The Democratic agenda is getting eaten alive by lobbyists.

Joe Biden began with a perfect plan for his domestic agenda: He would create popular new health-care, education, and child-care programs for broad swaths of the public and finance them by making the wealthy pay for it.

The flaw in the plan is that the wealthy don’t want to have less money. Swarms of lobbyists set loose in Washington have eaten Biden’s proposals alive. His plan to end the notorious “angel of death” loophole allowing capital gains to escape any tax? Dead. His proposals to allow the government to negotiate prescription drug costs, saving taxpayers and consumers hundreds of billions of dollars? Eviscerated.

Perhaps most amazingly of all, even his plan to crack down on wealthy tax cheats is hanging on for dear life in Congress. Over the next decade, because of rampant tax cheating and lax enforcement, the federal government will collect roughly $7 trillion less in revenue than taxpayers owe. The Biden administration conservatively believes it can reduce that gap by about one-tenth, collecting an additional $700 billion. Of […]