First, the national debt and the deficit are two different things.
The national debt is the accumulation of debt over 250 years. The deficit is the ongoing annual addition to that total debt.
National Debt = Sum Total of all the ANNUAL DEFICITS
Second, the Republicans and Democrats are culpable in both. Neither has done a serious thing about reducing the debt or the deficit since Clinton in the early 90s. We can debate who did what first and/or the most. But neither is anywhere remotely clean on this point.
Yes, and as I've noted here, Clinton's "accomplishment" was a complete fluke anyway. He only got it because the voters stood up at town halls and knocked down his $1T the first decade attempt at socialized medicine. Plus, I love how he ignores that his own party pulled the same "Lucy holding the football" trick they love, immediate tax increases with "later" spending cuts that never happen - they only happened this time because of the wipeout at the 1994 midterms, and Gingrich and Dole felt, "Meh, you passed these cuts, we'll take them."
What I'm saying is, sure, we can give Clinton credit for the one four-year accident that happened, but it only happened because of things he actually opposed being forced on him.
Third, there are two balrogs to address. Social Security and Medicare. So long as the speaker addresses anything other than these two points, they're pandering to their base.
DOGE was never anything more than political strutting. The numbers to be gained by cutting personnel in an admittedly bloated federal bureaucracy pale in comparison to Social Security and Medicare.
I don't object to streamlining the federal payroll. But expecting personnel cuts to address the deficit (let alone the national debt), is kind of like thinking a rain shower will turn the Sahara Desert into Alabama's Black Belt.
Theatrics that are a sound and a fury signifying nothing.
But what I honestly wonder is this: how much of our deficit has to do with people living longer and thus deriving more of a benefit than was presumed originally from Social Security and Medicare (which, of course, did not exist in 1935)? I recall seeing a show back around 1993 showing that when FDR originally passed SS, the projections were that by 1980 it would cost the government about $6B per year. And then in 1980, it cost about $290B per year, which is one helluva miscalculation (and again - that doesn't even include Medicare or Medicaid that came later).
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Look, I think it's surely possible to have too much fixation on the deficit. Not that it isn't important, but - and you've forgotten more about money than I'll ever know - circumstances sometimes impose themselves so that even the best laid plans cannot happen. Presidents (and Congress) are not clairvoyants. A President can be sitting down to agree to budget deficit reduction with the other party (1990 Bush-Foley-Mitchell) and while the negotiations are ongoing be pushed into spending unplanned billions on a war to liberate
oil Kuwait because the cost of not doing something is far worse. FDR, Carter, and Reagan all promised balanced budgets, they all did different things and not one of them ever came close*. We had ONE balanced budget between 1932 and 1946, but I'm also sure anyone who knows the basics of history knows why. We then had four in five years, but we also had horrid inflation post-WW2.
Carter's party ran the entire show his four years, but
his deficits ranged between $59B and $79B.
But Carter was also the victim of the inflation caused by both LBJ's social programs and Vietnam War, because the Big Texan was loathe to raise taxes as his unpopularity increased. And while I think some of the criticism of Reagan's early policies are fair, it should also be remembered that unemployment skyrocketed, which made already bad numbers even worse. Obama got us some trillion dollar deficits - but what was he supposed to do when he walked into two wars and a crashed economy? I think Trump was a colossal disaster (and his party, too) on the 2017 tax cut and spending - but we have to spot both Trump and Biden a bit of grace with the pandemic, too.
* - note that FDR did have a balanced budget in the wake of the 1937 Recession, but the national debt still increased by $1 billion that year.
