The risk is that both will find it too politically convenient to hide behind the easy pieces of taxing the rich and discretionary spending caps--both of which have been enacted, and neither of which are sufficient to fix the problem instead of focusing on the real issues of entitlement and tax reform.
That is consistent with a second theory, familiar from other studies, that decision making is mentally taxing and that, if forced to keep deciding things, people get tired and start looking for easy answers.