Maxing Out the National Debt Clock

Times Square's National Debt Clock that has been tallying up the numbers for what the U.S. Government has owed since 1989 is finally running out of spaces. The national debt is currently 10.2 trillion dollars. The digital dollar sign was eliminated to make room for an extra digit in September 2008. Completion for the new clock that will allow room for quadrillion dollars of debt is greatly anticipated in the early year of 2009. Times Square's National Debt Clock was created in 1989 by Manhattan real estate developer Seymour Durst to inform the public about the nation's national debt which was 2.7 trillion dollars back then. Seymour died in 1995, and the clock is now owned by his son, Douglas Durst. According to the Treasury, the national debt has grown more than 500 billion dollars each year since the year 2003.
This is not the first time the clock has experienced technical difficulties. In 1991, Durst had to remove and revamp the clock so it could keep pace with the national debt's $13,000-per-second increase. Before Durst's death the amount began accumulating so fast that the last seven digits became totally illegible. At one point, the surge actually crashed the computer that calculates the billboard's numbers. A historic moment in U.S. history — the national debt was shrinking because the clock wasn't built to count backwards, Durst pulled the plug. Just two years later, following the burst of the dot-com bubble and the economic fall-out of 9/11, he turned it back on. The billboard has ticked forward ever since. Today, it hangs near the entrance of the city's IRS office.