America’s debt-ceiling crisis is snoozing, but it’s still very alive. Peter Coy of Bloomberg’s Businessweek says that if Congress doesn’t choose a “long-term plan that credibly shrinks deficits with a phased-in combination of spending cuts and higher tax revenues,” then things could get ugly on January 1st, 2013, a critical date along Washington’s schedule for treatment of the economy’s recession. His suggestion doesn’t fall far from the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission plan from 2010, or the Obama administration’s own 10-year plan from its 2013 budget. Coy says that to cut spending and lift tax revenues is a better route than the choice between extreme austerity and no austerity – the dichotomy Congress is currently wrestling over.