Illinois will only get economically healthy if we stop focusing on growing minimum wages and start focusing on growing everyone's wages.

Being a successful CEO, where I've driven a bottom line, assembled teams, driven results, that's a critical benefit to running the state government.

I think we've got to be competitive here in Illinois. It's critical we're competitive. We're hurting our economy by having the minimum wage above the national. We've got to move back to the national.

The critical thing is that we have to reduce the tax burden.

I was one of the first women partners at my law firm, the first woman in my Minnesota prosecutor job, and the first woman elected from my state to the Senate. So advice from women who had done similar things was important for me.

I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

Because our government has been so incompetent at protecting its highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of the electronic vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and shot right back at us.

Washington politicians think that government can make better decisions than you and me. But we know better. We know it's smaller, less intrusive government that will lead to real economic prosperity. We know it's business-friendly policies, not more red tape, that will create real growth.