TAX.COM: Legendary Omaha investor Warren Buffett loves stuffing tax dollars into his pockets, which means that money never gets to schools, police, and libraries. Now it looks as if he is about to defeat an Oregon law intended to ensure taxes go for public purposes, not private gain.
Events transpiring in Salem, Ore., give us a perfect real-world economic experiment, one that shows how a simple change in tax law could stop the growing practice of capturing tax dollars for private gain. It also shows a major reason why the use of holding companies is damaging to utility customers and taxpayers and why requiring all utilities to be stand-alone companies would reduce costs, streamline expensive regulatory proceedings, create transparency, and stop the conversion of tax dollars into private profits.
Americans pay billions of dollars each year to cover the corporate income taxes of legal monopolies — electric, gas, water, cable, and other utilities. The taxes are built into the regulated prices that utilities charge, prices set by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for interstate operations like pipelines and by state agencies like the Oregon Public Utility Commission (PUC) for intrastate utilities… (more)
