USA Today linked to an article in yesterday's International Herald-Tribune about French President Jacques Chirac's proposal for an "international solidarity tax" on airplane tickets and fuel to fight epidemics in Africa, including AIDS.

While I'm certainly not opposed to providing more assistance to Africa for this cause, why would Chirac propose taxes specifically on air travel? Where's the connection between air travel and Africa's problems?

The fact that the article does not say that the tax would be only on international air travel (as compared to his proposal for a tax on international capital movements) leads me to suspect a little political grandstanding on Chirac's part - he knows fully well that a tax on all air travel would fall disproportionately on the United States and other low-population-density countries that rely on domestic air travel (especially Canada and Australia), and thus the US is likely to reject it. So France gets to look good in imposing this tax on its own citizens and Chirac gets to paint the US in a bad light.

It would seem to me that if Chirac was serious about this, he'd propose imposing the tax on train travel as well, so that Europe would pay a more equitable proportion of the total tax. Of course, you could then argue that since Americans (and Canadians, and Australians, etc.) use cars for trips where Europeans are more likely to use trains, the tax should be on petrol as well. Which just leads us back to my original point - why a tax on air travel at all?

Or am I just too cynical here?

(Or is the tax only proposed for international travel, and the IHT article was incomplete?)