With all the other issues facing the country and the federal government, the pernicious debt ceiling limit is one that cannot go away and, without solution, will subsume all the others.

And even as different groups in Congress finally show proposals while President Joe Biden says no conditional deals, some big banks are saying that the clock may run out by mid-June at the latest. Given the pace at which legislation moves, that doesn't realistically offer much time to pass a deal.

The Treasury Department started taking "extraordinary measures" in mid-January as by then the federal government already had reached the statutory $31.81 trillion debt limit. That was for existing debt, not new debt. Pandemic aid and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs bill ran up trillions of dollars in additional debt.