U.N.'s World Health Organization Eyeing Global Tax on Banking, Internet Activity

The World Health Organization (WHO) 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...

[link to www.foxnews.com]

Tax the internet to create "vaccines" to "save" the poor children of the world?