Washington’s feckless drift into class war is based on the illusion that we have endless time to put our fiscal house in order. This has instilled a terrible budgetary habit whereby politicians continuously duck concrete but politically painful near-term savings in favor of gimmicks like freezes, caps and block grants that push purely paper cuts into the distant, foggy future. Mr. Ryan’s plan gets to a balanced budget in the fiscal afterlife (i.e., the 2030s); the White House’s tactic of accumulating small-fry deficit cuts over the enormous span of 12 years amounts to the same dodge.

Such fiscal jabberwocky ignores the fact that we have experienced a recession every five years or so for the last six decades; that the budget is now exposed to even more frequent and amplified cyclical turbulence amid the aftershocks of the financial crisis; and that the United States does not have a divine right to issue any amount of interim debt that suits the ideological convenience of the two parties.

Nevertheless, the Democrats are immobilized because Keynesians insist on kicking the budgetary can down the road until cyclical “demand” has in their estimation fully recovered, while Republicans sit on their hands because supply-siders insist on letting the deficit fester until tax cuts work their alleged revenue magic.

A generation ago, such spurious ideological conceits would never have taken root, because deficits had adverse consequences like rising interest rates or an outflow of monetary reserves.

But for decades now, the central banks of the world have been giving policymakers a false signal that sovereign debt is cheap and limitless. Functioning like monetary roach motels, central banks have become a place where Treasury bonds go in but never come out — thereby causing bond prices to be far higher and interest yields much lower than would obtain in a market that wasn’t rigged.

Indeed, the Fed and currency-pegging central banks in East Asia and the Persian Gulf have absorbed nearly all of Uncle Sam’s multitrillion-dollar spree of debt issuance. Moreover, about $4.6 trillion, or more than half of all debt held by the public, is now sequestered in central banks — paid for with printing-press money.

Even central banks cannot defy the canons of sound finance indefinitely, however. Japan will buy less Treasury paper as it turns inward to recover from the wrath of nature. Likewise, China will drastically curtail its currency pegging and related Treasury bond purchases in order to suppress the rip-roaring imported inflation and speculative bubbles now engulfing its domestic economy. And unless the Fed wants to ruin the value of the dollar, it will need to keep its promise to get out of the bond-buying business, too, when its second round of quantitative easing ends in June.