Hillary's campaign will probably pay only a fraction of the cost of Obama's endorsement stop

Flying from New York to Mumbai in Etihad Airways' three-room suite (which comes with its own butler) will run you about $38,000 for the 21-hour journey. That's about $1,800 an hour -- only about 71 times what the average American earns as an hourly wage.

That's not the priciest flight in the world, though. That honor may belong to a trip on the luxury Boeing 747-200B that includes a bedroom, kitchen, office and plenty of seating for friends, family, dignitaries, reporters and Cabinet secretaries. Because we are talking about Air Force One. Trips on the president's plane cost about $200,000 an hour, according to CNN, although the primary passenger gets his rides comped.

What about everyone else? When it was announced over the weekend that President Barack Obama would be campaigning with Hillary Clinton in North Carolina on Tuesday, Donald Trump quickly questioned who was footing the bill. "Why is President Obama allowed to use Air Force One on the campaign trail with Crooked Hillary?" he tweeted. "She is flying with him tomorrow. Who pays?"

The answer is: Clinton -- but mostly you. Clinton's campaign told Fox News that it would "cover its portion of the costs," as is "standard practice." That's true, but that portion still leaves Obama's normal expense-payers making up most of the cost.

Perhaps the most obvious use case of a presidential campaign using Air Force One for campaign appearances is when a president is running for reelection. In 2012, the New York Times looked at Obama's use of Air Force One for his campaign. As then-White House spokesman Jay Carney put it, "The president is the president 24 hours a day and seven days a week, and he has to fly on Air Force One. He has to have security and communication. There are elements of his job that are always with him." Fair enough: Obama can no more just fly on a campaign charter plane than he can defer to local law enforcement to run security at his events.

But Obama's 2012 flights were pricier than the previous president's: In 2004, President George W. Bush's reelection campaign reimbursed the government a little under $1 million for trips on his presidential aircraft over the course of his campaign.

Eight years later, Obama's spent over $3 million.

The Times noted that the increased cost for Obama was thanks to a 2010 change in how reimbursements for travel on Air Force One should be done. "Instead of repaying the government based on the cost of first-class commercial airfare, as presidents had since Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald R. Ford," the Times' Jackie Calmes wrote, "reimbursements must now reflect the cost of chartering a 737 aircraft." Chartering a 747 through PrivateFly will cost you $21,038 an hour -- a bit less than the average line item for air travel that Obama's 2012 campaign paid, $23,050. Chartering a 737 is cheaper, at a little over $11,000 an hour.

Those figures suggests that Clinton's campaign will probably end up paying less than a tenth of the cost of Obama's trip to Charlotte. Had she been running prior to 2010, the flight would have cost her a few hundred dollars instead.

Previously:
• 07/04/16: What would have happened if Joe Biden had run?
• 06/27/16: Hillary Clinton leads, but Donald Trump supporters are more certain they'll vote
• 06/15/16: Tenure vs. Toughness: Hillary's terrorism fighting background would seem to be an advantage. Thus far, it really hasn't been
• 05/25/16: Donald Trump's primary success may have convinced him to make a critical error
• 05/06/16: So you want an independent candidate for president? You're running out of time
• 04/27/16: How Donald Trump dominated Tuesday's primaries
• 04/14/16: Trump's complaints about process are just whining
• 04/11/16: Trump's terrible night in Colorado exemplifies his campaign's Achilles' heel
• 04/04/16: In the year of Trump, a made-up news website run by an ex-convict finds success
• 03/30/16: Is Donald Trump a politician? An investigation
• 03/29/16: California could hand Donald Trump the GOP nomination --- and then doom him on election night
• 03/28/16: Let's uproot the pernicious, unproven claim that Ted Cruz attacked Donald Trump's wife
• 03/24/16: Why Donald Trump is poised to win the nomination and lose the general election, in one poll
• 03/23/16: The Brussels attacks and the increasing isolationism of Donald Trump
• 03/21/16: Will the GOP really keep trying to Stop Trump for four more months? It'll be tough
• 03/10/16: The unravelling of a political messiah
• 03/08/16: Hillary's bogus electability argument
• 03/07/16: Donald Trump has not brought 'millions and millions' of people to the Republican Party
• 03/02/16: Trump cites his $100,000-a-year golf resort as proof of his efforts on equality
• 02/23/16: Ted Cruz isn't running a dirty campaign, but that perception just cost a staffer his job
• 02/22/16: How Donald Trump won South Carolina
• 02/19/16: Trump says he'll win independents and New York state, but the numbers don't
• 02/19/16: Does Trump have a ground game? We probably still won't know after South Carolina
• 02/17/16: The Bush family reinvented itself to dominate politics --- which is now Jeb's problem
• 01/27/16: The dead people of America really don't want Hillary Clinton to be president
• 01/21/16: Sarah Palin's son, and the link between combat duty and veteran violence
• 01/18/16: The dark undercurrent for Hillary Clinton in Sunday's Dem debate
• 11/23/15: Just so you know: The government already has a list of Muslims in the U.S.