Richard Florida, from the University of Toronto, had an opinion piece in the New York Times on Sunday, January 4 entitled, “Is Life Better in America’s Red States?” In it, Florida makes this initial observation about “red states”:
 
Red state economies based on energy extraction, agriculture and suburban sprawl may have lower wages, higher poverty rates and lower levels of education on average than those of blue states — but their residents also benefit from much lower costs of living. For a middle-class person, the American dream of a big house with a backyard and a couple of cars is much more achievable in low-tax Arizona than in deep-blue Massachusetts. 
 
Unfortunately, while Florida admits that the lower cost of living benefits residents of mainly “red” states, he neglects to account for that lower cost of living when claiming that red states have higher poverty rates.
 
The U.S. Census Bureau’s official poverty measure, now 50 years old, doesn’t account for the cost of living differences from state-to-state. These differences can be huge—as much as 40 to 50 percent from Hawaii, New York and California to Texas or Kansas. Once the cost of living is accounted for, as Census has done in its new Supplemental Poverty Measure (at least for housing costs), the picture of poverty in America looks very different, with California having the highest poverty rate at 23.4 percent, some 47 percent more per capita than in Texas at 15.9 percent.
 
Interestingly, California’s welfare benefits are far more generous than in Texas and, as a result, the Golden State taxes 52 percent more income on the state and local level than does Texas.