Yes, Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility. But that will (and should) change.

Even though it made him “a little uncomfortable,” David Leonhardt of the New York Times acknowledged recently that the familiar story of the politics of the federal budget is wrong: Democrats are not irresponsible spendthrifts, but consistently devoted to fiscal responsibility and reducing the federal deficit. And Republicans, despite their endless talk about debt, deficits, and the need for balanced budgets, have consistently driven up the deficit, by cutting taxes without doing much to reduce spending.

This should not be news, and in fact, it’s such an old story that it may already be out of date. Exactly 25 years ago, in the spring of Bill Clinton’s first year, Congress was beginning work on legislation that by August would squeak through with single-vote margins in the House and Senate, putting the country on a path to a budget surplus. Not one Republican voted for that bill, even though it cut spending as well as raising taxes, and many Democrats who did lost reelection in 1994.

Something similar happened in Barack Obama’s first years, when desperately needed economic stimulus was held down by fiscal concerns. The Affordable Care Act was forced into a convoluted form, designed to reduce the deficit while also expanding health coverage. And as soon as the economic crisis eased (“green shoots” of recovery were in sight), the administration turned toward the fantasy of a deal with Paul Ryan and congressional Republicans, naively taking seriously their rhetoric about debt and deficits.

(After Obama formed the Simpson-Bowles commission on deficit reduction, Ryan and his House colleagues then rejected the commission’s recommendations, blocking them from a congressional vote, and then attacked Obama for not embracing the commission’s proposal anyway.) Later, Obama embraced sharp restrictions on discretionary spending, in a package that reversed some of the Bush tax cuts.

Democrats didn’t enforce fiscal discipline just because they “do a better job” on the issue, as Leonhardt puts it. At each point, they made a choice, shaped by the political environment and economic assumptions of the moment. In 1993, in the wake of a mild recession, Clinton’s first step was toward a promised economic stimulus.

When that was blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate, Clinton turned toward economic adviser Robert Rubin’s argument that the deficit, by harming investor confidence and “crowding out” private investment, was a drag on the economy and that reducing red ink would provide a long-term economic stimulus of its own. Polling showed broad concern about the deficit, especially among the suburban swing voters increasingly key to Democratic success. And a budget-cutting bill could be pushed through using the 50-vote procedure known as reconciliation, sidestepping Republican obstruction.

The deficit was a symbol, and no one understood that better than Bill Clinton, who in a 1992 debate with George H.W. Bush was asked by an audience member, “How has the national debt affected each of your lives?” and got that the question was really about personal economic hardship, not the budget. For many Democratic politicians, it was a symbol of responsibility, moderation, trustworthiness. It was a way of saying, “I’m not like those crazy, big-spending Democrats,” even if that caricature was, as Leonhardt shows, either long out of date or fictional.

But if Democrats win control of Congress and the White House by 2021, will the doctrine of fiscal responsibility prevail again? Much will depend on the state of the economy at that time, but it seems unlikely. Democrats are coalescing around legitimately big-ticket ideas, from various versions of universal health coverage to a jobs guarantee, that call for spending public money, albeit in ways that will certainly be good for broadly shared economic growth.

And the next Democratic majority, if there is one, will be anchored well to the left of the last House/Senate majority, in 2009-10, when countless Southern Democrats clinging to a last chance at their seats felt they had to appear as conservative as possible.

These Democrats of the near future, with the benefit of decades of evidence, will recognize that doing “a better job” on deficit-reduction has delivered no political benefits. The 1993 budget was followed by an electoral debacle. And while there are many causes for the Democrats electoral devastation in 2010, it could be argued that defying political caution and pushing for a much bigger stimulus in 2009 might have accelerated the recovery and protected Obama’s majorities. (Assuming Obama could have persuaded overcautious conservative Democrats to go along with a more ambitious recovery agenda.)

Nor have Republicans ever suffered political consequences for their disregard of fiscal discipline. Bob Kuttner of the American Prospect often derides Democratic budget discipline as “bad economics and bad politics,” and it’s hard to deny the truth of that assessment.

Further, the pattern of Republican deficits and Democratic austerity was a carefully designed trap. Because the stereotyped assumptions of conservative thrift and liberal excess were so deeply ingrained, the Republicans could swing far in the other direction without consequences, and then, when power shifted, coinciding with economic trouble, Democrats were all but forced to take up the pain of austerity.

Imagine, for example, if the George W. Bush administration had not run up a $438 billion deficit by its last fiscal year? Would the incoming Obama administration have had more political breathing room to spend enough to actually restart the economy? We’ll never know, but there is politics as well as economics in the business cycle, and when Republicans run up deficits during recoveries, there may be less political flexibility to spend during recessions. This dynamic has generally played out in ways that are harmful to Democrats, but more importantly, to the people who are most vulnerable in recessions, such as the victims of foreclosure and long-term unemployment.

If Democrats regain power, and assuming the economy is not in recession at that point, they will have some limited room to pay for new initiatives, because the Trump tax cuts remain enormously unpopular, and the cuts that most overtly benefit the wealthy, such as the lower rates on pass-through business income, can be so easily severed from the rest.

But they will also want to extend some of the cuts for middle-income taxpayers that are scheduled to expire. Reversing some tax cuts while extending others will make a dent in the projected deficit of $1.1 trillion, or almost 5 percent of GDP, in 2021, but it won’t finance new initiatives. A party that puts forward an ambitious agenda to bolster opportunities for working families, but then can do little except raise taxes for the abstract goal of reducing the deficit, will surely have a hard time maintaining the enthusiasm that will have put them in power.

There’s also been a shift in the economic assumptions of Democratic policymakers and thoughtful politicians. The school of economics that argues that deficits generally don’t matter, often known as Modern Monetary Theory, is still a bit out of the mainstream, its jargon and ideas sometimes still feel outlandish. (Remember the giant platinum coin?).

But the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who hired MMT economist Stephanie Kelton to the staff of the Senate Budget Committee, along with interest in MMT-influenced ideas such as the job guarantee, has nudged mainstream Democrats toward a fiscal policy that is more relaxed about deficit spending, at least in periods of less than full employment, and integrates some of the insights of the deficits-don’t-matter school. The fact that we’ve now gone a decade with inflation, the supposed danger of deficits, below 2.5 percent has also helped modify mainstream economic assumptions among the political class. That’s a healthy development.

Like Leonhardt, I’m a little uncomfortable. Going back to those early Clinton years, when I worked on Capitol Hill, I’ve always thought fiscal balance, over the business cycle, was important, and that we should be willing, as a democracy, to finance the public goods and services we value. I defended President Obama for appointing the Simpson-Bowles commission, in part because I thought it was a good way to escape the trap of the Bush tax cuts.

And I think we should find ways to bring our spending on health care, both public and private, in line with other countries. But the emerging Democratic Party cannot be paralyzed by those assumptions, as they were in the Clinton and early Obama eras. The priority has to be on building programs, in health, education, jobs, and economic security, that support the aspirations of individuals and families. The era Leonhardt wrote about is over, almost as soon as he noticed it.