Balanced Budget Amendments: Damned if you do, damned also regardless of what you do

So I'm writing this final for my government finances class and it's like pulling teeth because it's not a topic I particularly care about and the class is really low level and I'm coming up to the conclusion I most hate in public policy (oh, well, we're screwed here but there's nothing we can do) so I'll just vent the basics of the topic on you guys.

So yeah, we all know that the idea of the balanced budget amendment seems like a simple fix for what to many seems like one of the great problems of our time--debt and deficit spending and whatever.  Deficit spending is always bad regardless of context, so the obvious solution is to make it illegal, right?

This comes up against the brunt of the problem--lawmakers aren't doing deficit spending during boom years because they're morally specious individuals (though they are but hey), they overspend because they are rewarded for short-term growth.  Almost all the research I've looked into has corroborated with the idea that having strong growth during your election year is one of the best ways to get elected.  This means that larger systemic issues (like the debt you're accruing from this deficit-engineered growth, or whether your economy's fundamentals are at all sound) are ignored in favor of a series of short term boosts promoted by deficit spending.  So while moderate internet lefties blame Bush for the recession, this kind of short-sightedness would likely have been followed by a democrat and indeed has been replicated all over the country.  This concrete pressure towards deficit spending has led to us going deeper and deeper into debt all during years when we should have been paying it off.

So yeah, simple solution: ban deficit spending.  This leads to the common kind of balanced budget amendment you see at the state level, which is cash-basis balanced budget amendments.  Cash-basis is a really simple form of accounting that just means that your cash inflows must match outflows at the end of the fiscal year.  It doesn't account for growth or for what other non-cash assets you have (a far more interesting question I should've gone with is does cash-basis accounting lead to a stronger pressure for privatizations since, if you're selling your assets off at market price, a privatization of your assets would by any more complicated system than cash-basis would be budget-neutral), it simply counts the cash you have at the end of the year.

The issue with cash-basis accounting is that it's both very draconian and too easy to cheat.  Thus, New York State, which has had a balanced budget amendment since the early 00's, has also run deficits (by doing a series of accounting tricks like sending out checks the day after the fiscal year ends, or by selling off roads, by underfunding pensions, by not accounting for yearly raises in municipal worker's wages and then putting off negotiations until the end of the year/until the next guy gets elected, all of which [besides the last one if you can get away with it for a couple of years] don't actually do anything to lower your 'real' deficit).  The issue that arises from this is that cash-basis accounting does not fix the incentives problem that leads to deficit spending, thus so long as no one cares about the deficit you can go on running de facto deficits until a recession hits, which is when people start caring about your deficits and debt.  Thus, forced cash-basis balanced budgets not only don't work, they lead towards cyclical policy making.

Accrual-based budgeting is slightly better (because it accounts for growth and counts non-cash assets) but it's far easier to cheat.

Anyways there's nothing that really solves the incentive problem and we're stuck with shoddy policymaking forever wooo