It wouldn't surprise me at all if that happened. If you recall, the last time Congress had a "debate" over raising the debt ceiling, the arguing and recalcitrant school children who serve in Congress waited until the very last minute, spooking the credit rating agencies, who dropped our AAA rating to AA for the first time in history.

The financial situation is more dire now than back then. The annual deficits are larger, the national debt is growing faster, and Congress was so dysfunctional that it formed a supercommittee to do what the full Congress couldn't, and even then they failed to reach any meaningful agreement on anything. After months of negotiations, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (the "supercommittee") announced that it could not reach agreement, stating: "we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement before the committee's deadline." Congress is broken and that press release confirmed it.

The result is there will be a number of damaging changes that will take effect automatically beginning in 2013. Included are...

• $1.3 trillion in spending cuts--half from the defense budget and half from discretionary spending. (Congress specifically exempted Social Security or Medicare from such cuts.)

• The Bush tax cuts will expire. On average, individuals will pay about 10% more in federal income taxes.

• The most immediate and noticeable tax increase will be seen by almost everyone in the first week of 2013. Topping the list is the 2011 payroll tax cut. In 2011, the amount of payroll taxes an employee saw taken out of each paycheck was reduced from 6.2% to 4.2%, but that amount is set to revert to 6.2% on January 1, 2013.

• Businesses are particularly concerned about the expiration of the research and development tax credit, and several other expiring business tax provisions.

• In addition to increases in individual tax rates, among other items set to expire are the deduction for state and local sales tax, the deduction for college tuition and the IRA charitable rollover. Also expiring at the end of this year is the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) "patch". Without a renewal of this temporary patch by Congress, the exempted amount would tumble, exposing an estimated 20-30 million Americans to higher taxes.

So basically, Bucco, Congressional inaction and dysfunction will have dire effects on our economy and unemployment. The debt rating agencies know this and will be moving to further downgrade the U.S. debt rating shortly after January 1. It doesn't take a registered financial analyst to understand that if these things happen, the country will be less able to service its growing debt.

So, as Nancy Pelosi suggested, it might not be a bad idea for the POTUS to simply do what most Constitutional lawyers have said is within his power and responsibility. It's pretty clear that Congress will again fail to agree on increasing the limit in a timely manner, so it looks like the POTUS will have to do it.

It'll cause another giant political flap, probably a multiple of the outrage expressed by his recent immigration executive order. But there's lots of legal opinion that such action by Obama would be legal.

But let's not forget...all this could be avoided by timely action by the Congress. It would probably require negotiation and compromise, but any flap like this is perfectly avoidable. If it happens, President Obama will have done the right thing for the country. The Congress will complain loudly, but they will be the party at fault.