Could also have something to do with inflation. High house prices and high cost of living in the big cities in the US (where it's also more likely you can find

Could also have something to do with inflation. High house prices and high cost of living in the big cities in the US (where it's also more likely you can find 100k+ jobs) effectively make a dollar worth less there. What keeps the overall inflation lower is that this fast increase of housing prices doesn't apply to more of the non-big-city areas of the country. 1 USD is just under 0.85 EUR at the moment, but if you convert the price of a beer or hamburger in a place like New York or San Francisco to euro and compare to Paris or Berlin you get 1.2 or so beer/burger there for that same dollar. Suggesting that in US big city terms maybe a dollar is only worth maybe 0.70 euro in buying power. I'm not an economics expert, but I think this results in a built-in wealth transfer from "countryside" US to big city US. Because wages in San Francisco and New York increase with the high prices but the rest of the country doesn't do so as much.