America is running out of 000000000000

Today someone on the radio said that "America is running out of zeros".

Wait a minute, I thought... they still have Dubya, Cheney, "Condi" Rice, Paulson, Bernanke and McCain, not to mention at least a dozen others whose names no-one even remembers. So there are plenty of zeros... and they found Sarah Palin as well.

Looking around on the internet I think that a country so full of morons as the USA will never be short of zeros.

But after listening a bit closer I realised that the radio reporter was actually talking about real zeros, as in 0, the number without individual value.
The US government's debts have meanwhile ballooned so badly - he said - that the "National Debt Clock" in New York - yes, such a thing exists, no joke - has run out of digits to record the spiralling figure.

The digital counter marks the national debt level of the entire USA and is updated constantly and electronically through a connected computer.
But when the national debt - thanks to robber baron Bush and his gang - passed the $ 10 trillion (10,000,000,000,000) point last month, the sign could no longer display the full amount. It has simply not enough digit fields!

The board was placed on a wall at New York's famous Times Square in 1989, to highlight the then $ 2.7 trillion level of national debt under the rule of another Bush, the current incumbent's father (and former CIA director) George Herbert Walker Bush.

The clock's owners have said that they will now add two more zeros to the display, allowing it to record even a quadrillion Dollars of debt. (Should McCain be the next President, that is quite a realistic figure to expect...)

Douglas Durst, son of the late Seymour Durst who invented the clock, hopes to have a longer replacement ready early next year. For the time being, the counter's electronic Dollar sign has been replaced with the extra digit required.

Economists believe the $ 700 billion bail-out plan for ailing financial institutions will send the national debt level of the USA to $ 11 trillion soon.

Now, isn't that just the right kind of thing to remember Dubya for...?