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.