From the 2026 budget audit
Your taxes pay for ads persuading you to lend your savings to the state.
The 1.9 milliárd Ft bond-marketing budget uses tax revenue to steer household savings toward the public deficit and away from private investment.
Roughly 410 Ft per employed Hungarian per year — 1.9 milliárd Ft in tax revenue spent persuading citizens to hand their savings to the same state that collected the tax.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: advertising campaigns for retail government bonds, visible in Hungarian media. The unseen: the wage-earner whose income tax funds campaigns that steer wealthier neighbours' savings into the state's deficit — and away from the private capital formation that drives long-run wages.
Objection
"But retail bonds help ordinary Hungarians earn a fair return on their savings — isn't promoting that a public service?"
Answer
A bond with a competitive return needs no advertising — institutional investors buy Hungarian bonds without it. This line exists to steer household savings from private investment into state financing. Hungary's capital stock per worker trails Austria's by more than double; directing savings into the deficit deepens that gap. Cancel the campaigns; the bonds remain available.
Share if you think tax money should not be spent persuading citizens to lend their savings to the state.
The analyst's verdict
Communications Expenditure Supporting Government Securities Sales
Rationale
This is the marketing and advertising budget for selling government securities to the public — the campaigns promoting retail government bonds to Hungarian households. It is the one line in the chapter that funds neither a contractual obligation nor a necessary operating function of debt management. It is state spending to persuade citizens to lend their savings to the state. Stated plainly, the mechanism is this: the government taxes households, then spends a portion of that revenue advertising to the same households, urging them to hand over their savings as well — savings on which the state then pays an inflation-linked coupon that appears in the 769,096.6 millió Ft retail-bond line above. A government security that offers a competitive risk-adjusted return does not need an advertising budget; institutional investors buy Hungarian bonds without being marketed to. The communications line exists to direct household savings toward the state and away from alternative uses — bank deposits that fund business lending, equity, direct private investment. From a classical-liberal standpoint this is a small line doing a perverse thing: using tax revenue to bias the household savings decision in favour of financing the public deficit and against financing the private capital stock whose thinness is the binding constraint on Hungarian real-wage convergence. At 1,926.3 millió Ft it is small, but the principle scales regardless of size, and there is no reliance interest to protect: cancelling a marketing campaign strands no creditor and breaches no contract. It is a clean Immediate Cut. Households entirely free to buy government bonds will still be able to; they simply will not be advertised to with their own tax money.
Transition mechanism
Eliminate in the 2026 budget cycle. No severance or contract run-off is required beyond honouring any in-flight advertising contracts to their existing term — a matter of weeks to months, not a structural phase-out.
Affected groups
Advertising and media firms holding government securities-promotion contracts (small, transferable-skill commercial counterparties); the ÁKK's retail-distribution function; taxpayers, who stop funding the persuasion.
Free Society Institute
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