National Debt Clock Adds a Digit to Accommodate Growing Deficit
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In these uncertain financial times, one thing remains certain — the ever-expanding national debt. But it's growing at such an accelerated rate, the clock that has kept track of the deficit since 1989 has had to add a digit.
The National Debt Clock switched its digital dollar sign to a 1 on Monday to accommodate the nation's ballooning deficit, now past the $10 trillion mark, thanks to Congress' $700 billion bank stimulus package.
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Few passersby looked up at the billboard Wednesday afternoon, as the clock tallied each American family's share of the debt at just past the $86,000 mark. But one man on a cell phone stopped to tell the person on the other end just how much they owed.
Real-estate developer Seymour Durst first began publicly clocking the nation's deficit in 1989, erecting the digital billboard a block from Times Square.
"Early in the 1980s, he recognized that the national debt was a problem and was going to be a burden for his children and grandchildren and the next generation of Americans," said Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for the Durst Organization, which owns the clock. "So he put it up to call attention to the problem that we can’t borrow our way out of bad times."
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Over the years, the debt has grown, and so have the zeroes on the clock, though it was turned off for a time in 2000.
"It shut off for a few years during the Clinton administration, when the national debt started going backwards," Barowitz said.
But it snapped back on in 2004 at 1133 Sixth Avenue, a block from its original location. Now located next to an Internal Revenue Service office — a coincidence that Barowitz calls "happenstance" — the clock had a quickie facelift in anticipation of a new clock.
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"We pasted a dollar sign onto the clock," Barowitz said. "We’re going to design and build a new clock that will probably be up sometime next year."
The designers had better hurry. It may not be long before the American family's share will need a new 1, too.