Well, it’s complicated. But actually, it might surprise you, our treasury earns money from the Crown estates rather than the other way around. It pays for our Queens’ stipend many times over. It pays for nearly all the security expenses and royal visits too. She doesn’t actually own Buckingham Palace

Buckingham palace from the air (C) Thomas Nugent - not actually owned by our Queen, she just lives there (sometimes)

And look at the expenses for the US president? And the costs of the US election campaign every four years? The 2016 election cost an estimated $6.8 billion according to one estimate. So that’s the equivalent of more than $1.5 billion a year which has to come somehow from the US tax payers, as gifts, donations etc. Election 2016's price tag: $6.8 billion

And the White House? See How Much It Costs to Keep the White House Looking Great - but that’s not including costs such as security, which under President Obama were approximately $1.4 billion a year.

Airforce One costs a little over half a billion a year.

Here in the UK election expenses are capped, so we don’t have much to pay for those. The Prime Minister doesn’t have the same frills and trappings of power as a president, doesn’t fly around in a private jet. The Queen has a fair bit of trappings - but many of those trappings, the robes, jewelry, paintings etc - if not used for her, they’d be in a museum perhaps. She used to have a huge private yacht, HMY Britannia, but it is now a public attraction in Leith. We could make a lot of money by selling all the artworks and treasures in all our museums. South America had vast amounts of gold in the form of artifacts which are now all melted down and stored as gold ingots in the vaults of various countries. Is it better that way?

So - she cost us £43 million last year, and will cost us around £45.6 million next year in the Sovereign grant. That’s the cost for her and her family, which is a lot more than Holland’s £31 million a year, the next most expensive of the European monarchs. But it costs much less than the Élysée presidential palace in France, which costs £103.5m a year. See The Queen is the most expensive monarch in Europe

The cost of the royal family, as for the president, has many other elements, including security, paid by the Metropolitan Police, royal visits paid by local councils, etc comes to £334 million. See How much does the UK royal family cost?

And Buckingham Palace and the grounds and other parts of the Crown Estate are just occupied by the royal family. To explain the distinction - if any of that property was sold, the proceeds would go to the government not the Queen. So she doesn’t really own them in the normal sense.

If you include all that they seem like billionaires, but actually the Queen just owns Balmoral Castle and Sandringham House. The rest belongs to the Crown estate.

In 2016 the Crown estate was valued at 12 billion and earned £304.1 million, all of which went to the treasury - in other words, to the Government. The Sovereign Grant is paid out of that, so it’s just a fraction of it. Even when you include all the extra costs in that £334 million figure, it still means she is costing the tax payer only £30 million a year including security, costs of royal visits, etc.

More precisely, the Crown Estate are neither government property nor the monarch’s private property. See this FAQ - Who owns the Crown Estate?

“The Crown Estate belongs to the reigning monarch 'in right of The Crown', that is, it is owned by the monarch for the duration of their reign, by virtue of their accession to the throne. But it is not the private property of the monarch - it cannot be sold by the monarch, nor do revenues from it belong to the monarch.”

“The Government also does not own The Crown Estate. It is managed by an independent organisation - established by statute - headed by a Board (also known as The Crown Estate Commissioners), and the surplus revenue from the estate is paid each year to the Treasury for the benefit of the nation's finances.”

She also is independently wealthy, about £340 million estimated, from which she has an independent income, not included in those calculations. That means she is a multimillionaire for sure, but she no longer features in the list of the 300 richest people in the UK. She also owns the Duchy of Lancaster which is held in trust, with income of about £12.5 million a year - which is called the “Privy Purse”. (See again How much does the UK royal family cost? )

One way or another, you are going to have someone with the trappings of wealth because we seem to need that, or at least most countries do.

In the UK we manage it by having a symbolic head who has a lot of the trappings of wealth but no actual political power, who is required to keep neutral in all political decisions. The Queen by convention never makes any political decisions. This then takes away the need to provide similar trappings for the PM who lives in a much more modest house, 10 Downing street, actually a very large terraced house.

10 Downing Street

There are some who think we’d be better off without a Queen. Jeremy Corbyn is one of them. But he has also said clearly that abolishing the monarchy is not on his agenda. As he put it in the leadership debate: “It is not on anyone else’s agenda, it’s not on my agenda, and I tell you what, I had a very nice chat with the Queen”.

Most of us think we are better with a monarch. Scotland would continue to have the Queen as monarch after independence. It’s a strange system in a way, but it works. Most people here support it. There are some who have similar views to Jeremy Corbyn, but nobody has abolishing the monarchy seriously on their agenda.