So it's obviously part of Peter Roskam's campaign to have letters to the local press, naturally written by independents. The Republican claim to care about the deficit would be more reasonable if they hadn't been responsible for creating most of our current one through tax cuts aimed primarily at the wealthy, a prescription drug plan that had no cost controls, and two wars. Furthermore, Romney plans to reduce the top tax rate paid by high income earners from 35% to 28%, adding $900B to the deficit in 2015 alone (http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxtopics/romney-plan.cfm). This is in addition to rescinding the over $700B in Medicare savings that Obama negotiated with medical providers, so that he can claim to defend Medicare. Apparently, Romney will pay for his tax cuts by reducing tax loopholes, but he refuses to provide any details about which ones (charitable donations, mortgage deductions?). As Clinton said, simple "arithmetic" shows that this will either require gutting spending on schools, roads, homeland security, etc. or increasing taxes on the middle class. But Romney will only discuss the details with Congress, conveniently after the election. It would be nice if we could have an adult debate using realistic numbers that allowed us to decide on what difficult choices we need to make, but the Republicans won't trust us with actual numbers before the election because we might not like them.

Terry, you have to start somewhere. Also, I am very tired of republicans saying that american companies have the highest tax rates in the world, If that were true the deficit would be a lot less. But the truth is, some of these companies through many loop holes do not even pay taxes or a lot lower than what is said. O'bama is not presenting smoke and mirrors. That has been done the 8 years prior to O'bama and from guys like roskam. I tell you this, if folks like roskam, Boehner, cantor, and mcconnel would have helped this guy instead of fighting him on everything tooth in nail, things would be a lot better now. Sorry, i disagree with your views. Romey with all do respect floats like the wind. A brilliant business man? That is debatable. I do know that he shipped a lot of jobs overseas when he was in charge and with all do respect, how can anyone back him when he won't release more that 2 years of his returns like his opponent has?

OK dgguy, Will give him some slack.

Who cares who writes the letters, so longs as the fact are truthful. Be informed and vote. And do not buy the media hype that the election is already determined. YOUR VOTE COUNTS. in 2010 Pat Quinn won only 3 our of 102 counties and by about 1% of the vote.