Why Minnesota is hurting...

So I couldn't figure out why things really felt bad in Minnesota from an economic perspective. While Minnesota has a very diverse economy compared to a lot of other Midwestern states
and is still doing pretty good, I haven't seen nor heard of wages really going up. So we have housing, fuel, food, health care---everything getting more expensive (except electronics, and that is a whole different story)---but wages are not keeping pace.

Then, I saw this great post by Paul Krugman that actually gave some stats to what I was feeling. Check out the drop in median wages in the Midwest over the past fifteen years. The Midwest is the green line and spiked at about $52,000 in the late 1990s and now has dropped about $5,000 while the other costs have gone up. (click here for full post)