The problems with the budget are said to arise from politicians who are unable to make difficult decisions. The problem with these laws is that they do not explicitly force politicians to make those decision. GRH provides targets for the politicians to work towards, creating motivation, and the BEA provides a framework for penalizing inaction, but neither truly forces politicians to make the tough choices.

Real political solutions involve actually making those tough choices. This is not to discount the value of having these frameworks to guide the negotiations and hold Congress to the outcomes of those negotiations, but the negotiations themselves are the critical component to the budget problem. For example, if the sequester is initiated, Congress can follow it up with laws to build back some of those spending cuts, and it would likely do so quickly. There are no provisions in the BEA, for example, that call...
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