A new tax to fund drinking water

Three hundred miles to the south, our society rewards the makers of tech trinkets with the greatest fortunes ever amassed in history — largely, infamously untaxed.

Meanwhile, a coalition of government officials here and in Sacramento is asking you to pay a little more to ensure that everyone in the state has access to clean drinking water.

It’s true, clean drinking water is an admirable goal for all and a sad memory for some. Just ask the residents of Flint.

But why should our leaders be inventing new taxes to ensure the delivery of the most basic of services when there are plenty of old taxes laying around, endlessly abused or ignored outright by a long line of corporations that are by no means in any danger whatsoever of experiencing a moment of thirst?

Let the gloriously untaxed among us pick up the canteen and walk to a well, for once, for the betterment of the society that shelters them from any of the great responsibility that should by all rights and the wisdom of Stan Lee come with the great power they’ve managed to accumulate.

The proposal currently trickling through the halls of power in Sacramento, if adopted, would take effect in July 2020. It looks to charge most of us 95 cents a month, with heavy business and industry paying $4 to $10 a month. Additional taxes on fertilizers and dairy products would swell the pool of revenue collected each year to around $140 million. Color us skeptical.

If it seems petty of us to object to a proposed 95-cent-a-month tax, if that’s so insignificant an amount to ask of mere mortals so that we may all slake our thirst, than what a trifle of a trifle it would be to the lords of the Silicon or the Central or the San Fernando Valley to pick up the whole tab and see to it that all of us peasants are well watered.

Look away for a moment from the vast untapped reservoirs of wealth carefully guarded by legions of corporate accountants. Turn your gaze instead to the relatively modest lake of budget surplus funds built up by the governor: a mere $6.1 billion.

Yet between these two deep lakes of fortune, we, somehow, find some of us parched.

How many of us? Proponents of the proposed new tax tell us that 1 million Californians each year go without access to safe drinking water, and that nearly 2 million Californians lack service from a public water system.

It’s hard to argue with thirst of that magnitude.

But.

What guarantee would we have, once we give into the idea of this 95 cent tax, that it would not grow larger, and leave us ever more at the mercy of distant and unresponsive powers to the south?

Who’s going to pick up the tab when smaller water districts — the same districts that are too small to successfully match funds awarded by state or federal grants — have to adjust their operations to funnel this tax revenue to Sacramento?

What safeguards would we have to rely upon to see that revenue collected by this new tax reaches its intended recipients?

Finally, what other fundamental necessities of life are we going to tax? Oxygen? Sunlight?

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, they say.

Is this good? The best they can do? Can’t they do better?