World War II ballooned the debt as the nation ratcheted up defense spending to finance the war, causing the country’s debt to rise to more than 100% of gross domestic product. Jackson followed through on his promise, vetoing virtually every spending bill and using federal funds to pay down the debt until it was fully paid off in 1837 - right before a six-year economic depression that pumped it back up again. “My vow shall be to pay the national debt, to prevent a monied aristocracy from growing up around our administration that must bend it to its views, and ultimately destroy the liberty of our country.” “I believe it a national curse,” Jackson said in 1824. He campaigned on the promise of eliminating the national debt, which he regarded as a tool empowering the federal government and thus centralizing power. President Andrew Jackson differed considerably in his opinion. “It will be a powerful cement of our Union.” “A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing,” he wrote in 1781. Alexander Hamilton saw collective debt as a way to build the nation - and its international credit - and bind the several states together in common cause. One of Congress’s first actions was to assume states’ Revolutionary War debt in exchange for moving the country’s permanent capital to Washington, D.C. The United States has had an up-and-down relationship with debt. And away from the political arena, economists and wonks are deeply conflicted about what the national debt really is, and how afraid we need to be of it. But what the debt is and how it works are intrinsically intertwined with what it represents, and in recent years it hasn’t been behaving the way it’s supposed to, and no one knows precisely why. In many respects it is the basis of the global financial system. That is not to say the national debt is imaginary - it is very real. The national debt, at least as far as politics is concerned, is a symbol - a representation of something else, just like Durst’s ticker on West 43 rd Street. It is the obligation of minority parties to view the majority’s agenda as wasteful, and by extension regard the money spent on those priorities as money better off not spent.

“The argument is that interest rates are low. John Thune, R-S.D., said during Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s nomination hearing. “What I'm concerned about is we seem to have no concern now about borrowing money in the short term,” Sen. And we are hearing them again, as Congress debates a nearly $2 trillion relief package to respond to the pandemic and its economic fallout.

Lawmakers have echoed Durst’s distaste for the national debt for decades, with varying degrees of sincerity. economy $16 trillion, give or take, and Congress appropriated more than $3 trillion in aid in 2020. The coronavirus pandemic has cost the U.S. The clock currently reads $28 trillion, give or take, and will grow rapidly in the coming years.

The clock can now track our collective debt into the quadrillions. In 2008, less than 20 years later, the debt clock ran out of digits, forcing the Durst Organization to add two more.

When Durst died in 1995, the national debt totaled more than $4 trillion.

National debt clock