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Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

Uh, that helps nothing. Outside of agriculture, it’s entirely only the rich who are wasting the water (look no farther than the recent example of Kim Kardashian from just this week on this issue) - it’s not like the lower / lower middle class has lawns to waste water on, anyway.

And since the idiots like KK wasting all the water are multi-millionaires or billionaires, of which there are a greater conglomeration of in California then there are in the rest of the states - increasing the price of the water based on more usage won’t change a thing.

Restricting the amount of water used by individuals in general is the only way I can see this working here. But the rich always figure out a way around everything. They always do.

Same issue with the private plane bullshit going on. These people are addicted to an unsustainable lifestyle that allows them to throw money at anyone trying to put restrictions their way.

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Correct. Increasing the price actually pushes toward guaranteeing that water is only for wealthy people or companies and therefore not for the poor.

Increased prices result in water being allocated to the most optimal needs.

Marginal water prices mean the price for amount of water needed for a family to bathe and cook and clean costs much less than the amount of water for landscaping around an opulent home.

If people are still too poor, then giving them cash (by taking from richer people) is the solution, not pricing water so low that it gets wasted

Lack of sufficient water and excessive income/wealth gap are two separate problems with separate solutions.

"Optimal" is doing a tremendous amount of lifting in your assertion, particularly in a world of grossly-unequal purchasing power. Much conveyed from birth and circumcstance rather than ability, effort, or social value.

Welfare != surplus. Maximizing surplus is rarely the optimal thing to do.

Prices for municipal use don't need to be raised. Municipal use isn't significant anyway, no matter if you're rich or poor.

Prices need to be increased (or, in some cases need to exist) for agricultural use.

The parent comment suggests a progressively priced system that would presumably allow for cheap consumption of water at small quantities. I think the comments here discarding this idea by claiming price sensitivity doesn't exist for wealthy people are unimaginative.

I'm not totally sold on on the idea, but it is very possible to create a tiered pricing system that makes domestic water waste unsustainably expensive. The price required to deter consumption may be absurdly high, but demand elasticity will always exist at high enough prices.

Not sure how people don’t get this or why my post was downvoted. Maybe it’s just not a comfortable truth for some people.

It got downvoted because it was uninformed and missed the point.

First, the point was that municipal water usage wouldn’t need and change and could actually decrease in rates if agriculture and industrial paid the same market rate.

Second, if we are talking about lawn watering, that’s absolutely a middle class thing in the vast majority of California.

> But the rich always figure out a way around everything. They always do.

Buy water from their neighbours to hop on their quotas?

If the intention of this idea is to allocate reasonable consumption to each person at low prices and quickly increase prices beyond that, then I don't think this wouldn't be a bad thing.

Tradeable quotas can be an effective way to protect a common resource.

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