I'm amazed that anybody would ascribe so complex a thing as the national increase in corporate cash holding to one single dominating factor.
Other important factors: deleveraging to reduce short-term paper costs, poor economic conditions for repatriating cash in foreign markets, and simple uncertainty about the long term future for improving consumer demand all play huge factors. While fear of uncertain new regulation has impacts, that would perhaps explain why they are slow to hire, but not so much why they are leaving the money in cash.
Frankly, when someone who knows better reduces a complex situation to a simple one, I assume it is a negotiating maneuver. Blame all the bad stuff on over-regulation to get your way, then next year blame all the same bad stuff on whatever the next thing you want to change is.
(Not to mention that the increase in cash holdings by U.S. corporations has been a multi-decadal trend that has only seen an increase in recent years not a fundamental change. How scared were the companies by Reagan that they started doing
this in the '80s.)