4 May—There’s legislation, stupid legislation, and damn stupid legislation. All municipalities (including boroughs), states, and nations have their fair share. No surprise, then, that the Connecticut General Assembly and administration should through the years have foisted some damn stupid legislation on the state.

I’m not talking about the legendary apocryphal bouncing pickles (based on an actual 1948 incident and a broad reading of CGS 21a-93) nor about not storing municipal and probate records where booze is sold (CGS 30-97, repealed in 2002, probably because it made perfect sense).

I’m not talking about Connecticut’s voluminous anti-firearm and fireless-arm legislation that’s not only damn stupid, but unconstitutional—by both federal and state constitutions.

Nope. I’m talking about CGS 10-262j, the totally, unquestionably asinine minimum budget requirement (MBR) for Connecticut public schools. This particular travesty was enacted in 1975 by—no surprise—the enthusiastic new Democrat majorities in both houses as well as a new Democrat governor (who, however, as I recall, being more prudent, was less enthusiastic), following a few years of a Republican trifecta, which was itself pretty terrible.

(The GOP trifecta had given Connecticut its first income tax in 1971, which it repealed six weeks later.)

Put simply, the minimum budget requirement says that in any fiscal year a school region must spend at least as much—money, in case you were wondering—as it had spent in the previous year. There are exceptions or loopholes due to little things like reductions in aid and enrollment, and, to a lesser extent, “increased efficiencies approved by the Commissioner of Education.”

Among the penalties the state may impose on public school systems guilty of practicing sound fiscal management is a reduction in their Education Cost Sharing (ECS) grants. Of course, an ECS reduction could itself be construed as a justification for a spending reduction. It all depends on the whims of the Commissioner of Education.

The very premise of forcing school boards to spend money based on a purely arbitrary, speculative, absolutely idiotic supposition (as opposed to a sound proposition) that education costs will without fail go up, up, and up some more is just plain ludicrous. It’s also counterproductive.

But not only did the MBR mandate give the unions (which dictate policy to Connecticut Democrats) what they wanted, it reinforced the mantra recited incessantly by pandering pols of both parties, “You can never spend too much on education.”

So regional and local school boards have been able—make that required—to squeeze more money than they often need out of taxpayers and then come up with quasi-legitimate ways to spend it. Because if they don’t, the state is waiting to penalize them.

The reality is, you certainly can waste too much on education. Especially with Connecticut’s monumentally stupid minimum budget requirement . . .