 million in 2007, he said. "I can confirm that I am determined to launch very rapidly the first action by UNITAID," Douste-Blazy told journalists. The first operation will involve supplying special medicines...

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - French President Jacques Chirac will urge world leaders to launch talks on a new international tax to fight world poverty, sources with him at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg say. The sources said Chirac rejected the existing "Tobin Tax" proposal to raise levies purely on foreign exchange transactions but would call in a speech to the summit for discussion on a wider tax on wealth generated by globalisation. "It could be a tax on airplane tickets, on carbon dioxide, on health products sold in industrialised countries, and indeed on international financial transactions," one source said. "The idea...

World leaders at UN development forum adopt action plan to fight poverty 22 March – In what has been widely hailed as a major achievement in the global effort to eradicate poverty, a landmark United Nations conference in Monterrey, Mexico, today approved a series of measures to help impoverished countries and promote economic growth around the globe. More than 50 heads of State, along with other senior government officials from across the world, adopted the so-called Monterrey Consensus at the International Conference on Financing for Development. In endorsing the Consensus, States resolved to address the challenges of unlocking resources...