Highest Paying Jobs Are in the East - AP

http://www.comcast.net/news/index.jsp?cat=GENERAL&fn=/2005/11/30/273612.html

Highest Paying Jobs Are in the East
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press Writer

Wed Nov 30, 2:57 AM

WASHINGTON - The East Coast may be losing residents to states in the South and West, but many of the high-paying jobs have stayed behind.

The states with the highest wage earners line the East Coast, while there are many pockets of wealth in the South and West, according to Census data released Tuesday.

Connecticut, with a median household income of $56,409, supplanted New Jersey as the country's highest wage state in 2003, the most recent year available. New Jersey slid to second, at $56,356, followed by Maryland, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Mississippi had the lowest median income, at $32,397. West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana and Montana rounded out the bottom five.

The median household income for the nation was $43,318.

Census figures show that Southern and Western states have been growing in population much faster than those in the Northeast and Midwest.

But despite those population shifts, the list of wealthiest _ and poorest _ states in 2003 looks a lot like the list from a decade before.

"You're going to see those areas _ Mississippi, Appalachia _ those are just characteristically, throughout history, poorer areas," said David Waddington, chief of the Census Bureau's small area estimates branch.

The wage gap among counties was even more pronounced than the one for states.

Los Alamos County in New Mexico, home of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, had the nation's highest median income, at $93,089. It was followed by Douglas County in Colorado and Loudoun County in northern Virginia.

Buffalo County in South Dakota, home of the Crow Creek Indian Reservation, had the lowest, at $17,003. It was followed by Owsley County in Kentucky and Ziebach County, also in South Dakota.

Most of the wealthiest counties were suburban, and nearly all the poorest ones were rural.

"This is a reflection of a poverty problem in non-metro areas," said Dean Jolliffe, an economist at the Department of Agriculture. "These are areas where there really isn't any economic development going on."

Jolliffe tracks "persistent poverty" counties, ones in which at least 20 percent of the population have lived below the poverty level for at least 30 years. There were 386 persistent poverty counties in 2000, and 340 were outside metropolitan areas.

None were in the Northeast. Most were in the South.

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what good is it to make $60,000 a year in manhattan when you have to share yr apartment w. three other dudes or live on the street?

the pay is good in the east, unfortunately, i've spoken to too many hard-working people who live in the east and who will never be able to own a home to envy them their pay

it isn't what you earn, it's what you can buy w. it

i think a sneaky single person who secretly lived at work could prob. pack away good money for awhile but if you plan to live like a normal person or even have a family, it sounds like a real mess

Real estate is ridiculous.

In each of these regions, nimbyism and development rules keep people from building housing to match the demand.

Furthermore, every dollar spent on land is a dollar down the tubes - no matter what the price, no one is building more. Because the supply is fixed, it's price is purely based on demand, and therefore, it can be taxed without raising the price. Which leads us to the neat trick of displacing harmful taxes on labor, sales, and buildings with increased taxes on land.

Overall it would mean a shift to building cities up, rather than out; land efficient shops instead of labor efficient big box stores; land efficient restaraunts rather than labor efficient fast-food joints; and it would allow governments to recapture the value they create when they build schools, transit, or other infrastructure. Shifting from labor-efficiency to land efficiency would mean vastly increased employment.

that the highest paying jobs are in an area that values education and keeping God out of the public schools. They actually learn real science!!

might be connected, but hey, why let reality interfere with an opportunity to declare one's wondrous superiority to the hayseeds?

:hi:

but when I see states that decide, by vote, that they want to teach Intelligent Design, and Abstinence Only, and that prayer belongs in school, it is logical to assume that the education is better in states that do not get involved with fights/discussions over God.

And that is not really even the point - these states get a large amount of the northeast's tax dollars and then kick us in the teeth calling us immoral and elitist. Well, yes, I guess I am elitist because I believe in education, and I must be immoral because I believe God should not be in the schools or my bedroom. And then they cannot even support themselves.

It's like the family member who dropped out of high school preaching to the PhD. relative about how to educate his kids.

A "liberal" on a supposedly progressive site mocking poor people. What a bunch of elitist bullshit.

cost-of-living.

$60k a year in New York or Jersey gets you a tiny little house in the burbs, or an apartment in the city...in a bad neighborhood.

$40k a year in Missouri gets you a 10 acre ranchette.

Who's poorer?

FWIW, I live in California, which has most of the country beat when it comes to cost of living. In my area, the minimum household income needed to buy the median priced home with a conventional mortgage recently exceeded $90,000 a year. And that gets you a suburban stucco BOX. Half that money in the midwest will have you living like a king.

Because taxes are so fucking high. In Mass. they are, that is.

Yea, I could make sometimes 20% more. So what when you have to pay 500% more for housing.