Illinois AG candidate Fioretti: Office must ‘be cooperative and engaging with the local state’s attorneys’

Bob Fioretti, Republican attorney and former Chicago City Council member, said that if elected Illinois Attorney General, he would prioritize coordinating with the state’s 102 county prosecutors to fight corruption and improve governance.

“I’ve talked to past attorney generals and past people who have worked in that office recently going back almost 30 years,” said Fioretti, Attorney and former Member of the Chicago City Council. “And it has a significant role. However, our role should also be cooperative and engaging with the local state’s attorneys. We have 102 states attorneys in this state.”

Fioretti appeared on the Prairie State Wire podcast to discuss his campaign for the 2026 election. He emphasized that after consulting with former attorneys general and office staff over nearly three decades, he sees the role as one that requires collaboration with local state’s attorneys across Illinois’ counties. Fioretti detailed plans to unite these officials in efforts against corruption and for accountability in law enforcement.

According to the Illinois General Assembly, the Attorney General must consult with and advise state’s attorneys on their official duties per state statutes. The Attorney General can assist in prosecutions or initiate proceedings if a state’s attorney declines a written request within 60 days when public interest demands it. These measures support coordinated enforcement of laws like the Election Code at both state and local levels.

The Illinois Attorney General’s office collaborates with local law enforcement and state’s attorneys to investigate fraud, public corruption, and violent crime. It has developed systems for officer professionalism and transparency through partnerships with state and local agencies. Such collaborations extend nationally with other attorneys general on issues including gun violence and civil rights protection.

State attorneys general nationwide serve as chief legal officers, often aiding local prosecutors in enforcing statutes and conducting investigations. In Illinois, this includes probing criminal offenses at a state’s attorney’s request and pursuing civil rights violations through dedicated bureaus. These roles foster accountability in government and law enforcement across jurisdictions.

Fioretti holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from Northern Illinois University. He served as Chicago’s 2nd Ward Alderman from 2007 to 2015 and has practiced as a civil rights attorney, handling over 500 cases. Fioretti has previously run for various offices, including Chicago mayoral positions and Cook County roles, before his current bid for Illinois Attorney General.

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FULL, UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT

Bryan Hyde: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prairie State Wire Podcast. I’m Brian Hyde. Today I’m joined by Mary Pat Campbell. She is an experienced writer specializing in public finance topics, but I su, I suspect Mary Pat that doesn’t begin to tell the story. Before we go into our topic today and, and what Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is up to, give us a little bit about your background.

Tell me about how you came to write on the subjects that you write on and you’ve, you’ve actually become pretty renowned for, for your expertise here. 

Mary Pat Campbell: Right. Well, it started with a beef with my fellow actuaries in the mid two thousands, and it’s really a, a hobby, a side thing that I’ve been doing. And the theme was, this was about 2007.

I was, I’m a life annuity actuary, so I worked with life insurance and annuities and I was working for the company, TIAA cref, it was called at the time, it’s now TIAA. And I was doing stuff with annuities. Retirement [00:01:00] annuities. And I noticed how those were treated very differently from public pensions. And I got into arguments with public pension actuaries.

It was very theoretical. And one of the retorts they had was that government doesn’t go out of business. And I’m like, oh, really? Because I’m a big history buff. And I knew a lot of stories of how his, how governments did go out of business. Entirely because of financial failures specifically, and I got it out of theory.

I’m saying I’m going to start accumulating examples of bad behavior of governments. Show you how they really get into trouble. I started. Blogging back then on group blogs, they know the ones I was on back then no longer existed. Then my late husband set up a website for me. And then in 2020 I transitioned to Substack, uh, right on Public [00:02:00] pensions, public finance.

And then one of my specialties is mortality trends, and that really came to the fore in 2020. I moved to Substack at just the right time. So yeah, those are my main topics that I write on online. And it’s for a general, it’s for a general audience. By the way. I mentioned actuaries, but I try to make it accessible for non-experts.

