So if balancing the budget in 10 years using only spending cuts is impossible to achieve, probably unnecessary and politically risky — and considering that budget resolutions aren’t even legally binding documents — why would a political party put so much effort into crafting such a severely austere document?
Presumably the answer involves the long-standing problem of the Tea Party tail wagging the Establishment GOP dog. When Rep. Paul Ryan, not exactly a moderate squish, first ascended to the budget committee chairmanship, he proposed balancing the budget in about 30 years. After congressional conservatives complained, Paul later crafted balanced budgets in a 10-year timeframe.

But the arbitrary 10-year demand was formulated when conservatives still had Greece on the brain. Three years ago, Sens. Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and others wrote that “balancing the budget within 10 years seems a minimal threshold of fiscal seriousness” partly because “[a]nnual debt interest payments alone will soon be larger than the entire Greek economy — which by itself is bringing Europe to its knees.” No one is making those hysterical arguments now. Shouldn’t Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have the gumption to stand up to the right wing and resist their obsolete demands, in the name of political expediency?