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Latest update: 20/09/2010
- Barack Obama - development - Nicolas Sarkozy - poverty - United Nations
Sarkozy calls for tax on financial transactions to fund global development
President Nicolas Sarkozy called Monday for a tax on all financial transactions to pay for global development at a UN summit in New York that aims to bring new life to the foundering Millennium Goals, which seek to slash world poverty by 2015.
By News Wires (text)
AFP - French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday called for a tax on all financial transactions at the UN Millennium Goals summit to pay for global development.
"Finance has globalized, so why should we not ask finance to participate in stabilizing the world by taking a tax on each financial transaction," Sarkozy told the summit.
The French leader said he would press for a global tax when France is president of the Group of 20 countries next year.
"I want to tell you of my conviction that while all developed countries are in deficit, we must find new sources of financing for the struggle against poverty, for education and for the ending of the planet's big pandemics."
Sarkozy, the first key leader to speak at the summit, also said that France would increase its payments to the UN fund on AIDS and malaria by 20 percent.
France has been a leading advocate of so-called "Innovative Financing" for development. It was the first country to introduce a tax on airline tickets to pay for aid.
While countries such as Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Norway and others support innovative financing. Free market countries such as the United States are known to be wary of imposing new taxes.




























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"Free market countries such
"Free market countries such as the United States"
America a free-market economy???? More like a fascist kleptocracy
Something to wrap your brain around...
Has no one around here heard of "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs"??
What it's about is wall street hotshots and people who make hundreds of thousands (if not millions)doing no more than betting, paying a surcharge for making a fortune off of companies and products and institutions that they did not create or invest in, and have no interest in other than how much money can be made betting on them.
That way people whose jobs have been sent to Indonesia, because the short-sellers & speculators have ruined manufacturing and industry in the "developed" world, can get some food and unemployment and healthcare while they're looking for the three part-time jobs it will take to keep them in their homes and feed their children.
This will have no effect on ordinary working stiffs, unless your job involves shorting manufacturers til they have no value, so that a company you're invested in can buy them for pennies on the dollar and outsource the work to Sri Lanka, laying off thousands of workers of "European descent" and making yourself rich at their expense.
Say again?!
Where is it written that people of European decent have to take care of everyone else and solve all their problems? What is going to happen to the world when we go extinct in two centuries?
OMG WTF
this is how they will be funding the new world government..more taxes for everybody ..first it will be small so they hope you wont notice then will ramp it up..now everybody go back to sleep
tax on begging
When roma people receive money from begging they should be taxed on it that too is a financial transaction.