I suspect that is the first and last time that sentence will ever be typed in the history of the universe 
When people stand around making excuses and coming up with reasons why they can’t save, then they never will. It’s the mindset more than the money.
I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, so I know all about cost of living. Trust me, I was at one time on a first name basis with poor. I got my financial act together on very limited means. At first my savings were literally penny by penny, then nickel by nickel. I found ways to do it, and as my circumstances changed, I never forgot the hard lesson I learned about not having enough savings.
If someone is living paycheck to paycheck, then they are living too large for their means. They can’t afford to spend the amount of money they are spending.
I suggested six months in another thread and was amazed at the number of people who thought that was impossible.
Which of course is the problem with this country (see below)
Modern life may be very expensive, but if so many people were NOT living paycheck to paycheck, and if more people would hold off on buying a car or house or having kids until they could actually afford it, there would be far fewer people in severe financial trouble simply because a job has been lost.
Having money set aside for emergencies can be done IF you actually do live within your means, instead of just moving forward with what you want without bothering to check to see if you can actually afford it.
Or of course it could have something to do with the wages of the general population falling farther and farther behind the cost of living for decades. The rich get richer, everyone else gets poorer, then they get lectured about how them not having money is due to their moral failings.
I think the only place the OP goes wrong is in asserting that this is a general problem. It’s impossible to know what percentage of all unemployed people are refusing to look for jobs outside their own city.
But there certainly are people who have never lived anywhere else, can’t conceive of living anywhere else, and won’t even consider looking for a job anywhere else even if it means penury. When I lived in California, I knew people who wouldn’t have moved to the Midwest or South for triple their salary, and many didn’t have family ties or kids in school. They think it’s all blizzards and rednecks and can’t bear the thought of not having a Thai restaurant within driving distance. Likewise I’ve known people in the Midwest who would be physically afraid just to walk down the street in Los Angeles. I have more pity than contempt for people like that.
That’s why I think going away for college/grad school, if you can afford it, is good. I left GA for NJ when I went to grad school, and it was the best decision I’ve probably made in my life. Not because Atlanta is a podunk town, but because it instilled me the notion that if I can make it in northern NJ, on $12,000 a year, I can make it pretty much everywhere.
Moving down to Miami for a post-doc? No big deal. I hated to move away from the Big Apple, but South Beach isn’t that bad, right?
Then when I got tired of that gig, I was set for another adventure. Ended up in central Virginia. It’s not as exciting or culturally diverse as either northern NJ or Miami, and not as culturally familiar as the ATL, but it works good enough. Good enough is all I care about.
But I’m lucky. I don’t set down stakes, for good or bad. If I lost my job right now and I had to move, I would in a minute. But eventually, I suppose even I would get tired of being so transient.
I will admit that I wouldn’t look forward to taking a job too far from the east coast. As a biologist, you learn what’s around you. You move out of a particular ecotone and suddenly it’s like being in a different country. What tree is that? What bug is that? Oh noes! I don’t know anything! So that’s why I have some sympathy for fellow biologists (of the natural history/field variety) who are reluctant to move too far away from where they were trained. But only some sympathy. As a scientist, your job is to keep learning and seek new challenges. And people with fresh eyes make the best scientists.
When you’ve been trying to find a job for 2 years in the same industry with no luck and your family is looking at losing their insurance and you’re not making the mortgage bills, it may be time to start assessing your other options.
Listen, like I said in the OP, I’m talking about the sort of people who show up on CNN talking about how they’ve been trying to find work in their field for 3 years and the economy is so bad they can’t even get a job at McDonalds or Walmart and their entire lives are about to disintegrate. When you can’t put food on the table, you have to take measures like this.
As soon as you tell me how I can save when I make $8000 a year, I’ll be all ears. (Though I must admit I am frustrated at my parents for not saving money when I think they could.)
So if millions of people move to those states for the jobs, the unemployment problem in the US would be ended. All is well.
