My Point of View: Pt 1 “Is the Money Out There?”

On March 10 I wrote an intro to this next series of posts and entitled it - very creatively I must say - INTRO: Is The Money out There?

Can we Canadians bail ourselves out from under growing public and private debt? Can we live comfortably within our means without starving to death?

At the time I said the following:

I’ll likely consider some of our spending habits and our view toward taxes.

I posed the following question:

How has Canada, for example, turned things around in the past?

I even gloated and said, I bet I’ll consider brilliant ways to pay down debt that experts have long over-looked.

Hey, anything is possible.

I’d like to start today by saying I believe the money is out there to pay down our collective debt load more quickly, there is no need to turn every citizen upside down and shake out every last penny, Canadians will not starve to death in the process, and my first idea - inspired by a recent newspaper clipping - can be duplicated in many other countries.

So, go get a glass of water, sit down and relax.

The clipping that gave me a brain wave is entitled ‘Bottled Water Free Day’ as found in the Mar. 10 issue of the London Free Press.

After reading that bottled water is an estimated $100 billion a year industry and is purchased by 25 - 33 per cent of all households no matter the income level, I feel governments should create for themselves - to help pay down debt - a wider revenue stream from the bottled water process.


["A wider revenue stream needed"]

Consider: 34 per cent of households with working-aged adults and children feel they need bottled water to quench their thirst over some other means (even though bottled water is between 240 and 10,000 times more expensive than tap water), and they’re spending a lot of money to satisfy that need.

Consider: Resources that could be better used for a better public good are being consumed in the process, i.e., it takes 17 million barrels of oil to produce the 31.2 billion liters of water consumed annually in the US. (Canadian figures are likely about 10 times lower). Other resources, e.g., hydro, roads, gasoline, packaging materials, human energy, etc., are used in the production, distribution and recycling process.

Consider: Governments make consumers pay high taxes on other goods in order to recover future costs to society. (All motorists and smokers in the crowd are now nodding their heads.

So, a wider revenue stream for government use - e.g., toward yearly debt charges, e.g., $22.2 billion in Canada from Apr. - Dec. 2009 - should be attached to the water bottling and retail process.

Call it what you will: A recycling fee, a resource management fee, a luxury tax.

Does 25 - 30 cents per liter sound fair?

It does to me.

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I believe the money is out there.

Please click here to read Part 2 "Is the money out there?"

How else can I get my hands on it to help pay down national debt?

Also from the news article - Bottled water ranks as the second largest commercial beverage sold in the U.S. by volume and outpaces the consumption of coffee, tea, apple juice and milk in Canada.


The price of a litre of gas is often less than the price of a litre of bottled water.


Consumers pay at least three times for reprocessed bottled water - through their municipal taxes, at the cash register, and for municipal waste disposal costs.

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