The comparison offered by state Rep. Bud Cook, R-Waynesburg, is sobering.

“In the state of Ohio, it took 11 days to get a permit to drill,” Cook told a reporter for The Center Square, for an article in Monday’s edition of the Sun-Gazette. “In the state of West Virginia, 14 days. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it was 365 days-plus.”

The pace of addressing the permits needed for job-creating projects in Pennsylvania, as we’ve reported on and editorialized about before, is inexcusable.

It is a problem that goes well beyond the energy sector. A real estate agent described to The Center Square’s Anthony Hennen how permitting hurdles and other bureaucratic obstacles will balloon the costs of constructing a $200,000 residential property well above $300,000.

“It’s no longer an affordable home,” the agent noted.

Pennsylvania needs jobs. It needs affordable housing. Our county and municipal leaders and our region’s lawmakers repeatedly have acknowledged that simple truth.

Unfortunately, too many of our leaders in Harrisburg resist accepting that truth.

Some of the business leaders in Monday’s article indicate that resistance may stem from a commitment to believing something else entirely: That a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to regulation and oversight can work.

But when the evidence rolls in that it isn’t working and instead is depriving our state of two direly needed assets — jobs and housing — we need Harrisburg to reassess that dogma.

The ability to support a family with a decent job and to raise that family in a nice house has long been the staple of what we call the American dream. When Harrisburg’s commitment to bureaucratic dogma denies Pennsylvanians both decent jobs and nice housing, it’s no longer a regulatory inconvenience or regulatory problem.

It truly is a regulatory nightmare.