My friend in Holland wrote again:
Dutch people might say that they think the Queen should be democratically elected, but they never say, “She owns Royal Dutch Shell, if she paid taxes on the $4 billion contract she just signed with the Pentagon last week, I wouldn’t be paying 42% on my income… We need to re-examine that.” They’ll talk about the golden horse-drawn carriage she rides around in on Prinsjesdaag, and how cool it looks on TV. And what an impartial symbol of Dutchness she is.
Does she own Royal Dutch Shell? Would she be obliged, as a regular citizen, to pay large absolute quantities of tax? I don’t know these things, so don’t know how to interpret the quote.
Even if she owned 100% of Royal Dutch Shell, and your friend’s figure of $4 billion represented her personal profit, even taxing it at 80% would lower your friend’s income tax rate by no more than one percentage point (figuring on 10 million Dutch taxpayers paying 42% tax on an average income of US$30,000 – I haven’t looked anything up, but this should be in the ballpark). Under realistic assumptions (the Queen is a minority shareholder, the margin on the deal is
Weird, my last comment got truncated (probably because I used a less-than sign in the original):
Even if she owned 100% of Royal Dutch Shell, and your friend’s figure of $4 billion represented her personal profit, even taxing it at 80% would lower your friend’s income tax rate by no more than one percentage point (figuring on 10 million Dutch taxpayers paying 42% tax on an average income of US$30,000 – I haven’t looked anything up, but this should be in the ballpark). Under realistic assumptions (the Queen is a minority shareholder, the margin on the deal is less than 10%), the prospective tax relief shrinks to practically zero.
Sounds like your friend is an anti-monarchist, so it’s logical for him to regard money spent (or taxes forgone) on the monarchy as pure waste. But really and truly, monarchies do not cost that much in comparison to the other functions of the modern state. If you’re going to have a monarchy, it must project an appearance of opulence, because the monarch as the personification of the nation needs to overawe all private interests (flashy billionaires etc.). But this can all be done on a few hundred million a year – chicken feed, relatively speaking.