MICHAEL BARONE: Real target of Republican tax bills: Feds, eds, and meds bloat.

The Republican tax bills do indeed reduce revenues to the “feds,” with surprisingly small rate cuts for high earners and by cutting the corporate rate from 35 to 20 percent. The current rate, highest in the world, had to be lowered sooner or later, as most liberal economists (and Barack Obama) have long admitted.

And it is hard to take seriously those moaning about increased budget deficits from those unwilling to reform entitlements, which includes all Democrats and many Republicans, notably President Trump.

The critics have more of an argument when it comes to eds and meds. But there’s a counterargument there as well. The tax bills push against the counterproductive government policies that have been pushing up education and health care costs, to the detriment of the consumers thereof.

The tax bills impose a new 1.4 percent tax on the investment income of endowments of very wealthy colleges and universities. They would eliminate deductions for student loans and tax tuition waivers for graduate students.

These institutions have been coasting on their reputation for excellence and as havens of free thought, even as they impose speech codes, conduct kangaroo courts on sexual assault charges and allow humanities and social science departments to be dominated by “postmodern” agitprop and gibberish.

Student loans impoverish many students, especially dropouts, while the money they pump into universities produces administrative bloat, to the point that there are more administrators than teachers in higher education today. Government subsidies produce an oversupply of Ph.D.s, whose theses go unread and whose job prospects are dismal.

Yep. Somebody should write a book on that problem.