The German government is using legal tricks to hide the true extent of its spending and is stacking up so much debt that its actions “threaten the future sustainability of the public finances.”

That is the alarming conclusion of the Federal Audit Office.

“In (the first) 70 years of its existence, the federal government built up public debt of 1.3 trillion euros,” the agency’s boss, Kay Scheller, told the Redaktionsnetzwerk newspapers this week. “In just three years - 2020 to 2022 - the mountain of debt then rose by a staggering 800 billion euros to over two trillion euros.”

That is worth repeating. Since 2020 new federal debt has amounted to 60 percent of all the debt that has accumulated over the entire history of the modern German state!

And here’s the curious thing. At the same time as this historic level of public spending is taking place, the government is assuring people that it will stick to the constitutionally enshrined ‘debt brake’ again by 2024.

“For the federal budget, we will …