National Republican party officials on Wednesday put their party officially on record opposing United Nations‘ attempts, some backed by Democrats in Congress, to assess a special tax on Americans and give the money to Third World nations.
In a resolution, the Republican National Committee made clear its objection to “three global taxes and a global monetary governance mechanism to raise $400 billion a year to aid developing countries.”
The move also could have the practical effect of complicating the ability of the U.S. to participate in such international accords as the Law of the Sea Treaty, which the U.S. Senate has never ratified, and successor agreements to the Kyoto global-warming pact.
The resolution, passed in a meeting leading up to next week’s presidential nominating convention, cites in particular reports that Ottmar Edenhofer, an official with the U.N.’s major international panel dealing with climate-change issues, “claimed that climate-change policy was a way to redistribute wealth globally.”
It puts the national GOP in the center of the global wealth-distribution controversy for the first time. The world body also has proposed a carbon tax, a currency transaction tax and a billionaires’ tax, “as well as allocation of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights,” which have been proposed by some as a replacement for the U.S. dollar as the common currency all nations use for international trade.