Neel Kashkari is not a radical. He began his career at the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush and ran for governor of California in 2014 as a Republican, promising to cut taxes, wasteful spending and welfare. Kashkari lost that race badly, but earned plaudits from big-name conservatives like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), who hailed him as an ideas guy capable of unleashing the power of the market to create good jobs.

Kashkari, who also worked at Goldman Sachs and helped administer the 2008 bank bailouts, is now president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, a man respected on Wall Street and welcomed by producers at CNBC. But these days he doesnt talk much about the virtues of the self-correcting market. Hes focused instead on the power of the public sector, and has transformed himself into an outspoken advocate of aggressive deficit spending.

There are enormous consequences if we just let things go, Kashkari told CNBC viewers on Wednesday. Whatever Congress can do with the executive branch come together aggressively to put money in the hands of people who have lost their jobs and to support small businesses so that we dont have this continuing wave of bankruptcies across the economy its just vital that they move quickly.

This would have been an extraordinary message to hear from a Republican official a few years ago. Throughout Barack Obamas presidency, the GOP warned that the accumulation of government debt was a menace to future generations and a threat to near-term economic stability. Even Democrats were worried. Obama himself called on the government to tighten its belt in his 2010 State of the Union address, a message his administration reinforced throughout the year, even with the unemployment rate hovering near double-digits.

Since March, however, Congress has appropriated $3 trillion to fight the coronavirus crash more than triple the size of Obamas 2009 stimulus package and authorized trillions more in Federal Reserve lending.

Kashkari, like most economists these days, sees the current economic decay as a far more serious problem than all of this spending. Job creation has slowed to a trickle since federal aid payments ended in July, and new layoffs continue to flow at levels that were very recently unthinkable. Last week , 840,000 people lost their jobs. Prior to the pandemic, the single worst week for job losses ever had been 695,000. Under conditions like these, witholding fiscal relief would court catastrophe.

Kashkari is just as conservative on economic policy as hes ever been. But what it means to be a conservative intellectual is changing. When he calls for aggressive federal economic management, Kashkari is not so much giving ground to the left as giving voice to an emerging bipartisan consensus from the respectable, cuff-linked political center. Under this view, people in a democracy may disagree on just how debt and deficits should accrue, but deficits themselves are a normal feature of a functioning polity, not a dire threat to economic health.

The change in the intellectual wind has been unmistakable. Economists who spent the George W. Bush and Obama years warning of a looming national bankruptcy now shrug off debt levels unseen in living memory. An influential new conservative think tank called American Compass has dedicated its existence to flouting the Republican economic orthodoxy of the past two decades. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, a veteran of the George H.W. Bush White House with impeccable fiscal conservative credentials, urged lawmakers this week to pass another stimulus bill.

Liberals are moving in the same direction. In January 2019, Clinton and Obama administration alums Jason Furman and Lawrence Summers published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled, Whos Afraid of Budget Deficits? Bernie Sanders adviser Stephanie Keltons new book The Deficit Myth is a New York Times bestseller. Everyone on MSNBCs Morning Joe seems to take the economic wisdom of further stimulus legislation for granted, and the public agrees. According to a September poll commissioned by the Financial Times and the Peterson Institute, 91% of Americans want to see Congress pass another stimulus package.

Any sensible policy is going to have us racking up the deficit for a long time, Harvard economist Ken Rogoff told The New York Times in May. If we go up another $10 trillion, I wouldnt even blink at that now. Back in 2011, then-Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was holding up Rogoffs research on the perils of national debt to call for massive, immediate budget cuts.

Over the past three decades, deficit hawks have issued several different warnings about the dangers of government debt, none of which have come to pass. High debt levels havent forced interest rates up to punishing levels. They havent sparked inflation, and they havent ignited a financial crisis. A large existing debt burden hasnt even constrained the governments ability to combat an unforeseen calamity, as demonstrated by the trillions of dollars in coronavirus relief this year.

In a sharp departure from the Obama years, nobody in Washington even questions whether this years relief has worked. Lonely opponents of government spending now rely increasingly on ideological objections about the proper role of government, instead of questioning the technical efficiency of government action.

What about true capitalism? CNBCs Joe Kernen asked Kashkari on Wednesday. What about not debasing our currency, holding the line on money-printing and not letting Congress get totally profligate? What about letting the chips fall where they may?

Its an interesting theoretical concept, Kashkari replied. Its like letting the forest fire just rage. Let it burn and eventually it will burn itself out and meanwhile, all the animals are all dead.

But Congress has been slow to adjust to this changing intellectual terrain. One of the first orders of business for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) when Democrats regained the House majority in 2019 was to pass a rule requiring that all new legislation be fully paid for with either spending cuts or tax increases.