Just quickly: Jim, are you proposing to funnel public money to the utilities
by them charging customers higher prices and then the customers get re-imbursed
out of the state treasury? Utilities get more money, customers come out even,
but taxpayers pay?
Not very appealing to me. For twenty-five years we've had national and
states giving money to low income people to offset the utility bills. I've
never like that, either. Just keeps the political temperature down while
paying utilities top dollar, doesn't it?
Gene
Jim Devine wrote:
then, make it a refundable tax credit, or lower the state sales tax further.
At 11:55 AM 1/23/01 -0500, you wrote:
problem is a lot of folks pay little or no income
tax but still pay utility bills.
mbs
It seems to me that Governor Gray Davis has a easy solution to the current
energy crunch, which seems to have shut pen-l down for awhile: he could
allow electricity retail prices to rise, while allowing California
consumers to write off electricity costs on their state income taxes this
year. (The latter is possible because the state government is running a
budget surplus.) This is not the best solution, but it would work, perhaps
to give breathing room to allow a better solution. Gene, what do you think?
At 05:49 PM 1/22/01 -0800, you wrote:
The Globe and Mail January
22, 2001
U.S. touts California-style power plan
By Barrie McKenna
SAN FRANCISCO -- The U.S. government is pushing California-
style power deregulation on the rest of the world even as the state's
controversial electricity free market experiment continues to unravel
at home.
Just weeks before Californians were hit with the first power
blackouts since the Second World War, the United States was
quietly lobbying in Geneva to convince Canada and other U.S.
trading partners that electricity deregulation should be an integral
part of a proposed free trade in services deal.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
