9 billion Ft a year for school trips — compulsory for every taxpayer, optional for every family.

Rationale

The Határtalanul! programme finances study trips — in practice, near-cost-free class excursions — for seventh-grade pupils from schools inside Hungary to Hungarian-inhabited areas in the neighbouring states. The stated purpose is identity-building: exposing Hungarian schoolchildren to the Carpathian-Basin Hungarian communities. Whatever the cultural merit, this is a state-financed domestic activity — school excursions for Hungarian pupils — and it fails the voluntariness test cleanly. A class trip is precisely the kind of activity that families and schools can and routinely do fund themselves; the case for compelling taxpayers who have no child in the programme to finance it is convenience, not necessity. The within-class transfer is worth naming. The benefit is concentrated on the families of seventh-graders in a given year — a specific, identifiable cohort — while the cost is spread across every Hungarian taxpayer. A childless worker, or a worker whose children are past or short of seventh grade, funds the excursion of a household they will never meet. Where the trip would happen anyway — and many school excursions do — the subsidy substitutes for spending the family would have undertaken voluntarily, which is a transfer to that family, not the creation of an activity that would not otherwise exist. Phase-Out over three years rather than Immediate Cut only because schools plan excursion calendars a year or more ahead and travel contracts may already be placed; the short horizon honours those in-flight commitments and no more. There is no decadal reliance chain here — this is a discretionary programme, and three years is the contractual run-off, not a protected cohort.