U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time | Hacker News Reader

U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time

usdebtclock.org

21 pointsjonmc1212 comments

  $ wget -q -O - http://www.usdebtclock.org | grep "\<embed\>" | wc -l
        92

Goodness.

edit: Check out their about page, too: http://www.usdebtclock.org/about.html

Haha that's one way to deal with browser differences...

Debt per citizen : 41392. Debt per taxpayer: 116490.

41392 / 116490 = 35.5%; can it really be that so few are taxpayers?

Is it OK for them to be using the Great Seal as a logo?

Apparently.

So, now tell me what debt is.

http://incredimazing.com/static/media/2008/03/27/c4ac3ef1404...

what an intentionally misleading graphic.

Can you point to the misleading part? I couldn't find it.

Are you referring to policies that was taken during one administration that might have lead to deficit or surplus in the next administration?

its a derivative being presented as its absolute function

Not sure how that's misleading actually. The derivative in this case is "spending - revenue", which is the thing that governments can actually control. A zero-borrowing budget (which would be a huge improvement at least according to the "spending is bad" metric that seems to be en vogue) would show a debt graph that looks almost exactly like your mortgage -- flat and uninformative.

Plotting the deficit shows which policies are likely to lead to sustainable government spending and which ones don't.

It's misleading because you have to take the integral to get the actual debt, right? (Which is always increasing, just apparently less quickly with democratic presidents. OTOH, a democratic president and a republican Congress is a great way to get nothing passed, which is free... and the image doesn't show anything about that.)

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