Why not add timer functionality to the core?

Why not add timer functionality to the core?

It seems to be that jQuery is all about taking what you can already do in JS in browsers, and wrapping it to make it a lot easier.  To that end, timer functionality would seem to be an ideal thing to add to the jQuery core.  You could have named timers, or timers associated with individual DOM elements.  I could just refer to a timer by name, for example:

$.timer("redCountdown").start();
$.timer("redCountdown").changeInterval(123);
$.timer("redCountdown").stop();

Or have a timer associated with DOM element(s) whose callback function is passed the associated element:

$('.countdownBar').timer(function(elem){ ... update each countdown bar in some way ...});

For those who say, "why not just directly use setInterval/setTimeout" - because a jQuery wrapper would be much more convenient.  Isn't that the whole point of jQuery - to take functionality that could be done without jQuery, and make it much more convenient to use?