Oh, this
AFP story has to be peeing into someone's breakfast cereal today. Because it really doesn't read well for the GOP and their profligate, irresponsible ways.
See, in Times Square there's a big digital signboard, put up during the Reagan economic boom period of Republican mismanagement to track the rapidly growing debt.
Guess what? The debt clock is about to run out of digits.
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.
"We really expected it to be quite some time," Durst told AFP. "But now, with the pace of debt growth only increasing, we're looking at maybe two years and certainly before President (George W.) Bush leaves office in 2009."
The only other time the debt clock has had a mechanical problem was under President Clinton, apparently:
Toward the close of the millennium, with a booming economy fuelling annual budget surpluses, the clock began to slow and finally ran into its first mechanical problem.
"It wasn't designed to run backwards," Douglas Durst explained.