Here's the answer to America's economic woes: Lower the corporate income tax rate.

I know, I know, with Congress mulling over how best to bail out some of the finest corporations in the land, it seems like an odd time to make such a suggestion. But that's exactly the argument made in the e-mail I received this morning from Dezenhall Associates, a public relations firm that bills itself as "the nation's leading high stakes communication consultancy."

With all the economy talk today and over the weekend focusing on the fine-details of the Administration's proposed $700 billion financial market bailout, there has been very little discussion of what our next President needs to do to ensure America's global economic competitiveness ...

While the much-debated bailout might save us from an immediate recession, leaders from the Tax Foundation point out that it does nothing to make the United States more competitive in the global marketplace.

Dezenhall then offered to arrange a chance for me to speak with representatives of the Tax Foundation so that they could explain why lowering the corporate income tax rate is the right thing to do now. Alas, life is too short.

That's right, first let's authorize the spending of up to $700 billion to bring solvency to Wall Street, and then we lower the corporate income tax rate. It's hard for me to imagine a more stupid, insulting and flat-out enraging public relations campaign at this particular moment in time than this travesty from Dezenhall Associates.

The again, Eric Dezenhall is the same joker who advised the American Association of Publishers that it should fight against a campaign to make government-funded research freely accessible to the general public by pushing the slogan "Public access equals government censorship." And who argued in his book, "Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management Is Wrong," that, as I wrote a year and a half ago, "we live in an era characterized by a 'frenzy of anticorporate witch-hunts' where large companies are constantly living in fear of assault from well-funded critics eager to tar and feather them."

Because, you know, it's not like corporations are ever guilty of doing anything deserving of public criticism. Bailouts, yes. Tar and feathering, no. Lower taxes and bailouts? Priceless.