Sharing the Water - 17 January 2003

"Would it not be better," a nice old lady once wrote to me, "instead of telling us who might be president, to wait until November and tell us who is?"

A timely rap on the knuckles I've never forgotten.

And it's from that lesson that I've avoided deliberately talking about Iraq for the past month - it would have meant retreading the old debating ground over and over.

On the other hand January 27th might be a turning point - the day when the UN inspectors deliver their report.

The secretary general and the chief man - the unflappable Mr Blix - say the "first" preliminary report.

Mr Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld are inclined to say, "No no, the last one."

But they're practically alone in so insisting.

Perhaps January 31st might be better when the president's only true and loyal ally - Mr Blair - will go to Camp David and together they'll decide.

Let's wait till then.

I was telling you the other week the sad news from California. How the Californians had been discovering lately that they haven't enough water to take care of all those 33 million people who live within the enormous paradise on the Pacific coast.

California gets its water from the great Colorado river which arises hundreds of miles to the north and east in the state of, naturally, Colorado - and flows through Utah and down through Arizona.

From the brink of the Grand Canyon you see it as a glistening snake a mile below. And thence it flows on into the Gulf of Mexico.

You'd rightly assume that Coloradans, the Mormons and the non-Mormons of Utah, and all the folk in Arizona receive bountiful water from that great river running through.

Well they do but not enough. So the federal government has decided that California has got to start sharing it.

A friend who makes frequent safaris from here - New York - to Bermuda, mentioned to me the other day that Bermuda desalinates its ocean water.

I can't believe it. But my friend's casual mention of taking the salt out of the sea brought back a very exciting occasion some 40-odd years ago, to be exact - the spring of 1956.

At a small evening party on an island in San Francisco bay - not Alcatraz - I recall lolling with the then governor - Governor Pat Brown - whom I knew.

And we got on to the perennial subject of California's pressing need for more water and how, whenever there was a drought - which in much of California is quite often - orders went out to stop all watering of golf courses, gardens, washing cars, even serving a glass of water in restaurants and so on.

The governor looked at me benignly, with an almost patronising smile.

He said to me: "Are you free tomorrow or the next day?"

"At your command," I bellowed.

Well next day or the one after that, I was picked up at my hotel and driven to the San Francisco airport and dropped off at a small field for private planes and there was the smiling governor and an aide.

"Let's go!" he said.

We flew south, along the superb mountainous coastline, for I'd say 160 - 80 miles and circled, at last, over a small coastal town called Morro Bay.

We looked down on a huge rock that threw its shadow onto a sort of square, large pier offshore with what seemed to be protruding derricks but it had nothing to do with oil.

We made a short tour of this strange contraption with the governor making wide explanatory gestures when he wasn't congratulating the crew for the work they were doing.

So this was it - the first desalination plant in California, maybe in the United States.

Back in the plane, "Our problem," said the governor, "is over. The whole Pacific Ocean is our reservoir."

It was a wonderful thought and I congratulated him.

I don't believe I ever saw him after that. I certainly heard no more about taking the salt out of the waters of the Pacific but I did hear later that desalination was a hideously expensive process.

I can only hope that the present governor of California will get in touch soon with the governor of Bermuda and find out how the trick's done on the cheap.

The present governor of California is in dire trouble on many fronts.

Like just about every one of the 50 states in the Union, California has a colossal budget deficit - California's is the worst.

Every state is laying off workers by the thousands. Two states, at least, are releasing minor offenders from jail, figuring that every convict who's sent home saves the state $26,000 a year in food and keep.

As you know Mr Bush has another solution to a deficit, what with the stock slump, the limping economy, the huge monies that have to be found to finance the national security, not to mention the money gone on and the money yet to go on a possible war.

Mr Bush's magic solution is a massive tax cut - which is complicated.

It does something now for most families but it has one big reform that the Republicans have been rooting for, for years: to abolish the tax on dividends - a form of double taxation that is held to be unfair to people who have hoarded their savings, invested them, paid a tax on the received income, and have then to pay another tax on any dividend that's declared.

The Democrats have leapt on this tax cut because it allows them to chant their old favourite campaigning mantra, "Cuts for the rich, at the expense of the poor!" - it used to be the working man.

Mr Bush says that helping the rich get more capital will help produce new industries, new jobs and discourage indebtedness.

But the Democrats rally their troops to the old cry while on the side, and not much listened to, are economists and sociologists who point out that "the rich" has for a long time not been a luxurious tiny minority.

Over 50 million American families are in the stock market.

Today, for instance, a $140,000 salary a year is counted as a middle class income. Forty thousand is the poverty ceiling.

And what today is a working man or woman? A label that must be stretched to cover most of the population that earns a livelihood.

However, nobody need get too agitated at the moment about what we're calling the president's budget.

Remember he's not a prime minister. His budget is what he'd like to have passed - the Democrats will submit a very different one.

They will both be debated. Then a so-called conference committee will straighten things out.

If I were to trace the steps whereby a bill is agreed on - three committee hearings, four separate debates in both houses - I'd drive you from the building.

And if, after all this, a bill does emerge it is sent to the president to sign.

He can, if he likes, veto it and send it back. Enough!

Suffice it, I hope, to say that the budget that emerges from all these slaughterhouses and meat grinders will be unrecognisable as the tasty, fat sausage the president first suggested.

I'm sure you'll agree to wait till well into the spring to know what the American budget for 2004 will be.

Whatever cuts and concessions Mr Bush gets through for the whole nation they're not going to be much use to the poor Californians.

Their governor has more power in these things than the president of the United States.

He is more like a prime minister - he can run on a programme and when he gets elected he can say, "Now we're going ahead with it."

California, like most states, has a state income tax as well as the federal - national - income tax.

If you have the misfortune to live in what Mayor Bloomberg calls the capital of the world, i.e. the Big Apple, aka New York city, you'd pay a federal income tax, a New York state income tax and a city income tax.

In addition, of course, to the sales taxes and rates, property taxes, electricity, gas, water and whatnot.

Well Governor Davis has now told Californians not only are they going to have to ration water, they're getting a hike in the state income tax, a hefty hike in the sales tax.

California is notorious for its city sales taxes on everything. A daily paper costing, say, 50 cents, costs 55 cents and so on.

So an increased state income tax, fatter sales taxes, an extra dollar 50 on a pack of cigarettes - which brings them now to about $9 a pack.

Governor Davis is not, you can imagine, the most popular governor just now but he says it has to be.

Which sends me back to old Governor Brown and that gaudy promise of desalting the Pacific.

It reminds me now of a similar revelation followed by a similar disillusion.

The very day after the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima the New York Times published a full account about the bomb, its making and its successful testing months before in the New Mexico desert.

The Times was the only paper to do this report because its scientific correspondent was the only layman allowed to watch the secret test in the desert.

The whole scientific account was double Dutch to, I'd say, 99.9% of the population, including me.

But that following morning I was lying on our beach, alongside one of the .01% who could understand.

He was a lawyer, a neighbour of mine, an industrial patent lawyer and he translated this weird jargon and the mystic equation, E = mc².

As we got up to go to lunch he said: "So you see, 10 years from now, maybe five, you'll no longer be using gasoline in your car, it'll be atom driven."

"Wow", I thought.

That was 57 years ago - I'm still waiting. Fossil fuels anyone?

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