This is worst time for tax increase

As a voter and member of Americans for Prosperity, I ask our Illinois state representative and senators to vote NO on any and all tax increase proposals presented to the Illinois General Assembly for fiscal year 2010. This could not be a worse time to raise our taxes.

Illinois uses a traditional incremental approach to budgeting, which assumes that existing programs and services are always necessary. The legislature and governor begin the budget process by starting with the appropriations each department received in the previous year's budget and then they choose to increase, maintain or minimally decrease funding levels. This system is not effective, nor is it responsible.

There should be no rush to pass a tax-and-spend budget until a process is in place that provides a review of how every tax dollar is being spent, and to justify those expenditures in a transparent forum.

I ask our representatives in Springfield to freeze or reduce spending from FY09 levels and focus instead on enacting real substantive budgetary reforms that will curtail the waste, fraud and abuse of my tax dollars.

Rod Drobinski

Wauconda