South Korea Calls for Unity Tax as North Slams Drills

South Korean President Lee Myung Bak called for a special tax to cover the costs of eventual Korean unification as North Korea threatened to respond to a U.S.-South Korea military drill with “the severest punishment.”

“It is imperative that the two sides choose coexistence instead of confrontation, progress instead of stagnation,” Lee said yesterday in an address celebrating the Korean peninsula’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. “It is therefore our duty to start thinking about real and substantive ways to prepare for reunification such as the adoption of a unification tax.”