Debt Clock Revs Back Up
Landmark sign computes government's I-owe-yous

July 11, 2002
By Ross Finley

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. government has returned to its old ways of bursting budgets and so New York's landmark national debt clock lit up again on Thursday after a two-year hiatus, whizzing higher by $30 a second.

A spatter of puzzled pedestrians stared up in the morning sun's glare near the bustling corner of Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street near Times Square as workers switched on a massive 11-by-26-foot digital clock that had lay dormant for nearly two years.

After taking a few seconds for the 13-digit figure to sharpen, the sign read $6.1 trillion, or $66,791 per U.S. household, and immediately began ticking higher.

"It's frightening -- really frightening," said Ruth Davis, 48, a native New Yorker, who paused from reading her newspaper at a table in Bryant Park, located across the busy intersection, and cast a glance up at the sign.

"When I looked at it yesterday, I thought, 'Gee, we must have paid off the national debt because the sign wasn't on'."

Since it was shut down and covered in September 2000, when the government was flush with budget surpluses, the national debt has rocketed up by nearly half a trillion dollars and Congress has lifted the borrowing limit to $6.4 trillion from $5.95 trillion.

First erected in 1989 by the late New York real estate developer Seymour Durst, the sign is lit by about 500 bulbs and costs roughly $2,000 a month to maintain.

Durst, who died in 1995, first put it up to help make Americans more aware of how much future generations would owe if the government continued borrowing at a dizzying pace.

After four years of surpluses that came as stock markets boomed and government purses tightened, the White House officially projected a $106 billion deficit this year.

But officials said late on Wednesday the Bush administration will release new budget projections next week showing higher budget deficits in part because of the recent stock market slide.

Many Wall Street analysts think this year's shortfall could top $200 billion.

"I'm concerned about it for my daughter, my 10-year old," said Ernest Viotty, 57, who works nearby and stopped to watch workers climb up a boom lifted up over storefronts to turn on the sign. "Our children are getting the bill."

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