economist and fiscal policy guru Daniel J. Mitchell has crunched the numbers. https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2025/04/21/improved-data-on-ronald-reagans-fiscal-performance/

In 2020, I crunched numbers from OMB’s Historical Tables to rank the fiscal performance of nine recent presidents, going all the way back to LBJ.

I was especially interested to see which presidents did best and worst when looking on overall domestic spending (entitlements plus discretionary).

The numbers showed that Ronald Reagan easily was the most fiscally prudent while Richard Nixon was the worst of the worst (though there’s an argument that LBJ was even worse when looking at the long-run impact of his policies). //

Mr. Mitchell also notes:

You have to go back to Harding and Coolidge to find presidents who were analogous to Reagan.

And there's a name I was not surprised to see: Silent Cal Coolidge. We could use a little Silent Cal today.