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.
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.