Charlie Sykes calls this gas-passing "Patrick McIlheran at his best." and says it's "a trenchant analysis."

Here's Paddy Mac, the Journal Sentinel's farthest-out columnist:

The question isn’t why we tolerate these inequities [between rich and poor] so much as why we tolerate the personal dysfunction that is behind them.

I suggest it’s because what we find more intolerable would be the kind of intrusiveness into the lives of the very poor that could help them become as prosperous as most Americans are. We cannot bring ourselves to forcibly make people not become pregnant while unmarried. We will not force children to pay attention in school or, for that matter, attend school. We won’t mandate a longer time horizon, a change in personal outlook, a resulting ambition to learn a useful career at MATC.

I don’t know that we should. I do know this, though: The question of North Ave. is not how it can be that some have so much while others on the same street have so little. Rather, it is why some fail to do the fairly simple things — stay in school, delay childbearing until marriage, learn a skill to permit employment — that most Americans of every race, ancestry and neighborhood manage to do, making them middle-class and relentlessly affluent.

At least he says he "doesn't know that we should" force people to do the right thing.

You can't help wondering, though: If he did think that we should, what methods would be prescribe?

How on earth would we

forcibly make people not become pregnant while unmarried. We will not force children to pay attention in school or, for that matter, attend school.

Have them read Sykes's "50 Rules" book? Paddy's right; I would find that intolerable. What else?

Maybe we'll find out when State Rep. Frank Lasee and some of his Republican caucus mates introduce the bill.

If this is McIlheran at his best, spare us the worst.