Warren Buffett Wants Your Taxes

[Hannah Bell]

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...

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.

Diverting taxes for private gain was a story that hit Oregon with a wallop nine years ago when I revealed that Enron, which owned the state's biggest electric utility, Portland General Electric (PGE), did not pay income taxes for years. Close to $1 billion of federal and state taxes built into PGE rates never got to government...

In 2005 the Oregon Legislative Assembly passed a law (SB 408) requiring the state's four corporate-owned utilities to either turn over to government the taxes built into the rates they charge or give the money back to customers. The next year Buffett bought Oregon's other corporate electric utility, PacifiCorp. It is a subsidiary of his MidAmerican Energy Holdings, which operates utilities from Iowa to Utah to Oregon...

http://tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/UBEN-8EK28B?OpenDocument

[Octafish]

1. Piratization really does require big money these days.

Basing their own value on materialistic gain over public service, the well-to-do consider themselves entitled to own what formerly only the state could afford, our formerly public utilities and infrastructure. What's remarkable to me is how little opposition there is to these greedheads.

Thank you for the heads-up on Buffett's latest feeding frenzy. These truly are gangster times.

[Canuckistanian]

2. "Piratization"

Ha! I like that. So accurate.