IS MADISON'S FACE RED!
McMillin, Miles
Is Madison's Face Red! By MILES McMILLIN IF THE PEOPLE of Madison, Wis., had a collective face it would indeed be red. Last Spring they believed the lies of utility interests and defeated a...
...Meanwhile, it has been officially announced that Madison's tax rate is going up to provide revenues which could have come from utility profits...
...TVA, for example, is paying taxes that exceed by $527,000 all former ad valorem taxes collected on power property acquired by TVA...
...Can it be that public ownership in both of these places has anything to do with it...
...A Stiff Jolt Members of the National Security Traders Association at a recent meeting in Chicago got a stiff jolt when a partner in one of the nation's biggest law firms told them that "eventually the private ownership of public utilities will disappear...
...The municipally owned light and power plant in Tacoma, Wash., pays nearly twice as much in taxes as does the Washington Water Power Company in Spokane, a city of about the same size in the same state...
...Just demands and desires of this kind contain nothing opposed to Christian truth, nor are they in any sense peculiar to Socialism...
...Pope Pius On Public Ownership In speaking for public ownership of utilities and other natural monopolies recently Msgr...
...The utility crowd succeeded in defeating the proposal by insisting that there was to be no change of ownership...
...The lowest in the United States are at Tacoma, Wash...
...John A. Ryan of the Department of Social Action of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, quoted from the Qua-dregesimo Anno of Pope Pius XI as follows: "It is rightly contended that certain forms of property must be reserved to the state, since they carry with them an opportunity of domination too great to be left to private individuals without injury to the community at large...
...Taxes And Utilities The Federal Power Commission has looked into this question of municipal utilities not paying taxes about which the power trusters are always howling...
...Recently the holding company complied with the SEC order and disposed of the company stock, spreading it throughout the country and making it impossible to place ownership responsibility...
...It found that municipal utilities are paying nearly 100 per cent more taxes than was true under private ownership...
...The municipalities and cooperatives in the TVA system are paying $649,000 a year more than the properties were paying under private ownership...
...Declaring that public ownership has proved its efficiency, the attorney »ited TVA rates which he said are "under two cents per kilowatt hour to the individual consumer as compared with an average rate of three and two-thirds cents for the nation as a whole...
...Just by way of underscoring what this attorney said, It is interesting to note that the lowest electric Vates on the whole North American continent are found in Win-nepeg, Canada...
...The move to acquire the utility was started when the Securities and Exchange Commission issued an order requiring the holding company to divest the Madison holdings...
...Studies show that if all the taxes paid by all the utilities in the United States, including those publicly and privately owned, are taken into consideration, the people of America are' still being overcharged billions of dollars in comparison with what they would pay under TVA rates...
...Those therefore who look for nothing else, have no reason for becoming socialists...
...Last Spring they believed the lies of utility interests and defeated a referendum to permit the city to negotiate for purchase of the local gas and electric company...
Vol. 8 • November 1944 • No. 47
