That’s what New York does. State and city. Those slush funds don’t fill themselves.
You thought gas taxes and vehicle fees went to infrastructure construction and maintenance? Adorable.
You think lottery sales revenue goes to education, and the governments in Albany and NYC would never use that cash flow as a pretext to under-budget for education by the same amount? Purely coincidental.
Probably people like me from Dagupan City in the Philippines who know nothing about NYC city expense, revenue, and capital budget or anything about NYC politics.
Water infrastructure was largely put in place during building booms and was paid for by developers -- they'd lay the pipes, hook up the houses, then turned it over to the local water utility.
Doesn't cost much to maintain brand new lines. Spending was mostly on water treatment, as quality standards improved and new pollutants were found that had to be removed.
But those new pipes eventually become old, and you have to start thinking about funding for future replacement. That requires new revenue, and the users are naturally the ones that should pay. So, bills go up.
It's not that it got more expensive, it's that the pre-paid chunk largely ran out.
Yes I don’t know where people think the money would come from to pay for infrastructure upgrades? I work in a water department and it’s amazing when they say “why do I have to pay for that, you pay for that”. Well…. How??? We’re already a government unit so we aren’t for profit, we can’t use tax money to fund water projects. It has to be run separately. We charge only just enough to cover our annual expenses and have basically no room to really save for replacement pipes. Now the state mandates we have to replace lead that we didn’t put in, but offer no funding, and we think it’s unfair to make the resident pay for it too. It’s a lose lose.
Yeah. And infrastructure we are using that is 50+ years old using 50+ year old dollars is now being replaced with today's dollars. And we all know what construction spending is crazy expensive today.
Even if it’s not that expensive, 50 years is a lot of inflation to account for, and someone else building it — and now you have to dig under existing structures. So it costs a lot more to replace than to build fresh under existing townhomes and apartment buildings.
Not to mention the extreme amount of regulation compared to laying pipe in 1940. They just had the neighbors do it. Now there are giant companies that rip us off.
I live in PA and while you are correct there has been a massive spending spree to buy out water systems and jack up rates. A law was passed in Pa so when they buy a water system they can jack up rates for all their customers.
They have been offering way over market rate for the systems because they can jack up rates even higher.
What you brought up is the reason this started but private companies are using it as a reason to buy up public utilities at inflated rates and force massive increases for everyone.
My first reaction to articles like this are “What about other time periods?”
I know where I live we spent a decade or two severely under investing in basic infrastructure. And this last decade a bunch of chickens have come home to roost. We need more infrastructure for development as well as fixing up a bunch of stuff that stagnated. So, yeah, our water rates have spiked. But it’s literally about the decisions 20-30 years ago to majorly underinvest in infrastructure.
Let’s also not forget that cumulative inflation over that time period was 28% (according to a quick search, other numbers may be more accurate) accounting for nearly 1/2 of the increase.
Either way, seems like this should have been addressed in the article as the inflation effect appears to be as large or larger than the effect on which they are reporting.
You know, I don't think water should be regulated like a utility. Every residence should be entitled to a baseline amount of water and then a fee like we have now kicks in afterwards. Individual consumers should have more of a right to water than businesses
Completely disagree. That would just encourage irresponsible excessive water use, in many parts if the country they need to up the price across the board to account for the fact that the aquifers need to be recharged.
Same with electricity. Businesses around here leave their lights on 24/7. And the utility company send flyers to everyone in the mail to be more responsible and use less electricity.
Okay, how about we have a non-residential rate that's double or something?
> I don't think water should be regulated like a utility.
Of course water needs to be regulated like a utility - there can't be dozens of water treatment plants in your city each running their own water main and underground lateral to your house.
That's when we have utilities.
None of the other stuff you mentioned is really relevant to utilities.
This headline is manipulative because it doesn’t account for inflation. Prices have climbed about 40% since 2016, so $100 back then takes roughly $140 now, and a dollar buys only about 71 cents of what it used to. That works out to around 3.4% a year on average, but the average hides the story. The first five years were dull at 1–2%, then it hit 4.7% in 2021, 8.0% in 2022, and 4.1% in 2023 before settling near 3% and ticking back up to 3.7% for the year ending September 2026. The stuff households can't skip rose faster than the headline number: housing 46%, transportation 47%, groceries 39%, with gas going from about $2.14 to $4.48 a gallon. Medical care and schooling lagged at 28% and 6%. Net of everything, most families are feeling something closer to half again what they were paying a decade ago.
