Inflation Reduction Act is the motherload of bad policy ideas

By Kent R. Kroeger (August 9, 2022)

Thomas Nast caricature of Boss Tweed in Harper’s Weekly, October 21, 1871 (This work is in the public domain in the US because it was published before January 1, 1927).

From elementary to high school, I was a short and skinny kid who was frequently subjected to various forms of socially acceptable peer group torture, the most common of which was the noogie headlock.

A guy wraps his arms around your neck from behind, bends you over and starts grinding his index finger’s proximal interphalangeal joint (i.e., knuckle) into the boundary between your frontal and parietal skull bones.

It hurt, but it was a tolerable level of pain compared to some other bullying alternatives.

For example, a snuggies attack, the process in which someone reaches into your pants from behind and grabs your Fruit of the Looms (i.e., underwear) and attempts to pull them over your head.

While that attack hurt less than the noogie, it inflicted far more emotional pain, particularly when conducted in front of fellow students.

Luckily, God blessed me with a low center of gravity and exceptional twitch muscle speed that helped me avoid most snuggie attacks.

Noogies, however, were another matter. Once they had your neck in a grip, they owned you. And to fight back it required a different set of fighting skills to weather the demoralizing fury of an…