Houston Day 620 - financially better off?

A Financial Comparison Between Texas and Victoria

So I've come to a conclusion, based on some bad maths and a drive through East Texas this last weekend.  I think the average Victorian (that's my home state in Australia, for all you Yankee readers) is wealthier than your average Texan.

I've suspected this for a while.  As in Melbourne, there are a range of areas and a range of people who live in them, with varying amounts of money.  The poorest neighborhoods in Houston look a lot worse to my eyes than the poorest suburbs in Melbourne.  Is it just that Americans really know how to build ugly and boring towns and/or that having grown up in Australia I prefer the aesthetics of Melbourne? Because my drive through a different neighborhood last week, where I couldn't find the building I was teaching in for ages because barely any buildings were put together enough to have a street number, might suggest otherwise.

There seem to be so many more
abandoned houses in Houston than back home:
evidence that the GFC hit this country harder than Australia

We personally enjoy a lot more money here than we did back home, mostly thanks to an ExxonMobil salary.  And we're not alone - Houston has a lot of wealthy people and a lot of industry money and I've commented before on how that means a lot more money in the arts.

A typical house in River Oaks,
one of Houston's wealthiest neighborhoods

This subject came up again in my thoughts as Leslie and I were driving home through East Texas after an audition in Kilgore.  I noticed a surprising amount of abandoned or smashed-up houses and asked Leslie if that was normal for country towns.  She said yes, but that the houses further off the main roads would be nicer.
So I did some research.  Now we're getting into some areas that I am not naturally very switched-on about, like the difference between the average and the median, how to factor in the exchange rate, tax, etc.  But I tried.  And it seems to me that while the cost of living in Australia is astronomically higher than in the USA, you're still financially better off being an Australian resident (the kind that gets access to Medicare) than an American one, unless you're the kind of American resident that moved there to get an excellent, above-average job.
Add to that the factor that college loans and healthcare are a far greater financial burden on Americans than they are on most Australians, and I think my hunch is correct.  Anyone wanting to do the maths themselves (please, you'll do it much better than I) can look at these websites:
Texan Census
Cost of Living Comparison
Median Income in Australia
Melbourne's Worst Suburbs
A Guide to Houston Neighborhoods
Something Quite Complicated from the Australian Treasury About Tax