Debt Clock Is Winding Down

For more than a decade, the green electronic sign atop a building near Times Square has chronicled the second-to-second growth in the national debt. Often the debt was rising so fast the last several digits were just a blur.

These days, the numbers barely budge, and the national debt has actually decreased since the beginning of the year, what with these strange phenomena of budget surpluses and the first buybacks of government debt in 70 years.

So, the owners of the sign are pulling the plug.

Barring an unexpected reversal in Washington's newfound sense of fiscal responsibility, the National Debt Clock will go dark on Sept. 7, the birthday of the man who invented it, the late New York developer Seymour Durst.

“It was put up to focus attention on the increasing national debt, and it's served its purpose,” said Durst's son, Douglas Durst, who now runs the family real estate business.

“We're obviously pleased that it was partially because of the sign that attention was focused on the debt and efforts were made to bring it under control. We think he'd be real happy with the fact that the deficit has been eliminated.”

The sign was just one facet of the elder Durst's campaign to raise public awareness of the soaring budget deficits of the 1980s and '90s. He also bought tiny ads at the bottom of the front page of The New York Times with dire warnings such as “Beware the Four-Letter Word -- Debt” and “Borrow, Borrow; Enjoy Tomorrow Today. Tomorrow will be Terrible.”

Durst's efforts can be traced back at least to 1980, when he sent New Year's cards to businessmen and politicians warning that the national debt had reached $914 billion. As of Thursday, that figure was $5.7 trillion, or $5,666,074,628,759.68 at one moment. (An updated figure can be found on the Treasury Department's Web site.)

Durst put up the sign in 1989. The sign has run with some interruptions since then. It had to be turned off for a few months in the mid-'90s when the debt was increasing so fast it crashed the computer that calculates the debt.

How times have changed. Blessed with budget surpluses, the government announced in January that it planned to buy back up to $30 billion of debt this year. It also said that the entire $3.6 trillion of the national debt held by the public could be wiped out by 2013 under current projections for budget surpluses.

David M. Jones, chief economist for bond dealer Aubrey G. Lanston & Co., said the dimming of the debt clock was not something he expected to see in his lifetime.

“It became an institution and people began to believe there was no end in sight and no hope for reducing the deficit,” he said.

But former Mayor Ed Koch said it would be a mistake to stop the clock.

“I think they should redraw the clock to show the paydown of the debt,” Koch said.

Not to worry: Durst said the clock will merely be covered with a cloth for the time being.

“We're not taking it away anything can happen,” Durst said. “We'd have to store it someplace, and that's a good a place as any. It's not exactly the kind of thing you can keep in a closet.”