Froomkin: Obama mulling Business Roundtable recommendations

[Enrique]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/15/white-house-mulling-busin_n_648209.html

A leading big-business group, responding to a request from top White House aides, last month submitted to President Obama's Office of Management and Budget a 54-page hit list that takes aim at regulations protecting the environment, workers, consumers and investors.

Having asked the Business Roundtable for its advice, the White House was then faced with the question of what to do with it.

(...)

But just like the advice the White House politicos are giving Obama about pressing forward with deficit reduction in the midst of a jobs crisis, the idea of loosening the reins on big business -- at a time when the cost of deregulation has been so viscerally on display in the Gulf of Mexico -- strikes some observers as spectacularly tone-deaf. Not just bad policy, but bad politics.

"What we're in the middle of is a string of regulatory failures that the Obama administration seems very insensitive to," said Rena Steinzor, a law professor at the University of Maryland and president of the pro-regulation Center for Progressive Reform. She cited the financial crisis, the Massey Energy mine disaster, and of course the BP oil spill.

(...)

Gary Bass, executive director of the pro-accountability group OMB Watch, said the Business Roundtable should be embarrassed by its insensitivity to the regulatory failures that have cost the nation so much in recent years. And he scolded the White House for soliciting the group's advice on regulation in the first place.

"Why the White House would be catering to this kind of rhetoric smacks of election-year politics, instead of governing," he told HuffPost. "What I continue to see in this administration is a battleground between the politicos and the policy people, whether it's deficit versus stimulus or regulatory matters."

(...)

[katandmoon]

1. We. Are. Screwed. Up one side and down the other. K&R.

[dkf]

2. Big business is a waste of time. Concentration should be on small business and sole proprietorships

With the aim of enabling individuals to start their own businesses.

Big business wants to maximize profits. They have no incentive to hire with economic expectations so low. Forget them and put our efforts into helping the engine of job creation which is small businesses.