I don't believe that this question can be answered without knowing all of the functions of the federal government and being aware of the implications of losing functions. I seriously doubt anyone on here (including myself) can make an informed opinion on such a huge budgetary issue.
- I think it can be evaluated from a macro perspective. There are costs and benefits to individual programs, but there are also costs and benefits to federal spending, taxing, surpluses, and deficits.
From the longest view, federal deficits are private sector surpluses. Deficits and surpluses are flows of money, so the sum of all flows of money must equal zero.
Conservatives forget this, and don't comprehend what their calls for a balanced budget amendment mean, from a macro perspective.
One macro perspective I find particularly useful is called the sectoral balances approach, which looks at the economy being divided, monetarily, into three sectors: the federal government, which is the monopoly issuer of the currency, the private sector, which produces real wealth and private credit/debt and uses the government currency, and the foreign sector with which the private sector trades.
The conservative approach is to argue that responsibility demands that the private sector and government sector must both either balance their budgets or run surpluses.
What they forget is that surpluses and deficits (like profits and losses) are flows, and cannot simultaneously exist among all sectors. For one sector to have a surplus (and a profit would be a surplus), then another sector must run a deficit.
For both the government and private sector to be net positive, the only way that can happen is for the US to be a net exporting country, with net flows of money incoming from other countries in exchange for real wealth which we produce. The only way that can happen is for US workers to allow wages to fall, and to forego the enjoyment of real wealth so that it can be shipped to other countries in order to produce a financial profit for the private sector (which would have to be realized, necessarily, outside of wages) and for the government.
This is why they have to advocate a race to the bottom for US workers. They don't understand their own logic, but at some intuitive level they know that people must be forced to suffer to produce the financial surpluses they feel government must run.
They simultaneously forget that government is the monopoly issuer of its own currency, so there is no reason it should run a financial surplus. To government, which creates money at will ("printing" it), money is free. Governments which produce their own currency are not constrained from producing more - their constraint is on their ability to buy real resources with that money, which means inflation, in a practical sense is their limiting constraint on spending.
So yes, even though we cannot evaluate individual programs this way, it is very clear that we can evaluate a macroeconomic effect which tells us whether government should have a deficit, surplus, or balanced budget. The answer will be different, depending on the behavior of the private and foreign sectors. Government exists to serve the private sector (us), and its budgetary position should be tailored to support our objectives.
If our objectives are to employ our labor and other real resources in order to create wealth and to provide savings for ourselves, that is only possible if we have government run deficits or if we run trade surpluses.
This is also my answer to the OP, and includes my cost-benefit analysis at a macroeconomic level.