Sources: BLS CPI news release for September 2026 (bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_10142026.htm); officialdata.org/2016-dollars-in-2026, using BLS CPI-U 240.007 → 336.940.
"Water prices rose 1.6 times faster than overall inflation between 2015 and 2025. Consumer prices increased 39% during that period, compared with a 62% jump in water bills, according to the study. Water costs also rose more than twice as fast as groceries, which increased 30%, and eggs, which rose 28%.
Water bills also rose faster than household incomes, increasing 19% more than the national median household income between 2014 and 2024, the study found."
Data centers: hold my Dasani…
There doesn’t seem to be much incentive to make this cheaper. Similar to how states with strong solar adoption get their utility bills reworked anyway. With more data centers coming online, I’m sure these bills will go even higher.
This is the bullshit reason that these papers are pushing.
If you want to reduce water usage - limit agriculture. It uses 100x more water than any other industry. And a lot of it wasted on crops like alfalfa, soybean and corn which, for the most part, are not even used as food in the US.
We’ll see that happen next year when many farms focus primarily on higher profit margin crops than before due to skyrocketing diesel and fertilizer costs.
What happens when they’ve cut everything else and wheat is the more expensive crop? We starve.
Fuck the data centers. We don’t need them. We do need crops though; both for groceries here, and for sale because we don’t want groceries to skyrocket more than they have already.
Alfalfa uses an extreme amount of water, and we are allowing the middle east to lease our desert land, grow alfala, then export the crop to the middle east for them to feed their cattle. All while WE are told to conserve water (and in the desert where this is happening, some town/private wells are drying up). So "not even used as food in the us" is so true! It's insane that we let this happen.
They are going to pay a whole lot more in the coming future.
There is absolutely no regulation of water production on a federal level, and if they keep hacking into water systems there is going to be a really bad incident that causes the federal government to step in, and then costs will be heading up dramatically.
Yep, they secretly privatized billing in my county and the bills have doubled, tripled, then quadrupled in the past 15yrs. they were finally outed about what they did and still didn't want to admit that adding a middleman entity that needed to be payed caused bills to increase dramatically.
City of Edgewater has the highest water bills in the state, and the quality of the water is horrible. And the city counsel votes to raise the cost every year 🤬
Last winter I left for a couple of months. I drained the faucets and turned off the water at the house. I was billed $50/month for the privilege of having access to water.
The water bills rose 62% in a decade, far outpacing inflation. The 67% gap between private and publicly owned utilities is particularly important. Ageing infrastructure is a real cost but who pays for it, and how utilities are owned, matters too.
Trump destroying the NOAA and reducing rainfall has real consequences. Of course, when you have less rain, you have less water. I don't understand why the conservatives are so stupid they can't be seeing that.
Ever since aqua took over my township water supply like 10-15 years ago ,prices have been going up dramatically. Luckily or township decided not to sell the wastewater treatment plan to Aqua. So for now our wastewater prices are going up slowly.
Fun factoid. Most water networks have a pretty limited lifespan. This depends on many factors, soil, rain, competence of the people installing, competence of the people running them, etc.
But, it is often around 25-50 years. With pretty much all systems starting to need major repairs around 25. Those water bursts which show up in the news sort of things.
Typically, someone in a brand new subdivision will pay roughly the same rate as someone in downtown house sitting on 50+year old infrastructure.
The cost to maintain that water infrastructure in the newest burbs is negligible compared to the older ones.
Thus, the new rate payers are subsidizing the older ones. This is why most cities hate satellite cities and towns. Ones which don't have to contribute to the older networks.
What most cities have been doing is seeing wave after wave, every 11-20 years of new development. These waves keep adding fresh new infrastructure, and thus new people to pick up on the ponzi scheme.
This ends for a variety of reasons; just like ponzi schemes.
You would have to pretty much start doubling the size of the city's infrastructure every decade to keep up.
The other is that as the water networks get larger, they don't overly benefit from volume discounts. Digging up some broken pipe costs about the same in a town of 5000 as it does in a city of 5 million, except the administrative staff for the city will bloat that cost. If you go to a town of 30,000, there will often be "that water guy" in the town hall, and he can pretty much tell you every problem with the system, and name the guy in charge of almost any dig. He will probably go to the bigger ones to put his hand literally on the broken pipe.
