Budgets in the EU are also structured or rather presented in different ways. As I understand it, the US budgets are not "balanced" in the same way. Here the presentation has to end in a 0 so your projected expenditure is always balanced by projected tax income plus borrowing. Budgets have an amount for "contingencies" built in so for example, the first year cost of the Iraq war was paid for from one rather than having to issue further "supplementals" as in the US Certainly in the UK all this happens before the start of the financial year rather than after it.

One interesting statistic is that the UK long-term government bonds are currently offering a real rate of return between 0% and 0.5%. In other words, it costs virtually nothing in real interest to borrow, although this is distorted at the moment by rules concerning the borrowing structure for pension funds.