Cleaning Michael Gerson's Clock

Michael Gerson is upset that Democrats didn't want to have a debt clock shown at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee. He huffs:

"numbers, it turns out, have an offensive ideological bias."

I'm sympathetic. Right alongside the debt clock we could have the lost output clock. If we use the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) measure of potential GDP this would be rising at the rate of about $3 billion a day or $1 trillion a year. If we used CBO's 2008 economic projections as the basis for...