Source: Congressional Budget Office, 2016.Note: In 2016, the US budget had a deficit of nearly $600 billion. To help give that number meaning, the graph below shows the federal deficit as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over time. The deficit is often shown as a percentage of GDP in order to make year-to-year and country-to-country comparisons possible. This is quite different than simply showing raw numbers, such as $600 billion. Raw numbers do not adequately show context: the size of the country, the size of the economy, and different inflation rates