The deficits of the past 30 years have been inefficient because the amount of stimulus Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama have created has been minute compared to the growth of the debt. This is because over the past 30 years our deficit spending has been tied up in garbage: tax credits for the rich, the military-industrial complex, pumping up Wall Street and keeping 90 year olds on life support. It's stuff that doesn't promote rapid growth and consumption.
$500 billion dollar deficits like we have now are bad, but if we cut and replaced all of our spending with a $500 billion deficit that featured infrastructure spending, education, help for the working class consumer, and small business investment, we could keep that deficit going infinitely.
The military-industrial complex is stimulus too. It provides lots of jobs. But you can't count on stimulus spending as self-correcting of the deficit any more than you can of tax cuts. There is some stimulus spending to be sure that will be effective enough to improve revenues in the future, and some tax cuts that will as well. But it's incredibly difficult to predict what those exact measures will be, and in any case they'll be unlikely to be enough to take care of being half a trillion dollars in the red on an annual basis.