Poverty throughout the US

This map shows the percentage of people in The United States who were living in poverty between 2006-2010. From this map you can see that the percentage of people in poverty is a lot higher in the southern states from New Mexico to Alabama and even further north to West Virginia, as opposed to the northern states such as The Dakota's, Minnesota and Wyoming. The cost of living in the U.S is fairly high as opposed to other countries in the world, causing more people to live below the poverty line.
This could be due to how the Republicans states which are generally the South, run their states by cutting budgets, not raising minimum wage and opposing labour union, as well as having the lowest per capita spending by state government causing the lives of the Southerners more difficult to get out of poverty. Therefore as their is no minimum wage it causes great difficulty for low wage earners to earn enough money to live off. Less income also leads to poor healthcare so people are unable to take proper care of themselves and this leads to a downward spiral of poverty and bad health.
The poorer states also tend to have a higher rate of gun culture which goes beyond hunting as people use it for protection. The poorer an area is the higher the crime rate can be due to the broken window theory if an area looks run down it will be treated worse.
Therefore it has become difficult to break the cycle of poverty as a 2014 census found that 47 million people lived in poverty in USA.
States in the North of America have a lower poverty rate such as the poverty rate in Wyoming less than 10%. Wyoming is one of the least populated state in the USA as the population is less that 600,000 and has many national parks. This could be a contributing factor to why there is less poverty because there are less people causing a higher standard of living as there is more room for everyone and they aren't fighting over resources and space. This is the same for Alaska as a small percentage of Americans live there, so therefore there is a lower rate of poverty.