The statement
"President Trump's Republican Party will create more debt in one year than was generated in the first 200 years of America's existence."
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, Sept. 11 in a column for the Washington Post
The ruling
First, there are two common measures for debt. One, called public debt, tallies up the debt held by the public, while gross federal debt is a larger figure that combines publicly held debt plus debt held by the government itself, such as in the Social Security or Medicare trust funds. Both figures are considered legitimate, and since Scarborough didn't specify which one she was referring to, we'll run the numbers for both categories of debt.
Because debt is cumulative (minus any intervening surpluses), the debt level at the end of a given time period is the cumulative debt up to that point -- you don't have to add the yearly figures for debt to get the figure Scarborough is referencing.
The first question to answer is, when do you start counting to calculate debt for "the first 200 years of America's existence"?
Probably the most obvious way to do it is to look at the cumulative debt between 1776, the date of the Declaration of Independence, and 1976, the national bicentennial year.
At the end of 1976, the public debt was $477.4 billion, and the gross federal debt was just under $629 billion.
So how does that compare to Trump's record?
The amount of public debt added in 2017 -- a year when Trump was president for all but 20 days and when the Republicans were in control of Congress -- was $497.8 billion, while the amount of gross federal debt added was $666.3 billion.
Whichever variety of debt you use, the amount of debt added under Republican control in 2017 was greater than the accumulated debt by the end of 1976, making Scarborough's statement correct. (Economists do not typically adjust debt figures for inflation; the figures cited above are nominal dollars.)
Meanwhile, projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office suggest that the size of the debt under Trump will only grow from what it was in 2017. In 2018, 2019 and 2020, the debt is projected to increase by more than $1 trillion in each year.
Will Trump, GOP create more debt in one year than in first 200 years of U.S.? :: WRAL.com