“There’s enormous appetite in the Democratic Party and among all Americans for major public investment to tackle our nation’s major crises: deepening inequality and structural racism and climate disaster,” said Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, in a statement to The Intercept. “Pelosi and the Democratic Party leadership’s support of Paygo makes actually solving these crises all but impossible.

Left-leaning economists hate the timing and the composition. But the expansionary fiscal policy they sought is on the way. The fiscal austerity that drove the budget deficit from around 9 percent of G.D.P. in 2010 to 3 percent in 2016 has, for practical purposes, been abandoned. First, Republicans passed a $1.5 trillion tax bill in December that sharply cut rates on businesses. Then last week they made a deal to undo budget caps demanded by the Republican House in 2011. President Trump signed that bill on Friday.