Income needs to be compared to cost of living (food, car, housing, gas, utilities, etc) for a meaningful comparison.
I am working on a spreadsheet comparison of ranking by median salary and ranking by cost of living. Have to go to bed.
In general I am thinking that if a state ranks higher in cost of living than it does by median salary, then the median salary is not making up for the cost of living. This could even be occurring in some of the states among the higher ranked median salaries, their cost of living could be even higher. I’ll finish the comparison tomorrow.