are utahns water wasters?

on the great salt lake... this one has been around the block several times. in the 60's there was a great fear the lake would go dry, with good reason. as water use on the bear, weber and provo increases, lake inflow goes down. pretty simple. then we had the 80's and the great floods, lake came back to record highs. lake is back down. the salient question is will it come back, stabilize or continue down. as levels decline you get a diminishing return so to speak, higher salinity reduces evaporation so the lake will likely never to entirely dry. but it could get a lot lower than current levels. the railroad is going to put a bridge in the causeway that will, in theory equalize north and south arms but because of inflow differences, salinity might always be different. water is never lost, over irrigation goes to ground water and ground water eventually ends up on the lowest place with permeability... in this case great salt lake or lower. but it may take decades or even hundreds of years to make the trip subsurface and it may acutally come out in other places depending on subsurface impermeable layers, etc. the dominant forces in the lake level are the inflows - so climatology is the big one. how much the weber, bear and provo kick in minus what we consumptively use as we drop much of our treated wastewater into the lake.