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By Wesley Brown TBP A garment factory worker in Arkansas making $35,000 a year has the same purchasing power of a pineapple farmer in Hawaii with annual income of about $48,000, according to a recently released report on the regional cost of living by the US Department of Commerce. That is a nice way of saying that the cost of living in Arkansas is a lot cheaper than Hawaii, New York, California and other states listed at the top of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) recently released Regional Price Parities (RPPs), a dataset that allows economists to directly compare the cost of living at the state level. Read more....