The raison d'être of the Republican Party for much of the past 100 years has been to slam the brakes on anything that would make the poor and middle class feel more secure and prosperous. 

Look at the list of popular government programs and initiatives they’ve decried as “socialism”: unemployment insurance, Social Security, disability insurance, Medicare, the ACA’s protections for people with preexisting conditions—the list goes on.

And now you have Joe Biden’s ambitious American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan, which, to hear Republicans tell it, were concocted in the same dank mausoleum where Hugo Chavez built the Dominion voting machines out of obsidian, mummy detritus, and 11 secret burial herbs and spices. 

It will be tough to pass both those plans in their current form, much less one of them. But if Democrats do manage to pull it off, Republicans are in for a world of hurt. That’s the conclusion Princeton economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman made in his April 29 New York Times column, anyway.