The doctorate is the new bachelor's?

Commenter qaz raised an issue the I think I last took up following an observation of Larry Moran. That was also in the context of discussing so-called over-production of PhDs. The new comment from qaz frames the issue as follows:

I AM advocating graduate PhD-level science training for the rest of the population – imagine if our politicians actually understood science (or even critical thinking) for example. A lot of professions would be improved by having scientific training. (But they don’t need it, you say. I say, why can’t they have it? Why can’t spending five years doing some good science not be a part of someone’s path in life, even if they don’t go on to do NIH-R01-Research?)