The state created a cost, then paid itself to reduce it

Indoklás

This line is worth reading slowly, because it reveals a mechanism the rest of the budget keeps implicit. The state mandates a minimum-wage increase. That increase raises employers' total labour cost — not only the gross wage, but the employer-side social contribution (SzocHo) levied on top of it. The state then partially compensates employers for the contribution cost its own mandate created. The budget is, in effect, paying one part of the state to soften the cost another part of the state imposed. If a payroll levy on a mandated wage increase is burdensome enough that the state must rebate it, the levy itself is the burden — and the rebate is an admission of that, applied selectively and temporarily rather than addressed at the source. The honest correction is not a 12 milliárd Ft compensation line; it is a lower SzocHo rate, applied generally, visible to every employer and every worker. The employer-side contribution is a tax on labour that falls, in incidence, on the worker: it is part of the wedge between what an employer pays to employ someone and what that worker takes home, and over time it is wages that absorb it. A worker at the median monthly gross wage already loses roughly 37 Ft of every 100 Ft of total employer labour cost to the payroll wedge before any take-home pay is spent. A targeted, temporary rebate of one slice of that wedge for one cohort of employers does not change the structure; it adds an administrative layer on top of it.