I read somewhere that the City of Pittsburgh almost saved the world from bad beer when they tried to close Iron City because the brewer wasn't paying their water bill. (Water being the source and closest taste to IC).

I love it. He goes to the Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Company website and finds everything he needs, goes to the city website and can't find anything -- then says that government should tell private business how to operate.

Second-best-case scenario: the companies stay put despite the taxes, but they must pass the additional taxes on to consumers. Instead of paying $1.50 for bottled water, consumers must now pay $1.65 or whatever, so sales will decrease. Thing is, the Laffer Curve can also work in reverse, so those sales could very well drop and take the tax revenues along with them.

Best-case scenario: the companies stay put, they pass the additional taxes on to consumers, and sales remain the same. But because a consumer now spends $1.65 on a 20-oz. bottle water when he spent $1.50 before, that's 15 cents taken away from other purchases. By definition it must come from *somewhere*, and it adds up to anything from a supersize option on fast food to a notepad to a restaurant meal. Now *those* companies will experience an equivalent sales decline, which means they must cut back on man-hours. Of secondary importance is the lost tax revenue. Now, this is the absolute best possible scenario, and it's also the most improbable. It won't happen for a simple reason: economies never, ever shift toward industries or sectors that are taxed higher.

A lot of people subscribe to the economic fallacy that charging more can be good, because it means the sellers (and in this case, government as a tax receiver) has more money to spend, and this supposedly spurs economic growth. On the surface it looks good, but it cannot avoid the fact that buyers have finite incomes. If I spend $1.65 on bottled water instead of $1.50, or when Henry Ford paid workers enough to afford the cars they made (an economic urban legend), that money must come from somewhere else. I'll spend less on other purchases if I'm to buy bottled water in the same quantity and frequency, and because Henry Ford's customers must spend more on the cars, they'll spend less on other things. True economic output does not increase -- unless the central bank prints more dollars so we can spend more, which is, of course, inflationary.

The lesson, as always, is to remember what Bastiat taught us. Look for the unseen.

I should add that I stick to bottled water, even if it's ultimately tap water, as a matter of taste and sanitation. I prefer spring water, but I'll still buy Dasani. To me, there's no choice between "free" water from a Grand Central Terminal fountain and paying $1.65 at any of the vendors. When government says it purifies, filters and UVs tap water, I wonder how well. When Coca-Cola says it does those, I actually trust it more, not because it's interested in protecting me, but because it wants to keep my business.

Oh, and by the way, liberal idiots like Murphy and Gavin Newsom can give themselves edemas with plain old tap water.

Who drinks brand label water? Progressive elitists ... I'm with W.C. Fields on this one. My hydration comes from a bottle of scotch, thnx.

I think it's a mistake to compare bottled water to tap water. The substitution is bottled water vs. Coke. The price comparison is a lot less extreme and it represents substitution better: convenient, disposable, &c.

"Freakonomist" Steven Levitt has an interesting piece discussing that Coca Cola now advertises that Diet Coke is 99% water -- after trying to hide that fact for years.