(In case you don’t already know, “nom nom nom” is the internationally recognized phrase for eating cutely. See Exhibit A for details and proper usage.)

Stuff Worth Reading returns with an insatiable appetite for prowling the internet for the very best of personal finance articles. My own appetite is also rather insatiable, but I’m sure that will subside this weekend when I face off against the IHOP All You Can Eat Pancakes. Current Vegas odds are 2:1 that I’ll be able to get through a dozen flapjacks. I’ll be disappointed if I leave before eating at least a thousand.

It looks like other personal finance writers are just as hungry as I am. Here’s a look at some of them and what they’re munching on this week.

1. Clever Dude tells the sad tale of some buffet lovers who got themselves banned for eating too much. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before this happens to me, but I don’t go to any single buffet frequently enough for them to have caught on to me yet.
2. If you think you’d save money fixing your own salad instead of eating one at a restaurant, The Frugal Duchess says you don’t know the half of it. She shares tips on making your own gourmet salad that’ll save you both money and time.
3. Give Me Back My Five Bucks laments the high cost of meat substitutes. I thought meat was expensive, but apparently not eating it can be even costlier!
4. Did you know that a clean kitchen can save you money? Frugal Village enlightens us on how a tidy cooking area isn’t just for obsessed neat freaks and haters of salmonella poisoning.

I’m sure I’ll have tales to tell of my battle against IHOP next week, so be sure to tune in for that. Until then, stay warm, and may your pancakes be light and fluffy!

In 1999, I was but a student in a Baltimore-area high school when Martin O’Malley, a former assistant state’s attorney and city councilmember, became the Mayor of Baltimore. Living in a suburb of Baltimore, I knew right then and there that he would eventually become Governor of Maryland and I’d have to deal with his financially retarded policies. You see, while he was Mayor of Baltimore, O’Malley did interesting things with taxes. He would first drop some taxes to make people happy, but then he would increase other ones—a lot. In the end, O’Malley left Baltimore more heavily taxed than when he first took office.

Fast forward to 2008. Sure enough, O’Malley is Governor of Maryland. Today, for the first time since 1977—before I was even born—the Maryland state sales tax is going up under legislation enacted by O’Malley. Indeed, he hasn’t been governor for a full year and he’s already screwing with decades-old tax rates. (While he was at it, he also raised several other tax rates but attempted to hide them behind tiny property tax rate cuts. O’Malley says that over 80% of Maryland families will pay fewer taxes overall, but he’s assuming that Maryland’s highest-in-the-nation housing prices are going to keep rising. In the end, it’s likely that even the poor of Baltimore City will pay more taxes than before.)

Starting today, our state’s sale tax is going up 20%: from 5 cents per dollar to 6 cents per dollar.

You might think I’m being a little silly getting so upset over a tax hike that only amounts to an extra $100 for every $10,000 of purchases. You might even think it’s a good thing because it will help discourage stupid people with credit cards from buying giant TVs and overpriced cars they can’t afford. Maybe you’re right. But my reasons for raging against the sales tax increase are different:

• Our 5% sales tax is sacred. Maryland is as proud of its 5% sales tax as it is of its historical significance, Chesapeake Bay crabs, and high STD rate. Touching our sales tax is like molesting a baby seal on its birthday—you just don’t do it.
• It’s the one affordable thing about Maryland. Everything costs so damn much in Maryland, especially in my county. Gas? $3.10 a gallon. Housing? $300,000 for a shack. Eggs? We only get 7 per dozen. At 5%, Maryland goes from being second-lowest among its neighbors to tied for highest.
• 5% sales tax is easy. Especially in this age of rampant illiteracy and people who can’t do math, we need an easy-to-compute sales tax. You can do 5% in your head in five seconds; 5% of $2.09: drop the nine and take half of what’s left, or half of 20 = 10 cents. What’s 6% of $2.09? Nobody freaking knows!
• It’s from O’Malley. For many reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, I don’t like O’Malley. I might have tolerated a sales tax increase from any other governor a little more, but having it come from O’Malley makes me think about moving. Unfortunately all of our neighboring states suck worse than we do. No offense, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Lucky for all of Maryland, this personal finance writer is not taking this assault on our freedom lying down. Indeed, I am sitting on my couch when I say that I will fight this unjust tax increase in the highest court of the land: the Court of My Wallet. And if you’d like to join me, here’s how you can help me fight the Maryland sales tax increase from anywhere in the country:

