At the top of the House Budget Committee website, there is a 14-digit clock, ticking away at all hours of the day and night.
Instead of counting down, however, this clock is moving upward from $36 trillion. And even if it’s not unwinding toward zero, to the Hollywood moment when the time bomb will explode, the point is the same: The clock is marching toward calamity.
These debt clocks, once a digital staple of the Tea Party Republicans who took over Congress in 2010, are mostly gone from lawmaker websites. Where they once hung outside of GOP congressional offices, displaying numbers like $15 trillion near the end of Barack Obama’s first term, there are now just more bureaucratic white walls.