Letter: Democrats did not start pension mess

In the Daily Herald on May 4 Gordon Szymanski writes that Illinois has been ruled by Democrats for the last 30 years and proceeds to ascribe a list of ills to it.

It took less than a minute of research to find a list of governors on Wikipedia.

In fact, of the last 38 years we had 26 years of Republicans and recently 12 years of Democrats. It was Gov. James "Big Jim" Thompson and his stock market cronies who started holding back pension contributions because they thought they could beat the market.

Edgar kept it up as did Ryan until 2003. Most of that time the legislature was in mixed hands.

Very few were complaining that we should have had a tax increase before the 2001 NASDAQ crash ended the market chasing.

I won't excuse Blagojevich because the problem was evident by that time. And lately the state has been making it's payments, although that is in doubt under Gov. Rauner due to lack of funds.

At this point the blame doesn't matter much, but if you want to assign it we should get the facts straight rather than throwing rocks at people who were not there.

Mark Muehlhausen

Schaumburg