By: Matthew Besler

How do you start reforming the nation’s most over promised and underfunded pension system? The first step taken by State Representative Tom Morrison was to refuse his own pension. Serious, independent reformers like Morrison refuse to partake in a corrupt system and reap its benefits at the expense of Illinois residents who are being driven out of their homes due to overbearing property taxes.

Last month, Wirepoints.com unveiled a pension pledge asking candidates to demonstrate leadership and show they are serious about reforming pensions by refusing to accept a legislative pension.

Illinois legislators are some of the highest paid in the nation despite only working part-time. The lucrative pension system is one factor that attracts and creates career politicians.

Homeowners are being betrayed by lawmakers like Representative Conroy (D-Villa Park), Representative Michelle Mussman (D-Schaumburg), and Representative Sam Yingling (D-Round Lake Beach), who take a taxpayer-funded pension while their constituents’ struggle financially to pay high property tax bills with no real push for reforms.

Legislators like Mussman, Conroy and Yingling continue to pass phony budgets, raise taxes, and vote as they are told by Speaker Mike Madigan.

We deserve independent legislators who will work to save our homes, not just sit by and collect a paycheck as families are being uprooted and seeing their most important investment destroyed.

Look at what candidates and legislators do, not just what they say. Our current representatives have failed us. There is a new coalition of reform-oriented citizen legislative candidates that are willing to take on the fight and have signed the pledge to refuse a taxpayer-funded pension.

Candidates Marilyn Smolenski (R-Park Ridge), Alyssia Benford (R-Bolingbrook), Ammie Kessem (R-Chicago), and Craig Wilcox (R-McHenry), to name a few, have refused to accept a pension if elected.

When candidates and legislators say they are serious about reform. Tell them to prove it. Ask them to sign the Wirepoints’ Pledge rejecting a legislator pension.

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