Bryan Hyde: Well, and you do a wonderful job of this. I say this because I, I just read your Substack article about the Chicago mayor and, and stupid tax ideas. Okay? I’ll admit I am not familiar with the whole head tax. Concept, although I understand it’s been tried elsewhere. Talk to me about what a, what a head tax is, and then let’s talk about why Brandon Johnson is in intent on enacting this.

Mary Pat Campbell: Right, and the concept of a head tax is very simple, which is why it’s attractive to politicians, because it’s simply a certain amount of money [00:03:00] per employee per month, because we know not all employees are going to last the entire year. So the accounting on it should be fairly straight. By the way, in that initial post, and I’m working on currently.

Follow up post because there’s been a lot of reactions to Brandon Johnson’s proposal of this head tax and it’s often proposed with a threshold of a minimum number of employees of you’re going to have per employee per month, and you’re going to be paying it, I don’t know, monthly, quarterly, however, it’s going to be dispersed to the city.

And they’re hoping that it would be more stable than some other sources of revenue, and also it’s going to be attached to a particular fund. Now, Chicago itself used to have, and this is my follow up post that I’m working on right now, used to have a head tax that was instituted [00:04:00] in 1973 and went away during rom emanuels.

Mayoral, uh, when he was a mayor in 2011, November, 2011, he announced town council, agreed with him. They were phasing it out over 2012 through 2014. They actually had to ramp it down because they were kind of dependent on that source of revenue, so they had to do it in steps. They, it used to be $4 per employee.

Per month, and the threshold was 50 employees. But at the time, remember the timing, there was a recession. Chicago had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. I think it was 10% at the time, and they wanted to attract business. So this was just an obstacle. If you want less of something, tax it.

You want fewer employees, less employment, your tax employment. This is not a great tax if you wanna build [00:05:00] business. And Governor Pritzker himself, that’s why I’m like, I’m accumulating. Reactions to it. There’s not a lot of people who know about business who are approving of this head tax, so that’s Chicago.

But Seattle itself had tried out, and it does have a head tax currently, and we called it the Amazon tax because they had put it together to target Amazon, one of their largest employers. I actually probably their largest employer in town to try to milk. Some money off of them to deal with their homelessness problem.

I mean, and it is a big problem in Seattle. But a lot of things happened. They tried it, it failed, it got vetoed. And they said, you know, the, I’ll just say it. They are explicit socialists on the town Council in Seattle said, okay, well, we’ll come back and put it in place when you’re not paying attention.

Well, in 2020, people weren’t paying attention. They put a [00:06:00] different version of it back with higher thresholds and. It’s in place, but it’s getting less revenue than they originally predicted. And then they diverted the funds to some other purpose, not the housing fund that they originally said it was going to be for.

So yeah, this is what I talk about, like the bad behavior. That I’m tracing and one of the things I do is I do it over a long period of time, not just what’s happening right now, which is what you usually see in the news, is I’m a very patient person. I’ve been doing this since like 2007. It, I’m coming up on T in a couple years ago have been 20 years.

I’ve been following these issues and I remember, I mean, I do have search and I can do that, but I remember what people had done. How it’s coming to fruition. I don’t have a memory that only reaches back one day, [00:07:00] which is what a lot of people act in some of these political discussions and disputes. 

Bryan Hyde: Mary Pat, let me ask you this, about, about this proposed head tax in Chicago.

How many businesses is this, is this going to affect, and I guess more importantly, what type of businesses is it only the big businesses with, with, you know, multiple employees, or are there ways that this can trickle down to smaller businesses too? I’m just curious who gets to feel the brunt of, of such a attacks?

Mary Pat Campbell: Right, so the, I mean, I don’t like these kind of taxes with a cliff. Because it’s like a hundred employees. Well, we had something like this with Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act where certain kind of requirements kicked in at different thresholds, and it creates all sorts of distortionary pressures.

If you’re a smaller employer and you’re starting to grow, you see this huge wall ahead where you have this. Enormous [00:08:00] step up in costs. You get 99 employees and then the marginal cost to go to that 100th employee is huge. Okay? It doesn’t ramp in like percentage wise, it’s this huge step up. So it, it creates this big barrier to get past it.

