Hey there from Darrington, Washington, and Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Texas Hill Country. Chicago is here. I wonder why Chicago decided to come today. Cortez, Colorado, Asheville, North Carolina, Farmington, Arkansas. I don't think I've done a double yet. Reno, Nevada, Bushnell, Florida, Oslo. Okay, that's not a double. And Kristen is here from California from Facebook. So we have Facebook here as well. Welcome everybody, and thank you for coming here this afternoon for our special guest today, Governor JB Pritzker from Illinois. Governor, thank you so much for being here.
Great to be with you, Heather.
So there's an awful lot of things that I would like to ask you about, but I'm going to start with something that I've been wondering about a lot lately. As more and more billionaires seem to be jumping into the business of governance, why did you decide to go into public service?
I'm so glad you asked that because I do get asked that question a lot, and it is a peculiar moment, I think, to have wealth and also be in politics. But I can tell you, at least in my family, it's not an unusual endeavor. Indeed, virtually every generation of my family — my grandfather served in the Navy, so too my father was a crypto analyst in the Navy, an officer, my uncle also, my sister was the commerce secretary for Barack Obama — and I have served in a variety of capacities in government, and now of course in elective office. So it comes naturally in my family to be involved in public service.
But I'll also say I get why people ask in this moment, because we have billionaires that are attempting to thwart the system to their own benefit. Indeed, often corruptly, and certainly as they have supported President Trump, they do it in support of someone who has demonstrated virtually every day in office that his administration is corrupt and often to their benefit. So I understand why people ask questions about it, and all I can say is I think the question that people ought to be asking is: what are the values of the people who are attempting to serve in public office, and do they deliver on their promises to working families? Are they doing what's asked of them that's in the best interests of the people who elected them? And I think I have done that. And I understand the skepticism that people start with.
Well, it's interesting because when you think about the sort of people you're talking about, we do of course have the examples of the Roosevelts — Theodore Roosevelt, for example, and I'm going to ask you more about that era in which he lived — but also FDR. So you're walking in trodden footsteps. But in that vein, one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you is because of what's been going on in Illinois. And what I mean by that is that the way that the state has essentially taken into its own hands the good of its people and tried to work within the state boundaries to create its own version of democracy reminds me very much of the earlier progressive era in the Midwest, of people like Fighting Bob La Follette or John Peter Altgeld in your own Illinois.
And I would love to talk really in some detail about what you have done in Illinois and your ideas of how states can be a model for democracy going forward — in the same way, or rather the opposite way, that we have tended to see states' rights in a number of Republican-dominated states as moving in a really retrogressive way. And so many people think of states' rights and they think only of that backward movement, and yet a state like Illinois is very consciously, it seems to me, moving forward. And can we break that down in some detail? Because it really seems to me that you have led on debt relief, education, bringing in business, and so on. And I'd like to know if you have a model, how you are doing it, and how you see that as a potential model for the nation.
Well, when I ran for governor back in 2018, I talked a lot about putting Springfield — that's our capital — back on the side of working families, because it had gotten off that center and focused on people who really need government just to give them a little bit of a hand up. Sometimes, of course, the most vulnerable need more than that, but the focus of government shouldn't be on the wealthiest people. But it should be instead on the people who really make this country great: the middle class, the working class, and again the people who are most vulnerable in our society, who are left out and left behind.
So when I think about the models for how I behave and what it is that we're doing here — I know you put it in the context of states' rights, and it's certainly true that we are taking advantage of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution and thinking a lot about the Supremacy Clause and how it is that we can operate in a world where Donald Trump is taking advantage of that clause in a corrupt fashion. And I would just say that although that's true, that we are taking advantage of states' rights, again it's because of my focus on the people who really need government most.
For them. So all of the things that you mentioned — and you know, you asked kind of what's the north star — we may not think of FDR, for example, as having had states' rights in mind.
Exactly, maybe the opposite.
All of FDR's national program comes directly from his work in New York State.
Well, it's a good point. And actually I want to say we have a governor — you didn't mention him — but we have a governor that served during the time of FDR who carried out the New Deal in the state of Illinois. And in fact, I'm in my office and I have his portrait on the wall. But he wasn't a states' rights advocate either necessarily, but what he was focused on was doing the right things for the people of Illinois. And again, John Peter Altgeld, same thing — was standing up for the people of Illinois.
You know, John Peter Altgeld, our governor in the late 1890s or mid-1890s, I should say, actually called out our National Guard to protect the strikers at the Pullman factories in Illinois when the federal government was sending troops to stand on the side of industrialists against the workers. And that certainly was a states' rights endeavor, but also so much an analogy for what we've had to do to fight Donald Trump in this era of ICE and CBP and their attacks on our states.
So when I was a little girl, I was actually born in Illinois — long story there. And one of the earliest political figures my mother ever told me about was John Peter Altgeld. So, and you spoke about him in your state of the state this year, as I recall.
I did. And again, the analogy of standing up to the federal government when we needed to protect the people of our state — that really was the theme of my mention of him. But he was the one who implemented child labor laws to make sure that children weren't being recruited at very young ages to work in industrial plants. And he was really the person who stood up, as I mentioned, for labor unions and the right to collectively organize and get better wages. And these are things that I believe in too.
