""The federal debt shrunk relative to the GDP from 1958-1967, 1969-1970, 1972-1975, 1977-1980, and 1997-2001.""
That is not the same as paying down debt...debt continued to rise is most of those years, GDP grew faster. In 2003 and 2004 and 2005 GDP grew faster than the accumlation of debt, so your figures are wrong. Your numbers from 2005 to 2006 say that debt grw nearly 2% faster than did GDP. Thus The budget deficit in 2005-06 would have had to been over 6% of GDP or nearly 700b dollars. Those figures you posted make no sense.