Ready for another government shutdown? Because here comes the debt ceiling.

(Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

published 25 August 2015

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced Tuesday that the national debt — which first exceeded $18 trillion less than a year ago — is due to pass the legal debt ceiling of $18,113,000,080,959.35 by mid-November. The debt has been frozen just below this limit since mid-March.

While debt ceiling negotiations have yet to begin, if Congress wants to keep spending money (and Congress definitely wants to keep spending money), it must raise the debt limit before that deadline is reached to avoid default. Depending on the course of debate, another government shutdown could be on the table.

If you'd like to panic in the meantime, as an American citizen your share of the debt is about $50,000.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.