July 06, 2008

Barack Obama's "Global Poverty Act" (S. 2433, United Nations, global tax?)

Need further proof that the Barack Obama candidacy is just an elaborate practical joke? Consider this February story:

Sen. Barack Obama, perhaps giving America a preview of priorities he would pursue if elected president, is rejoicing over the Senate committee passage of a plan [the "Global Poverty Act", S.2433] that could end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars in an attempt to reduce poverty in other nations...

It would demand that the president develop "and implement" a policy to "cut extreme global poverty in half by 2015 through aid, trade, debt relief" and other programs...

The House version is H.R.1302 (link), introduced by Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA). From the Obama bill text (link):

The [Struck out->] United Nations [<-Struck out] Millennium Development Goals include the goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, that live on less than $1 per day, cutting in half the proportion of people suffering from hunger and unable to access safe drinking water and sanitation, reducing child mortality by two-thirds, ensuring basic education for all children, and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria, while sustaining the environment upon which human life depends.

The "Struck out" bits are at the last link above; why they're removed some instances of "United Nations" isn't entirely clear.

What's worrisome also is that even though the bill supposedly only requires us to meet the poverty-related Millennium Development Goal, the other Goals are even more worrisome:

...that declaration commits nations to banning "small arms and light weapons" and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as "the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development."

Jeffrey Sachs, who runs the U.N.'s "Millennium Project," says that the U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP in increased foreign aid spending would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends. Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.'s Financing for Development conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is expected to meet the "Millennium Development Goals," this amounts to $845 billion. And the only way to raise that kind of money, Sachs has written, is through a global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels...

See the last link for much more.

Posted to Politics at July 6, 2008 01:27 PM