Here was the second thing I suggested to soon-to-be-newly-elected President Obama last August:

2). The day after the election, you need to convene a round table of the best minds in the world. Note I said the best minds, not the best economists or Wall Street executives or government leaders-just the 15 or so best minds in the World. Put them all in a room and challenge them to develop a plan to fix the world economy. Give them 72 hours and only allow bathroom breaks; send food and water in while they work. Tell them you want the solution in plain English with no more than 15 pages of text. You take the product to the UN and get the world to endorse it. This will atone for Colin Powell’s mortal sin in 2004 and may save us all.

So now every day you read about the President meeting with one group or another, and that he is expecting both sides of the Congressional table to throw aside all their baggage, issues and dislike for one another and agree on a compromise.

That’s about as likely to happen as … well, you get the idea.

So now I’m 0 for 2 in my sage advice to the president. I’m starting to get the feeling he isn’t listening!

On the other hand, a guy named Peter Diamond, a notable economics professor emeritus from MIT, wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times this morning. Here’s a link, if you’re interested…

The title of the piece is “Down with Supercommittees”. And – surprise, surprise, surprise as Gomer Pyle used to say – Professor Diamond suggests that

“Instead of wide-ranging, politically motivated panels, we need narrowly targeted commissions, without sitting members of Congress, modeled on the successful Base Closure and Realignment Commissions of recent decades.”

Hmph – that kind of sounds like a group of really smart people locked in a room until they come up with a really good plan.

So from all of this, one could almost glean the conclusion that Washington truly does not want to reach an agreement.

An alternate conclusion would be that they are not sufficiently competent managers to achieve that goal. A third conclusion could be that politics is still the best game in town, it’s still payback time for the Dems and the President, and there will no substantive agreement before the FC is breached. So in spite of a tick upward in the Dow and other indices yesterday, I stick with my prognostication that there will be no meaningful agreement, and there will be consequences to this failure.

Final note: my advice to the Chief Executive was to have the smart folks develop a solution to the woes of the world economy. This post is about the US economy. If anyone thinks one has no effect on the other, you just haven’t been paying attention for the past 4 years.

Maybe those Mayans knew what they were talking about!