Actually, there’s a similar kind of phenomenon with people on welfare. If you’ve ever seen those kinds of situations of, you get so many benefits if you’re low income or no income, but if you start working a little bit, I, I have a disabled son, for instance. If he ever started working, he’d lose so many benefits.

It, it’s not worth it. Therefore, the unemployment rate for many disabled people is very high because they’re not able to make enough money. They could make minimum wage, but then they lose all these benefits you have these cliffs put in. So that’s how [00:09:00] smaller employers would be affected by this kind of head tax.

Now, the claim being made is that only 3% of companies would be affected by this a hundred employee threshold. Well, okay. They’re not giving numbers. And the prior head tax, so back in 2011, and I found the press release, it was from November, 2011 that Rah Emanuel put out in 20, in 2009, 2010, when the threshold was 50 employees.

It was 2,700 companies or employers that were affected. Well. It’s only 3%. Okay? What? Where are you going? By count? Are you doing the count by whatever your corporate income tax is? Because how many of these companies are really single proprietor that have zero employees as just the owner? You’re calling that and they’re paying corporate income [00:10:00] tax.

What’s this 3% based on? And then you say, okay, it’s just 3%. Well, of that 3%, you know, how big are they and how much of the revenue you’re already getting depends on those because this is important. What happened when Ken Griffin and Citadel, you know, pulled up stakes and moved to Florida? And I work in Connecticut.

I live in New York State, I work in Connecticut. They have a, some, an office in Connecticut that keeps track of the billionaires in Connecticut because if one billionaire leaves Connecticut, a huge hunk of Connecticut’s state revenue goes down and they have to adjust their budget. I’m not joking about this, by the way.

It is true. Wow. Illinois. I don’t think they do that. They’re a bigger state than Connecticut. [00:11:00] New York State definitely doesn’t do that. We have a lot more billionaires, but if you get to the point, and I’ve said, I haven’t said this explicitly yet. People talk about killing the golden goose. Well, this is a golden goose that maybe you’re trying to strangle it, but it can fly away to Florida and lay its golden eggs there.

Florida can take advantage of getting revenue via a sales taxes. They might not have income taxes there, but they have other taxes where they can make money off of these businesses that have moved. They don’t have to do business in Chicago. There are certain types of businesses that do have to do business in Chicago.

So one of them that I looked up was Hyatt Hotels. There is a reason I looked up Hyatt because the Pritzker family is associated with it and there’s, you know, over a dozen Hyatt hotels. That said, that doesn’t mean the Hyatt company owns all those hotels. They’re Hyatt branded. They could be franchised.

They could be leased, it [00:12:00] could be licensed. And if you are giving incentives to break these up into other entities, then you start getting to lawsuits, oh, you should be paying that tax. This is not the situation the city of Chicago wants to be in, to have to litigate that taxes have to be paid. Uh, you thought it was a simple tax and then all of a sudden now it’s a complex tax of that you have to get lawyers involved of, well, you’re really one employer and you just gave them an incentive to outsource, to split up into other entities and say, I’m different employers.

You know, it’s franchises. This happens with McDonald’s, this ha I mean, it happens with all sorts of franchising, leasing, licensing, operations. It’s not unique to Hyatt. I just picked that because of the association with Pritzker. The problem is, of course, a lot of the politicians coming up with these, you know, one cool trick have never run a business themself.

So they don’t know the pressures, they don’t [00:13:00] know what happens when you’re trying to grow a business or some of the decisions that come into play of. I’ve got a choice now. I’d like to grow for the next 20 years, but is it gonna be in Chicago? Do I have to be in Chicago? Nashville is looking pretty attractive.

Maybe I’ll go there instead. There’s a lot of choices that can be made. 

Bryan Hyde: So I, I’m curious, I know Brandon Johnson has his own agenda that he is pursuing, but it sounds like this kind of a tax heavy budget wouldn’t be possible without a little help from his friends who are also in power. Talk to me about the disposition of other leaders in, in Chicago City government regarding, you know, this head tax.

