Are you taxed more than a Duke?

Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, rightly or wrongly, often gets used as an example of how the wealthy avoid paying the same sort of taxes as ordinary people. While he does pay a lot in taxes, £57 in total in 2025, it represents a small proportion of what he is probably making in income per year on average - and I am using income in the economic sense rather than the tax accounting sense, so all forms of income. This means that the Duke pays a lower average rate of income tax than ordinary people in the UK, which seems very unfair bordering on illegal. However, there is no evidence that the Duke is doing anything illegal (tax evasion), but has just structed and located his assets in a way which minimises his tax burden (tax avoidance). One way to deal with this is to try remove all the tax loopholes to make sure that the wealthy are subject to the same progressive structure in income taxes as the rest of the population face. The better way to deal with it would be a wealth tax in the way that Gabriel Zucman has proposed, which would circumvent many of the methods used by the wealthy to avoid taxes. #inequality #wealthtax #economics ‪@garyseconomics‬