The rent for Trent Kelly’s 550-square-foot apartment in Washington, D.C., is higher than the mortgage payment for his family home in Saltillo.
Of all the things first-term Mississippi First District Congressman Trent Kelly tries to get across to his colleagues on Capitol Hill, he said chief among them is how the value of a dollar differs from place to place and how the effects of government regulations can vary drastically among Americans.
“(Some) don’t understand that $50,000 in Mississippi isn’t the same as $50,000 in Washington, D.C., or New York City,” he told Columbus Exchange Club members Thursday during a speech at Lion Hills Center. “So we can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach.”
As a member of the House Small Business Committee, the Republican representative said he spends most of his time trying to “take away all the regulations that are killing us.”
Many of those regulations involve banking compliance or come from entities like the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Agency, he told The Dispatch in an interview after the speech, though he didn’t venture into specifics.
“I don’t think they’re necessarily bad-intentioned, they just don’t know how the real world works,” he said of the regulators. “A lot of these guys have spent their careers in politics or they come from academia. Don’t get me wrong, we need regulations because people will run amuck if you let them. Those regulations just need to be reasonable.”
One problem he sees with the regulatory system is that often, such as with the EPA, the regulator also assesses and collects fines on violations, leaving little incentive to levy standards that aren’t “too stringent.”
“These guys are self-fed by fines,” he told The Dispatch. “They fine somebody, which allows them to hire more people, so they can pass more regulations and assess more fines.”
One specific concern he did offer was with a Department of Labor regulation, effective in December, to pay overtime to salaried employees who make up to $47,476 per year. That’s more than double the current threshold of $23,660, and something he believes could hurt Mississippi’s economy.
“That’s not going to create jobs here,” he said. “All that’s going to do is get businesses to hire more part-time people.”
During his speech, Kelly voiced his support for the Trans Pacific Partnership, a much-debated plan that aims to open avenues for free trade in parts of Asia, although he doesn’t believe it will ever come to fruition.
He said most farmers and business owners he spoke to in the First District supported TPP, but special interest groups in both conservative and liberal camps, as well as both major party’s presidential nominees — Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump — have firmly stood against it.
“I’m a free trader,” he told Exchange Club members. “…If we don’t do partnerships with these groups, they’re going to do them with China or Russia. It’s not going to do away with the trade; it just means we won’t get our share of it.”
Elected in June 2015 to the seat left vacant by the death of Rep. Alan Nunnelee, the former district attorney and Tupelo city prosecutor is seeking election in November to his first full term in Congress. In his time in Washington, he told The Dispatch, he’s worked to reach across the political aisle to find solutions to problems — something he admitted was a difficult task in a hyper-polarized political landscape.
“There are no 100-percent solutions,” he said. “So, if you sit around and wait for a 100-percent solution, what you end up with is nothing.”
He said he plans to support Trump for President in November, a position more common among his Republican colleagues than he said it may appear in national media.
“I support our nominee,” Kelly told The Dispatch. “He wasn’t my first choice, but he’s my only choice now.”
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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