Posted on 04/30/2012 12:10:52 PM PDT by mdittmar
Figure has ballooned to about $10.2 trillion; new clock will go up in 2009
NEW YORK A watched clock never moves unless it's the National Debt Clock.
In fact, the digital counter has been moving so much that it recently ran out of digits to display the ballooning figure: $10,150,603,734,720, or roughly $10.2 trillion, as of Saturday afternoon.
The clock was put up by the late real estate mogul Seymour Durst in 1989 when the U.S. government's debt was a mere $2.7 trillion, and was even turned off during the 1990s when the debt decreased.
It will be replaced in 2009 with a new clock, said Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for the Durst Organization. The new clock will be able to track debt up to a quadrillion dollars, which is a '1' followed by 15 zeros.
In the meantime, the '1' from "$10.2" has been moved left to the LCD square once occupied solely by the digital dollar sign. A non-digital, improvised dollar sign has been pasted next to the '1.'
The current clock had enough digits to measure the amount of money owed by the U.S. government until debt recently hit $10 trillion. Since then, more eyes have been on the fixture near touristy Times Square.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Not to worry. The “rich” can pay all that off if they just pay their fair share of taxes. Now, gimme my government check.
SOMEBITCH
The debt did NOT go down during the 1990's (Link to 1990's) (Link to 2000's)
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