Katie Couric's Notebook: Sign Of The Times
Since 1989, the National Debt Clock has been a fixture in Manhattan's Times Square. After you've dropped a cool $200 on a Broadway Show, a glimpse of its ominous ticker might deter you from that $20 nightcap.
Video: And now, that clock has run out of numbers. Our national debt, now at $10.2, is one digit larger than the spots available on the sign.
When real estate mogul Seymour Durst created the clock back in 1989, the debt was at $2.7 trillion. Since 2003, it has grown by half a trillion each year, and the bailout Congress just signed will likely kick that number up even higher by the end of 2008.
But rather than retiring the debt sign, the Dursts will redesign it to include enough spaces for a quadrillion.
Expanding the credit line when money is tight - isn't that how we got into this mess in the first place? The debt clock literally is a sign of the times.
"As a very important source of strength & security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible: avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it--avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertions in time of Peace to discharge the Debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear."
http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/farewell/transcript.html#p21
I am both ASHAMED and EMBARASSED to be a US Citizen because it is NO LONGER George Washington%u2019s country. SAD!
Click on the link
wrote on 10/11/2008 06:49:08 PM:
You Sarah Failin IDIOTS read for yourself why Trooper Wooten got his Job with the State Police.
http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site163/2008/0721/20080721_111415_PalinLetterofRecomend.pdf
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by shylove2
October 13, 2008 8:03 PM PDT
- It is a sign of the times and is a familiar one. One time it was war with social programs and this time it was war with no taxes. In both cases severe economic times followed. It is time to realize war is a false profit. It is a deep debt, especially to the dead and wounded and to the collaterally damaged, those damaged with no collateral. Our collateral that was damaged wasn''t ever there, we are only bleeding paper blood, some are bleeding real blood, both our soldier and innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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See all 11 CommentsOur national debt is composed of more than dollars!!