Of course you do.  You're a creep, a wastrel, a planet polluter.  You clearly have too much disposable income.  In addition, very likely, as is sometimes said in at least one region of this great country, your feet smell and you don't love Jesus.

What have you been thinking? 

That you need to hydrate as much as the docs tell you to, particularly as your body tries to cope with global warming?  That bottled water is consistently safer, or tastier or more convenient than tap bilge?  That you should heed government advisories (or your own common sense) to lay in a goodly supply in case of emergency (boiling water from your bathtub being a bit difficult when your power is gone)?  That if it's good enough for FEMA, its good enough for you?  That you're not quite ready for urine therapy (if you don't know, don't ask)?

Whatever.  Your thinking, and that of all your countrymen who consume the evil elixir, is just bollixed up wrong.  Not to worry, though, your government, aided and abetted by radical environmentalists and other meddlers, will fix you.  One way or the other.

To date, the most striking example of the urgent need to restrain you comes from Chicago.  There, one of those upstanding aldermen, not content with regulating all other necessary or pleasing human pursuits, has decided in his unilateral wisdom that the Windbag City should tax bottled water.

The alderman's name is George Cardenas, and he is surely a godlike man standing tall among the morally and mentally challenged of his city.  Alderman Cardenas doesn't want all those empty plastic bottles ending up in landfills.  Alderman Cardenas doesn't like it that Chicagoans are deserting a public water system that has "won honors," but now has a funding deficit.

Mostly what Alderman Cardenas doesn't like is that Chicago has a $217 million budget deficit, and we all know what budget deficits do to politicians.  Why, they can't spend as much, and if they can't spend, what are they there for anyway?  To tax, so they can return to spending.

But what to tax?  There are so few unexplored opportunities.

Aha.  Bottled water.  Alderman Cardenas thinks that up to 25 cents a bottle would be adequate.  "There's a cost associated with this behavior.  You have to pay for it," Cardenas said. 

We can't wait until Alderman Cardenas learns there's a cost associated with walking and demands compulsory pedometers on all Chicagoans to tax that "behavior."  Or sex.  How do you even calculate the cost-benefit ratio of that "behavior," which is undoubtedly rampant in Chicago?

The fact is that bottled water has become such a staple of contemporary life that we wonder why other politicians haven't tried to establish a bottled water entitlement program, at least "for the children."  Oh right, we forgot.  Bottled water is produced by capitalist corporations.  The only government answer is to tax it.

Whoever thought that bootlegging bottled water might well carry on the great legacy of Chicago's favorite son, Al Capone?