Why does a minimum-wage parent fund a higher earner's maternity benefit?

Indoklás

CSED replaces income for a parent during the first 168 calendar days after a birth. It is paid at 100% of the prior daily income (70% where the parent returns to paid work after the child's first three months). This is the structural feature that the analytical frame fastens on, and it is worth being exact about it. CSED is not a flat per-child grant. It is an earnings-replacement transfer: the benefit a recipient draws is a fixed multiple of what that recipient earned before the birth. The funding, by contrast, is pooled — it comes from the szociális hozzájárulási adó and the társadalombiztosítási járulék paid by every contributor into the Fund, at a flat rate on wages. Set those two facts beside each other. A parent who earned at the top of the wage distribution before the birth draws a CSED several times larger, per day, than a parent who earned at the minimum wage — for the same event, the same 168 days, the same biological fact of a new child. The contribution that funds both is levied at the same flat rate on every insured wage. The effect is a transfer that runs, in net terms, within the working population from lower earners to higher earners: the minimum-wage contributor is part-funding the supplement that scales with the salary of the upper-decile contributor. The universalist branding — "every insured parent is covered" — is true and hides this. Coverage is universal; the benefit amount is earnings-scaled, and an earnings-scaled benefit paid out of a flat-rate pooled levy is a regressive cross-subsidy whatever it is called. The reform is not to abolish income protection around a birth. It is to change the financing mechanism so that the benefit a parent draws is funded by that parent's own prior contributions rather than by a pooled levy that makes lower earners cross-subsidise higher earners. A funded individual social-insurance account — each worker accumulates a balance from their own contributions, draws their own earnings-replacement benefit from it, with a general-revenue floor for workers whose balances are thin — preserves the income-protection function and removes the within-class transfer. The insured person still receives an earnings-related benefit; it is simply their own earnings that fund it.