The Debt Ceiling Time Bomb Is Ticking Again. This Could Be the Year It Explodes.

For a little more than a year, the looming partisan fight over the debt ceiling hovered over the nation’s economic future, lurking just out of sight like a monster in a horror movie or Jason Momoa on a red carpet—an inescapable problem that has not yet arrived but is destined to knock you (or the global economy) over with unsettling speed.

After a bracing fight in the fall of 2021, Congress raised the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion, ensuring that the country would not hit its borrowing limit until 2023. But future problems...