...and I can't stop laughing at this!

Remember the WTW story on how many corporations pay no taxes? Well, it sure isn't easy, but the Cato Institute's Chris Edwards found a way to make that sad story an aargument for lowering the corporate tax rate. And I assume he said this with a straight face: "By lowering the U.S. tax rate, you are giving companies less incentive to cheat and move their profits offshore."

Remember the WTW story on how many corporations pay no taxes? Well, it sure isn't easy, but the Cato Institute's Chris Edwards found a way to make that sad story an aargument for lowering the corporate tax rate. And I assume he said this with a straight face: "By lowering the U.S. tax rate, you are giving companies less incentive to cheat and move their profits offshore."

Yeah, Phil Gramm stepped down as McCain's economic advisor after his comment about Americans being whiners, and the recession being psychological.**

**The actual quote is "You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession....We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline."

And here we go again. Uh-huh. Seems our beloved gummint has conclusively proved that WT7, as in World Trade center #7, fell down and went boom due to an aggravated fire, and that "conspiracy nuts" should be all ashamed because we fail to get the joke.

Not the first time for me, of course.

I spent a chunk of yesterday taking phone surveys for my local Democratic Party. The goal was information, not persuasion. Three simple questions: Do you plan on voting for Obama, do you plan on voting for the Democratic candidate for governor in Vermont, and which issues are most important to you as a voter? I come away with two distinct impressions: (1) very few people are home during the day, and (2) an appreciable number of citizens have bought the Republican smears of Barack and Michelle Obama verbatim.

Meanwhile, back at the shamolic economy, courtesy those lovable buffoons known as our government, the word in the wind is that a big US bank is about to implode...

But which one?

After watching the presidential forum at Rick Warren's Saddleback church on Saturday, I was amazed at how complimentary the media has been of John McCain's performance. The media was so kind to McCain after the forum that they missed (or ignored) the biggest jaw-dropper of the night -- his answer to the question of which Supreme Court justices he would not have nominated.

Among the hired guns and tonsils that represent American Business interests at every level, and in every noook and cranny of America, my vote for the most shameless hack is the one and only Neil Cavuto of Fox. While many others on Fox and CNBC and the major broadcast channels mouth the same line--notably Lawrence Kudlow--Cavuto appears to be the standard bearer for the "business is sooooo ethical" scam.

Since the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act following the Enron debacle, the business community has ascribed every form of evil to that law. Hannah Clark of Forbes once described how the business world feels about the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act this way:

According to critics, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has caused a litany of ills: Executives are retiring early, public companies are going private, foreign firms are listing abroad and U.S. firms are losing their competitive edge. The sweeping law, written in the wake of the Enron scandal, has served as a scapegoat for all the evils facing corporate America since it was passed in 2002.

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