Are you ready for today’s lesson in Government Spending 101?

It involves overweight kids, financially-strapped school districts, and water.

Some genius in the bowels of bureaucracy along the Potomac River decided the best way to fight obesity is to give kids water to sip with their school lunches.

This means any school district taking federal funds for anything is going have to start providing water with lunch.

It doesn’t matter that there are drinking fountains almost everywhere you turn on a school campus. The new rule says water must be served with lunch

Manteca Unified Superintendent Jason Messer noted the most cost-effective way to comply with the edict is to provide water in paper cups. It isn’t, however, the most rationale way to go.

All it takes is a spill or two on a cafeteria floor and you’ve set the stage to put unemployed lawyers on the road to becoming millionaires.

So the safest route for Manteca Unified is to buy bottled water.

This will cost 11 cents per bottle. Given that Manteca Unified serves upwards of 15,000 lunches a day some 180 days each school year, the new federal dictate will cost $297,000 annually. Since almost 57 percent of the meals served in Manteca Unified are to those who qualify for free or reduced meals this will cost taxpayers $169,290 a year just to provide water for Manteca Unified school kids.  The balance - $127,710 - will be paid by families paying full freight for their kids’ school meals.

Now multiply those numbers by all of the nation’s students who have lunch at a public school cafeteria. Anyone want to take a wild guess why federal spending is out-of-control and the fact our national debt is growing faster than a Southern California canyon brush fire fanned by the Santa Ana winds?

It gets worse.

Now Manteca Unified will have to either have 15,000 plastic bottles a day trucked off with garbage or separate them so they can be recycled.

Not to be outdone, the State of California is now toying with the idea of outlawing Styrofoam-style food trays in schools.

Schools went to Styrofoam-style trays to reduce labor and water costs.

Manteca, going a step further, realized that 15,000 Styrofoam-style trays were taking up a lot of space in dumpsters and thus costing the schools a lot of money to have hauled away.

So they have invested in technology that takes used Styrofoam-style trays and employs heat and compression to reconstitute them into a significantly smaller block that can then be recycled into new products.

If Sacramento passes the new law that means schools will have to trade Styrofoam for sturdy paper plates. Not only will it cost more but soiled paper plates can’t be recycled.

So in order to avoid pieces of Styrofoam from a student’s lunch tray from somehow ending up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean choking Flipper to death, California is going to institute a law that will consume even more materials and create even more pollution.

If Sacramento must interfere, then why don’t they do something sensible such as requiring schools to recycle Styrofoam trays instead?

And as far as the federal government is concerned, they need to explain with a straight face how serving kids water with lunch is going to reduce obesity.

If we have $300,000 per school district to throw away - which we don’t - wouldn’t it make more sense to hire five or so physical education/nutrition teachers?

Oops! Silly me. The first thing you learn in Government 101 is that government makes regulations and not sense.