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At $8.3 trillion, it breaks the legal limit, fueling a fiscal debate in Congress.
Maybe the national debt clock was retired too soon.
Between 1989 and 2000, the electronic display near New York's Times Square tracked the rise of the nation's red ink until it reached $5.7 trillion. When it shut down, the federal budget was running a surplus.
The economic burden posed by the national debt, economists say, is more serious now than in 1980, when a $1 trillion figure stirred national anxiety. Today, the public debt is larger as a share of the American economy, more than half is held by foreigners, and the wave of baby-boomer retirements is no longer decades away.