I don’t think Wyoming having a low unemployment rate necessarily means they’re handing out jobs though. Here’s a rough measure of job postings per capita, many of the areas with a lot of postings are also those with high unemployment. If your in CA, your actually better off staying there, despite its high unemployment. I suspect part of the reason Wyomings employment rate is high is that when people loose their job in Wyoming, they go somewhere else.
As a practical matter, I think most people who have been out of work for a while do start looking out of state eventually. They don’t end up in Wyoming because there aren’t actually that many jobs there.
Bah, at least I’m employed. Class nepotism may be high at Geico, but I get a paycheck and just have to avoid getting noticed. 
A low unemployment rate may actually indicate a *hopeless *job market - one where locals who lose their jobs, or who reach adulthood there, know they can’t ever have careers or even find work there. So they *leave *places like Nebraska to *go *to places like California.
The OP would have been much stronger had it focused on job creation totals.
Well, what exactly did you mean in your OP? Are you saying that families should just move to a flyover state on a lark, and hope things work out for the best? That the unemployed should look for jobs in those states, and if they were to get one, to move out and hope it sticks? Or that if they got a job AND moving expenses that they shouldn’t be picky about their locations?
I vehemently disagree with the first premise, think the second is a tough call depending on circumstances, and agree about the third. If you’re long-term unemployed and getting desperate, you can’t be too picky about your destinations, especially if your new job will arrange for you to move there.
Plus finding a job before you move to a new location is hard as hell. Esp in this economy, when there are already tons of qualified applicants who already live in the area rather than needing to relocate.
Your two yearsbof CASH on hand is nuttier than a squirrel’s cheeks, and does not address the OP’s point. As others point out, having everybody who is unemployed in one area move to a lower unemployment area simply does not solve the employment problem. The job market is not booming in the Dakotas or Nebraska if you begin importing even a fraction of the unemployed from other states. Not to mention skil mismatches.
If unemployment was as bad as the great depression, then yes it is reasonable expect the majority of people to move to where any job was. But we are luckily far away from that.
:dubious: Are you using this as an excuse to live beyond your means and/or not saving money?
You mean, it’s not?? 
Are you living beyond your means? If you aren’t, it doesn’t apply to you.
I think this is more the point of the OP, not that every unemployed person in California should move to Wyoming. One of the first rules of jobhunting is you start with what you’re looking for, where you want to be first, then expand outward if things don’t pan out.
This is kind of the same discussion we had about not wasting so much gas - everyone has an excuse why they can’t possibly drive less or drive a more economical vehicle. “Difficult” is not the same as “impossible.” It might be difficult to move to a good job, but it is not likely to be impossible.
California? How about the Indian reservations in the same states as the OP? What’s their unemployment % these days, and why haven’t they all moved only a few miles for all those supposedly available jobs? Is it because there really aren’t that many jobs, or something else, like a shortage of travois poles?
Something else the OP is forgetting–some professions are inherently urban professions. At one point, I got to know a couple who make custom props for commercials and theatrical productions. They do OK in NYC, and they might be able to move to LA with their skill set, but they’d probably be stuck with manual labor if they moved to Omaha.
Even if all their clients fired them tomorrow (which is highly unlikely, but we’ll ignore that for now), it would make much more sense for them to stay in NY and scramble like hell to rebuild their business than it would for them to haul their butts to, say, Omaha.
In Omaha, they might never be able to make more than a cleaning lady makes, because that’s the kind of job that they’d end up doing. In NY, they’d at least have a fighting chance of getting their professional lives back.
I guess this is really an extension of the point another poster made—that some people’s skills or credentials (such as a license to practice law) simply aren’t very transferable to other places. But in the case of a lawyer who’d have to re-take the bar, it would at least be possible to transition to practicing in a new state. In the case of someone whose profession wouldn’t exist outside the place where he or she lives, having to move would be the end of any hope of a career.
Macroeconomics question: to what degree is a relatively profligate standard of living necessary to keeping a consumption-based economy going?