To the extent that debt (or debt-service cost) to GDP matters, balancing the budget is way outside of what is needed to address it. The concerns are, in the short-term, ability to pay debt service out of current revenue, and, in the longer term, assuring the GDP grows faster than debt. Neither of those requires balancing the budget.
I agree. I don’t mean balancing the budget in an accounting sense. I mean getting spending down to sustainable levels. It just isn’t sustainable right now, and the only two possibilities I see is to either get that under control or to buy government debt with “printed” money, causing inflation which will decrease the real value of the debt.
Seeing the flagrant incompetency and immaturity in Congress, I’m betting on the latter.
The next biggest item is the defense budget, and I suppose a "competent and mature Congress" would be able to cut that dramatically, but it's a challenging task. People genuinely believe that our enormous defense budget is required.
The rest of the budget is a lot of little things, each one barely more than a rounding error. You could zero out whole departments without moving the needle. People talk about them because of culture warfare, with "teh deficit" as a fig leaf.
In the end, the US budget is so big because we want it to be so big. And that's not inherently a bad thing. It is part of an economy doing well enough that people believe the government will repay loans. Eventually we'll outstrip that, but it's not today.
The fact that Congress is immature and incompetent... that's kind of a different problem. And one much more important than the deficit. But I don't have any idea how to fix that, because the voters know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.