Yahoo! SmallBizVote readers responded with overwhelming cynicism to a report we posted yesterday about an Executive Office memo to federal regulatory agencies. The guidance, issued on Tuesday by regulatory chief Cass Sunstein, instructed agencies to consider the special challenges that redundant, overlapping, and inconsistent regulations pose to small businesses and startups.
SmallBizVote readers say the memo is phony election-year pandering. In 14 comments and 71 "likes" (indicated by readers who gave a comment the "thumbs up" symbol), readers expressed their resounding distrust of the Administration's too-little-too-late guidance.
"It takes election season for the White House to hear your cries," remarked a reader with the pseudonym He Lies. Hope commented, "So the EPA regulations, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank are job killers…duh!" And T-Rex wrote, "What a coincidence. Obama is suddenly worried about small businesses! Appears to be major league pandering in an election year."
Reader HDR wanted to know, "Why didn't the White House listen when signing all these business-killing regulations into law? The only reason Obama is pretending to hear is that elections are coming closer; the same deaf ear will return after elections are over."
Chris from Portland, Me., even called for a boycott of Yahoo! for reporting the story, calling it "propaganda to support small business." (I'll just be grateful no one gave a thumbs up to that remark.)
A Sunnyvale, Calif., reader who goes by the handle NoGas4U commented that "Cass Sunstein and EPA chief Lisa Jackson have done more harm to American business than any two people alive. This is a pandering, phony political memo leaked to dupe Americans once more."
Alas readers, Sunstein might dismiss your collective comments as the predictable outcome of what he calls "cyberbalkanization." According to Wikipedia, Sunstein has argued that "the Internet may weaken democracy because it allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences, and thus cut themselves off from any information that might challenge their beliefs." Now don't shoot the messenger.
