11/21/2023 0 Comments Debt clock“I got it for a Republican fund-raiser,” he explained, jamming his hands into his pockets.ĭurst, who is bell-shaped and balding, turned to Jordan Barowitz, the director of external affairs at the Durst Organization. He was wearing a dark suit and a blindingly blue Thomas Pink tie spackled with small golden elephants. The morning was brisk and cloudy, and Durst, who took over the family business, and the clock, from his father, was standing in the courtyard of 1133 Sixth Avenue, where the current iteration of the device-complete with a shinier façade and a higher-resolution display-was installed in 2004. In fact, interest in the National Debt Clock tends to be cyclical, Douglas Durst said the other day. Just last month, Tom Reed, a Republican congressman from Corning, proposed that a facsimile be erected on the floor of the House. The National Debt Clock remains an effective piece of agitprop, its running tallies of the total debt (some $14 trillion) and the portion theoretically owed by each American family ($122,000, give or take) a reminder of exactly how deeply the country has fallen into the red. In 1989, Durst paid Artkraft Strauss $100,000 to build him his masterwork: a 21-foot-wide metal-encased federal-debt odometer, which he hung off the side of a building not far from Times Square. “Tomorrow will be terrible.”) Once, he mailed New Year’s Eve cards to Congress reminding each legislator how much he or she owed toward the federal deficit. (“Borrow, borrow enjoy tomorrow today,” he wrote in one. He regularly took out advertisements on the front page of the Times warning of looming fiscal calamity. He was also a resourceful and inveterate debt scold, and something of a lyricist to boot. Seymour Durst, the late Manhattan real-estate mogul, was said to believe a man should never invest in a property he cannot reach by foot. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images
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