(Washington Times) President Obama and Congress suffered a massive budget relapse over the last year, sending the deficit soaring by a staggering 34 percent in fiscal 2016, according to the final numbers released Friday.
Debt piled up at rates unseen since the early years of the Obama administration, and the deficit hike was the latest since the depths of the Great Recession.
The Treasury Department said the government ended the year $587 billion in the hole, up from $438 billion in 2015.
The problems came on both sides of the ledger: Revenue rose by less than 1 percent, as the economic continued to sputter after more than seven years of recovery. And that was nowhere near enough to keep up with politicians’ appetites for more spending, which surged 5 percent.
