06 October 2008

National debt now too large for the clock


Earlier this week I showed a graph of the skyrocketing increase in the national debt. The number is now so large that it can't fit on the analog clock in Times Square, which wasn't built to handle numbers on the order of $10,000,000,000.

And this is interesting:
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the government won't account for the gross outlay of the $700 billion asset purchase in its budget. Instead, it will account for the net cost minus the "expected value of any estimated future earnings from holding those assets and the proceeds from the eventual sale of them," according to testimony by the C.B.O.

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