Yesterday, President Obama signed an executive order instructing agencies in his administration to ferret out environmental, health, and safety regulations that need to be repealed or modified in the name of economic growth. (See OMB Watch’s statement here.) “[The E.O.] orders a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive,” Obama wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

Obama’s case study in unruly regulation is an obscure EPA rule that considered saccharin, an artificial sweetener, a hazardous waste. “Well, if it goes in your coffee, it is not hazardous waste,” Obama wrote, noting that the agency has eliminated the rule under his watch. This flimsy example is apparently the best one Obama and his small army of speech writers and policy advisors could come up with.

Businesses, too, cannot produce many concrete examples of big, bad regulation. Last month, Rep. Darrell Issa asked industry lobbyists to produce lists of “existing and proposed regulations that have negatively impacted job growth.” In the lists that have crept into the public domain thus far, the overwhelming number of rules the lobbyists have identified fall into the proposed category. Pending greenhouse gas standards and rules implementing health care and financial reform seem to be the items lobbyists and conservative critics spend the most time crowing about. Their lists make clear that industry is more concerned with the specter of regulation than the existing regulatory state and its impacts.

The reality is, regulatory compliance costs are not stunting economic growth. The Dow is up more than 10 percent from this time last year; the S&P nearly 12 percent. Corporate profits reached their all-time highest levels during the third quarter of 2010.

But unless you have experience lobbying against health care standards or Wall Street regulation, you’ll have trouble securing gainful employment. Many firms simply aren’t hiring, choosing to sit on record cash reserves and rely on increases in employee productivity or move jobs offshore. As a result, the unemployment rate declined only modestly in 2010 and still stands above nine percent.

How will regulatory rollbacks – which will take years to accomplish given that, by law, agencies will have to initiate new rulemakings to undo their old rules – put America back to work? That’s a question I’m nearly certain no one in the White House, including President Obama, has an answer to.