Can economic growth increase public debt? Previous studies on the debt-growth nexus focused on the effects of debt on growth. We present a new and opposite perspective by showing that growth can reinforce deficit spending. We construct a model of endogenous public debt driven by political myopia. The model shows that economic growth induces short-sighted politicians to increase public debt and that this effect is magnified by the extent of political myopia. We test the model’s predictions using a panel of U.S. states over the period 1963-2007. Our identification strategy rests on constitutionally-entrenched differences in gubernatorial term limits that provide plausibly exogenous cross-state variation in political time horizon, and aggregate national TFP shocks that are exogenous to individual states. We find that a one standard deviation positive TFP shock induces an approximate $480 increase in real per capita public debt in politically myopic states.