Senate candidate Hovde showed this photo.
source: head.
I believe the candidate's staff made the addition correctly, although I think the calculation is pointless. For example, how were the debts of the various colonies calculated in 1776? More substantively, does it make sense to report nominal debt over such a long period? *I think maybe nominal debt divided by nominal GDP makes more sense.
figure 1: Total federal debt as a percentage of GDP (blue). Note the total debt at the end of the fiscal year as a percentage of historical GDP. The orange shading mainly represents the Trump administration (debt from fiscal year 2016 to fiscal year 2020). source: U.S. Treasury Department, measure valueand the author's calculations.
It's hard to get the recent context through annual data (lately, federal debt held by the public, FRED series FYGFDPUN, makes more sense as a measure of debt). Therefore, I show in Figure 2 the year-over-year change in federal debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP.
figure 2: Year-on-year percentage change in the ratio of federal debt held by the public to GDP (blue). NBER-defined recession peak-to-trough dates appear gray. The orange dotted lines represent the beginning and end of the Trump administration, with dates in the first quarter of 2017 and the fourth quarter of 2020. Source: U.S. Treasury Department through FRED, BEA, NBER, and author's calculations.
The largest increase in federal debt as a percentage of GDP occurred during the Trump administration.
For a similarly spurious (and arithmetically incorrect) calculation, see the discussion in this post.
*From 1776 to 2023, CPI increased by 3501%; nominal GDP was 141,750 times that of 1790 (data from measure value).
