A good presentation on the imperative of raising the debt limit from Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Holtz-Eakin elucidates the arguments in his column, “The Debt Ceiling Dance.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office and an economic advisor to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, dissects the President’s address in a blog post at The Corner. Very astute.

[We] got mostly a series of broad, sweeping vision statements followed by narrow, more-of-the-same policy prescriptions. Take for example innovation. The president praised the government’s widely recognized role in funding basic research. But in the next paragraph, he switched to “research and development” (not the same) and targeted on vague progressive agenda items like clean energy, information technology, and biomedical research. Why those, when the president acknowledged that “none of us can predict … what the next big industry will be”?

Why should 80 percent of electricity come from “clean energy”? How do we get there? Why should 80 percent of Americans have access to high-speed rail? These are proposals, but not a vision of any sort.

And …

To be fair, most of these addresses disappoint. And there were nuggets of promise in the emphasis on education, and the acknowledgment that corporate profits are not a bad thing and that corporate tax reform is desirable. But there was little in specifics and it was countered by the pro forma attacks on oil companies and banks, and the stone-walling of fixing the health-care mistake.

In the end, this speech did little to change the landscape.

ABC’s This Week program had as a guest David Axelrod, the White House senior advisor, and host Jake Tapper inquired about the recent, more public expressions of unhappiness with the Obama Administration coming from prominent business leaders. Excerpt from the transcript:

AXELROD: This is important, Jake, because you — you have to recognize what the kind of — you know, there’s no doubt that there was a kind of “Katie, bar the doors” philosophy in Washington during the eight years previous to us. And what it led to was a financial disaster.

And all these companies were — were in very difficult straits. In fact, their — their profits are up 65 percent since — since that time, over the last two years. Our financial system is now stable instead of collapsing, which would have been a devastating thing for every business in this country, large and small.

But, yes, and we’re working closely with business and we want to continue to work closely with business, but working closely doesn’t mean that we — that — that we simply turn away from the kinds of corrective measures that are necessary to prevent that kind of disaster from happening again, and that’s what we’re pursuing.

We need a financial reform that — that is commensurate with the challenges that we saw, and we pushed for that. We need commonsense environmental policies to — to prevent what happened in the — in the gulf, and you can’t simply let industry in each and every case self-regulate. We’re not micromanaging anything, but we are looking after the public interest.

You can’t simply let industry in each and every case self-regulate? When was that ever the demand from business? Straw man …

Reuters examined the issue in an article this weekend, “Businesses step up criticisim of Obama agenda.” Excerpt:

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist who was a top adviser to 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain, said Obama’s agenda has “nothing in it” for the business community.

“We are growing too slowly,” said Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “Households are broke. Governments have to retrench. The only places to get strong growth are in the business community and in net exports and that’s where they have nothing.”

Smart commentary on the PBS Newshour last night from Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office. From NRO, The Corner:

Putting aside the philosophical differences about using the income tax for redistribution, I think these tax increases run into two problems of logic. The first is that, when this stimulus bill was passed, a lot of the spending occurred past 2010 into 2011, 2012, 2013, and that was defended by saying, “Gee, the economy might still be weak. We can’t possibly stop spending.”

Well, they’re now going to turn around and whack it over the head with a big tax increase. Those two shouldn’t be around at the same — they don’t make any sense.

The second is, our fundamental problem over the long term is spending. And we won’t tax our way out of that problem. There’s no economist who believes we can raise taxes enough to cover our long-term spending bill.

This budget gets us off on the wrong foot, because where it does cut spending, it turns right around and spends it again on something else. It doesn’t on net put any controls on spending. And spending is the ultimate fiscal discipline. That’s what we need.