Say what you will about him, but Barack Obama was consistent. On the campaign trail in 2008, he was already firing up crowds with the promise that “we will all need to tighten our belts.” Upon taking office, he reminded everyone, “Americans are making hard choices in their budgets, and we’ve got to tighten our belts in Washington as well.” Even when, in his 2015 budget request, he belatedly adopted the rhetoric of anti-austerity, he still promised that everything would be “fully paid for.”

By comparison, Joe Biden sounds like John Maynard Keynes himself. “The biggest risk,” he has said, “is not going too big, it’s if we go too small.” The stimulus bill that passed in March was equivalent to around 9 percent of GDP, 1.5 times more than the Obama stimulus.

Can the change be explained by new ideas? Perhaps austerity was based on a sincere but mistaken belief. But the Biden shift doesn’t really depend on recent thought, per se. Back in 2009, Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer recommended a bigger stimulus and fought to get Obama to stop publicly calling for Washington to “tighten its belt.” Different ideas were right there in the White House, and if the president hadn’t been busy discussing Edmund Burke with David Brooks, he might have heard them.