How will you define "everyone"?
Will the government find out how many people live in a certain household and use that to arrive at a "basic personal amount" of water?
Will the government find out how many people live in a certain household and use that to arrive at a "basic personal amount" of water?
An acre-foot of water, the amount that some farmers are paying $20 for, is 325,000 gallons. At that price, a typical persons usage would be about $0.20/month. Raising that number by 10x, which is roughly the price San Diego pays for water, each person would be using about $2 of water per month. Even assuming the worst case, that 100% of the water had to be produced by desalination costing $2000 per acre-foot, that would only be $20 per person per month.
It's also not too expensive to err on the safe side and give out a generous personal amount. In the quantities that an individual uses, water is pretty darn cheap.
At the moment Irish Water is a semi state body, but there are large fears that it will be sold off to a private company in a few years, along with the PPS numbers and details of everyone in Ireland.
There was a large demonstration against it last weekend [1]
[1] http://www.thejournal.ie/water-charge-protest-in-dublin-1718...