In an exclusive interview last week, CME Group Executive Chair Terry Duffy said he’s more than ready to leave Illinois if he doesn’t get what he believes is a “fair” tax deal from the General Assembly.

The company owns the Chicago Board of Trade and several other firms. It’s a very big wheel in this state, and leaving would be the worst sort of news for Democrats who raised taxes this year.

Duffy has been under intense pressure all year from Wall Street to reduce expenses. State taxes are listed as expenses on corporate books, so Duffy has been publicly fuming about his company’s $150-million-a-year state-tax burden since corporate tax rates were increased.

Duffy claims CME pays 6 percent of all corporate income taxes in Illinois, and pays more than any other company. “I don’t know another company in the world that pays 6 percent of another state’s taxes.”

An apparent legislative drafting error has created a massive loophole in the state’s new campaign-contribution-limit law, and ComEd and its parent company Exelon have been aggressively exploiting it since early this year.

State campaign-finance-reform laws that capped campaign contributions went into effect January 1. One provision of the new law set a $50,000 cap on what political action committees could receive from other political action committees during a calendar year.

Despite that cap, Exelon’s federal PAC has transferred more than $189,000 this year to a state PAC controlled by subsidiary ComEd. Those transfers appear to be almost four times larger than the law allows.

It’s long been a tenet of public opinion that voters want the government to cut its budget and don’t want new revenues, but also don’t want any actual programs slashed.

However, the latest Paul Simon Public Policy Institute poll shows a slow but sure trend in favor of specific state budget cuts and revenue increases.

A large majority of Illinoisans do still believe in magic. According to the poll, 58 percent say the state budget can be balanced by cutting waste and inefficiency. And because of this belief in an utter fantasy world where fairies reign and pixie dust solves all our problems, too few want to actually cut state spending programs.

Illinois Democrats can be excused for feeling more than a little spooked these days.

And there’s probably no greater example about why they are so worried than the stunning announcement earlier this month that longtime Democratic Congressman Jerry Costello won’t run for re-election.

Shock combined with fear was in almost every Democratic voice the day of Costello’s announcement. If Costello was bailing on them, then things must be even worse than they thought. It didn’t help that there appeared to be no “reason” for his decision. His son, state Representative Jerry Costello II, immediately defied all expectations by saying he wasn’t interested in the seat, so Costello wasn’t stepping aside for the kid. The congressman wasn’t ill. He didn’t have a job offer. He isn’t under investigation. The widespread conclusion was that it must be the worsening political environment.

Pat Quinn has been trying to get rid of Illinois Power Agency (IPA) Director Mark Pruitt almost since the day the governor was sworn into office. He finally did it, but the move is backfiring.

The governor is a big cheerleader for alternative power sources such as wind and solar. But Pruitt, whose main job is negotiating contracts with electricity generators on behalf of consumers, refused to sign some alt-energy contracts because they’d cost consumers too much money.

Pruitt’s IPA was created after mega utility ComEd announced that it intended to buy electricity via a weird reverse auction system that was roundly slammed by Attorney General Lisa Madigan and every other reasonable political leader in Illinois. As a result, Pruitt claims to have saved Illinois electricity consumers $1.6 billion since 2007, and he has the numbers to back him up.