62 billion Ft in national farm subsidies — on top of what the EU already pays.

Rationale

This is the chapter's largest discretionary line and the one where the public-choice mechanism is sharpest. It is national-budget agricultural subsidy — distinct from, and additional to, the EU Common Agricultural Policy direct payments Hungarian farmers already receive through separate channels. The line concentrates a large transfer on an organised, well-represented constituency — agricultural producers, and within that, disproportionately the larger landholders, because area-and-output-based agricultural support scales with the size of the holding. The funding is general taxation, paid disproportionately by working-age wage-earners across the whole economy. The distributional reality is worth stating plainly. Agricultural support of this kind is universalist in branding — "support for farmers, for the rural economy" — but the benefit scales with land area and output. A large estate receives a transfer proportionate to its scale; a smallholding receives a transfer proportionate to its much smaller scale. The funding does not scale that way: the wage-earner in Budapest or Debrecen pays SZJA at 15% and stands behind an employer SzocHo of 13% whether or not anyone in their family farms a hectare. For a worker on the roughly 575,000 Ft median monthly gross wage, total employer cost is near 650,000 Ft; of every 100 Ft of that employer cost, somewhere between a quarter and two-fifths reaches the state through payroll taxes before the worker spends a forint (the exact share depends on which contributions are counted — employer SzocHo, employee SZJA, TB járulék — but the combined wedge is large by any decomposition), and ÁFA at 27% on most of what they then buy lifts the cumulative state take toward the 50-60% range. Some fraction of that flows into a 62.6 milliárd Ft transfer whose largest individual recipients are the largest landholders. This is the regressive cross-subsidy that universalist framing hides — and naming the mechanism, area-scaled benefit funded by a flat general-tax wedge, is what makes the point land across the political spectrum rather than as a partisan complaint. There is also the calculation difficulty. The state setting the level and mix of "priority" sectoral support has no market price to tell it which crops, which regions, which production methods are genuinely the priority — only the political process, which responds to the intensity of organised lobbying rather than to underlying value. The line is a subjective allocation of resources by political officeholders, dressed as sectoral strategy. New Zealand removed agricultural subsidies in 1984; its farm sector, after a difficult adjustment, went on to compete globally without subsidy and became a major export earner. The Hungarian agricultural sector retains its EU CAP support; this line is the additional national layer on top, and it is the layer that the framework identifies for removal.