Sorry, but I'd rather pay more and live in a state higher wages, lower poverty rates, and higher levels of education.

I don't even know that there's a good way to compare standards of living like the author does, though, but the housing price difference definitely seems important.

I couldn't live in Walmart world. There are "costs" involved that aren't measurable in dollars.

My hometown is in the very heart of "Walmart world", but I have lived in 6 other states, half "red" and half "blue", on both coasts and in the middle, too. Every one of those states had its own set of problems, including high cost of living, high crime rates, and a lot of very unpleasant people. But when I go back to my home town on vacation, I am greeted with a smile in every business establishment I visit. My family home is in a quiet, fairly rural area but is still close to "town". And the cost of living there is much lower than in other places (although that could change when the Republicans get their way). If I ever move back to the US, I would most likely move back to my hometown area, despite its flaws.

Yesterday I vaped some weed then went to the museum where I stared at ACTUAL Picasso paintings before eating French-Moroccan food at a restaurant at midnight.

Yesterday, I had a snowball fight with my kids in our backyard before we drove to the community center and played basketball and went swimming and then met their friends at a pizza joint.

Different strokes and all that.

Nothing wrong with that. Some would call it freedom.

Probably written by a "Walmart Shopper"

I've lived in Texas but Deep Blue California is home.

Some things, you just can't put a price on.

I can unequivocally tell you...NO it isn't better...quite the opposite actually!

I live in Nebraska. Omaha and Lincoln are nice towns with relatively low crime and good schools. Unemployment remained low throughout the great recession.

Barring some extremely compelling reason, I don't think I could live in Little Rock, even though it's one of the "bluest" areas of Arkansas, but I could easily move back to familiar haunts in the more conservative northwest part of the state. I probably couldn't live in Lee County, which is heavily Democratic, but also very poor, or Sebastian County, which is much richer but extremely conservative.

There's a world of difference between Austin and Dallas, for example.

From what I can see, the affluent are treated with great respect in Red America. In Liberal states... LOL.

Once you loose the plantation mentality.

for the rich in red states.

CT has lower Fairfield County and NY has Westchester County and The upper east side of Manhattan.
These areas highly skew the numbers for those states.

My sister and brother in law live in Indiana in a huge home with 4 children and their home was 270 thousand. My home in Arnold Maryland was 750 thousand and is a smaller home by 1000 square foot. Their property taxes are crazy low compared to mine. With 4 kids they do well with the schools, but Maryland is better especially my county.

And I earn over $200K per year

Who do you think is better off

but I built a new house here 10 years ago,3k + sq ft for 80 k
and am well off for here.

I couldn't say who is better off.

Kind of does it for me

Many of those states are great places for retirement but seriouly lacking for the majority of the population

The same could be said of Mexico

inexpensive home?

Went through a couple of them before we found one we could work with

If you live in a low-cost area, then at retirement, you get squat on your housing investment
and are stuck living like that for forever.

My parents did that at retirement in their 60s. Bought 10 acres and a modular house in
WV for $60,000 cash. Twenty-five years later, it sold for $80,000. They bought a new
van with a wheelchair lift, and that took half of what they had.

I'm stuck in Pennsylvania. No jobs, low education, high redneck factor... my house lost
35% of its value in the bust...unfortunately, the cycle of my life had me buy this home
at the peak of the market.... we may never get that money back. My daughter lives in
No Virginia and as much as we'd love to move there, it is financially impossible. I'm from
Maryland/DC suburbs, and if my husband's illness didn't keep me extremely busy, I'd
just go completely bat-shit crazy here. Big thrill around here is the maybe four times a
year a movie worth seeing comes around. Many of the movies we'd like to see don't even
make it to the theatre here.

I live in a peculiar place.

I lived in California before moving up here in 1975. Alaska has its issues, but I wouldn't live anywhere else.

I've lived in 8 different states (not a record, I know) but enough to see lots of differences.

One aspect of a Red state with a low cost of living, meaning low housing prices, is that often the public education and health care aren't so good. Also, even places that are supposed to be too expensive to live in, such as Santa Fe where I live now, still has plenty of homes that are affordable.

I know that every time I start thinking some city or state is just so awful you couldn't pay me to live there, someone here waxes eloquent about how wonderful that place is. So I tend to withhold my judgement these days.

Here's another hugely important point that is always overlooked: the vast majority of people live where they do because they grew up there, or got a job there, or married someone from there. Not very often does an adult look around, decide to relocate, and then make a more or less rational decision not constrained by job or nearness of relatives or something else. Sometimes adults at retirement seem to be making a free choice about relocating, but all too often they are guided solely by a fear of paying taxes and a true horror of shoveling snow. I prefer to make my choice of where to live not by a negative (tax or snow avoidance) but by positives (cultural life, good public transportation).

And as much as I love living in Santa Fe, I'm very clear about the disadvantages here, such as limited public transportation and poor public schools. But since I don't have children in school, I can be a bit cavalier about that. I hope to relocate at least once more in my life, and public transportation will be high on my requirement next time.

I prefer living in a state with a good safety net for the poor and strict environmental laws. I'm willing to pay extra in taxes for this. I like libraries and nice parks, and good schools. I want to live where science is taught as fact, not something to be ignored when it collides with a religious belief.

It bothers me that the red states use my tax dollars to fund some of their state's annual budget and then poach businesses from my state by promising low taxes and little regulation. I guess that makes us suckers...

The lifestyles of my friends in California and the Northeast and those who headed South are night and day apart.

I'm just very fortunate that in the early 90's my parents sat me down and said "you're buying a house right fucking now" and Prop. 13 let me stay there.

During your working years, at least, you need work pretty much above all else. After all, during those years you probably have kids to support too. And you have to save for retirement. As an apocryphal story I once heard goes, an Irishman who moved here was asked how he could bear to leave such a place as beautiful as Ireland. His reply? "You can't eat the scenery." A red state may be able to offer lower housing costs and lower taxes, but they also offer lower wages and lower job security. Plus, the lower property values kill you when you go to sell. I've just now finally got got an offer on a condo I own in a small, job-poor city-- after a year and half of trying to sell it. I was lucky enough to find a good deal on a condo here in Indy, a city I know and like. Home prices are higher here, and so are the taxes; but the job situation is better. And I'm certainly sitting better than I would in expensive Chicago, which would have been my next choice. I guess I've found a happy medium.Now if we could just get rid of Pence the Dense . . .

red, blue or purple.

I cannot go back. This is the best state, hands down.

Especially in the pacific west and the northeast. You either have to deal with out of reach housing costs or high crime (or somewhere inland) or bad weather (Pacific Northwest in general and Minnesota and the rest of the Midwest and NE during winter) or in somewhere isolated (Colorado, New Mexico). In order to afford the housing (especially in the metropolitan areas) you have to be in a good paying career which itself gets more and more competitive. You have to be in the upper tiers of society (at least the top 20 percent.)

The cost of living in a blue state is too high for many Americans.