1. Never visit Maryland. If you’re debating a family vacation in either Florida or Maryland this year, let me save you the trouble and point you straight to Disney World. Why anyone would want to travel to Maryland is beyond me since the only thing we have that you can’t find in a closer, cheaper state is lots more traffic. Now that our sales tax is 6%, please keep your tax dollars in states with much sexier governors.
2. Never live in Maryland. We make it easy for you by keeping our housing prices and rent at the highest levels in the country. If you really want to pay high housing prices on the East Coast, go live in New Jersey.
3. Never drive through Maryland. Not even to get to Pennsylvania from West Virginia. Go the long way. Otherwise you risk contributing financially to Maryland via its ridiculous highway tolls or taxes on rest stop vending machines. Also, don’t fly through Maryland because our air is 30% slower than the national average.
4. Don’t buy from Maryland online retailers. Some Maryland retailers, mostly of candied asparagus, will charge Maryland sales tax from their websites. Send those retailers an e-mail letting them know you’re not buying from them because they didn’t complain loudly enough to block this sales tax increase.
5. If you live in Maryland, go shop somewhere else. Yes, you’re probably supposed to pay Maryland use tax anyway on items you order out-of-state or online, but we all know you don’t. That said, if anyone asks, I do.
6. Tell O’Malley what you think. You can use this convenient online form to let Governor O’Malley know that you won’t stand for his sales tax increase, even if you live in France and don’t speak a lick of English. Zut, O’Malley! C’est merde!

With any luck, O’Malley will see that a 6% sales tax isn’t any better at fixing his budget problems than a 5% one.

By the way, if you think you’re safe from O’Malley’s rampage from one of your 49 other states, beware: I’d put money on an O’Malley U.S. presidential bid by 2020. If you like the 15% income tax bracket, then you’ll love 25%!

This past year was a phenomenal year for Punny Money. Despite the fact that I only wrote three articles with any useful information in them, Punny Money received over 180 billion unique visitors in 2007 and is now read daily in more than 8,000 countries. [Editor's Note: It turns out I accidentally added six zeros too many to those figures. It was really only 180,000 visitors, and Punny Money is read in 0.008 countries. My apologies.]

I’d like to thank all of you who read Punny Money daily or whenever I got off my butt to actually write an article, and I promise everyone that there will be a lot more financial news you couldn’t possibly use in 2008. I’d also like to thank those fellow personal finance writers out there who linked to various articles on Punny Money, especially those who sent massive numbers of internet people this way. Here are the biggest Punny Money referrers of 2007*, in order of visitor-sendingosity:

*Excludes sites with a bounce rate of 80% or more, indicating stoned teenagers searching the internet for shiny objects.

