Chirac's bold AIDS proposal

Honest to God, there are so many things that I would rather write about then the French. But they just keep baiting me. Chirac has proposed an international tax on...you ready...fuel, airfare and financial transactions. Now, if I remember correctly (and I've been there twice in the last year and a half) the French economy looks a lot like a dead, bloated beached whale. Gas runs more then a euro per liter ($5 per gallon) and unemployment is double digits. There is zero economic growth and even a recent recession. Now Chirac wants to apply this winning formula to the entire world. In typical European fashion, Chirac has decided that the only way to fight AIDS is to take money from everyone and re-allocate it through...the U.N.? This proposal is so bad that it actually plans on taxing the movement of capital between nations. You might as well just throw a wet blanket over the entire international economy. I am also a little confused about how making capital and people more expensive to move around is going to lead to sustainable development in the poorest nations. It seems that if an American gets to keep more money by investing it at home, then there is no reason to invest in, for example, a manufacturing plant in Mexico or Ghana. Read the story here.