In your story you stated: Amazon invests in its own enterprise to stay competitive. If they were to try and balance their budget, it would mean cutting the lifeblood that is ensuring the only thing about themselves that people are actually invested in seeing succeed: its own future.

This statement reflects a misunderstanding of accounting. In a private business investment, whether new or taken from profits, is not an expense. In the balanced budget enterprise profits, non-cash expenses and borrowing are available for reinvestment or return to the stockholders. If new investment comes from non-cash expenses like depreciation, there is no effect on a ‘balanced budget’.

What enterprises must do to attract investors is provide the expectation of profits now or in the future. The government does not have investors and only has the expectation that it will repay its borrowing. It may do that from new borrowing or spending less than it takes in. It does not earn a profit. People lend money to the government when they value safety and believe that the government can always pay them back since, unlike private business, it can extract the needed revenue at gunpoint from the citizens. It can also, alternatively, default on its obligations. The lenders have no security beyond the government's pledge to pay back the loans. In a private enterprise that fails, the investors receive a distribution of what is left of the company after the bondholders are paid and the assets are sold. For a government, there are no investors and the bondholders may not be paid either if the government chooses to default. The citizens end up paying for the debt one way or another.