The rollback of Illinois’ income tax rate on Jan. 1 isn’t the only major tax change on the horizon.

State lawmakers and key lobbying groups also are eyeing a potential overhaul of the state’s business taxes, all in an attempt to update the tax code and generate economic growth.

The push comes at the same time Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner is set to take office after campaigning on a pledge to make Illinois more friendly to businesses.

This year, judges in California and Michigan approved the exit plans of two of the largest municipal bankruptcy filings in the country’s history. In California, Stockton upheld its obligations to the state’s pension system behemoth, Calpers, while paying its other creditors as little as pennies on the dollar. Detroit, meanwhile, was able to restructure its obligations to all of its creditors, including city pensioners. While the exit plans differed, both judges ruled similarly: public pension obligations could be shortchanged like any other debt.

Stockton and Detroit aren’t alone. Cities and states across America are facing catastrophic budget shortfalls. After decades of promising municipal employees pensions and healthcare benefits, municipalities do not have the savings to pay them out. According to a Pew report released last year, some cities had only 50 percent of the funds needed to cover pension promises, and Charleston, West Virgina, had only 24 percent funding. Now, paying off these shortfalls—and serving the debts incurred—is taking up a growing portion of municipal budgets, at the expense of essential public services.

Kim Rueben, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, calls Illinois “the basket case of all of these pension cases.” For decades, Illinois and most states have hired public employees and promised them generous pensions upon retirement. But as an analysis by the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability for the Illinois 2014 budget reported, Illinois got into trouble “by diverting what it owed to fund benefits to instead subsidize the cost of providing public services. Through this process, the state effectively borrowed billions of dollars from the pension systems, using them like a credit card.” Now, the state faces a pension deficit of $111 billion. This year, Illinois’ budget dedicated almost one in every five dollars to funding pension obligations—and 80 percent of that amount was spent servicing the debt itself instead of lining retirees’ pockets.

The rollback of Illinois’ income tax rate on Jan. 1 isn’t the only major tax change on the horizon.

State lawmakers and key lobbying groups also are eyeing a potential overhaul of the state’s business taxes, all in an attempt to update the tax code and generate economic growth.

The push comes at the same time Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner is set to take office after campaigning for the past year on a pledge to make Illinois more friendly to businesses.

Chicago doesn’t need another law that makes it harder to start a business.

And business owners don’t need rules that add “policing” to their laundry list of responsibilities.

But if you own a tobacco shop, a filling station or a convenience store, the line between proprietor and neighborhood watchman may get a lot blurrier if an ordinance moved forward by Chicago’s Committee on License and Consumer Protection becomes law.

Imagine an economic historian in the year 2050 talking to her students about the most consequential innovations of the early 21st century—the Model Ts and Wright flyers and Penicillins of our time. What would make her list?

Surely fracking—shorthand for the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that is making the U.S. the world’s leading oil and gas producer—would be noted. Surely social media—the bane of autocrats like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and of parents like me—would also get a mention. Mobile apps? Check. The emerging science of cancer immunotherapy? Hopefully, with fingers tightly crossed.

After drawing up this list, our historian would then observe that each innovation had “Made in USA” stamped all over it. How strange, she might say, that so many Americans of the day spent so much of their time bellyaching about the wretched state of their schools, the paralyzed nature of their politics, their mounting fiscal burdens and the predictions of impending decline.

In response to the CIA torture report, President Obama stated that torture was “contrary to who we are.” (Peter Beinart explained why this statement is not logically coherent last week.) But Obama didn’t comment on how odd it is for a Chicago politician like him to claim that torture is somehow separate from the American experience. Chicago, as the president must know, has a dark legacy of torture and cover-ups for which the city is still trying to confront and atone. But whether Chicago ever will be willing to truly say that torture is “contrary to who we are” remains unresolved.

Chicago’s history of torture is centered on police commander Jon Burge, who was assigned to Chicago’s south side in 1972. Between then and 1981, Burge and his men used torture to elicit confessions from more than 110 African-American men. In addition to beatings, the police under Burge allegedly suffocated suspects with plastic bags and used electrical shocks to victims’ genitals, a technique Burge may have learned as a military police investigator in Vietnam.  Burge also suffocated his victims with plastic bags. Anthony Holmes, one of the victims, provided this description of the torture in a statement to special prosecutors:

“[Burge] put some handcuffs on my ankles, then he took one wire and put it on my ankles, he took the other wire and put it behind my back, on the handcuffs behind my back. Then after that, when he—then he went and got a plastic bag, put it over my head … so I bit through it. So he went and got another bag and put it on my head and he twisted it. When he twisted it, it cut my air off and I started shaking. … So then he hit me with the voltage. When he hit me with the voltage, that’s when I started gritting, crying, hollering … It feel [sic] like a thousand needles going through my body. And then after that, it just feel [sic] like, you know—it feel [sic] like something just burning me from the inside, and, um, I shook, I gritted, I hollered, then I passed out.”