WASHINGTON — What is so special about a balanced budget?

That question is at the heart of the warring Republican and Democratic budget plans coming out this week — with Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin vowing to eliminate the federal deficit within 10 years, and Senator Patty Murray of Washington State setting a more modest goal of bringing spending closer in line with revenue over time.

While economists generally agree that narrowing the government’s deficit and limiting the size of the debt are necessary in the long run, most argue that balancing the budget would not restore the nation’s still-weak economy to health in the near term. Indeed, rushing to do so with unemployment still elevated and the economy growing at only a sluggish pace could even set back the effort to reduce the deficit.

“There’s nothing magic about exact balance,” said Alice M. Rivlin, a Democratic economist at the Brookings Institution who has worked with Republicans like former Senator Pete V. Domenici on bipartisan deficit-reduction proposals. “The really important thing is to keep the debt from growing faster than the economy.”

The question of whether to balance the budget and when is a new staging ground in the long-running fiscal fight between Republicans and the White House. Mr. Ryan, whose previous budget proposals did not bring spending below revenue for decades, vowed this time to do so by 2023, in part to satisfy the demands of the more conservative members of the Republican Caucus.