Haven’t quoted Larry Kudlow in quite some time. Rectifying that now, noting his post in NRO’s The Corner, “Washington Needs to Help Businesses for a Change“:

You can begin by stopping the taxing of overseas corporate profits. Do not hike the minimum wage. Back off cap-and-trade. Do not nationalize health care. Stop the anti-trust assault on phone companies, pharmas, Google, airlines, and multi-nationals.

And how about a six-to-twelve-month payroll-tax holiday? That would make it cheaper to hire new workers. What about a corporate tax cut? And immediate cash expensing for business-investment write-offs? In other words, cut the tax cost of hiring, investing, and doing business. Because it’s businesses that create the jobs and the incomes for families all throughout America.

And if you are still worried about the housing story or bank toxic assets, how about a capital-gains tax holiday?

Does anyone in Washington understand the way the world really works? It’s called incentives. That’s what this is all about. And we’re going to need many more of them if businesses, investors, and families are to start prospering once again.

As we’ve noted before, too many politico like jobs just fine, it’s the jobs-creators they’re not so fond of. And those jobs-creators are business.

CNBC host and analyst and all-around smart guy Larry Kudlow comments on the inclusion of pro-growth tax relief in the Obama stimulus plan, “Team Obama Adds Business Tax Cuts.” He’s positive, but says more can be done:

However, as yet there is no Obama signal for the most powerful tax incentives that would slash the 35 percent top corporate rate to something around 20 percent. This should apply both to large C-corps and small-business S-corps. It would attract investment, improve future job creation, and relieve consumers who really shoulder the corporate tax costs. Additionally, full cash expensing for business investment write-offs would provide an even greater bang for the buck.

So while the new tax-refund plan and faster depreciation are positives, they are still much weaker than a full-bore supply-side tax-rate reduction that could even morph into full-fledged corporate tax reform. Now we wait for a Republican response, which hopefully will be bold corporate tax reform as well as reduced individual tax rates (at least for the middle class).

In our continuing campaign against the use, and especially the Washington Post’s use, of the inaccurate and inflammatory term “nationalize” to describe the U.S. government’s purchase of $250 billion in preferred bank stock, we report progress! In today’s Post, two legit uses.

Op-ed columnnist David Ignatius refers to global developments as “quasi-nationalization” in  “A Bailout Beijing Would Cheer“:

Free-market partisans in the West were shocked by the Chinese intervention and decried it as a dangerous precedent. But it helped stabilize the Hong Kong market. Now, that earlier bailout seems modest indeed — compared with the quasi-nationalization of the world’s leading banks we’re seeing this week.

Fair enough, and especially in an opinion column. The other mention is in a story about UBS’s difficulties, reporter Howard Schneider writes in “Swiss National Bank Takes $60B in Toxic UBS Assets“:

Swiss authorities moved to stabilize their storied banking system today, agreeing to move $60 billion in troubled assets from the books of financial giant UBS and into a special government-backed fund.

The Swiss government also invested $5 billion of public money into the bank, a reversal for a country that had taken a more hands off approach even as its European neighbors moved to shore up or even nationalize their financial institutions.

Accurate and fair.

Now, it’s possible the news has simply moved on and the bad newswriting featuring the term “nationalization” will return. But it’s also possible the editors and reporters acknowledged that the purchase of up to 3 percent of a bank’s assets does not equal government control and ownership, i.e., nationalization.

Seems like Treasury Secretary Paulson is also making the point, as reported in Bloomberg:

“The steps we’ve taken are absolutely the right steps, they’re bold steps, they’re strong steps to stabilize the financial markets and inject confidence into the banking system as well as capital,” Paulson said in an interview on CNBC television tonight. “I’m very confident that the moves we’ve taken will do just that.”

Paulson defended his proposal as “anything but” a nationalization of the country’s banking industry. He also distanced his effort from a U.K. plan to set aside as much as 50 billion pounds for equity stakes in the banks, provide 250 billion in interbank loan guarantees and 200 billion in a special liquidity program.

“What we’re doing is very different than what the British are doing,” he said.

Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

Larry Kudlow’s CNBC interview with Secretary Paulson is here.

Did you know the only successful accomplishment of the Bryanite populist movement of the 1890s was to update the old phrase, “Behind every cloud there’s a gold lining?” Really. Debased the sentiment in the process, but what the hell.

In any case, Larry Kudlow always seems to find the silver lining in the dark clouds of the market, swirling as they do. And he provides campaign advice to John McCain, but that’s beyond our purview.

Kudlow:

Another bad day for stocks, which seems to be a habit lately.

Fear is the big factor. Fear over the latest credit-crunch freeze-up in short-term lending markets. Fear over deepening recession. Fear over profits. Fear that Treasury-Fed bailouts — which grow larger by the minute — somehow won’t be enough. And fear that John McCain is going down in a three-house, Reid-Pelosi-Obama sweep that will raise taxes, embrace trade protectionism, end union secret ballots, and spend us into oblivion.

Amidst all this pessimism, permit me three silver linings: First, the strong dollar. Second, plunging energy prices that will generate an economy-wide tax-cut effect. And third, rapid money-supply growth after 18 months of flat money. In fact, on this last pint — which is so important — it looks like the Fed has un-pegged its fed funds target rate and is instead focused on pouring cash into the liquidity-starved global banking system. Meanwhile, the Treasury purchase plan for toxic assets will get off the ground sooner, not later. And the Fed is now backstopping the commercial paper market.

Against the rising tide of pessimism I would argue that these positives are planting the mustard seeds that will grow into the next bull-market prosperity. Believe it or not.