It’s been nearly eight months since Rudy Yakym took office as representative for Indiana's 2nd District and in that time, he’s navigating Washington in his own way, preferring to avoid cable news shows in favor of doing the homework and building relationships.
Speaking at a Kiwanis Club meeting in Elkhart on Tuesday, Yakym said that approach is paying dividends as he highlighted a pair of bills working their way through congress.
The first is the reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration which passed through the Houses’ transportation committee this month. The bill would raise the retirement age for pilots from 65 to 67 and lower the number of hours of training required for commercial airline pilots, without compromising safety, Yakym said.
“What we’ve tried to do is maintain that top level gold standard of safety while also creating more pathways for people to become commercial airline pilots,” Yakym said.
The pilot shortage has had an impact in northern Indiana, with Delta Airlines canceling its South Bend to Detroit route last year. But just this week, the company reversed course and will start the popular route up again in September.
Yakym also told WVPE he’s glad to be moving forward with a bill he’s sponsoring that will correct a mistake in the 2017 tax cuts, that will allow RV dealers to write off interest payments on inventories.
The original bill meant to include RV trailers in its language, but it didn’t and so RV dealers have been unable to write off the biggest section of their inventories.
“We’ve simply made a correction in the tax code that allows them to deduct interest on their travel trailers. It’s something every other business and every other industry has the ability to do, except for RV dealers,” Yakym said. “We want to make sure they can compete against other recreational dealers nationwide.”
Yakym also recently introduced a bill to collect data on illegal school bus crossings.
The first-term congressman also touched on national issues like the debt ceiling showdown, where he voted in favor of the deal reached between President Joe Biden and house speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Yakym feels the compromise cut down on “reckless spending” and called the deal a victory. Yakym was one of 149 house Republicans to approve the deal, with 71 hard line Republicans rejecting it.
The deal will see clawbacks to IRS funding and unspent COVID relief money in addition to ending Biden’s freeze on student loan repayments. Throughout the process, Democrats criticized Republicans for risking a national default as leverage.
Yakym also declined to endorse any candidate for the Indiana gubernatorial race or the presidency. Current Gov. Eric Holcomb recently endorsed his fellow Hoosier Mike Pence in the race on the Republican side.
