A kind word for taxes

As a reporter on a small town newspaper many years ago, l met a farmer who believed strongly in self-reliance as the way to slash taxes. Each family, he insisted, should drill its own well for water, surface the road in front of its own property, and dispose of sewage in its own outhouse or septic tank instead of depending on government.

He was angry and frustrated because his ideas didn’t become public policy. The 21st century has many people of the same mind and with same emotions. Their cause is anti-tax, and their reaction is anger, because their ideas are not implemented.

At my youngest son’s graduation ceremonies in the vast Coliseum in Richmond, I got a taste of popular feeling against taxes. Each group of black-clad graduates of Virginia Commonwealth University got our warm acclaim even when we could hardly fathom their achievement. Then, amid the successful candidates from the School of Business, a lone male stood up to receive the degree of master of taxation.

Master of taxation! The words triggered a deep and prolonged booooo. Afterward, I recounted the incident in a column that appeared in the U.S. News & World Report under the heading “A Kind Word for Taxes.” I quoted the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

“A reversal of values is in order,” I added. ‘Those of us – individuals and corporations – who have benefited much from the freedom of our land ought to be proud to pay taxes. To wipe out or huge federal deficit, we need to address a deficit of another sort – one of wisdom, unselfishness, and, yes, sacrifice.”

Nowadays, when so many believe our taxes are much too high, we should at least be open to the facts. Charles R. Philips, in a Commonweal article (October 22 issue), points to one widely unrecognized fact: we’re not as heavily taxed as are citizens of most other industrial nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Counting all taxes – sales, income, property, whatever, imposed by all levels of government – as a percentage of GDP, the United States ranks 27th out 30 countries in the total taxes paid by its citizens. Only the people of South Korea, Turkey, and Mexico carried a heavier burden.
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Seeking better ways to evaluate a nation’s well-being

How to tell whether a country is making progress? Experts have been grappling with that question for years under the auspices of the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development (OECD).

They have now come up with recommendations that will be discussed at the October 27-30 OECD World Forum on “Statistics, Knowledge, and Policy” to be held in Busan, Korea.

The goal is to reach an international consensus on indicators that transcend the traditional one, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which measures a nation’s total flow of goods and services.

It’s time to end “GDP fetishism,” Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told a Bloomberg reporter last week. “So many things that are important to individuals are not included in GDP. There needs to be an array of numbers, but we need to understand the role of each number. We may not be able to aggregate everything together.”

In a September 14 announcement OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria observed that there is a growing gap between what official statistics state and the conditions under which people live their daily lives. “This gap,” he said, “can be clearly damaging both to the credibility of political debate and action and to the very functioning of democracy in our countries.“

The World Forum in Korea is part of a global project on measuring the progress of societies, initiated by the OECD five years ago.

A newly released draft OECD working paper sets out a proposed framework to measure that progress – a framework “broad-based and flexible enough to be applied in many situations around the world.”

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Many children left behind in U.S.

Although the United States is a very high-income country, its record on the well-being of children lags behind that of many countries that are less rich, according to the OECD’s first-ever report on child well-being within OECD-member territory.

Here are some of the details that “Doing Better for Children” contains on how the U.S. record on children ranks among the 30 OECD countries:

-- fifth worst in child mortality.
-- seventh worst in average educational achievement of 15-year-old children.
-- sixth worst in rates of low birth weight.
-- twenty-ninth lowest in the rate of births for girls aged 15-19.

Total U.S. public spending on child welfare and education in 2003 was $140,000 per child 17 years old and younger, compared to the OECD average of about $125,000

The United States should spend more on giving better starts in life on younger, disadvantaged children, the report recommends.

Last year the OECD issued a report on income distribution and poverty in its 30 member countries. It rated the United States as the country with the highest inequality level and poverty rate, Mexico and Turkey excepted. U.S. income inequality was found to be to rising even more after 2000, thanks partly to a decrease in government spending on unemployment compensation and other social benefits.

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Rooting out worker rights abuses abroad

Is there anything that the governments of rich countries can do to integrate human rights into the overseas operations of their multinational corporations? Yes, the government of Norway says, and shows how in a recent statement on corporate social responsibility.

That responsibility does not stop at the Norwegian border, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store said in releasing the policy statement, or white paper.

A key element of that policy urges all Norwegian multinationals – about 100 in number – to enter into “global framework agreements” with global unions to safeguard the rights of workers in foreign countries in conformance with core conventions of the UN International Labor Organization.

Among the Norwegian companies that have already taken that step are StatoilHydro, with an agreement covering 29,500 workers in 40 countries, and Norske Skog, a newsprint producer with 11,000 workers worldwide, both with Norwegian unions and their global union, the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine, and General Workers Unions. (ICEM).

The white paper states that; in countries that do not respect the right to organize and to bargain, multinationals should seek ways to establish some sort of system that permits the voice of workers to be heard in workplaces.

In addition, the white paper provides guidance on corporate responsibility with regard to decent working conditions, the environment, and anti-corruption among other human rights issues.

The government also intends:

-- to address by legislation, through Accounting Act amendments, the duties of corporations to provide information on their actions to implement ethical guidelines, and

-- to strengthen the Norwegian government's “national contact point” for dealing with worker rights complaints alleging violations of the multinational guidelines of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In short, supplementing its efforts to root out worker rights violations through trade negotiations and ILO programs, the Norwegian government intends to use its own powers to regulate corporate behavior beyond its national boundaries.

So far, that’s only an intention, but it’s an intention that the U.S. government would be wise to adopt as its own.
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The government of Australia is considering a similar initiative. See To Embed Huuman Rights in Multinationals.



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