There is no need to rehearse all the economics here in detail, but the move disproportionately benefits high-earning Americans at the expense of — everybody else. There isn’t any real economic case for it, and the political case for it is only the great infantile cry that sustains all such political escapades: “Baby want!”

Baby want, baby get.

We have, possibly, overdone it with the self-esteem. The prim, grim urban and suburban progressives who today dominate the Democratic Party believe that they are “like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened” — that in spending four or five or six years at Haverford or Bryn Mawr or Michigan State or the University of Texas or some other ghastly inverted cloaca of American intellectual life they have become, in some ineffable way, a national treasure. Sure, they earn a lot more money than the schmucks who drive them to the airport or cut their grass, but they have done the hard work of becoming enlightened — and is not a dedicated leader of the people entitled to his dacha? We have so invested college degrees (even the mediocre ones) with social and quasi-spiritual significance that college graduates have come to regard their time inhaling intellectual flatus in the Dutch ovens of higher education as a kind of national service — and they believe that it is outrageous that they should be expected to pay a little something for it.