Numbers don’t back crowing about debt

On “Fox & Friends” Saturday morning, former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain credited President Donald Trump with reducing the national debt, after just one month in office.

“And here’s another statistic that I haven’t heard anybody talk about. Did you know that the national debt in President Trump’s first month went down $12 billion?” Cain asked the hosts.

Less than an hour later, the statistic appeared on another highly visible platform. “The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo,” Trump tweeted.

The debt statistics Trump and Cain cited appeared earlier this week in an article on the conservative blog Gateway Pundit, which compared the change in the U.S. debt load during Trump’s first month in office with what happened for former president Barack Obama. Looking closer at these figures, they hardly add up to the success that Trump and Cain are claiming.

The Gateway Pundit article says that the change in debt under Trump translates to a 0.1 percent reduction in the U.S. debt burden. However, that may be because they had their Excel spreadsheet set to display only one decimal point. Re-crunching their numbers, the change in the total debt outstanding between Jan. 20 and Feb. 21 is -0.0006 percent - pretty much nada.

The dollar figures, which come from the Treasury Department, are accurate, but they deserve a lot more context.

The level of debt fluctuates day to day and week to week, depending on seasonal changes in growth and when the government makes payments, collects tax revenues, issues new debt and other debt matures — making the data very susceptible to cherry-picking.

Using the same logic, for example, you could claim that after four days in office Trump increased outstanding public debt by more than $10 billion, and that Obama had reduced it by $6 billion.

On Thursday, the public debt outstanding was $19.9 trillion — or, to be more exact, $19,913,903,120,188.10. And while that is less than it was on inauguration day, it’s $29.2 billion more than it was on Feb. 8. All that goes to say you can’t pay attention to infinitesimal movements in the debt week-to-week.

It’s impossible to know if Trump’s election has really had time to filter through to concretely affect the economy. Congress has not passed any of his policies yet.

While it’s possible anticipation of tax cuts or regulatory relief is heating up the economy and leading to increased government receipts, investors might also be choosing not to sell assets to avoid current capital gains tax rates and waiting to see if Congress cuts those rates.