The U.S. [tag]Debt Clock[/tag] has a special significance in American culture; it’s a depressing reminder not only of our astonishing national debt, but also of each Americans’ share of the national fiscal liability.
But it now appears that there’s a practical problem with the clock: It’s run out of digits.
Tick, 20,000 dollars, tock, another 20,000 dollars.
So rapid is the rise of the US [tag]national debt[/tag], that the last four digits of a giant digital signboard counting the moving total near New York’s Times Square move in seemingly random increments as they struggle to keep pace.
The national debt clock, as it is known, is a big clock. A spot-check last week showed a readout of 8.3 trillion — or more precisely 8,310,200,545,702 — dollars … and counting.
But it’s not big enough. Sometime in the next two years, the total amount of US government borrowing is going to break through the 10-trillion-dollar mark and, lacking space for the extra digit such a figure would require, the clock is in danger of running itself into obsolescence.
Oddly enough, in the late 1990s, the Debt Clock faced a different kind of problem. Clinton was starting to pay off the debt and the clock had technical troubles. Apparently, it was never designed to run backwards to reflect a shrinking debt. In fact, at the end of Clinton’s second term, Douglas Durst, who owns the clock after inheriting it from his inventor father, pulled the plug on the clock altogether.
Fortunately — or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective — the Debt Clock wasn’t dismantled.
[Durst] only had to wait two years as the Bush presidency coincided with an upsurge in borrowing. The curtain was raised in 2002 and the digital readout flickered back to life showing a national debt of 6.1 trillion dollars with the numerals whizzing round faster than ever.
Now, the 10-trillion-dollar mark is right around the corner. And the man responsible for the federal budget just got promoted.