debt clock counting backwards

Hi @screamingfingers, thank you for your interest in this plugin!

The direction the clock travels is based on whether the publicized debt amount is currently in an increasing trend or a decreasing trend. This is detected by looking at the difference between the last two “Total Public Debt Outstanding” debt amounts at https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/debt-to-the-penny. If you’d prefer, you can turn of the counting animation altogether in the plugin’s widget settings.

If you’re seeing some other behavior here, it would be great to have details: example amounts being displayed, timestamps, etc. so that I can look into it further.

Every place I’ve tested the plugin including at the URL you provided is showing a debt amount close to $28 trillion. Glad that refreshing the page worked out for you.

If you have any questions or if you need anything else, just let me know.

Based on the most recently available debt data that I linked to, the debt level held by the public has decreased in recent days, so it is expected that this plugin’s output will reflect that. Again, you can disable the animation of the number if you’d like.

Hi @screamingfingers. I’m not quite sure what else I can offer here. As noted earlier, it is expected that the animation will show a decreasing amount when the difference between the most recent two data points on debt show a decrease. That’s exactly the case with the data available for October 21 ($28,842,489,318,660.40) and October 22 ($28,828,878,392,199.23), so it’s expected that the amount would show as decreasing because that reflects that debt trend.

My best suggestion is to disable the animation if you don’t like that the number is shown as decreasing, or to look for another plugin that will better meet your needs.

In the widget settings for the debt clock widget, please uncheck the option labeled “Animate dollar amount with estimated change over time?” and the animation will be disabled.