Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Paul Krugman: More Thoughts on Weaponized Keysianism: Even (or perhaps especially) the Republicans acknowledge that cutting on useless weapons systems costs the economy jobs.

  And the evidence clearly shows that weaponized Keynesianism works -- which means that Keynesianism in general works.

  So why do politicians and their hired economic propagandists say differently? On reflection, I think it's a bit more complicated than I suggested in my previous post on this topic, because there's a strong element of cynicism as well as genuine intellectual confusion.

  What kind of cynicism am I talking about? First, there's the general fear on the part of conservatives that if you admit that the government can do anything useful other than fighting wars, you open the door to do-gooding in general; that explains why conservatives have always seen Keynesianism as a dangerous leftist doctrine even though that makes no sense in terms of the theory's actual content. On top of that there's the Kalecki point that admitting that the government can create jobs undermines demands that policies be framed to cater to all-important business confidence.

  That said, there's also the Keynes/coalmines point: there's a strong tendency to take any spending that looks like a business proposition -- building bridges or tunnels, supporting solar energy or mass transit -- and demanding that it appear to be a sound investment in terms of its financial return. This makes most such spending look bad, since almost by definition a depressed economy is one in which businesses aren't seeing good reasons to invest. Defense gets exempted because nobody expects bombs to be a good business proposition.

  The moral here should be that spending to promote employment in a depressed economy should not be viewed as something that has to generate a good financial return; in effect, most of the resources being used are in reality free.

• Paul Krugman: Graduates Versus Oligarchs: On the argument many apologists for the status quo make that the key to getting ahead is getting an education: "that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don't have these skills." Krugman whips out a chart that shows that the income share of the 80-99 percentile group has remained level since 1979 -- actually, bulges a bit in the middle but by 2007 has returned to 1979 levels. On the other hand, the share of the top 1% has increased dramatically:

  The big gains have gone to the top 0.1 percent.

  So income inequality in America really is about oligarchs versus everyone else. When the Occupy Wall Street people talk about the 99 percent, they're actually aiming too low.

  One last point: I see that David Brooks is arguing that the oligarchy issue, if it matters at all, is a coastal phenomenon, not the issue in the heartland. Let me point out, then, that we have one country, with a tightly integrated economy. High finance is concentrated in New York, but it makes money from the United States as a whole. And even when oligarchs clearly get their income from heartland, red-state sources, where do they live? OK, one of the Koch brothers still lives in Wichita; but the other lives in New York.

  Put it this way: having much of the wealth your state creates go to people who are in effect absentee landlords, whose income therefore shows up in another state's statistics, doesn't mean that you have an equal distribution of income. Out of state shouldn't mean out of mind.

  Also see Krugman's I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means, Hypocrisy Edition: E.g.:

  Apparently you can only be authentic if your politics reflect pure personal self-interest -- Mitt Romney is Mr. Natural.

  One more: Inequality Trends in One Picture: OK, straight to the picture:

  

• Andrew Leonard: America's Corporate Tax Obscenity:

  In 2010, Verizon reported an annual profit of nearly $12 billion. The statutory federal corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, so theoretically, Verizon should have owed the IRS around $4.2 billlion. Instead, according to figures compiled by the Center for Tax Justice, the company actually boasted a negative tax liability of $703 million. Verizon ended up making even more money after it calculated its taxes.

  Verizon is hardly alone, and isn't even close to being the worst offender. Perhaps most famously, General Electric raked in $10.5 billion in profit in 2010, yet ended up reporting $4.7 billion worth of negative taxes. The worst offender in 2010, as measured by its overall negative tax rate, was Pepco, the electricity utility that serves Washington, D.C. Pepco reported profits of $882 million in 2010, and negative taxes of $508 million -- a negative tax rate of 57.6 percent.

  Altogether, according to "Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-10," a blockbuster new report put together by the Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that will have you reaching for your hypertension medicine before you finish reading the third page, 37 of the United States' biggest corporations paid zero taxes in 2010. The list is a blue-chip roll-call.

  As the authors acidly note, "Most Americans can rightfully complain, 'I pay more federal income taxes than General Electric, Boeing, DuPont, Wells Fargo, Verizon, etc., etc., all put together.' That's an unacceptable situation."