Wanted: lawmakers who will step up

In response to Carol Murray (“Vulnerable citizens suffer as bills unpaid,” Nov. 4), I agree totally with your complaint about getting old bills paid, but I totally disagree with your conclusion. Where have you been for the last 20 years? Who got us into this mess? A democratically controlled state legislature? Right! And when they got a 66.6 percent increase in revenues what did they do? Pay off bills? Begin balancing the budget? Get rid of worthless programs and tighten the belt? No way.

The governor went out and tried to put in a bunch of new programs (additional spending) and the legislature decided we could gamble our way out of their mess, but real budget trimming and paying bills never crossed their minds. Quinn deserves no praise. Remember, he’s the one who threatened to reduce all of the programs whose bills you wrote about and pledged to protect all of the union employees. Let’s get off this “Republicans did it” business, and just agree that our legislature did it, and is doing nothing about it.

This is not a partisan thing, it is a matter of character, and our legislators have proved time and again that they have none. So let’s vote them out and see if we can’t find people with some common sense and strength of character to replace them. If we turn over enough of them enough times, I think we just might get the message out to them and find a few people of good character (from both parties) to get our deadbeat state out of trouble.

Robert Williams

Rolling Meadows