"The Program in International Policy Attitudes at the U of Maryland recently did a poll of OECD countries asking if people were willing to pony up the money the UN says is necessary to meet the UN MDG of halving world poverty.
In every OECD country, the majority said yes, usually by a wide margin. In the US it was 3/4.
PIPA took the money the UN says is necessary and divided it up among the OECD countries according to share of GDP (a standard thing to do.) Then, in each country, they divided by the adult population, getting e.g. $56/year for the US."
So 75% of US citizens would not only pay more taxes to help people outside of their national community (i.e. not even to help those *in* the community), but they would, at least indirectly, give it to the UN (!) Yet supposedly US citizens have an aversion to taxes so deep that every US president has to pander to this ideology of zero taxation. Is that just because he has to talk to the people who write his checks? Or is it the case that people simply can't abide by talking about taxes unless the discussion is paired with what those taxes will be used to do? In any case, the fact that these can be disarticulated from one another, such that taxes themselves are the only issue, seems to be a peculiar fetish.
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