Are they okay with, with, you know, basically sticking it to, well, the people there. I 

Mary Pat Campbell: mean, I don’t have the names in front of me, sorry. I mean, and some have left because of legal difficulties and other issues, so I’m not up on the current names there of co. Of [00:14:00] course there is the head of the Chicago Teachers Union and she’s like, actually a lot of the players that are on Brandon Johnson’s side, his background of course is as a.

Public sector union organizer and the public sector unions are like, yes, more money for us. And to them, money and numbers seem like a play thing. Like there’s an infinite power to tax, except there is not. And this is where I’m coming in when I got into the disputes with various people about government doesn’t go out of business.

Part of this is they were assuming there is some amount of discipline of, well, you have, oh, we’ve gotta have a balanced budget. People are calling into question and some of them are alderman. I’m not, I’m sorry, I’m not as familiar with the names because I’m in New York. [00:15:00] It’s not as personal to me. I just noticed that their Chicago Alderman calling into question some of the numbers that like, are you sure that’s the amount of revenue we’re going to get from that proposed tax through this proposed tax?

The math doesn’t add up. I don’t really think you’re making some assumptions that are rosy from your perspective, that’s going to get a lot more revenue. I went into the act first. That’s the audit audited financials for the last several years. It’s hundreds of millions of dollars deficit each year. The budget is just a projection, it’s a plan, but when the actuals come in, it’s always a hun, hundreds of millions of dollars in shortfall.

And that’s not sustainable, and that’s not even taking into consideration. And I know you’ve had Sheila Weinberg. On. They’re not including all of the obligations that have been accrued during the year, and I’m talking about the public [00:16:00] pensions. But not only that, the retiree healthcare obligations, they’re only including the cash flows that they have decided to put into the pensions that year, and they have grossly underfunded the pensions forever, even though they’ve been increasing the payments to the pensions.

It is still an underpayment. That’s why the funded ratios are so bad on the pensions, but this is why they have to increase the revenue so much. They, no one’s really talking about how much money needs to go into the pensions, and it doesn’t help that you have this fire and police pension sweetener that just got passed.

That’s not gonna help, but that’s not part of the conversation because there’s no plan to do anything about the pensions. It’s a tough, it’s a tough situation and Brandon Johnson came in as the city pensions. It’s the worst in the country. So he had a situation that he had to [00:17:00] deal with, but let’s put a committee together and.

We have all these committees he put together, but it doesn’t seem that he’s taking recommendations from any of these committees and it doesn’t seem that any of the politicians are working with each other. And definitely Chicago doesn’t seem to be working with Springfield. That’s very obvious, even from this distance.

And Chicago definitely needs money from Springfield and it seems to be stop. You can’t let us fail. Springfield, you cannot let us Chicago fail. You don’t let us go bankrupt, so you better give us the money, or you better let us do what we want to do. That seems to be the politics of the situation from this distance.

JB Pritzker and Brandon Johnson obviously do not get along, and that has been obvious since the beginning. I mean, from New York. That’s the basic obviousness. 

Bryan Hyde: We are, unfortunately up against the rock. Sorry, [00:18:00] I, I wish we could, I wish you, you have no shortage of, of material here. I, oh, I just wanna, I do wanna ask you, that’s why 

Mary Pat Campbell: I love Chicago and Illinois.

It’s like an infinite. Amount of material and that’s like why I like beating up on them. 

Bryan Hyde: Where, where can people find your website if they want us? Yeah. 

Mary Pat Campbell: So it actually uses, it’s called Stump, but it uses my name. It’s Mary Pat Campbell. Campbell like the soup. So altogether Mary Pat campbell.substack.com is where I write.

Or you can Google Mary Pat Campbell actuary and that’s all me. I’m the only actuary named Mary Pat Campbell, and you’ll find a whole bunch of stuff I’ve written on Substack and elsewhere. 

Bryan Hyde: Thank you so much for joining us today on the Prairie State Wire Podcast.