TLDR, in many situations in Illinois you make more money (due to benefits) by making less, up to a staggering income level of ~$70000 a year in some cases. I h

TLDR, in many situations in Illinois you make more money (due to benefits) by making less, up to a staggering income level of ~$70000 a year in some cases. I have seen this first hand. When I was broke in community college I became eligable for $200 month food subsidy which quickly dropped off a cliff if I worked more than 26 hours a week. So I worked just under that. Any more would be a net loss until ~35 hours due to my low wage per hour not making up for benefits lost. I did some more math, and it turned out I would make only ~10% less money if I could find a job with very high hourly pay and very low hours per week. With the incredibly broken way the system was set up, I ended up finding a website admin job that paid 18 hourly but only 4 hours a week to maximize the benefit. Some would say I "messed with" the system, but I was going to be broke either way and it made zero sense to work more for less money when I was going to school. I quickly moved out of Illinois from this and a hundred other political happenings that convinced me the government there was just unfixably corrupt and broken. I'm not surprised this is coming from Illinois, at all. Incredibly high taxes from benefits allocated absurdly. Laughable benefits for students and other blocs that don't "bring in the vote". The state has a shadow governer Madigan who has run the state for two decades no matter who was in charge on paper. Illinois is teetering on bankrupcy and the only state with a shinking population due to so much out migration. And the average person leaving makes almost $30,000 more a year than the average person moving in. Because anyone that can afford to leave is on the way out due to extremely high taxes. Businesses have been fleeing in droves for over a decade, and it's rated in many small business polls as one of the top 5 worst states to run a business. The state has turned to raiding the public universities and local governments in recent years. Cutting funding so severely that several large public universities are almost bankrupt. My education grants dropped from 10k a year from my low income to zero in a single semester because of budget cuts, and I have about 20k in student loan debt as a result. Basically, don't move to Illinois, it has easily the crappiest most corrupt government of any state. The financials are so bad they've narrowly avoided bankrupcy and have a junk credit rating. If you move there be prepared to pay down the previous decade of uncontrollable debt to the state in taxes due to the inability of Madigan and friends to balance a budget while maintaining their staggering level of corruption