Late last summer industry chalked up one in the 'win' column of the "Economy vs Regulators" standings when President Obama asked the EPA to withdraw an air-quality rule business groups said would cost millions of jobs. The EPA wanted ozone standards tightened to 60-70 parts per billion, down from the 75 ppb proposed by President George W. Bush but never put in place. Most states currently adhere to a level set in 1997 of 84 ppb.

At the time, Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, was hopeful the White House was "becoming more sensitive to the uncertainty created by its heavy regulatory hand." As would be expected, environmentalists had another take. "The White House is siding with corporate polluters over the American people," said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The White House now has polluted that process with politics." 

The environmentalist's view is overstated. Congress is facing 219 major regulation proposals, each with an estimated cost to the economy of $100 million or more. And the White House concedes seven of those will each have a price tag of at least $100 billion. The Administration has also increased the number of regulation proposals (environmental, financial and so on) it is drafting by 15 percent, and bumped up the budget for regulatory agencies 16 percent.

As it stands now, the score at the end of 2011 is actually one victory for business and the economy and 4,200 for the regulators. That's right. Along with the 219 big ticket regulations, the Administration admits another 4,000 new or revised regulations are in the pipeline. 

It's bad enough that the expanding array of government regulations costs the American economy $1.75 trillion annually, which the Small Business Administration also calculates as more than twice the amount of revenue collected each year from individual income taxes. While large and small U.S. businesses grumble about the expense, tediousness and inconvenience of compliance, it seems some of the beneficiaries of the regulations, especially those in the wild, are, well, ungrateful.

Two decades after six million acres of federal forests in the Northwest were closed to logging by the Endangered Species Act in an effort to restore the spotted owl population, these nocturnal birds of prey don't seem to have got with the program. They are vanishing at an average rate of 3 percent a year and 9 percent in some parts of the preserve. In the meantime, 200 sawmills in Oregon alone are out of business. Unemployment there is 20 percent, and the unmanaged forests have become firetraps. The 2002 Biscuit Fire in southern Oregon and northern California burned 500,000 acres, cost $150 million to fight and destroyed $5 billion worth of timber. It also resulted in the deaths of an estimated 75 pairs of spotted owls.

Biologists admit they don't really know what is behind the spotted owls' demise. But some suspect the hoot owl, a fierce rival, is preying on its cousin. So, despite Mother Nature's settled law, i.e., natural selection, survival of the fittest, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is pressing on with a final Revised Recovery Plan issued this past summer. The Plan sets aside additional acreage for the spotted owls and calls for shooting the hoot owl.

As the U.S. prepares to withdraw most of its troops from Iraq by the end of the month, is the nation really prepared for an incursion of armed federal agents into the Northwest forests on a search and destroy mission against hoot owls? By the way, the price tag for this Revised Recovery Plan is $127 million, and the Fish and Wildlife Service only ventures to say it might restore the spotted owl population in 30 years.