In a city of a million, that "guy" is 8+ layers away from the pipe. He also doesn't care about the pipe. He cares about feathering his own nest, as getting that job is political, not competence. The people around him want that job, and also do not care about pipe. That doesn't kick in for a few more layers. The water HR department, or the water communications department in a city of 1 million is probably bigger than the entire water department in a town of 50,000.
Where the ponzi scheme starts to show up is where the money is coming from for major repairs. In an old small stable town, it probably comes from local taxes. In the larger cities, it will first come from the growth, but then the regional government, and then the federal one.
In the USA, they had a Build Back Better, which was trying to fill in this gap. This is when ponzi schemes implode; when the last possible suckers are exhausted.
The result is not only having to circle back to the original rate payers, but now, they are paying the price for bloated bureaucracies who think that 40% leakage of treated water is acceptable (yes that is common), or even worse, bureaucrats who will claim 5% leakage (pretty much impossible); because they are bureaucrats who realized that the person measuring a thing, can declare any measurement they want. (Or more specifically, not measure it at all, and just declare a number)
There is a fantastically simple way to solve this. Open books. Not kind of sorta open books, but don't allow water utilities to conceal any piece of information. Internal communications, records, contracts, bids, maintenance, even all the way down to pressure readings, etc. The worst bureaucrats would lose their minds, as this would be a total lost of control. The good ones would find it mildly annoying as making that information public would be effort spent not running the water network correctly.
This Guardian article by "Maya Wang" is such a non-biased Source...
Ask yourself if we are in a race withe China regarding AI development...
If you say no you are not being realistic...
Here is my google question answered by AI...
"is the Guardian a left leaning news organization?
Yes, The Guardian is widely described as center-left or progressive.
Media bias watchdogs and analysts generally categorize its editorial stance as follows:
Center-Left / Liberal Alignment: Independent media analysis groups like AllSides classify The Guardian as having a left or center-left bias due to its strong alignment with liberal and progressive thought."
GodzillaSpark | a day ago
In nyc (didn’t make the list in the article), it’s a tax. The city diverted funds from the water board directly to the general fund.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/nyregion/water-bills-nyc.html
knockatize | a day ago
That’s what New York does. State and city. Those slush funds don’t fill themselves.
You thought gas taxes and vehicle fees went to infrastructure construction and maintenance? Adorable.
You think lottery sales revenue goes to education, and the governments in Albany and NYC would never use that cash flow as a pretext to under-budget for education by the same amount? Purely coincidental.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Suitable-Economy-346 | 16 hours ago
Why are people upvoting this nonsense?
three29 | 15 hours ago
Probably people like me from Dagupan City in the Philippines who know nothing about NYC city expense, revenue, and capital budget or anything about NYC politics.
East_Appearance1174 | a day ago
Not shocking the government here is corrupt and incompetent as hell.
TaylorSwiftian | 17 hours ago
Vote out the Dems!
OptionConcoction | 21 hours ago
Yet the citizens keep electing the same clowns into office.
basquehomme | a day ago
In the book, Enron, the smartest guys in the room. They decide to get into water distribution because people aren't paying enough for it.
They bought Thames water and then American water.
IPredictAReddit | a day ago
Water infrastructure was largely put in place during building booms and was paid for by developers -- they'd lay the pipes, hook up the houses, then turned it over to the local water utility.
Doesn't cost much to maintain brand new lines. Spending was mostly on water treatment, as quality standards improved and new pollutants were found that had to be removed.
But those new pipes eventually become old, and you have to start thinking about funding for future replacement. That requires new revenue, and the users are naturally the ones that should pay. So, bills go up.
It's not that it got more expensive, it's that the pre-paid chunk largely ran out.
Yoroyo | 23 hours ago
Yes I don’t know where people think the money would come from to pay for infrastructure upgrades? I work in a water department and it’s amazing when they say “why do I have to pay for that, you pay for that”. Well…. How??? We’re already a government unit so we aren’t for profit, we can’t use tax money to fund water projects. It has to be run separately. We charge only just enough to cover our annual expenses and have basically no room to really save for replacement pipes. Now the state mandates we have to replace lead that we didn’t put in, but offer no funding, and we think it’s unfair to make the resident pay for it too. It’s a lose lose.
