The U.S. government once again hit its borrowing limit yesterday, forcing the Treasury to deploy "extraordinary measures" to avoid default.
Of course, it's kind of hard to call those measures "extraordinary" when we're forced to take them every two years.
Nevertheless, they'll last until sometime in June. That's when we'll hit the debt ceiling in earnest. And if we don't raise it to accommodate our spending commitments, the economy will collapse into a crisis the likes of which we haven't seen since at least 2008 - maybe ever.
Why are we doing this to ourselves?
Conservatives have been playing this game of chicken in one form or another for more than a decade now and it never gets us anywhere.
It only causes problems.
The first time they tried this back in 2011, the gambit caused credit ratings agencies to lower America's credit rating for the first time ever, increasing the amount of interest the government has to pay on its debt.
It also drove the S&P 500 into a tailspin that cost 12% of its value in the span of a month. (The index shed 20% last year.)
However, that could be the least of our problems this time around.
Because these days, the more extreme wing of the Republican party has even more power and less sense. They have a tenuous grasp on economic matters and are prone to conspiracy theories and magical thinking.
We already saw how stubborn they could be when they held up their own House speaker's appointment to start the year, forcing 15 votes over four days. It was the first time in a century that that routine appointment dragged out like that.
And the hard-liners were rewarded for those efforts with committee appointments, rule changes, policy concessions, and more influence.
So you can see why they might be emboldened to play hardball on this issue too.