US debt clock: a time bomb?

What is interesting about the following article is that it came from the AFP — Agence France-Presse. France is not generally considered to have the best economic system with its high unemployment rate, generous (by American standards) guaranteed vacations, and relatively socialized national economy. And here the AGP — not an American news agency — is covering this story:

US debt clock running out of time, space
Mon Mar 27, 8:58 AM ET

NEW YORK (AFP) - Tick, 20,000 dollars, tock, another 20,000 dollars.

So rapid is the rise of the US national debt, that the last four digits of a giant digital signboard counting the moving total near New York's Times Square move in seemingly random increments as they struggle to keep pace.

The national debt clock, as it is known, is a big clock. A spot-check last week showed a readout of 8.3 trillion -- or more precisely 8,310,200,545,702 -- dollars ... and counting.

But it's not big enough.

Sometime in the next two years, the total amount of US government borrowing is going to break through the 10-trillion-dollar mark and, lacking space for the extra digit such a figure would require, the clock is in danger of running itself into obsolescence.

(The rest is here.)

We're borrowing against the environment by spewing more and more greenhouse gases into the air, by overfishing the seas, by polluting our soils and lakes and rivers. We're borrowing against our energy resources by pumping our limited oil reserves dry. And we're borrowing against our children's econimc future by piling on mountainous public debt.

Conservatives from all walks of life have been warning us that we can't go on borrowing forever. And yet, I thought conservatives were running the government.

Six years ago, the US debt clock was running in the opposite direction. What has happened since then?

For more on this issue, see:

• "Conversation with a Conservative: Peter G. Peterson". The Commerce Secretary in the Nixon administration explains that the Republican Party "has lost its moorings" in recent years.
• "Bartlett on Bush".... Bruce Bartlett is not a happy camper these days. A Reagan-era conservative who thinks that George Bush has betrayed conservatism, he got fired a few months ago from his job at the conservative think tank NCPA because he decided to write a book explaining in detail just why he thinks Bush is a "pretend conservative."
• "Former Reagan economist exposes the Bush administration's radical departure from fundamental conservative principles".... And explains why it may cost the GOP the presidency and its congressional majority.
• "Hey, Big Spender. Should we have known that President Bush would bust the budget?" from Peggy Noonan
• "Bush Is No Conservative" by Paul Craig Roberts
• American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips
• Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy by Bruce Bartlett
• Running on Empty by Peter G. Peterson
  

LP