If you search the internet for “U.S. national debt,” one site you’re sure to find is the U.S. Debt Clock. If you want to get a sense of how fast the U.S. national debt is changing, it does its job, I suppose. But it’s a mistake to call it a clock.
It is really a dashboard, and a convoluted one at that. It presents about a hundred points of data. Some are directly related to the U.S. national debt, but more than half are not. From a user perspective, it’s on the level of a video gaming machine in a Las Vegas
