Rank the following taxes from best to worst: individual income taxes; payroll taxes, corporate income taxes, sales or consumption taxes, and residential property taxes. The vast majority of economists would rank the corporate income tax as being worst and the sales tax and residential property tax as the best.

Unfortunately, the corporate income tax is often the favorite tax of fiscally irresponsible politicians because it is not easily seen.   In fact, the corporate tax is paid by workers in lower wages and fewer new jobs, by consumers in higher prices and by savers and investors in lower rates of return.

Last week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a study that showed 28 percent of large companies paid no corporate income tax in 2005 almost always because they had made no profit.

Rather than thoughtfully considering whether the corporate income tax should be reduced or abolished, several bluster brains in the U.S. Congress used the report as an excuse to attack corporations.

Ever heard of Richard Armitage?  Assistant Secretary of Defense for President Ronald Reagan.  Deputy Secretary of State for President George W. Bush.  An impressive résumé as long as your arm.  Why would such a man lie about being a Navy SEAL?

SEAL is an acronym for SEa, Air, and Land for the comprehensive training required to be a member of the most elite special operations force in the US military.  It was my great privilege to serve my country as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam, and ultimately to be the Commandant of the Naval Special Warfare Training Center in Coronado, California, where graduates of the BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) course earn the right to be a SEAL.

I had heard Armitage's claim before and knew it was false, because I had researched the student personnel files at the Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, and there was no record of an Armitage ever having been enrolled in BUD/S (much less graduated).

This got me to thinking - how many others are there who lie about their being a SEAL?  I decided to look into it, and got a number of retired SEALs to help me.  What we discovered astounded us.

Grab a seat, folks - a ringside seat to the Greatest Show on Earth.  What more exciting fun could there be than watching Zero's Washington caught in a vise between California and England, struggling vainly as it gets squeezed to death?

From California comes what America needs more than anything else, a Tax Revolt.  California voters didn't buy the extortionist threats from its girlie-man governor and the Dem crooks who run the Legislature.  They prefer state bankruptcy to more thieving taxes.

Such bankruptcy would be the solution to its woes, for e.g., all contracts with public employee unions would be voided.  What fun...

That the federal government is also headed towards Bankruptcy City can be seen by this observation in Bloomberg:  The Dollar Is Dirt, Treasuries Are Toast, AAA Is Gone.

As the dollar disintegrates, unemployment and inflation explode into deep double digits, and taxpayers decide to spend what money they have on food, clothing, and shelter instead of government thieves, the fury of what's happening now in England is going to be replicated here.

As an intelligence officer or journalist, you've got to know which sources you can trust. And a source who's never let me down told me this week (3/30) that the terrorist multinational based in Pakistan is coming apart.

According to this insider's insider, the Pakistan-headquartered Afghan Taliban is furious at the Taliban's Pakistani wing because its assaults on the Islamabad government triggered a stunning backlash.

Unleashed at last, Pakistan's military launched a series of offensives aimed at smacking down the domestic Taliban.  Good news at last.  If only there were the same in Afghanistan, where our president made a furtive six-hours-in-the-night visit Sunday (3/28).   The Taliban laughed at Obama, saying he was afraid to come during the daytime and calling him a thief in the night.

If Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is elected president of the United States, do you know what will happen to federal tax rates and government spending?

If you answered "yes," then you have not been paying attention, because Mr. Obama and his advisers keep changing what they say they are going to do.

Even more importantly, under the U.S. Constitution, Congress has the sole power to tax and appropriate funds, not the president. Congress always rewrites presidential tax and spending proposals, even when the president and congressional majority are of the same party, and hence no president gets to dictate fiscal policy.

The questions we should be asking are: What changes is Congress likely to make in the tax law, the level of spending, and energy policy if Mr. Obama is elected, and likewise if Sen. John McCain is elected?  This table shows what happened to the economy during the past quarter of a century when each party controlled (or shared control of) Congress:

It's glorious to be in Paris on May Day with a beautiful woman - especially if she's your wife.  We're here this week to see our youngest son who's spending his junior year in high school studying in France.

On May Day, the streets of Paris are filled with sellers of muguets, the sweet-smelling flowers of Lillies of the Valley.  Every man buys a muguet for his sweetheart.  I am no different.

