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If you are insinuating corruption, then no discussion can be had since no numbers can be trusted. If there is no (or sufficiently little) corruption, then shareholder returns would be a reflection of the business’s profitability.

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Call it what you want, these are unnecessary margins that should be crammed down. Regulation, nationalization, I am not picky how. Whether shareholders are seeing outsized returns from the regulatory capture, also not too concerned about.

I am fairly confident the cohort of those who support investor owned utilities are a vocal minority.

For all the non taxpayer owner utilities I am aware of, the margins and utility prices are completely controlled by government employees. Government employees that are hired by leaders that voters vote for.

Note that there exists the same incentives for publicly owned and investor owned utilities of voters today wanting lower utility prices at the expense of future utility customers by keeping capital expenses down today.

>I am fairly confident the cohort of those who support investor owned utilities are a vocal minority.

I will be the first to support only publicly owned utilities. But that has nothing to do with using bad logic and numbers to determine outsized margins.

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