Yikes, We Need a New Debt Clock

It’s hard to fathom how much money 700 billion dollars is. It’s a larger figure than most modern country’s GDP, yet our beloved government seemed unable to come up with any ideas on how to save our economy without just writing a few huge checks to bailout the banking industry (and to pay for all sorts or ridiculous pet projects, but that’s a whole different story).

Perhaps the government could have opened this crisis up to the private sector. A colleague of mine wondered why officials didn’t offer investors the benefit of tax free earnings if they were willing to buy up risky investments from these failing banks. I don’t have the financial background to say whether that would have worked, but it seems all of our elected officials lacked the creativity to come up with such an idea.

We played it safe, America.

And now we are seeing a consequence. The Debt Clock, in place since real estate mogul Seymour Durst turned it on in 1989 to measure the U.S. Government’s Debt, is out of numbers. Yep, we broke the $10 trillion mark in national debt over the weekend; Durst never imagined an America that would owe so much.

So now we’ll need a new Debt Clock, one that will be turned on next year and be able to calculate to a quadrillion dollars. Wow.

Maybe if the government continues to bail out other business sectors (McCain’s idea to buy up the foreclosure market, for example) we can get to that quadrillion mark in our lifetimes.

That’s a one followed by 15 zeros.

In other words, one really big number.

—Jacob Harkins, Yellow Scene Magazine editor