Kirk Targets Regulatory Excess at IFB Annual Meeting

That requires pulling in the reins of federal regulation, empowering private industry to leverage public investment in highway and waterway infrastructure, promoting trade in growing Asian markets, and enabling farm families to adequately train the next generation of U.S. producers, the senator told farmers at an Illinois Farm Bureau policy "coffee" Sunday. Kirk conducted a roughly half-hour question-and-answer session with members during the organization's annual meeting Sunday in Chicago.

Kirk related "some good news, some good news, and some challenges," applauding the recent passage of new free trade agreements (FTAs) with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia, a once-drug-plagued nation which now should see significant export strides among its "legal businesses" even as it reduces or eliminates import duties on U.S. farm goods. South Korea long-term prove the most beneficial new trade partner of the trio, given the need to be "connected more and more closely to the Asian market," the state's junior senator said.

Within a decade or two, China likely will become the world's leading economy, largely on the strength of a rapidly growing middle class expected to devour more U.S. commodities and value-added imports. He was hopeful the Chinese government would initiate its own domestic currency reforms to spur middle without need for congressional intervention that could risk starting a "trade war" with the influential Asian giant.

"You know of the bad news in Europe and with the euro," Kirk noted. "Having increasing connection to Asia not only links us to the market that has the fastest growing potential, but also the one that doesn't have any of the currency or banking problems we see in Europe."

The European debt crisis nonetheless requires U.S. attention, though not in the form of an American financial bailout, Kirk said. The lawmaker is slated to meet with International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde to discuss ways to avert the kind of European collapse that in 1931 contributed heavily to U.S. Midwest bank failures.

Kirk also cited "good news" on the regulatory front - successful producer efforts to stem a hasty federal reaction to a non-existent "dust pollution crisis." IFB and others were able to dissuade the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from pursuing new rural air "particulate" rules even at a time "when the president was more popular," and he was optimistic the next Congress could help bring further logic to federal regulation, he said.

Kirk supports a proposed moratorium on any new federal regulations with a public cost projected at more than $100 million, as well as a single "streamlined authority" for regulatory permitting that would cut through the bureaucracy and multi-agency conflicts that currently delay important public projects and farm/business improvements. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) likely will remain "pretty pro-regulatory," but bipartisan lawmakers should be able to reach some compromise in easing the regulatory yolk on U.S. business, he suggested.