They are most expensive because they care about the poor, environment and justice which are not cheap programs to have.

typically blue states like New Jersey, New York, California, Illinois, and Minnesota tend to contribute more money to federal coffers via taxes than they get back in the form of federal spending. Many typically red states (and especially in the poor and rural south), on the other hand, take in much more via federal spending than they contribute with tax dollars. There are exceptions, of course--Wyoming, for instance. But, overall, the trend holds.

It may be true due to the sheer numbers based on population.

But how does that account for anything given federal the tax rates are the same across all states?

Might be tricky to get the right search terms and plow through the drivel that surrounds this.

The key to making sense out of this (before being outraged) is to break the flow both way into components.

There are household income taxes.
There are things like FICA, dedicated-use income taxes.
There are corporate income taxes.
There are fees.

For out-flow, there are
General use services and contractors (roads, government offices, file-folder vendors, for examples)
Military and military contractors
Social Security and Medicare recipients
Need-based entitlements
Farm and related subsidies

Blue states may have large needy populations, but compared to the large corporations and wealthy they pay in more. Many are coastal, with large ports of entry and rake in fees there.

Military bases are often in red states--in land, in states with a lot of land. A lot of military contractors have relocated to red states. Retirees tend to go to red states because they're cheaper and often warmer. Many red states have larger rural populations that receive need-based entitlements, but they also have farm subsidies.

By and large, it's a case of resenting that those don't like the idea "from each as he is able" benefit from it, but that's an odd understanding. They focus on income tax and payments to individuals and assume that's the entirety of the accounting. (Even then it's a large portion of it, but that's how people move and the Congress decided.)

The government puts the farm subsidies where the farms are, not because they're in red states but because it was considered good policy at one time. Much of the redistribution is for federally mandated programs, often driven by blue-state voters and often resisted by red-state politicians. And some of it is military bases, which provide a lot of low-paying service jobs and restrict land development for private use but which gobble up federal money. Even when 10k troops from a base are deployed overseas, the money for their pay is still accounted to the state the base is in.

based on the Fed tax rates?

I'm more inclined to think these differences are due to state taxes, cost of goods & services and real estate costs.

It is quite basic. NY state receives fewer funds back from the federal government than its people pay in, where as South Carolina receives more funds back than its people pay in.

but it doesn't address the OP.

especially when you factor in that the states with the highest rates of poverty are typically southern and/or rural states. Also, cities have their own and/or state taxes to draw on, as well as funds from local/regional planning authorities, and large-scale expenditures will be cheaper per capita in the urban areas than elsewhere. The result is that a major highway project in the NYC metro area may cost a lot more than a major highway project in, say, Mississippi, but a lower percentage of the project is likely to be paid by federal funds and the cost-per-user will be much lower.

Anyway, here's one such study by wallethub. (This one is fairly recent, but there have been similar stories/trends for a while now.) It includes other data other than just the ratio of federal taxes to federal spending, but you can find that figure in the first column: http://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/

Like just getting goods shipped to HI is incredibly expensive.

But higher taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. I would much rather be in high-tax Maryland than low-tax Mississippi, for instance.

Hello? Krispy Kreme?

We've seen instances of sellers claiming to ship "worldwide," who won't ship to Alaska. eBay sellers will charge us $10 or $15 to ship, even if the item will fit in an envelope and be sent by U.S. mail. Consequently, everything is more expensive here.

demographics, urban planning, population distributions and the like, I can only speculate but looking at NY, NJ and CA, you have tightly controlled urban centers that house the bulk of the population with finite building space.

Property costs (for both rental and purchase) and its proportion to other costs (it is generally the single largest expense) have a ripple effect across all facets of society and directly influences other costs (like food, one of the other large expenses).

Couple that with population density (take NYC for example: it comprises almost half the population of NYS) and the results skew rather dramatically.

You can probably lather, rinse and repeat for CA.

AK and HI have logistical challenges: almost everything has to be imported and from a significant distance and that would directly impact overall costs.

On the flip side (states with the most bang for the buck), I would look to correlate the above #s with the agricultural production. I would discount CA as an anomaly because it has the aforementioned housing issues and specific population density issues.

Fresno is hella cheaper than SF. Same thing with, say, Utica vs. NYC.

He had a series of job offers.

The first thing he did was figure out what the pay for each job meant by comparing cost of living to the income offered.

He found that the employers knew this "trick", hardly new in '98, and since they wanted him for essentially the same job and the job marketplace was the US as whole because it was a small but mobile candidate pool, their offers were just about the same.

Speculation?

Taxes, prevailing wages, food prices, how you factor in housing (which often means zoning restrictions and school taxes), cooling/heating day equivalents, energy prices and types, transportation (and the assumptions--do you count bus or car in NYC, Los Angeles, and Houston?). When everybody makes $15/hr you'll see cost of living increase. Money's a commodity, and if there's more commodity then it's worth less in real terms.

I remember seeing "cost of living" comparisons when I was in high school in the early '70s, with breakdowns by various categories.

I could sell the same junk as a 99 cents store and the people would be lined up for the valet parking .

expensive to live.

Feels like it's barely $20