In the category of "things that make you go duh," the smarty-pants at Alaska Economic Trends give us cause for our complaints about high living costs in Alaska: "The Anchorage consumer price index, the only CPI for Alaska, measures cost-of-living changes from year to year for a specific place. The second method compares costs between two locations: for example, is it cheaper to live in Juneau or Fairbanks?
"...The latest quarterly survey reports that food for a week in Bethel costs about twice as much as the same food in Fairbanks: about $270 versus $130. The key drivers of Alaska’s cost of living are housing, transportation, food — and energy. Housing takes the biggest bite out of most households’ incomes, but studies show that Alaska prices in all categories are typically higher than most U.S. cities."
Housing at 41.3% is far and away the largest component of the consumer price index weighting in Anchorage, with transportation second at 17.4%, food and beverage third at 14.5% and everything else in single digits. Nationally people spend about the same percentage on the same categories, it's just that the prices tend to be lower than in Alaska.
It should be noted that the categories are most appropriate for urban wage earners, and there are alternative CPIs for rural folks and even an experimental one for the elderly, which presumably weights medical expenses more heavily as they are a much larger percentage of expenses for the elderly. Speaking of medical expenses: "No other component over the long run comes close to matching the increases in health care prices, nationally or in Anchorage. During the past decade, medical care costs in Anchorage increased by 46 percent compared to 27 percent nationwide."
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