Unfortunately, communists and lefties of every stripe use May Day - a happy day of celebration of springtime since ancient times - to vent their envious hatred of capitalist prosperity.  Demonstrations and protests took place today in hundreds of French cities - and Paris was no exception.

Seeing these angry "workers" and "students" marching along in rage and resentment demanding the world provide them with a living while ignorantly denouncing the only economic system that can provide it is an amusing "Walpole moment."

As in Horace Walpole, who observed, "This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel." (See What We Have Got and They Have Not.)

There are hundreds of years of oil supplies (at present and projected consumption levels) if oil in oil sands and shale is properly included in reserves.   And it can be produced at a cost of $35-$50 a barrel.

Does it seem a bit odd that the current price of oil is between two and three times the cost of producing all the oil the world presently needs and will need long into the future? The reason the price is so high is that the supply has been artificially constrained by governments.

Take our Congress.  Some politicians there argue that even if the U.S. government started to allow increased production, that it would be seven to 10 years or more before there would be additional output. This is nonsense.

Yet the very same politicians who claim we cannot increase oil production quickly are often the same ones who tell us we need to move to alternative forms - windmills and solar, etc. - without seeming to understand these desirable technologies will take far more time to meet the goals of "energy independence" than ramping up oil production.

A few years back, I wrote that Russia's Vladimir Putin was the most impressive major leader on today's world stage. Since then, he's gotten better.

Back then, he was eating President George W. Bush for breakfast. Now he's snacking on President Obama as sushi -- eating him raw, in happy little bites.  Mr. Obama is so naïvely pliable in the Russian leader's hands Putin should nickname him President Putty.

Putin is ruthless, unforgiving, and murderous. He is the Evil Empire's belated answer to President Ronald Reagan. Where the Gipper focused uncompromisingly on bringing down the Soviet imperium, Putin focuses uncompromisingly on restoring imperial Russia.

Putin doesn't seem like a man much given to hilarity, but he must be laughing his butt off at our incompetence. Consider his strategic achievements in just the last few months:

The mass murder of innocent civilians in the Moscow Metro suicide bombings on Monday (3/29) has again brought into focus the evil of radical Islamism and the imperative of civilized people everywhere to stop it.

As clear-cut a case of Islamist barbarism as it is, however, it is difficult to make sense of the spiraling violence in Russia without reference to Vladimir Putin's disastrous anti-terrorism policies.

A Moslem terrorist group from Chechnia - a province in a region of southern Russia called the North Caucasus - has claimed responsibility for the attack.  It is the latest incident in a long struggle between the Chechens and their Russian overlords.

Unlike his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, President Putin from the very beginning of his tenure in the Kremlin ten years ago showed himself completely unwilling to consider any negotiated settlement with the Chechens.  He pursued a strictly military solution, and set up a puppet regime in the Chechen capital of Grozny instead.

Putin's attitude is characterized by his vulgar promise to the resistance to "rub them out in the latrine."  He made that promise in 1999.  This week he slightly rephrased it, promising the resistance will be "scrapped from the sewers."  Thus we could call his anti-terrorism policy Putin's Sewer Strategy.  Unfortunately for him, it is his strategy that is in the toilet, not the terrorists.

Which of the following families is "richer"?

The first family consists of a wife who has recently become a medical doctor, and she makes $160,000 per year. Her husband is a small business entrepreneur who makes $110,000 per year, giving them a total family income of $270,000 per year.

However, they are still paying off the loans the wife took out for medical school and the loans the husband took out to start his business, amounting to debts of $300,000. Their total assets are valued at $450,000; hence, their real net worth or wealth (the difference between gross assets and liabilities) is only $150,000.

The second family consists of a trial lawyer who took early retirement and his non-working wife. They have an annual income of $230,000, all of it derived from interest on tax-free municipal bonds they own. However, their net worth is $7 million, consisting of $5 million in bonds, a million-dollar home with no mortgage, and a million dollars in art work, home furnishings, automobiles and personal items.

The second family is clearly far better off financially than the first family, yet many in the U.S. Congress, including Sen. Barack Hussein Obama, want to increase taxes on the first (and poorer) family and not on the wealthier family.