"John A. Weeks III" <john[at]johnweeks.com> writes:
- quote -

And, in particular, the PDF with the list of many many cities:

http://www.taxfoundation.org/SR125.pdf

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Nope - that makes perfect sense and is to be expected.
But it does argue for showing the _median_ as well as
or instead of the _mean_. In an asymmetric distribution
(a few very expensive, many many cheap/moderate - but
a narrower spread at the bottom than the top), one would
expect there would be far more places below the mean.

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I disagree. You can't reasonably toss NY out. NY's cost
of living is not an outlier in the same sense that, say,
Bill Gates wealth is.

But the median would have been nice to see, too.

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So, too, do property taxes and sales taxes - all of which go
towards making taxes at those levels, while far from uniform -
NYC's burden is still the highest - nowhere near as different
as one might guess at first. The problem is that those things
vary a _lot_ by not just income, but how one lives and what
one does. The various finance magazines try to come up with
estimates on this every year or two and typically give up
trying to find a "typical" family and instead profile what
state and local taxes would be for three or four family
situations - young singles, married with kids, older retireds, etc.


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In article <3064b51d.0404290602.6e84951[at]posting.google.com> ,
<beliavsky[at]aol.com> wrote:

- quote -

Three points to make on this report...

1) Notice that the chart in the press release only shows the
most expensive places, rather than showing a variety of different
scenarios. Is this a bit of scare mongering?

2) I noticed that there are far more places below average in
income than above average. That seems to me that your method
of computing the average was not well considered. It is likely
that there are 2 or 3 places far above average that scews the
entire statistical process. These data points should be thrown
out as outliers to avoid skewing the averages, and note them
in a seperate section. Failing to do so makes the average and
any stats computed from the average meaningless.

3) State income tax was not included. Since that varies from
between 0% to 10% across the USA, it would be a very significant
factor since this is supposedly an analysis of income required
to pay your taxes.

-john-

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John A. Weeks III 952-432-2708 john[at]johnweeks.com
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The Tax Foundation has done a study on the amount of income needed to
maintain a median standard of living in various cities, accounting for
the cost of living and federal taxes. A summary is at
http://www.taxfoundation.org/costofliving.html . I think the
statistics are useful for people considering relocation.