Ernie : How the 1/3rd figure was arrived at was by calculating all goods and services which require water at some point in the process. Much of San Joaquin Valley water has to be pumped. OK, that means energy, it means building and maintenance of power plants that otherwise would not exist, plus all the overhead. It means university research etc It means water treatment. It means the agricultural sector of the state budget. Etc I have no idea if all this adds up to a third, but it does say that a common sense approach to water costs is fallacious. I donno, Ernie, maybe to arrive at his 1/3rd he also factored in highway construction in various places that serve water facilities or that have watershed management purposes. Maybe he factored in Forestry Department salaries. And maybe his third is an exaggeration, but the point he was making, that the true costs of water are seldom recognized for what they are, seems reasonable. Billy ======================================================= In a message dated 11/26/2009 11:26:24 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, [email protected] writes:
On Nov 26, 2009, at 18:00, [email protected] wrote: > that 1/3rd of the California state budget goes for water ? So he said, one way or the other, a full third. That's absurd. California's budget is between 90 and 120 Billion, depending on how you count. So, a third would be at least 30 billion dollars. Education and Prisons account for around 55 billion. The only line item the right size is Health and Human Services at $28 billion, but that would basically imply every health and social problem is counted as against water. Now, I might believe it would take $30 billion to truly fix our water problems: http://californiabudget.blogspot.com/2009/11/water-bond-makes-bad-budget-wor se.html http://gov.ca.gov/issue/water-supply But the current $11 billion bond is at most 8% of our budget, and strictly speaking isn't part of the General Fund. And for the record, our total debt service is (while horrible) still only around 6% of the budget, so even if all infrastructure was counted against water you're still not even close. Either you mis-remembered what he said, or he's smoking some of our premium irrigation-fed agriculture products... -- Ernie P. _______________________________________________ Centroids mailing list: [email protected] http://radicalcentrism.com/mailman/listinfo/centroids_radicalcentrism.com Archives at http://radicalcentrism.org/pipermail/centroids_radicalcentrism.com/
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