Not to steal any of your thinder, but I did post the idea (albeit with little detail) to PP before you did. I am all for calling it the Walden-Deal plan.

http://www.peachpundit.com/2007/11/01/mike-jacobs-bringing-up-water-issues/#comment-94214

Your ideas about privatization sound great, but it sounds a heck of a lot like what Enron executives were saying about electrical power about eight years ago. I think that as citizens and consumers, we have good reason to be skeptical of utility privatization.

Are you ready to support your City Council and County Commissioners raising fees?

But now I’m a little confused. Yes, Hank, I can see you feel the same way about spelling as you do about water service. But your spelling and typing are so bad in this post that I’m wondering if your misspelling of your name was accidental.

I think you are dead-on with your comments in this thread. You’re right in that there is no real “market” price for the water and we are just talking about raising the pain threshold until water consumption reduces to a level that is in-line with forecasted scarcity.

I think the “market based” language is just playing with buzzwords, to sweeten the bitter taste a little for hard-care conservatives and libertarians. We’re really just talking about jacking up the rate for a public utility in a time of scarcity.

This REQUIRES an artificial tiered system. The market doesn’t care that a half-million people are getting diseases, sharing diseases for failing to bathe, or dehydrating, as long as the product is being sold to _somebody_ at a price that’s acceptable to sellers.

I’m not quite sure why you’re trying to deny you want something that stupid at the same time you’re explaining that you want something that stupid.

Unless, of course, you can propose a purely market mechanism that will create tiers so that poor people can get their water, despite the fact that wealthier people would easily price it up out of their reach. And I don’t consider the inevitable Water Riots to be a purely market mechanism, even if that’s what you’d cause.

When did I say that I opposed a tiered pricing system? I promoted a market-based system, but I did not speak against a tiered pricing system. Anything would be an improvement over our current system.

I think this really speaks to a conservative versus liberal mindset. The conservative sets a price that is more in-line with the scarcity of the commodity (making sure a minimum amount is available at a reasonable price) where the liberal wants to be directly involved in the water usage debating and creating lists as to what is acceptable and what is not: 30 minute showers okay, washing car outdoors not okay, washing car indoors okay, swimming pools not okay, hot tubs with grey water okay, etc..

The liberal is not really concerned with how to quickly reduce water usage, the real motive is how to demagogue the issue and make sure “rich people” don’t scam the system.

I don’t think anybody with sense is opposing that plan. I’ve seen several nutcase libertarians opposing it in this blog, but most of them are frontpage bloggers.

It has electrolytes.

You keep trying to introduce and unnecessary class-warfare argument.

You haven’t addressed the fact that everyone here is saying you keep the bare minimum priced at a lower tier and then raise the price exponentially. It’s not about a lack of alternatives, raising the price on the high end will have the most immediate and far reaching impact on the water crisis.

There is no bleeding heart argument, the poor folks will still be able to have drinking water and it’s not about rich people gaming the system.

We need to use less water, period. We need to spend the money to increase suply. That anyone thinks creating a system where rich people can pay more money so they can fill their pool will ever actually lead to less usage is mind boggling.

However, whether you can’t fill your private swimming pool due to a usage restriction, or whether you can’t do it because the market price of doing so would be astronomical, the end result either way is that people are going to have to go without swimming pools. My main point was simply that people are being delusional in thinking that the water crisis will pass by without them having to sacrifice at all, or take personal responsibility for any of their lifestyle choices.

I believe that pretty much every serious water proposal I’ve heard involved tiered pricing. That is, affordable pricing up to a basic needs level (so the poor aren’t without water), with a dramatically increased rate for heavy users. There may be a couple of bloggers who’ve floated the notion of flat pricing. However, that’s just a cultural thing with hard-core conservatism or libertarianism… either hating the poor outright, or being middle-class yourself and utterly oblivious to the position of anyone who’s not you. The mainstream doesn’t go that far.

How many short showers would you need to take to fill a pool up and water your garden, and to keep filling it up when it evaporates?