Water

If you Google the search term “water main break,” you get close to 6 million
hits.

In the Washington area, the suburb of Potomac, Md., is dealing with a huge
water main break that spewed water 50 feet in the air.

That is nothing compared to the water main break in Boston last month, which
nearly created a panic for Red Sox fans everywhere.

Philly had a bad water main break, as did Los Angeles, Detroit, Muncie,
Richmond, Hackensack, Atlanta, Cleveland, Stamford and Pittsburgh. Odds are
that a water main broke at a town near you.

Water is one of those things that we all need to survive.

Earth is about 75 percent water, and muscles in the human body have about the
same percentage, so without water, we are basically screwed.

Delivering water is an essential government responsibility. Governments that
don’t come up with an effective water allocation plan are completely useless
and tend to collapse quickly.

When a water main breaks, it puts a tremendous strain on local governments,
especially these days, when most of them are going broke anyway.

In the late 19^th century, water was transported via lead pipes, but
around the turn of the century copper piping was introduced and became the
standard in the 1950s. Proving that Mr. McGuire was ahead of his time, by the
1970s plastic became the tubing of choice for most water districts.

Water wars are fairly commonplace in the West. After all, many big Western
cities, places like Phoenix and Las Vegas, were built in deserts, places
notable for their lack of water, and competition for the commodity can be
intense on that side of the Mississippi.

Drinking water from a water bottle has become very popular, showing the immense
power of marketing. Tap water is every bit as safe as drinking from a water
bottle (maybe more so, especially if the bottle is made with Bishpenol A, or
BPA), is a lot cheaper (free, vs. whatever the bottler charges) and is better
for the environment (landfills are filling up with plastic water bottles). Yet
the American public continues to consume billions of gallons of water from
water bottles.

Water is one of those things that everyone assumes will be with us forever, but
that is just not the case. History is replete with civilizations that died off
when the water dried up.

To keep the water coming in the future, local, state and federal authorities
are going to have to start to make some tough decisions.

If pension and healthcare spending continues to expand and take up an
increasingly large part of the local and state budgets, there will be no money
to make future investments for water infrastructure. That means that more and
more of these aging water systems are going to fall apart, straining the local
budgets even more.

Local and state officials are going to turn to the federal government for help,
but guess what? The feds are broke, too. The Obama administration has spent all
the money on a wasteful stimulus bill that doesn’t make the right long-term
investments in water infrastructure, because all of those Obama projects needed
to be shovel-ready. Making long-term investments in water projects takes, well,
a long time. That means they aren’t shovel-ready.

Throw in the money the president wasted on spending even more money on his
dubious healthcare plan, and the out-year choices for the federal budget become
even grimmer.

Local and state officials are going to be coming to Congress asking for
earmarks. Republicans better start reformulating their opposition to earmarks,
or they are going to have to start begging the Obama administration for federal
money that, of course, the feds don’t have anymore.

That means that at some point in time, state and local governments are going to
either start raising taxes (or maybe user fees for those who use a lot of
water) or cut spending on other government services (like education) or make
some fundamental reforms on how they deal with pensions and healthcare for
government employees. It is those entitlement costs that are killing budgets at
all levels of government.

For me, I think it is crazy that somebody gets to retire at age 50 with a full
pension and healthcare paid for, as many government employees do.

I think it is crazy that we give Medicare benefits to millionaires when we
can’t afford to pay our bills.

I think it is crazy that we don’t raise the retirement age to 70.

We have some tough choices to make if we want to keep the water flowing for the
next generation.

I don’t get the sense that we are making those choices today.

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