USDebtWatch displays an estimate of the national debt of the United States of America. The estimate is updated at a regular interval specified by the user. The program was inspired by Jamie Zawinski's xdebt. I have used a more recent debt estimate based on numbers from the 5 July 1992 Albuquerque Journal (“AJ '92”). It assumes a starting figure of $3,965,170,506,502.395 as of June 30, 1992, with a linear rate of increase of $14132.887 per second. “Your share” is calculated using the estimated US Population, and its rate of increase, as of July 1, 1990, based on numbers from the CIA's World Factbook 1990. If you know of more recent and/or accurate algorithms, please send me email.
Icon
The icon is intended to depict Lady Liberty being crushed by the burden of a heavy debt portfolio. I am not an artist; otherwise, I would have done a better job.
NeXTSTEP Notes
Interface by Erik Sowa (sowa@netcom.com). USDebtWatch is an old FORTRAN hacker's first publicly–released NeXTSTEP program! Preferences for updating are stored in the defaults database.
Version 0.2 Garance Alistair Drosehn (gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu) added a preference option to save the location of the windows to the defaults database, so each user can have the windows appear right where they'd like them to.
Version 0.3 Erik Sowa (sowa@netcom.com). Replaced 1989 Survey of Current Business debt estimate with 1992 Albuquerque Journal estimate. The old estimate is still in the source code if you want to play with it. Added population estimate for “Your Share” calculation.
