2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
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This author tracks right to work states over time...and finds that non right to work states are actually poorer than right to work states.....
Blog Are the poorest states really Right To Work
Something that people often forget when making state-to-state comparisons of income is that the cost of living varies widely by state, but the federal poverty line doesn’t account for this. For example, Texas has a higher poverty rate than California when comparing nominal incomes, but once the cost of living is adjusted for, California has a higher poverty rate than Texas.
The website “Compare 50” has an archive of the cost of living-adjusted poverty rates among all 50 states and Washington, D.C. until 2011. If we rank states by poverty in a given year, a state that’s in the poorest 10 could easily not be in the poorest 10 the next year, so it didn’t seem fair to just compare states for a given year. Instead, I looked at the COL-adjusted poverty rates from 2007-2011 and averaged them together.
Overall, of the right-to-work states had a COL-adjusted poverty rate of 13.6774, which was 0.7208 percentage points lower than the 14.3982% poverty rate in the non-RTW states. Excluding D.C. (which ranks #1)
Blog Are the poorest states really Right To Work
Something that people often forget when making state-to-state comparisons of income is that the cost of living varies widely by state, but the federal poverty line doesn’t account for this. For example, Texas has a higher poverty rate than California when comparing nominal incomes, but once the cost of living is adjusted for, California has a higher poverty rate than Texas.
The website “Compare 50” has an archive of the cost of living-adjusted poverty rates among all 50 states and Washington, D.C. until 2011. If we rank states by poverty in a given year, a state that’s in the poorest 10 could easily not be in the poorest 10 the next year, so it didn’t seem fair to just compare states for a given year. Instead, I looked at the COL-adjusted poverty rates from 2007-2011 and averaged them together.
Overall, of the right-to-work states had a COL-adjusted poverty rate of 13.6774, which was 0.7208 percentage points lower than the 14.3982% poverty rate in the non-RTW states. Excluding D.C. (which ranks #1)