U.S. National Debt Clock Will Soon Run Out of Space

If you have ever been to New York, you'd know that there is a national debt clock near Time Square (Picture from 2003).


As you can see however, the clock can only show a debt of at most $9,999,999,999,999 . But now with the debt already at $8.31 trillion, and increasing at a rate of more than $20,000 per second,it can soon reach $10 trillion-a number higher than the clock can handle.

The clock's owner, one Douglas Durst, had shut it down in 2000 when the national debt had stabilized due to a surge of tax revenues related to the tech stock bubble. But in 2002, after Bush had proven his fiscal recklessness, he felt he had to restart it. At the time it restarted it was only $6.1 trillion. Now with the $10 trillion mark expected to be reached some time during 2008, he plans to replace the clock with one that can show 14 instead of just 13 digits.

He motivates the existence of the clock like this:

"Durst insists that the clock is non-partisan in its effort to shame the federal government over what he sees as its willingness to gamble away the nation's future.

"We're a family business," Durst said. "We think generationally, and we don't want to see the next generation crippled by this burden," he said."