Liberals wanted fiscal stimulus. Conservatives delivered it.

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.

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This sudden reversal has the economists who have long argued we should run the economy a little hot — that is, stimulate it using the government’s power to tax and spend — in something of a quandary.

“It’s a very weird and conflicted feeling,” said Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who worked in the Obama White House. “On some level I should be happy, and I am sort of happy right now, but with some nontrivial caveats.”

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