(WASHINGTON EXAMINER) — Most people think of the national debt as a huge amount of money the government owes, which grows each year because of the budget deficit, which is the amount of new money the government has to borrow to maintain current spending levels.
But the national debt is growing much more quickly than that. Over the last decade, the debt has expanded by more than $3 trillion beyond the sum of the government's budget deficits over that same period of time.
In most years, in fact, the government's reported budget deficit is lower than the actual growth in the national debt. Fiscal 2016 was a perfect example.
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