Diligent-Lettuce-455 | a day ago
Yeah. And infrastructure we are using that is 50+ years old using 50+ year old dollars is now being replaced with today's dollars. And we all know what construction spending is crazy expensive today.
wbruce098 | a day ago
Even if it’s not that expensive, 50 years is a lot of inflation to account for, and someone else building it — and now you have to dig under existing structures. So it costs a lot more to replace than to build fresh under existing townhomes and apartment buildings.
Yoroyo | 23 hours ago
Not to mention the extreme amount of regulation compared to laying pipe in 1940. They just had the neighbors do it. Now there are giant companies that rip us off.
wbruce098 | 23 hours ago
Yeah it sucks that we can’t just lay lead pipe anymore!
Yoroyo | 15 hours ago
Yeah that’s not really what I meant but sure
WarChortle18 | 21 hours ago
I live in PA and while you are correct there has been a massive spending spree to buy out water systems and jack up rates. A law was passed in Pa so when they buy a water system they can jack up rates for all their customers.
They have been offering way over market rate for the systems because they can jack up rates even higher.
What you brought up is the reason this started but private companies are using it as a reason to buy up public utilities at inflated rates and force massive increases for everyone.
swoodshadow | a day ago
My first reaction to articles like this are “What about other time periods?”
I know where I live we spent a decade or two severely under investing in basic infrastructure. And this last decade a bunch of chickens have come home to roost. We need more infrastructure for development as well as fixing up a bunch of stuff that stagnated. So, yeah, our water rates have spiked. But it’s literally about the decisions 20-30 years ago to majorly underinvest in infrastructure.
BikeStackerNYC | a day ago
Let’s also not forget that cumulative inflation over that time period was 28% (according to a quick search, other numbers may be more accurate) accounting for nearly 1/2 of the increase.
Ketaskooter | 23 hours ago
The cpi says 40%. The dollar devaluation says 28%. So it depends on what they’re reporting
BikeStackerNYC | 9 hours ago
Either way, seems like this should have been addressed in the article as the inflation effect appears to be as large or larger than the effect on which they are reporting.
personman_76 | a day ago
You know, I don't think water should be regulated like a utility. Every residence should be entitled to a baseline amount of water and then a fee like we have now kicks in afterwards. Individual consumers should have more of a right to water than businesses
N0b0me | 16 hours ago
Completely disagree. That would just encourage irresponsible excessive water use, in many parts if the country they need to up the price across the board to account for the fact that the aquifers need to be recharged.
angry_wombat | a day ago
Yes exactly!
Same with electricity. Businesses around here leave their lights on 24/7. And the utility company send flyers to everyone in the mail to be more responsible and use less electricity.
Okay, how about we have a non-residential rate that's double or something?
thewimsey | 15 hours ago
> I don't think water should be regulated like a utility.
Of course water needs to be regulated like a utility - there can't be dozens of water treatment plants in your city each running their own water main and underground lateral to your house.
That's when we have utilities.
None of the other stuff you mentioned is really relevant to utilities.
LeMayMayMan | 23 hours ago
This headline is manipulative because it doesn’t account for inflation. Prices have climbed about 40% since 2016, so $100 back then takes roughly $140 now, and a dollar buys only about 71 cents of what it used to. That works out to around 3.4% a year on average, but the average hides the story. The first five years were dull at 1–2%, then it hit 4.7% in 2021, 8.0% in 2022, and 4.1% in 2023 before settling near 3% and ticking back up to 3.7% for the year ending September 2026. The stuff households can't skip rose faster than the headline number: housing 46%, transportation 47%, groceries 39%, with gas going from about $2.14 to $4.48 a gallon. Medical care and schooling lagged at 28% and 6%. Net of everything, most families are feeling something closer to half again what they were paying a decade ago.
Sources: BLS CPI news release for September 2026 (bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_10142026.htm); officialdata.org/2016-dollars-in-2026, using BLS CPI-U 240.007 → 336.940.
daviddjg0033 | 20 hours ago
"Water prices rose 1.6 times faster than overall inflation between 2015 and 2025. Consumer prices increased 39% during that period, compared with a 62% jump in water bills, according to the study. Water costs also rose more than twice as fast as groceries, which increased 30%, and eggs, which rose 28%.
