That's a rather uncharitable interpretation. Your parent may just feel like people should pay for the water they use, and not for the water they don't. Which only works properly if the pricing is set right.
See complaints about how rooftop solar customers don't pay their fair share of fixed grid overhead. Wouldn't be a problem if you billed people an accurately priced fixed charge, plus usage charge.
Pretty sure the issue with utilities is that basically the entire cost is the fixed part. The incremental cost of delivering a few thousand litres of water each day to any one house is effectively zero.
Even worse, the fixed cost varies enormously depending on the particulars of any one residence (older infrastructure costs more to maintain, for example). So it's really hard to come up with a truly fair scheme for distributing these costs— pretty much no matter what you do, some households will be subsidizing other households. If not on their water bill, via their income taxes.
You can very reasonably turn e.g. a damn or a water treatment plant into a usage charge. Say you want to pay it off in thirty years. Divide the cost by thirty & project the annual quantity of water it will provide. Set the rate to match.
The true(st) fixed costs are things like the last mile to your house, that only you benefit from.
That’s really surprising! Population more than doubled in that timeline and usage went up by way less, and per person water use is even more dramatically down in the past few decades
I would guess that technology played a major role in lowering water consumption. Most of household water use comes from washing clothes, dishes, bathing, and of course watering the lawn and garden.
Automatic clothes and dishwashers are far more common now, and today’s models are more efficient than than manually performing the same task by hand. Simple automated drip irrigation systems can be had from any local hardware store, customizable to deliver the exact amount of water needed to plants at the most optimal time to minimize wasted water from evaporation.
And low pressure shower heads are everywhere now; the ridiculous hurricane bathroom shower of the 70s and 80s is only fond childhood memory.
Water and sewage treatment is not what you'd generally call a "fixed cost" since it involves ongoing operational costs (labor, chemicals, etc.). On the other side, usage fees are split into a fixed-cost portion (the connection charge, which runs $30-70k) and a variable-cost portion (per-gallon charges).
You can tweak the balance between fixed and usage charges though.
I've lived places where the fixed amount of my water bill was maybe $10-$15/mo while a unit (~750 gallons) of water was about $5. My current home, at the other extreme, has almost $90/mo in fixed charges while a unit of water runs about $1.
Not nearly the same incentive to conserve water but I am much more confident that my city will still be able to service the infrastructure 20 years from now.
The capital cost of treatment facilities is enormous and fixed. The operating cost of those treatment facilities changes very little per gallon comparatively.
On that very different topic... Complaints almost exclusively from local privatized electricity monopolies. The US residential solar footprint is a drop in the ocean compared to central European nations (thinking Germany in particular). Public utilities see reduced reliance on their service as a success, while for-profit utilities see it as a threat.
Our population density is very much lower so transmission costs per connection are very much higher.
I grew up in an area where the length of transmission line per home would easily have been calculated in miles. I currently live in an area where transmission line per home would be measured in feet or maybe inches.
The population density is pretty much the same if you ignore the plains states and other extreme rural areas, who get their water from wells anyway. A city of a million people is a city of a million people, regardless of whether your country contains the Rocky mountains or not.
What will happen is like what happens in Florida with schools. People retire here from other states then complain/refuse/lobby/vote/etc about taxes going to schools. They say they're retired and they've already paid for schools in their previous state and their kids are grown and they should not have to pay.
See complaints about how rooftop solar customers don't pay their fair share of fixed grid overhead. Wouldn't be a problem if you billed people an accurately priced fixed charge, plus usage charge.