Will Trump, GOP create more debt in one year than in first 200 years of U.S.?

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.

Some might suggest starting the clock in 1788 -- when the Constitution was ratified -- and stopping it in 1988, rather than starting with pre-Revolutionary War independence.

In that scenario, the accumulated public debt over 200 years would be $2.1 trillion and the accumulated general debt would be $2.6 trillion. That would make Scarborough's calculation incorrect.

However, "I think most people would say America began its existence in 1776," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Beyond the starting date, we see a few caveats.

First, Scarborough lays the blame entirely at the Republicans' feet. However, decisions made by Democrats or by both parties long before Trump's tenure have shaped how much was added to the debt in 2017.

Net interest on the debt accounted for 6.6 percent of federal spending in 2017, and mandatory spending -- outlays that are essentially on autopilot, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- accounted for an additional 63.3 percent of federal spending. So the broad outlines of today's spending picture were not solely set by today's Republican congressional majorities and Republican president.

Second, the inevitable grind of inflation and population growth puts an upward pressure on the scale of the debt. Unless and until the United States reverses course and starts paying down the debt, every new president will preside over ever-larger amounts of debt.

We rate the statement Mostly True.