The last time an administration engineered a budget surplus, voters soundly rejected a continuation of that regime in favor of an 8-year spending binge. A substantial number of voters are planning on voting this fall for the candidate whose economic policy has contributed the most to the current debt.
Generally, looking at the last 30 years or so, it is evident that voters do not care about this issue very much.
I am going to argue slightly on your wording although I fully acknowledge the numbers do line up with your timeline.
RE the budget surplus, the dotcom boom led to a large increase in taxes collected which collapsed from 2000 to 2003. Similarly countries naturally spend more when their population is either skewing old or skewing young. The US hit peak working-age demographics during the period you are describing. The outcome doesn't seem to be "engineered" so much as accidental. In fact taxes on balance were cut during this timeframe while significant contributors to the long term debt / future crisis were unleashed (glass steagall repeal which arguably led to the great financial crisis & federal loans for eduction were dramatically expanded without oversight to ensure the money was being well spent).
Similarly, the covid response caused an explosion in the budget deficit which I wouldn't blame squarely on "a candidate's economic policy". The 2023 deficit in real dollars and as a % of GDP the largest (by a fair amount!) outside of a war, economic crisis, or the covid response. This doesn't even count the ~400? billion in student loan forgiveness that was attempted and failed.
"Generally, looking at the last 30 years or so, it is evident that voters do not care about this issue very much" <- 100% agree.
My bias is that I don't give mulligans or asterisks to presidents[1]. Every administration faces a unique set of challenges, and some of those will be financial. Most of the others will involve large-scale finances. So I don't grant escapes to administrations that are hit by recession, war, or plague. That's literally part of the job.
How that relates to the (relevant!) factors you raise is that firstly, most of them were knowable at the time. Bush knew that tax revenue was falling when he proposed his tax cuts. He also planned two foreign wars without planning to pay for them. These were choices that were quite obviously, without the benefit of hindsight, going to lead to increased deficits.
Covid was unpredictable, but the administration had choices on how to handle the deficit spending. Notably, they did not choose to increase revenue in any meaningful way. And the administration was not blocked by Congress in this, raising revenue was simply not a concern mooted by the Executive. (They did not even add spring-loaded revenue increase that would trigger when the economy recovered.)
These choices to increase the deficit were made will roughly all the information we have now. Both choices were contemporaneously derided by deficit hawks; it is not a surprise that they raised the deficit.
But again, Dick Cheney was correct that deficits do not matter (to voters).
I legitimately cant tell who you are referring too, politics is so muddled now that both sides believe wholeheartedly that their side is the one with the correct plan to fix the economy.
I wrote it that way intentionally. The data are available, so it's easy enough to find out "who was president during the last budget surplus" and "who presided over the largest increase in the federal debt." Some people will be surprised by the answers and will see the data as partisan.
I'm not linking to sources because people feel the need to find the sources or they don't believe them. But there are a number of graphs of the numbers available on the Internet.
Suffice it to say that any adviser advising a presidential candidate to pay any attention to the deficit beyond lip service is doing that candidate a disservice, as voters have shown time and again that they simply do not care.
According to Investopedia [1], US debt rose most under administrations of FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan. This is pretty easy to explain by their terms coinciding with winning in WWII, WWI, and the Cold War respectively.
The last president to attain a budget surplus was indeed a surprise for me.
That's like crediting a football team's chapionship win 100% to the players and 0% to the coach. It's true in the most literal sense, yet widely missing the mark.
Congress does all legislation. Saying the President "just" signs legislation handily relieves the President of responsibility for any laws they sign during their tenure.
But Presidents typically take credit for their legislative wins, so we also give them credit for budgets they sign.
(It is also the case that one measure of the efficacy of an administration is the quality of the budgets they are able to coax out of Congress.)
Eh, the majority party in controls the budget negotiations, and the president is either the leader of that party or of the minority party. Either way there is considerably more involvement than just signing the result of other people’s work.
I think I first heard Biden say, "don't tell me what you believe, show me your budget and I'll tell you what you believe". He perhaps got it from Ted Kennedy who I doubt was the first person to say it, but I've just found it to be one of the simplest ways to cut through BS. Talk is cheap; doing the work is not. And as you say, when you look at the US budget deficit through the last half century, it's quite clear that the party that claims the mantle of fiscal responsibility it not on the level.
There was a surplus in the last year of the Clinton presidency, so I presume he's referring to George W Bush. There was also the whole 9/11 and War on Terror thing in the first year of his presidency though, so it's hardly a fair comparison. Gore would have blown his budget if he'd won too.
Largely speaking democrat administrations reduce the deficit while republican administrations increase the deficit, despite this being the polar opposite of political talking points.
I remember the budget hawks in the aughts saying that if the administration wanted to spend a ton of money on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (this: unrelated to 9/11), that it would be fiscally prudent to raise tax revenue to cover the costs. Bush instead cut tax revenue substantially.
I'm not making a judgement either way, just saying that there was a choice here and Bush made the choice to increase the deficit. (Dick Cheney was correct when he advised Bush that deficits don't matter. The increase in the deficit indeed didn't matter to the electorate, and the deficit spending, in part via tax cuts, did win him a second term.)
Both Gore and Clinton were actual budget hawks. A big part of his campaign was highlighting the fact that the last few years had been budget surpluses, and talking about paying off the debt entirely.
We all know he would have been better than Bush, the bar is low, but you don't have to make it look like we missed out on the least shitty president in all of US history.
While the Congress certainly plays a major role, some of the hugest debt sources are wars, and getting into a war is never done without a presidential decision. Especially starting a war, like in Iraq in 2003.
To the best of my recollection, all of the budgets in the timeframe I mention were signed by the sitting president. (I realize this is not necessary for laws to take effect, but in the years I cited I believe the presidents all signed the budgets into law.)
If you want to argue that presidents are not responsible for laws bearing their signatures, I stridently disagree.
Presidents can only sign what is put in front of them. They have the option to veto, and sometimes do, but in many cases they may view that as the worst of two bad choices.
This position handily relieves the Executive branch of responsibility for any laws they sign during their tenure.
As Presidents typically take credit for their legislative wins, we also give them credit for budgets they sign. (And then we name them things like "Reaganomics.")
The budgeting process is a huge hairball of political Rube Goldberg contraptions, and who "proposes" the budget on paper has very little to do with the actual political maneuvering involved. As far as the point of this discussion is concerned, both Congress and the President are responsible, since both branches are deeply involved in the political maneuvering.
> voters soundly rejected a continuation of that regime
In that election the democrats had net gains in both houses of congress, the democratic presidential candidate won the popular vote, and the presidential election was won by 537 votes. I don't know how this could be called "soundly rejected."
Congress writes the budget, not the President's administration. What was notable about the late 90s was for the first time in 40 years the Democrats did not control the House of Representatives. One could argue that divided government forces compromise which is a good thing. Personally, I think the financial problems in the United States transcend political party.
Generally, looking at the last 30 years or so, it is evident that voters do not care about this issue very much.