ROBBING PETER TO PAY PAUL
Randal, Judith
Robbing Peter to pay Paul Although the reference dates back to the Renaissance, when a British king sold off the lands surrounding one cathedral to finance the building of another, the principle of...
...More money is not the answer to this problem...
...The Peripheral Canal proposal illustrates how little Californians have learned in the past century...
...Eighty years later, however, the frontier has long since disappeared...
...The result is that tens of billions of Federal dollars have been invested in dams and canals and that—while the rest of the country continues to pay disproportionately for this extravagance—the West is clamoring for more projects, to the tune of still more billions, because it is wantonly "mining" water from underground sources faster than it can be replaced...
...This year, for instance, the Federal Government will have spent more on irrigation projects in Arizona alone than in the fourteen states from Minnesota to Maine combined...
...Western water is a commodity needlessly scarce because it is vastly underpriced...
...An end to the pork-barrel extortion of Peter by Paul is...
...Without these laws, settlement of the region would likely have never come about...
...All these are 1976 figures, the latest available...
...The other and related reason is explained by a report issued in March by the General Accounting Office, a support arm of Congress...
...Coupled with state statutes in the West, Federal water policy is, in fact, both the link between the Sunbelt's wasteful urban and rural water habits and a major cause of the entire robbing-the-eastern-Peter-to-pay-the-western-Paul phenomenon...
...And there are at least two reasons why it is even more insidious than it at first appears...
...At some point, those limits will force an end to waste and stall the economy that refused to change its wanton ways...
...water policy...
...Robbing Peter to pay Paul Although the reference dates back to the Renaissance, when a British king sold off the lands surrounding one cathedral to finance the building of another, the principle of robbing Peter to pay Paul is alive and well in U.S...
...Half-baked technological fixes do not solve water ter use...
...And again the East and upper Middle West largely foot the bill for a profligate West...
...they merely move them from one spot to another...
...Consider, for example, that water costs New Haven and Philadelphia residents, respectively, $18.90 and $13.93 a month per 1,000 cubic feet, whereas the equivalent cost in El Paso is $3.99 and, in Denver and Sacramento, a flat fee—and a modest one—buys people in most parts of those cities as much water as they choose to consume...
...As the Government pays growers for the surplus, the taxpayer is hit twice: once for the cost of the water and again for so-called agricultural set-asides and price supports...
...Judith Randal (Judith Randal writes a syndicated Washington column on health and science issues for Princeton Features...
...And perhaps nothing so confounds the law of supply and demand...
...One reason is that, despite the popular impression that western irrigation is almost solely for fruits and vegetables for the nation's tables, this is not the case...
...Moreover, if you happen to live in Phoenix, the more water you use the cheaper that use becomes as the monthly $7 charge for the first 2,000 cubic feet drops to $2.10 per 2,000 cubic feet after that...
...This was understandable in 1902 when Congress passed the Reclamation Act which, with its successors, has fueled western development ever since...
...When push doesn't come to shove, there is almost no incentive to conserve...
...and suburbs, they too are getting, if not a free ride, one that is heavily subsidized...
...After closely scrutinizing six Federally financed water projects, selected as typical, the report found that "since no interest is charged [to the farmers and ranchers who use the water] . . . these payments [for irrigation] actually cover less than 10 per cent of the Federal Government's actual cost...
...What is true for municipalities also applies to agriculture, the more so because irrigation accounts for about 80 per cent of the nation's waprodigal agriculture is brazenly discussing plans to put 200,000 acres of new lands into production before the year 2000...
...And small wonder, either, that the Sunbelt has taken little advantage of recently developed water-sparing technologies...
...More than a little of the water is applied to such crops as cotton, sorghum, alfalfa, barley, and feed corn, and more of these are raised than can be sold or eaten on the premises by a rancher's or farmer's stock...
...The limits to development of the dry West are even clearer now than they were in Major John Wesley Powell's day...
...Small wonder, then, that farmers and ranchers in the West are given to irrigating some land too marginal to produce good yields...
...Nothing else explains why consumers in the East and upper Middle West, where rainfall is comparatively plentiful, generally pay more for their water than do consumers in the arid and semi-arid region that stretches from western Texas to the California coast...
...Or that householders and others there think nothing, in the midst of drought, of keeping golf courses and flower gardens green throughout the year...
...Moreover, as local and state governments in the West also tap into these water projects on behalf of cities, towns, problems...
...Copyright ©1981 by Judith Randal...
Vol. 45 • June 1991 • No. 7
