I'm not sure how much deficits matter.
I've thought about it a lot and it's a hard one for me to make sense of.
But I'm pretty good at remembering who said what and when.
From 2009 to 2017, there was a lot of talk about the deficit. A lot. It went up a lot due to the stimulus, which Obama said was necessary to alleviate the recession. Obama and his surrogates encouraged us to not look at the deficit at that time. His opponents brought it up every other sentence. The recession ended, whether the stimulus helped or not, and of course deficits went down. Suddenly Obama and his people wanted us to pay a lot of attention to that.
But the Obama years give a hint at a framework: deficit spending is a tool to alleviate recessions, it should go back down once the economy is healthy again.
However now we have Obama sized deficits in an economy that has really good indicators. And we have Obama's old opponents in Congress and on talk radio saying absolutely nothing about the deficits.
What changed?

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