How many can afford this?

A political fund-raiser. This one’s for Trump, but it’s hardly a Republican-only thing.

tickets sold for a hefty $50,000 per head, with an exclusive $300,000 tier offering perks such as a photo opportunity with Trump 

Income is not a perfect proxy for wealth, but it’s not awful, either.

The chart is from a quick Internet search that took me to a BLS page. I just multiplied the weekly data by 52 to get an annual number.

$50,000 is just under the median annual income (of $59,228). I consider that the price of a nice, but not great, new car. The Laird’s Jeep Gladiator was about that, new two years ago.

$300,000 is more than twice the ninth decile (which would be the top quintile) annual income. I consider that the price of a nice, but not great, used house. My last two houses cost about that, three years and twenty-three years ago.

How much would you pay to support your favorite politician while seeing him in person? Presumably, if he’s there for pictures, you get to shake his hand, even if you don’t get a picture, for $50,000. A week’s salary doesn’t seem unreasonable. Let’s pretend it’s a super-important election that you feel strongly about and call it two week’s salary.

$50,000 x 26 is $1,300,000. $300,000 x 26 is $7,800,000.

Quora is not a great source, but it was easy to find: 0.02%, which is probably households, not individuals, earn more than $1,000,000 annually. About 132,000,000 households x 0.0002 is 26,400 people who could pay the $50K using my standards. That’s not a large crowd. A bit more than a high school gym, but far fewer than a college stadium.

The $300K must be coming from wealth, not income. If only 26K people earn over a million, the number at 8M must be tiny.

I wanted to work it out, so why not do so here?