1. the incumbent utility companies should not have been promised an opportunity to recover the costs that everybody thought would be stranded by deregulation (he obviously includes himself among the "soreheads" who opposed the idea, insisting that "these behemoths should be treated just like everyone else who made investments that didn't pan out");

2. the logic of stranded cost recovery would apply at least equally to residential customers who "had installed electric baseboard heating or home air conditioning in reliance on a regulated residential rate" (and who by analogy should not be required, "because deregulation has intervened," to pay "an electric bill calculated at three times the regulated level");

3. the solution to the catastrophic squeeze on utility distribution companies between skyrocketing wholesale and frozen retail rates is not to raise the latter, but to cap the former at just and reasonable-i.e., cost-based-levels (because, as Cudahy insists, "price spikes caused by shortages are [surely not] the proper product of a competitive market").