When people in Washington talk about the debt ceiling, they use a lot of metaphors.

In the last week, as Democrats and Republicans fought over whether and how to pay the U.S. government's outstanding bills,

the president first said the looming debt ceiling was a meteor headed to crash into our economy.

Then he accused Republicans of playing Russian roulette over the debt limit.

But none of this tells you very much about what the debt ceiling's all about, or what exactly is going to change on October 18th when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the U.S. is going to default on its loans.

So I asked Slate's Jordan Weissman to give it a try.

Let's do a thought experiment.

Looking ahead like a couple weeks into the future,

if the debt limit hasn't been raised, what does the world look like? Like,

am I walking around? There's just garbage fires everywhere, abandoned cars, post-apocalyptic vibes.

What's the deal? Are we going full thunderdome? If we go over the debt limit is what you're asking.

That's what I'm asking.

I think the honest answer is it would be quite bad.

It would be quite ugly.

It would be painful at best and potentially cataclysmic at worst.

But we don't know exactly how things would unfold.

We don't know what will happen if the government can't borrow more money, simply because for the

last hundred years or so, the U.S. has done everything in its power to avoid that outcome.

We've come close to going over the edge back in 2011 during this specially contentious debt limit fight.

The Fed actually started making contingency plans.

Years later, transcripts of their meetings emerged.

And they offered these clues of what hitting the debt ceiling now

...