It's not wrong.

We were doing great in 2000.

[EDIT] Plus of course there's the '01 crash in here, which doesn't help matters, as those never do.

Bush pushed through a huge tax cut while launching two extremely expensive wars, one of which was definitely not necessary (arguably, neither of them were a good idea—I'd have argued that at the time, certainly).

Then, financial crisis. You (under orthodox modern political-economy and national fiscal policy guidance) usually try to reserve your biggest deficit spending for exactly these kinds of cases. We had no "cushion" because we'd wasted it on tax cuts and wars. The deficit goes very unwisely deep.

Then, Obama. Tax cuts not reversed under the democrats. Wars not ended (fast enough). More expensive foreign adventures, in fact, though not really comparable to the budgetary catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan. At least the economy recovers, but we don't get back to what should be baseline levels of deficit spending, we stay way too deep in the red.

Then, Trump. More tax cuts. Deeper in the red.

And wouldn't you know it, another disaster! Covid. If only we weren't already in awful territory with our budget... but we are, and deficit spending beats a bad recession and still seeing bad budget results due to a weakened economy, so, more spending it is, because that is what you do in these cases, you're just not supposed to start from such a poor position.

Biden. Little done to fix any of that, aside from doing a pretty good job managing Covid on the econ side (which, I have my complaints, but credit where it's due)

Trump again. We're likely to see tax receipts drop due to IRS cuts and a declining economy, this time for no good reason. And they're talking tax cuts... again.

So yeah, we were on track to need decades of very-careful policy to let our GDP catch up with our debt, without making big cuts. And we'd have to raise taxes back to late-90s levels for that to work, anyway.

That many years of responsible management weren't gonna happen. Tax increases evidently aren't, either. Realistically, we were on track to eventually hit and have to work through a crisis over this, probably early in the back half of this century.

This administration appears to be moving that point many, many years earlier, though.