Nope, won't happen. The politicians won't cooperate because the electorate is divided. Right now, what you have is a situation where all sides of the spectrum have been able to get what they want. You've got a decent (still overly low) level of social spending and high level of military spending, coupled with a non-economically-interventionist government and rock bottom tax rates. The liberals are insistent on the social spending, while the conservatives are enamoured with the military spending, small government talk, and then you've got a plutocratic class that have a government taxing them and meddling in corporate affairs.
Until you decide on a course of action out of this position, the deficit will remain. It will decrease when the economy gets going again, but the deficit is structural. Either you drastically cut social spending, or raise taxes. An amendment won't help anyone decide; they will merely entrench their position, and insist the 'other side' has to give in.
This is really my view on this in the specific situation of the current American political climate. I doubt even most Republican voters would be against the drastic social cuts that would be necessary in this situation, once they realize what social spending actually does for people - including themselves. On the other hand, I doubt the GOP is ideologically capable of agreeing to the amount of tax increases that would be necessary. We'd end up in a situation comparable to the debt ceiling problem of last summer, only without a debt ceiling to raise.
More generally, I do think that more should be done to avoid that the national debt spirals out of control. This has nothing to do with "living within one's means" or similar approaches based on false equivalences to private budgets. Look at the pie chart Cutlass posted:
Almost 5% of the federal budget are spent on interest, and if the amount of debt rises in relation to GDP, so does this portion of the budget that is immediately lost (assuming stable interest rates). So additional debt limits the capabilities of the state to actually do something, which is something especially liberals do not want.
But a strict balanced budget law would just limit the government too much. Governments should be able to react to recessions and economic crises. Governments should be able to spread out a surplus over several years without having to accumulate and sit on it for an extended period of time, which is just economically stupid. It's hard (i.e. impossible) to cover every possible kind of crisis the government would need to respond to as exceptions to such a law, so you could end up in situations where you would need to break laws or even the constitution to avoid problems, or let the economy collapse just out of principle [the Eurozone faces a similar dilemma right now].
I'm in principle in favor of making Keynesian policies actually Keynesian, i.e. increased spending during recessions would have to be accompanied by corresponding cuts when the economy grows again, which most of the time doesn't really happen because politicians like to use these times to pay for their favorite programs again. But again, this is hard to turn into law, because the circumstances are too varied to account for everything again, and you'd end up in situations where the law forces you to do stupid things.
So yes, there is a problem, but I don't really think legal limits can solve it.
I can't think of many good reasons for it and can think of a ton of problems with it. But there must be something redeeming if a Keynesian dislikes it.
So the only reasons to run a deficit are supply side economics? Like tax cuts?
Yet.
It is not for lack of trying, though.
If you really think that the US are anywhere close to Greece's problems in the foreseeable future, you really don't know what you are talking about and need to get some perspective.
Someone has to serve as an example of misguided thinking.
Good that new people barge into this forum in regular intervals to provide this sort of service.
Either way, live within your income.
And this is the fundamental problem budget hawks have. They treat national budgets like private budgets, as if macroeconomics was the same as microeconomics.
It's not the governments job to feed people. Charities are far more efficient than the government could ever hope to be.
If only it were so. Why do you think the government had to step in to prevent severe suffering in the first place? Because liberals love to waste money, I suppose.
