There was a bit of an argument at a wedding I went to last night and we decided that we should just stop and look it up, so here are the facts:

A deficit is when a government spends more than it takes in.
The accumulated deficit over a period of time is the debt.

The absolute value of the national debt has been steadily increasing since 1981 (Reagan) when it was 2.0 trillion dollars. It is currently over 7.0 trillion dollars! This site has a couple nice graphs of the debt over time (one is corrected for inflation if that concerns you, but the trend is the same)
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/faq.html

However, the accepted method of evaluating the national debt is by comparing it to GDP (the nation’s income). Reagan inherited the lowest national debt ‘as a percentage of GDP’ since the great depression (32.5%) and began deficit spending on a massive scale (this is excused by the Republican party faithful today as Reagan’s brilliant strategy to outspend the Russians to topple Communism). When Clinton took office, the US national debt ‘as a percentage of GDP’ was about 70%! Clinton reduced the DEFICIT year after year until the national DEBT was “only” about 55% of a percentage of GDP. It seems likely that this is more an effect of the growth of our GDP during this time than any massive spending cuts (the boom created by the dot-coms in the 90s) but Clinton did cut spending and we started to save a lot of money by computerizing government services.
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html