Great Job, Suggestion

Thanks for your note. There are CSS classes available for additional customization; see the source HTML of the rendered widget for all of them, but a few key ones are:

• us_debtclock_widget_introduction
• us_debtclock_widget_amount
• us_debtclock_widget_credit

There are also various general ways to customize the CSS of a widget.

I hope that helps!

I thought everything was fine until I noticed the clock is counting down, not up.

I wish the national debt was going down, but we all know it is not.

Any ideas?

Sometimes the debt does decrease. In the last two data points made available on TreasuryDirect dot gov (the site this plugin uses as its data source), the debt decreased from $35,965,533,024,604.05 on Nov. 14 to $35,959,176,987,940.11 on Nov. 15. The plugin’s animation is based on the recent data points and any trend they might represent.

Thanks for the quick response, but before I sent this note I compared the calculation to four other websites that track the debt and they all seem to be headed up, not down. The speed of the growth in the debt would seem to me to overcome any temporary drop. The figures you cited are probably right, but would that not just establish a new baseline from which the debt rises? That is a correction to the previous estimates, not a trend.

I looked at the USDebtClock.org, The Treasury Department, and two others claiming to connect to these. The White House website pegs the debt at about $4 T lower, but that is pure propaganda from what I read. Not even the Treasury would accept the WH figures. I know that there has to be some estimation between official reporting dates, but if it drops it would seem to me that it establishes a new baseline from which it can only rise.

I ran into a discussion yesterday talking about the debt going down, but that was in relation to tax season and payments, which established a new floor. Every website that reports the debt that I can find has it rising. I am concerned that if I use your plugin my users will just disregard the figures as incorrect.

Thanks and a good discussion.

Here is an example that I think agrees with the official government figures. They peg the last official number as $35.95T on 11/14 and show it now growing to $35.977T. These sound more reasonable knowing what we know about the debt.

United States National Debt Tracker (Real-Time)

You can always turn off the animation in the widget settings if you don’t want to display the numbers changing in a certain direction.