Every year, the government collects some money and spends more or less of it. For most of the postwar era the two lines nearly touched. They haven't touched since FY2001. Everything between the lines is what we borrow — and OMB's own baseline shows the gap still open through 2031. All figures in 2025 dollars (OMB's GDP price deflator), so the comparison is real purchasing power, not nominal inflation. Hover any year for exact figures.
The green is the surplus era that no longer exists. The wedge opened in the 1980s, closed briefly under the late-'90s boom, and tore open after 2008 — then again in 2020. Even OMB's baseline (hatched) never brings the lines back together: the FY2031 gap is still 4.2% of GDP. Every dollar of the $40T+ national debt is area between these two lines — the debt is not a separate thing, it is the gap, accumulated.
Why % of GDP: a $1.8T deficit in a $30T economy is not the same animal as $1.8T in a $3T economy. The wartime years and FY2020 (−14.5% of GDP) are the times Americans chose to tear the scale; note that the structural deficit of the 2010s–2030s runs at roughly a third of the pandemic's — every year, by choice or drift, not by crisis.
Two quiet revolutions. The corporate income tax — 26% of what the government collected in 1950 — has shrunk to 9%. The payroll tax most people never itemize now takes 33% of all receipts, and the individual income tax 51%. Together: ordinary workers fund the government several times over what corporations do — and the "other" band includes customs duties, which more than doubled in FY2025 to $194.9B as tariffs returned at scale not seen in decades (some may be refunded, pending the Supreme Court's IEEPA ruling).