1. Grad Money Matters - Back in August, Grad Money Matters wrote an article entitled What I Do to Live Frugally that got picked up by virtually every social bookmarking website on the internet. It pointed to my buffet article, so I ended up getting lots of visitors too. Sadly, the author of Grad Money Matters hasn’t written anything in over a month. Come back and link to me again soon, ya hear?
2. My Money Blog - If you aren’t reading My Money Blog, then you should probably start. You’ll find more genuinely useful and practical information there than on any other personal finance blog on the internet. A lot of personal finance writers like to write about ponies and rainbows, but My Money Blog gives you the coupon codes to save 10% off your next purchase at Ponies-and-Rainbows.com.
3. Clever Dude - Back in the day, Clever Dude wrote many a useful personal finance article. Now he writes about his new favorite topics: videogames and liquor. Perhaps that’s why you all read him more than me. But that’s fine, as long as he keeps sending me a few of you guys.
4. Get Rich Slowly - Other than The Simple Dollar, Get Rich Slowly is the biggest personal finance blog there is. But unlike The Simple Dollar, who writes mostly book reviews and philosophical thoughts about money, Get Rich Slowly writes more practical stuff like advice for buying your first home and interesting tricks you can do with gift cards.
5. Stop Buying Crap - I’m sad to see that Stop Buying Crap seems to have stopped writing crap lately too. If there’s one website out there that inspired me to start writing Punny Money, it’s this one. Come back, Cap!
6. Money, Matter, and More Musings - Golbguru started writing about personal finance at the exact same time I did. Money, Matter, and More Musings has 8 jillion readers. Punny Money has 900 or so. Perhaps it’s because Money, Matter, and More Musings is alphabetically before Punny Money. Yeah, we’ll just assume it’s that.
7. Five Cent Nickel - Nickel and the next two guys are the big members of the Money Blog Network. Together, they write 80 thousand posts a year. For once, I am not making up that number; I am making an educated guess. Go read their stuff, then come back here since they obviously link to me quite a lot.
8. Free Money Finance - By far the most prolific personal finance writer in the world. In June, he finished writing about the very last topic in personal finance, so he started again from the beginning. Amazing. Free Money Finance gives all of his website’s revenue to charity. I use my revenue to eat at buffets. Seriously, I think I’ll stop writing now and just redirect all of my visitors to Free Money Finance.
9. Blueprint for Financial Prosperity - I have a lot in common with jim from Blueprint. We both live in Maryland. We both own a home. And we’re both Asian, except he’s Asian by birth, and I just watched so much Japanese anime that I became one somehow. Go visit him now and tease him because his website name doesn’t match his domain name.
10. Bank Deals - I read no other personal finance blog more religiously than I do Bank Deals. Thanks to Bank Deals, my money in savings is making more money than I do. Yes, lazy paper money has a higher salary than a real person. If you are looking for the best savings account or CD rate for your money, you go here. No, you don’t go somewhere else. You go to Bank Deals. Hey! What did I just say? WHAT DID I JUST SAY??? Go to Bank Deals.

Now here’s a look at the most visited articles of 2007 on Punny Money, in case you missed any of them the first time around. If you memorize them all word for word, I’ll give you a shiny penny.

1. Fight Thieving Restaurant Servers With Checksum Tips I never thought this article would take off like it did, but it accounted for fully one out of every 10 viewers Punny Money had in 2007.
2. Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Dry Loop DSL This was a follow-up to the next article in this list, partly due to the success of that article.
3. Verizon Lies About Dry Loop DSL Availability I wrote this article back in 2006 and it still pulled ‘em in last year.
4. Eat Your Money’s Worth At Any All-You-Can-Eat Buffet And here I was thinking that nobody else would be interested in my strategies for packing away the calories at buffets. Some trivia about this article: It was the sole inspiration for Clever Dude’s wife to start her own nutrition and healthy stuff blog because she wanted to help all the poor people I was leading to an early grave.
5. Ten Ways Anyone Can Go to College With Zero Student Loans This is another older article that keeps pulling in the visitors—poor college kids who don’t want to get buried in an avalanche of debt that will take 20+ years to pay back.
6. How to Get Paid to Go to College It wasn’t enough for people to go to college without having to borrow money. Now they want to get paid for it. I happily obliged with this article based on my own personal experiences.
7. No Fax Machine? Send Faxes Online Cheap or Free! Yet another older article that still brings in the cheapskates. Hmm… I’m seeing a trend here.
8. Borders Bookstore 30% Off Coupon, Expires November 5th Yes, the coupon expired on November 5th… of 2006! I should either update this article, sell books from it, or just kill it altogether. That is, unless someone out there has a hobby collecting expired internet coupon codes.
9. Five Fabulous-Paying Jobs Anyone Can Do—Except They’re Totally Illegal I get it. I get it. You want the six-figure salary, and you don’t care who you have to kill to get it. *sniff* I’m so proud of you guys.
10. The 9-Volt Battery Conspiracy Rounding out the list is my exposé of the battery conglomerate’s attempts to extort millions of dollars out of you with smoke detectors that only take super-expensive 9-volt batteries.

Oh, and I’m taking requests for topics people want me to write about in 2008. Do you want to see more investing talk here? Or perhaps you’d like some insight into the housing market. Or maybe you just want me to write about hookers every article. Feel free to comment and let me know what you think. Thanks again for a wonderful year, everyone!