Word: costs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Undecided, Although utility men do not contest the right of the Government to fix their rates, they argue lustily about the method used to value their properties for rate-making purposes. Instead of reproduction cost the New Deal would like to have valuations based on what the properties would have cost under a policy of ''prudent investment." For obvious reasons the utilities as a rule favor the former, upheld in a series of Supreme Court decisions since 1898. For reasons equally obvious the New Deal has been trying to get the utilities, either through persuasion or compulsion...
...California Railroad Commission in 1933 directing the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to reduce its gas rates by $1,744,681 a year. The company got a three-judge Federal court to enjoin enforcement of the order on the ground that the commission had not properly considered the cost of reproduction in setting the rates. When the injunction was appealed to the Supreme Court last term it was upheld by a 4-to-4 decision, Justice Sutherland not voting. But after Hugo Black succeeded Willis Van Devanter, the Court voted to review its decision...
Last week the Court, in a 6-to-2 decision (Justice Sutherland again not voting) made prudent investment v. reproduction cost nearer to an open question than it has been for 40 years by remanding the case to District Court for further evidence. Chief Justice Hughes's majority opinion declared: "The main issue in this litigation is whether the rates as fixed by the commission's order are confiscatory." At what looked to him less like a decision than a flipflop of indecision, dissenting Justice Pierce Butler spoke a tart word: "Our decisions ought to be sufficiently definite...
Besides the complexity of performance, a major hindrance to experimentation with the huge power tubes, which sometimes are as much as six feet high, has been their cost, about $5,000 a unit...
...giving names and addresses. For Arizona the State director was laconic Novelist Ross Santee, one-time cowboy and rodeo performer. For Texas it was J. Frank Davis, an ex-newspaperman, successful magazine writer and one of the authors of The Ladder, which lost money on Broadway for a year, cost its millionaire backer...