While you are generally correct in your analysis of Republican v. Democrat governance concerning the overall economy, you are almost exactly 180 degrees wrong in "why" that is the case. A great example of this is evidenced by your graph depicting US Budget Deficit By Year and how it misrepresents our economic reality.
The graph ignores the simple logic of money flow that says that every dollar created by the currency-issuing government that isn't subsequently extracted from that economy (taxation) becomes someone's monetary asset in the private sector. The "red ink" of our government is the only net source of "black ink" the private sector has. It is our money supply that we need to net retire our private sector bank debt and net save in US dollars.
This can be made into a visual representation by simply extending the graph upward from 0 so it can include a mirror representation of the private sector. Reverse all of those lines representing the government's deficit and you will see something like a sound wave where every value below 0 has an equal and opposite value above 0. If one recognizes this relationship with our money it becomes obvious that what appears as a negative is actually a potential positive.
Would it surprise you to discover that we have made significant efforts to reduce the deficit only seven times since our nation was founded? What if you also discovered that each of those, including the Clinton surplus, was almost immediately followed by a major recession or depression? They were, and they were only mitigated by massive injections of newly created money via bailouts and safety net expenditures that negated any "savings" of surplus budgets.
Republican leaders, and many Dems as well, fully understand how money works, but have no desire to educate us in their secrets, especially when even "liberals" are willing to perpetuate the single largest econ lie in history, as this piece did. They know that the "national debt" is nothing more than an accounting function reflecting the total net money supply in the economy and that "deficit spending" is the only way government can compensate the private sector for the resources and labor it demands.
Economics is seldom about numeric totals. It is about deploying resources and labor in our economy and who benefits from those. As long as the (federal) government directs its money creation to the wealthy and their corporations those entities will decide how much of it gets "trickled" down. When that government directs money creation to providing real benefits to the poor and middle class they have more say in its distribution. It's all about "where", not how much.
Please watch this video and try to "unlearn" what you may think you know about economics in the process. Dr. Kelton (econ advisor to the Sanders campaign and the Senate Budget committee) does a great job of laying out complexities of our economy in "user friendly" terms.