Water bills also rose faster than household incomes, increasing 19% more than the national median household income between 2014 and 2024, the study found."
RandomlyHere25 | a day ago
Data centers: hold my Dasani…
There doesn’t seem to be much incentive to make this cheaper. Similar to how states with strong solar adoption get their utility bills reworked anyway. With more data centers coming online, I’m sure these bills will go even higher.
phiwong | a day ago
This is the bullshit reason that these papers are pushing.
If you want to reduce water usage - limit agriculture. It uses 100x more water than any other industry. And a lot of it wasted on crops like alfalfa, soybean and corn which, for the most part, are not even used as food in the US.
klingma | a day ago
Oh, an almonds, which use roughly 3 gallons of water per literal almond grown.
wbruce098 | 23 hours ago
We’ll see that happen next year when many farms focus primarily on higher profit margin crops than before due to skyrocketing diesel and fertilizer costs.
What happens when they’ve cut everything else and wheat is the more expensive crop? We starve.
Fuck the data centers. We don’t need them. We do need crops though; both for groceries here, and for sale because we don’t want groceries to skyrocket more than they have already.
SimpleVegetable5715 | a day ago
Those crops feed livestock and the corn’s used for ethanol. Still important parts of the food chain.
fatbob42 | a day ago
Ethanol is a famously bad idea and is only happening due to government subsidies.
jeffwulf | a day ago
Ethanol is sometimes a bad idea especially if used to excess but used in moderation it's a lot of fun.
YoghurtHistorical527 | 19 hours ago
Alfalfa uses an extreme amount of water, and we are allowing the middle east to lease our desert land, grow alfala, then export the crop to the middle east for them to feed their cattle. All while WE are told to conserve water (and in the desert where this is happening, some town/private wells are drying up). So "not even used as food in the us" is so true! It's insane that we let this happen.
NoPriorThreat | a day ago
5 - 6 years ago datacenters used 0.4% of water, now it is 0.3%. So no it is not datacenters.
RandomlyHere25 | 20 hours ago
Ai data centers consume much more resources vs other data center types.
Kelsig | 17 hours ago
and are a data center included in that statistic
RandomlyHere25 | 16 hours ago
Prolly not lol
CONFIGdotSYS | a day ago
If you think data centers use a lot of water, just wait till you learn about golf courses
wbruce098 | 23 hours ago
Why not get rid of both?
Kelsig | 17 hours ago
because one is relevant to the topic at hand and one isn't.
wbruce098 | 10 hours ago
I see lots of golfers are on this sub. Guess I won’t win this argument.
lakem5050 | a day ago
They are going to pay a whole lot more in the coming future.
There is absolutely no regulation of water production on a federal level, and if they keep hacking into water systems there is going to be a really bad incident that causes the federal government to step in, and then costs will be heading up dramatically.
kowycz | a day ago
That's not true. The EPA and state health departments regulate drinking water production.
lakem5050 | 23 hours ago
Not from cyber attacks or terrorism, and that's going to be expensive to roll out.
Its coming though, its inevitable.
Ateist | 22 hours ago
Why are they averaging completely different systems?
That's just asking for Simpson's.
And why are they only counting 45% of the households?
It invites major selection bias.
bannana | 15 hours ago
Yep, they secretly privatized billing in my county and the bills have doubled, tripled, then quadrupled in the past 15yrs. they were finally outed about what they did and still didn't want to admit that adding a middleman entity that needed to be payed caused bills to increase dramatically.
Vampire_inthe_Church | a day ago
City of Edgewater has the highest water bills in the state, and the quality of the water is horrible. And the city counsel votes to raise the cost every year 🤬
wbruce098 | 23 hours ago
It’s an election year. Vote them out and yell at your state reps to invest in your local water!
Seldomsought | 10 hours ago
Last winter I left for a couple of months. I drained the faucets and turned off the water at the house. I was billed $50/month for the privilege of having access to water.
Low_Ability4450 | 7 hours ago
The water bills rose 62% in a decade, far outpacing inflation. The 67% gap between private and publicly owned utilities is particularly important. Ageing infrastructure is a real cost but who pays for it, and how utilities are owned, matters too.
Quiet___Lad | a day ago
USA has 'mostly' Socialistic water providers.
