Walt Palmer (poacher) is proof that wealth does not trickle down and that the rich are undertaxed.

[Gormy Cuss]

24. So you agree, 50K is excessive.

However, you may not be aware how skewed that "average cost" cited by CNN really is. From a Slate article:

But even accounting for regional variation, these numbers seem exorbitant. And the New York number is positively Gatsby-esque. My fiancée and I always knew we were not particularly well-off by Empire State standards, but we couldn’t believe that our fellow Manhattanites were shelling out a sum that exceeds our combined annual salaries on a single decadent day’s worth of nuptial festivities....



The first problem with the figure is what statisticians call selection bias. One of the most extensive surveys, and perhaps the most widely cited, is the “Real Weddings Study” conducted each year by TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com. (It’s the sole source for the Reuters and CNN Money stories, among others.) They survey some 20,000 brides per annum, an impressive figure. But all of them are drawn from the sites’ own online membership, surely a more gung-ho group than the brides who don’t sign up for wedding websites, let alone those who lack regular Internet access. Similarly, Brides magazine’s “American Wedding Study” draws solely from that glossy Condé Nast publication’s subscribers and website visitors. So before they do a single calculation, the big wedding studies have excluded the poorest and the most low-key couples from their samples. This isn’t intentional, but it skews the results nonetheless.

And the people publishing this tripe either lack a basic knowledge of statistics ("average" = mean, not median) or they publish the mean as a marketing ploy for wedding vendors:

Apologies to those for whom this is basic knowledge, but the distinction apparently eludes not only the media but some of the people responsible for the surveys. I asked Rebecca Dolgin, editor in chief of TheKnot.com, via email why the Real Weddings Study publishes the average cost but never the median. She began by making a valid point, which is that the study is not intended to give couples a barometer for how much they should spend but rather to give the industry a sense of how much couples are spending. More on that in a moment. But then she added, “If the average cost in a given area is, let’s say, $35,000, that’s just it—an average. Half of couples spend less than the average and half spend more.” No, no, no. Half of couples spend less than the median and half spend more.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/weddings/2013/06/average_wedding_cost_published_numbers_on_the_price_of_a_wedding_are_totally.2.html