California's Drought Mindboggling : Fish Survive - People Suffer

California is truly out of touch with reality on many fronts, but it seems their drought has taken them to double down on the absurd. The price of water per gallon in some areas is .002 cents and raising it to .5 cents is politically troubling? What??? What ever happened to reality?

What is as bad is the amount of water set aside to preserve a small fish from going extinct even in the face of driving thousands of people out of work and causing devastation to many industries, is of not importance. The fish comes first.

Only in California where the mind cannot comprehend or rationalize situations that occur in that state, and where progressive socialist liberal democrats reign supreme and have for ever. Oh and what about places like Baltimore and Detroit are also totally controlled by democrats?

Could Higher Costs for Water in California Curb Water Waste?
Source: Lloyd Bentsen, "Water Price Increase Solution for California Drought," National Center for Policy Analysis, May 6, 2015.

May 11, 2015

A neighborhood in the epicenter of rain-deprived Southern California pays only $0.002 per gallon for water. Other Californians pay up to three to four times more, but that is still less than a penny per gallon, NCPA research fellow Lloyd Bentsen.

While the obvious effect of extremely low prices is to encourage people to use more water, the less obvious effect is to discourage people from incurring even modest costs to curb water use.
At current water prices, many water-saving methods do not make economic sense in many areas of the state:

• Dual-flush mechanisms can be installed in existing toilets and cost $20 to $40 each ― a median cost of $90 for three mechanisms. Assuming five "half-flushes" per person a day, at current price, the water bill saving for a family of two would be $12.41 a year. It would take more than seven years to recover mechanisms' cost.
• New, water-saving toilets use 1.28 gallons per flush instead of 3.5 gallons. Three high-quality water-saving toilets cost $2,254 installed. The saving on annual water bill would be $16.21. It would take more than 138 years to recover the cost of the new toilets, not including interest costs.

If the price of tap water were raised to the price of water sold by the gallon at the local Costco, then cost of the three toilets could be recovered through lower water bills in a little more than five months. That 325-fold price increase might be politically unacceptable. However, if the price of water were raised to just a nickel a gallon, many homeowners may adopt the new water-saving toilets.