A dollar’s worth

I recently saw an article online that gave the “true value” of a dollar depending on what state you live in.

And good news, fellow Arkansans, you’re actually about 16% richer than you thought you were!

You see, based on the cost of living difference in each state, one U.S. dollar will get you more bang for your buck in one state than it will in another, something the article called the “purchasing power differential” — and I’m sure there’s some kind of formula for figuring that out. The important thing is that you can get more for your dollar in Arkansas (at about $1.16 in purchasing power) than you can in New York (at about $0.87 in purchasing power).

That might not sound like a whole lot of difference, since it is just 29 cents. Expand that out, though, to a $10,000 budget for a used car and that’s $11,600 in buying power versus $8,700 in buying power in the local market. And those states weren’t even the extremes. Mississippi actually had the highest at $1.18, while California had the lowest at $0.84.

While it might seem on the surface to think that means that states like Arkansas and Mississippi are among the poorest and California and New York are the richest (and that is true on some level), what it actually measures best is how well the middle class can thrive in each state, since the rich are going to be rich and the poor are going to be poor in every state, so a middle-class family in Arkansas can actually afford to live a little better than one in New York, so that’s pretty cool!