But you talked about states as a kind of laboratory for democracy or a laboratory for policy, and indeed that's what we've been doing here. You mentioned, for example, cancelling medical debt. We eliminated billions of dollars in medical debt in this state for people who are up to three times the poverty level. And there are lots of people walking around with $1,500 or $2,000 or $3,000 of medical debt, sometimes much more than that, and they can never pay it because they're only earning $50,000 a year and they can barely make it on that 50 or 60,000. And yet their credit rating has been affected by it. The guilt that lays on them — and these are often people who just got into a car accident or got a disease that they didn't know they would get. It's not their fault. They had to go into a hospital and they're getting bills and now collection agencies calling them. That's not right. And especially in this era when we ought to finally have universal health care, we need to make it a lot easier for people to get access to a doctor and be able to pay for it. So we're trying to alleviate that burden. That's an example of — I don't know if I'd call it unique, but we were the first state, along with Connecticut — we did it at the same time actually — that really had a state program to eliminate medical debt. And it didn't take much money. For every billion dollars of medical debt that we cancelled, it cost $10 million.
Yes. Can you please explain to people how you did that, which seemed like such a no-brainer once it was done?
Yeah. So there's a great nonprofit that was actually — philanthropists helped to create it — called Undue Medical Debt. And they were really in the business of buying, usually for small towns and cities, for the people who live in those towns and cities. No state had ever done this — buying uncollected medical debt from collection agencies that were never really going to collect this money. And the collection agencies get a percentage of whatever they're able to collect when they're handed these overdue bills, and they weren't going to get any money on it. And so Undue Medical Debt would go and buy, for essentially on average a penny on the dollar, medical debt, because these collection agencies wouldn't even have gotten a penny for it. So we were able to use Undue Medical Debt, this nonprofit, to go in and talk to all the hospitals and health care providers. We're still on the hunt, by the way, for medical debt that we still haven't maybe uncovered at these providers. And it was something that was so easy for us to do because it didn't cost very much money. The Cook County — I want to give credit where credit is due — Cook County, our largest county where Chicago is, was actually the pioneer in our state. They went after it first, and I looked at Cook County and said, "Why are we not doing this for the entire state?" So really four times the amount of medical debt we were able to cancel across the state of Illinois that they did in Cook County. So I'm very proud of that.
And yes, it's an unusual endeavor, but I just passed — I want to talk about affordability because this is in the same vein. You know, our insurance companies announced, in particular homeowners insurance, announced last year that they were raising homeowners insurance rates by 27% in one year. 27%. People can't afford to pay for their mortgages, let alone to pay 27% higher homeowners insurance. So we said this shouldn't be possible — and do we regulate them enough, or have them report enough to the state, and give us the opportunity to force them to prove why they need a hike that big? They claimed that it had to do with climate change and the effects in Illinois, but at the time they did it, we were not a state that was massively impacted. I mean, Florida, yes, of course, not Illinois. And so we suspected that they were really gouging their customers. So we just passed a bill yesterday, as a matter of fact. So I'm proud to announce it today, along with an auto insurance bill that allows us to bring down rates for families across the state of Illinois. I think these are things that we all ought to be thinking about and using our states to sort of figure out what works, what is actually going to effectively lower costs. I hate the word affordability because I don't think people really understand the concept. What they understand is lower my prices. You know, everything costs too much.
So we eliminated the grocery tax in our state, for example. We're not the first state to do that, but it was something I looked at and said, why are we charging people, already being gouged by the high cost of groceries, with a tax on top of that? So we eliminated that just two years ago. Anyway, these are all things that I've been engaged in doing. Also, free community college in the state and paid leave. These are all things that I got done. Maybe people don't expect someone that they look at and say, "Oh, he's a billionaire," to be standing on the side of working people, but that's the whole reason that I ran for office in the first place.
Well, so let's also add in there — Illinois has raised the minimum wage, right?
That's right. Thank you. That's probably the most important affordability measure. But helping people deal with inflation — how about if we raise wages in the state? So Illinois was at $8.25 when I took office, and I passed in my first year — in fact, the first bill that I pushed through the legislature, and it was my introduction, and the first bill that I signed — was raising the minimum wage to $15. And even though today you might say, "Well, that's not enough," and indeed my lieutenant governor Juliana Stratton, who's now the Democratic nominee for United States Senate, has proposed a national minimum wage hike to $25 an hour. And I just have to say, if we can put more money in people's pockets, give them the right to organize and get a better wage, and raise the minimum wage — and I've raised the minimum wage for teachers in my state as well, the minimum salaries — if we can do all those things, that is the most effective way to make everything more affordable.
Okay. But this is what really interests me about Illinois is that you are doing all of these things that have been — I mean, they're called progressive. I would suggest that Teddy Roosevelt was a bit ahead of us on asking for all of these things, and he can hardly be called a progressive for today, since he was running around more than 100 years ago. But the other real thing that I've watched out of Illinois that fascinates me is that when you came into office, Illinois's credit rating was in the dumpster, and you have gotten — is it 10 credit upgrades?
So tell us please how you have managed to level the playing field economically, the way it seems that Illinois is trying to do, and yet repair the state's finances.
Well, I have to start with my Republican predecessor decided that he wanted to destroy labor unions in the state. And the way he would do it is by refusing to sign a budget that would be passed by a Democratic legislature until Democrats acceded to his demand to destroy labor unions. Well, Democrats didn't give in. And by the way, that is how we ought to be operating today at the federal level — the Congress needs to stand up to this president the way that our legislature stood up to the governor of this state. But we went two years without a budget because this governor was unwilling to sign a balanced budget and demanded the destruction of labor unions. Two years. So by the time he was running for reelection, we had collected up about $17 billion in unpaid bills. And we were paying a 12% interest rate on overdue bills because that was in state law. People were doing services for the state, not getting paid, and we would give them 12% for every year we were late — 1% a month. And that was costing a billion dollars right there just to pay off the interest on the debts that he was racking up. So when I came into office, $17 billion in the hole, and we really hadn't balanced the budget in many years in the state. It was sort of covered up that we were running deficits. So I came into office at a time when people understood that we need to get back on track. We were 50th in credit rating — 50th out of 50 states.