The article notes that when the Means of Production (Water System) are owned by the Gov't (people), costs are almost always lower.
But.... ignore everything here. USA doesn't have any Socialism currently existing. And to introduce Socialism is a declaration of war.
teacher_59 | a day ago
Trump destroying the NOAA and reducing rainfall has real consequences. Of course, when you have less rain, you have less water. I don't understand why the conservatives are so stupid they can't be seeing that.
Dub-MS | a day ago
Trump reduced rainfall? WOW
ThickGur5353 | 22 hours ago
Ever since aqua took over my township water supply like 10-15 years ago ,prices have been going up dramatically. Luckily or township decided not to sell the wastewater treatment plan to Aqua. So for now our wastewater prices are going up slowly.
BigvalBROski | 19 hours ago
Invest your money into VOO and Bitcoin every month… your future self will thank you in 15 years. You won’t be complaining about money anymore…
EmperorOfCanada | 15 hours ago
Fun factoid. Most water networks have a pretty limited lifespan. This depends on many factors, soil, rain, competence of the people installing, competence of the people running them, etc.
But, it is often around 25-50 years. With pretty much all systems starting to need major repairs around 25. Those water bursts which show up in the news sort of things.
Typically, someone in a brand new subdivision will pay roughly the same rate as someone in downtown house sitting on 50+year old infrastructure.
The cost to maintain that water infrastructure in the newest burbs is negligible compared to the older ones.
Thus, the new rate payers are subsidizing the older ones. This is why most cities hate satellite cities and towns. Ones which don't have to contribute to the older networks.
What most cities have been doing is seeing wave after wave, every 11-20 years of new development. These waves keep adding fresh new infrastructure, and thus new people to pick up on the ponzi scheme.
This ends for a variety of reasons; just like ponzi schemes.
You would have to pretty much start doubling the size of the city's infrastructure every decade to keep up.
The other is that as the water networks get larger, they don't overly benefit from volume discounts. Digging up some broken pipe costs about the same in a town of 5000 as it does in a city of 5 million, except the administrative staff for the city will bloat that cost. If you go to a town of 30,000, there will often be "that water guy" in the town hall, and he can pretty much tell you every problem with the system, and name the guy in charge of almost any dig. He will probably go to the bigger ones to put his hand literally on the broken pipe.
In a city of a million, that "guy" is 8+ layers away from the pipe. He also doesn't care about the pipe. He cares about feathering his own nest, as getting that job is political, not competence. The people around him want that job, and also do not care about pipe. That doesn't kick in for a few more layers. The water HR department, or the water communications department in a city of 1 million is probably bigger than the entire water department in a town of 50,000.
Where the ponzi scheme starts to show up is where the money is coming from for major repairs. In an old small stable town, it probably comes from local taxes. In the larger cities, it will first come from the growth, but then the regional government, and then the federal one.
In the USA, they had a Build Back Better, which was trying to fill in this gap. This is when ponzi schemes implode; when the last possible suckers are exhausted.
The result is not only having to circle back to the original rate payers, but now, they are paying the price for bloated bureaucracies who think that 40% leakage of treated water is acceptable (yes that is common), or even worse, bureaucrats who will claim 5% leakage (pretty much impossible); because they are bureaucrats who realized that the person measuring a thing, can declare any measurement they want. (Or more specifically, not measure it at all, and just declare a number)
There is a fantastically simple way to solve this. Open books. Not kind of sorta open books, but don't allow water utilities to conceal any piece of information. Internal communications, records, contracts, bids, maintenance, even all the way down to pressure readings, etc. The worst bureaucrats would lose their minds, as this would be a total lost of control. The good ones would find it mildly annoying as making that information public would be effort spent not running the water network correctly.
Prestigious_Ear505 | a day ago
This Guardian article by "Maya Wang" is such a non-biased Source...
Ask yourself if we are in a race withe China regarding AI development...
If you say no you are not being realistic...
Here is my google question answered by AI...
"is the Guardian a left leaning news organization?
Yes, The Guardian is widely described as center-left or progressive. Media bias watchdogs and analysts generally categorize its editorial stance as follows: Center-Left / Liberal Alignment: Independent media analysis groups like AllSides classify The Guardian as having a left or center-left bias due to its strong alignment with liberal and progressive thought."