Latham Promotes Key Initiatives for 2012

U.S. Congressman Tom Latham grew up on a family farm in north central Iowa, outside of a small town named Alexander.

“There’s about 165 people there,” Latham said. “I have four older brothers and my dad started a soybean seed business in 1947. After I got married, I moved home in 1976 and got back into the family business and the farming operation.”

Latham had never run for an elected office until running for congressman in 1994, where he has served ever since. Currently, Latham represents the Fourth Congressional District and is running against Leonard Boswell for the Third Congressional District, which includes Creston.

“I chose to run for this district because I didn’t see a reason why Steve King and I should compete against each other,” Latham said. “I’m very concerned because Boswell is voted 100 percent with Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, and I want to make sure that there are different values brought to Washington.”

Some of Latham’s key initiatives for 2012 are regulatory reform, forcing Congress to enact an annual budget and protecting Iowa’s family farms from intrusive youth labor regulations.

Regulations

The point of regulatory reform is to clear out the burdensome, redundant and costly federal regulations through a Red Tape Reduction Commission.

“The commission will look at all regulations to see which ones are actually worth it and which ones are redundant,” Latham said. “The ones that don’t have a purpose anymore are costing a lot of money with no benefit.”

The job of the commission, in essence, would be to identify those regulations and then see if they are outdated and need reformed.

“The Department of Labor has jurisdiction over child labor laws,” Latham said. “This is a regulation specifically for agriculture.”

This regulation would deny any young person to work on a farm, unless their parents were actually the only people involved in the operation.

“Today there are all kinds of partnerships,” Latham said. “It would basically eliminate virtually every kid from being able to be a part of the farming operation. Everyone wants farmer safety, but there is no one who cares more about your safety than your family.”

Latham added people would really get hurt if someone was sent to work on a farm with no experience.

“That’s when people will get hurt,” he said. “When you grow up with it and it is natural to you, you take responsibility and you learn the skills you need. It really is a great thing.”

Annual budget

It’s been the law since the Budget Act of 1974, that every year Congress must have an annual budget resolution.

“There’s no consequences to them not making a budget,” Latham said. “That’s the reason for this legislation, to make a consequence. It’s been almost three years that they haven’t had a budget.”

The legislation Latham will be proposing will stop the disbursement of funds to Congress until a budget is passed.

“This means, I won’t get paid, my staff won’t get paid, we wouldn’t get plane tickets home, we would have to stay there and complete our work,” Latham said.

Latham added the reason there has been no budget is because they don’t want to subject their Democrat members to tough votes.

“We are actually supposed to take tough votes and do our work,” Latham said. “We are $15 trillion in debt and to ever get a handle on that you’re going to have to have a budget sometime.”

The biggest issue today is creating jobs and getting the economy back on track.

“The best thing we can do to create more jobs is to give certainty to employers,” Latham said. “It’s not a matter of dollars of liquidity or of the federal government priming the pup anymore, if you just had certainty out of Washington you would release the money to be invested into the economy, creating unbelievable jobs.”

He added this was the reason the regulatory things were so important.

“People have great ideas and are motivated to do stuff with those ideas,” Latham said. “Then the government steps in and says no you can’t do this and no you can’t do that. For a small business person, it’s like hitting a wall.”

Latham added that he was looking forward to representing people in this area.

“What they’ll find is someone who does listen to them,” he said. “Someone who is out and about all of the time; they’ll see a lot of me.”