NPR.
I have in front of me a market conundrum in the form of two glasses.
Both look pretty much identical, but they come with two very different prices.
One cost about $1.30.
The other costs less than a penny.
You may have guessed it, but im talking about bottled water versus tap water.
Weve done a lot of stories on the economics of water and how tap water is surprisingly cheap.
At the same time, water utilities often dont have enough revenue to patch up their aging infrastructure.
So if customers are willing to spend so much on bottled water and water providers need more cash, why don't they just charge more?
This is the indicator from planet money.
I'm Darian woods, and joining us today to answer that very question is Stephen Basaha from the Gulf states newsroom.
Hey, thanks for having me.
And yes, we're a family of public radio stations in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.
And today we talk about why it's so hard to raise rates while still making sure everyone has access to what's considered an essential human right, clean drinking water.
We also hear about how a plan to solve that in Mississippi led to a threat to cut off hundreds of thousands of people from food stamps.
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