On March 12, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) released its own budget for the 2015 fiscal year. The idea of the Better Off Budget, as they call it, is to sketch out a liberal alternative for how the government should collect and spend money—that is, a budget vision that’s a bit to the left of President Obama’s and way to the left of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s.

This is the fourth consecutive year that House progressives have released such a proposal. It’s also the fourth consecutive year that nearly everybody in Washington has ignored it.

And while nobody expects the proposal to become binding—Democrats don’t have the votes, not even in the Senate—it’s not clear why this proposal isn’t part of the conversation. Predecessors of the Better Off Budget won praise from well-respected and mainstream economists, including Paul Krugman and Dean Baker. And while you might expect such approval from progressive intellectuals, the proposal has fans elsewhere on the ideological spectrum. The Economist has called it “courageous” and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget commended it as well.

It’s not hard to see why. The primary goal of the Better Off Budget is to close the “output gap” that opened after the financial crisis—that is, to tap the economic resources that have been idling for the last few years, leading to higher unemployment and lower wages. Obama’s budget seeks to do the same thing, but wouldn’t close the gap by nearly as much. Ryan’s budget would more or less ignore the gap altogether. In 2013, the gap—measured as potential gross domestic product versus actual gross domestic product—stood at $790 billion. The CPC budget closes it in three years by investing in infrastructure, state aid and a government jobs program. By 2017, the Economic Policy Institute estimates, it will create 8.8 million new jobs.

The new spending would not lead to higher deficits, by the way. On the contrary, the House progressives are also calling for higher taxes on the highest earners and corporations—enough to bring in more than $6 trillion in additional revenue over the next decade. That would more than make up for the new spending. Overall, living within the budget would reduce the deficit to 1.4 percent of GDP in 2024.