President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) met on Feb. 1 to talk about raising the U.S. debt ceiling. Many Americans, however, may not have a whole grasp on what that is, though oddly so many have an opinion on what should be done about it.

A recent poll conducted by RMG Research, for example, found that 79 percent of Americans think the debt ceiling should be raised, but are divided on whether that should be accompanied by spending cuts.

Of the 1,000 registered voters surveyed, 45 percent said spending cuts should be a prerequisite for raising the limit, and 24 percent said it should be raised with our without cutting spending.

A 2013 poll from National Journal showed that 62 percent of Americans thought raising the debt ceiling would allow the government to borrow more money for future spending, which is not the case.

The debt ceiling, sometimes called the debt limit, is the total amount of debt the federal government is allowed to have at one time. That limit is set by Congress and cannot be exceeded without congressional approval.

The current U.S. debt ceiling is a bit over $31 trillion. To be more precise, it’s about $31,381,000,000,000.

Hitting the debt ceiling is like hitting the limit on a credit card. Unless you have cash, you have to stop spending money, even on things you’ve already bought, like electricity or phone service.

The United States would have reached the debt ceiling on Jan. 19 if Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen had not taken “extraordinary measures” to keep the nation’s bills paid for another five months or so.

The short answer is that we’ve spent more money than we’ve received in taxes and other revenues for a long, long time.

The United States began borrowing during the American Revolution and had accumulated $75 million in debt by the start of 1791. We’ve been in debt ever since.

Historically, the national debt has grown the most during wartime. It jumped $2.7 billion during the Civil War, reached $22 billion after World War I, and topped $4 trillion by the end of World War II.

From there, the national debt settled back to around $3 trillion and remained there through the 1970s.

The rest of our $31.4 trillion debt was created between 1982 and today. During that period, the national debt has doubled approximately every seven years.

Some of that increase is attributable to unusual circumstances that called for emergency spending, like the pandemic.

More often, debt has increased because Congress elected to operate the country on a deficit budget. That means we made a spending plan that intentionally exceeded our income, planning to borrow money to cover the difference.

That has been the case in all but four of the last 52 years. Since 1970, we’ve spent more money than we had about 90 percent of the time.

Raising the debt ceiling is about paying for the past, not financing the future.

If you wanted to remodel your kitchen, you might hire a contractor to do the work. You’d sign a contract for, let’s say, $5,000. If the contractor trusted you, you might pay anything upfront.

But when the contractor did the work, you’d have to pay. If you didn’t have cash, you might put it on a credit card.

That’s essentially what happens when Congress passes a deficit spending bill. It obligates the country to spend money in the future for a commitment made today.

So when Congress agreed to spend $1.7 trillion in 2023, members knew that would require borrowing money at some point.

And that $1.7 trillion is not all the government is committed to spend this year. Many spending commitments were made years ago, but will come due in the months ahead. That includes things like Social Security benefits, Medicare payments, employee salaries, defense contracts, and many other obligations.

When you reach the limit on your credit card, you have three choices. You can pay all your bills with cash, ask the bank to raise the limit, or stop spending money.

It’s much the same for the government. But since the government planned to spend more than it would receive in revenue, paying cash for everything is not an option. Either Congress must raise the debt limit or the U.S. Treasury must stop paying for some things.

President Biden has said he won’t consider any negotiation on the subject of the debt ceiling, because failure to raise it would put the “full faith and credit” of the United States at risk.

Speaker McCarthy and other Republicans, however, are determined to use this occasion to get both political parties to stop overspending the country’s income, or at least to spend less.

The president will release his proposed budget on Mar. 9.

The parties have until early summer to reach an agreement. That’s when the United States will again reach its debt ceiling.