No APIs. No AI. Just an official number and a clock.
Every "Live" counter starts from an anchor: an official annual or period total from a named government source, and the exact moment that total was true. From there, the site divides the annual figure into a per-second rate, and the page simply adds rate × seconds elapsed to the anchor, live, in your browser. Close the tab and reopen it — the counter picks up exactly where the math says it should be, because it's not "remembering" anything, it's recalculating from the same two numbers every time.
Most of the figures on this site — GDP, the national debt, tax collected — are only published periodically (daily at the earliest, often monthly or quarterly) even by the government itself. There is no live feed to call. A formula estimate that ticks smoothly between official updates is actually a more honest real-time picture than a number that jumps once a month and sits flat otherwise.
There's nothing to model or predict here — it's arithmetic on a public number. Introducing AI would add cost, latency, and a black box where a simple, auditable formula already does the job.
Numbers like the Federal Funds Rate, mortgage rates, or the unemployment rate are not cumulative totals — they're levels. Ticking them upward every second would misrepresent what they are. Instead, rate counters show the exact last-published value with an "as of" date, and are refreshed as soon as practical after each official release.
Anchor values and per-second rates are reviewed quarterly at minimum, and sooner whenever a source publishes a figure materially different from what's on the site. See the data updates log for the history.