MOsanthrope

Posted by Chris on March 31, 2006 at 12:13 pm.

 
The thirteen digits available on Times Square’s famous national debt clock will soon be inadequate to tally our rapidly increasing national debt:

So rapid is the rise of the US national debt, 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.

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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.

The clock’s owner, real estate developer Douglas Durst, knew such a problem could arise but hadn’t counted on it so soon.

According to the AFP article, the clock experienced an unanticipated mechanical problem in the late nineties: “It wasn’t designed to run backwards,” Durst said.

Durst decided to mothball the clock in 2000, but placed it back in service two years later when the national debt again began to rapidly increase. At that time the clock displayed $6.1 trillion.

Filed under: Politics, U.S., Economy