Just to be sure that you understand this correctly, the deficit is only the difference between what the government spends and what it takes in in one year. To use your credit card analogy, the deficit is how much more you put on your card in a month, say, than you pay off. When you add all the deficits from the various years, you get the debt.

Also to nitpick, the Reagan-Bush era ended in January of 1993.

For 1992, the last year of George HW Bush's presidency, the deficit was $290,334,000 (in dollars from the year $2000).  Before Bush, President Reagan had run deficits as low as $78,968,000 in 1981 and as high as $221,227,000 in 1986.