Your citation shows 2013 precipitation roughly 1/3 of normal. If cities and industry (20%) don't reduce their consumption at all, there's still plenty of water for them. However, in that scenario farms (to be 13%) are destroyed, those with tree crops permanently.

This indicates that the perverse incentives from government (water subsidies to farmers) have led to a food chain vulnerability, which is potentially a very severe problem.

There should be no subsidies at any level of use. Farmers should pay the same as everyone else. This will have a number of effects.

• Higher water cost to farmers means higher food prices, to cover costs.
• Some farmers will not be able to raise prices enough to cover costs. They'll go out of business, and farmers growing in more appropriate places will take up the slack.
• Prices to previously unsubsidized water consumers will fall. That's you and me and industry.
• Taxes will fall slightly as the people employed in handing out subsidies lose their jobs. Some lobbyists would lose there jobs also. Both sets of people would have to find actual productive work.

Net, some temporary disruption, less wasted human effort overall, and the moral advantage of not forcing one group of people to pay for the undeserved perks of another group.

One of the major advantages of market-driven pricing is that economic pressures direct resources to where they have the most value. Put another way, market-driven pricing reduces the waste of valuable things. The effective use of resources is characteristic of rich societies, not poor.

It's not like you can have competing markets with a water system.

Arguments for monopolistic markets keep being debunked by practice. Satellite TV breaks cable monopoly. Cell phones break landline monopoly. Three different sources of water have already been mentioned in earlier posts: rivers, aquifers, and desalinization. If water systems were not state and city owned, there would be an opening for competition in at least some aspects of water supply.

There aren't a lot of farms in Los Angeles now . Northwest L.A. (the San Fernando valley) used to be heavily farmed, particularly citrus.

Water was critical in making Los Angeles a single city. Mulholland, acting for the city, bought up most of the water supplies in the area; then surrounding cities were told "become a part of Los Angeles or dry up and blow away."

So the extreme plant growth leads to giant animals? How quickly? By Tuesday?

Dangerous large animals can be made extinct very quickly by things like howitzers. I don't think the dinosaurs will be armed.

Or were you just making a joke?

(wikipedia) The term slush fund is used in accounting to describe a general ledger account in which all manner of transactions can be posted to commingled funds and "loose" monies by debits and credits cancelling each other out.

It's the "all manner of transactions" that's key here, and it means that the funds will be used at the pleasure of the president and his minions, without accountability or traceability.

Love Canal was a properly lined and capped toxic waste dump, privately owned. It was seized by the government, and over the warnings of the old owner the integrity of the containment was destroyed.

If you need an analogy you can understand, watch Ghostbusters.

Government investments are inherently more inefficient because the money is funneled through another layer, which bleeds off a portion. Government investments are inherently immoral, because they use funds not acquired voluntarily.

You need both private and public funding or your economy falters.

[citation needed]