June 26, 2006

Let me ask you a question: Do you think you pay enough taxes? Throughout the year you paid federal taxes through withholding, including Social Security payroll taxes. You also paid state income taxes, unless you’re fortunate enough to live in Texas or another state without an income tax. You paid local property taxes. You paid local sales taxes every time you bought something, and you paid numerous miscellaneous taxes such as vehicle license fees and federal gas taxes. Like most people, you probably feel taxed to death by all these city, county, state, and federal taxes. Well, hold on to your wallets, because the United Nations now wants to impose a whole new level of global taxes on us.

UN bureaucrats think rich nations like America ought to give more money to poor nations- a lot more- simply because we’re rich. Never mind the billions of foreign aid tax dollars we send overseas every year; never mind the billions donated to overseas charities by Americans, the most charitable people on earth. The UN mindset blames the western world for poverty everywhere, assuming that our relative wealth must have come at the expense of the third world. The poor countries themselves are never deemed responsible for their own predicaments, despite their often corrupt governments, lack of property rights, and hostility toward wealth-producing capitalism. Somehow, it’s always our fault. So the UN holds conferences to talk about how we should pay to make things right, and the idea of a UN tax naturally arises.

Understand that the UN views itself as the emerging global government, and like all governments, it needs money to operate. The goal, which the UN readily admits, is to impose a comprehensive set of global laws on all of us- laws that supersede sovereign national governments. To do this, the UN needs a global military, a global police force, international courts, offices around the globe, and plenty of highly-paid international bureaucrats. All of this costs money.

Rest assured that the UN is absolutely serious about imposing a global tax. In fact, it has been discussing a global currency tax for years. The "Tobin tax," named after the Yale professor who proposed it, would be imposed on all worldwide currency transactions. Such a tax could prove quite lucrative for the UN.

The Tobin tax is not the only idea being considered. Some have suggested taxing all airline travel or carbon emissions. The ultimate goal is an income tax, which will be imposed after we’ve all swallowed the concept of UN taxing authority.
Fortunately, the House of Representatives last week passed my language in the 2007 Foreign Operations bill that prohibits the Treasury from paying UN dues if the organization attempts to implement or impose any kind of tax on US citizens. But that only protects us for another year. Given the stated goals of the UN, it would be foolish to believe the idea of a global tax will go away.

(Republished with special permission)

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