When talking about expenditures for late medieval/early modern states, isn’t the idea that the king should “live off his own” really important here? Basically, normal expenses (including pomp) were supposed to be covered by the income of the king’s own demesne, whereas taxes were for wars and other extraordinary expenditures.

True. Although in the early modern period this came under strain when a lot of the institutional choices that made that idea possible – smaller feudal armies that didn’t require regular wages, a Catholic Church that did a lot of the heavy lifting for you, and fewer demands on a much more decentralized and limited state – broke down. 

Armies got huge and professional, the Catholic Church now became something to plunder, fight for your life against, defend against the people doing the first two, or any combination of the above, and in order to do any of that you need a larger and more professional bureaucracy that could extract the taxes and provide the services that merchants and landowners demanded in return for their tax dollars. 

So I guess what I’m saying is that it’s something of a moving target.