39 billion Ft a year — for the government to advertise itself to you.

Rationale

This is a statutory budget for the government to advertise itself and to run "national consultation" mailings to the population. Call it what it is rather than what the line name implies. The "national consultation" is a periodic mass mailing of leading questions to the electorate, followed by an advertising campaign promoting the government's framing of the answers. The activity is not cheap, and the chapter line is not the whole of it: the first fifteen national consultations between 2011 and 2025 cost at least 119 milliárd Ft in public money, of which roughly 90 milliárd Ft — three forints in every four — went on advertising rather than on the technical mechanics of collecting opinions. The 39,470.0 millió Ft in this chapter is the 2026 budget envelope for the continuation of that activity. Consider who benefits and who pays. The visible beneficiary is the governing administration of the day, which receives a publicly-funded channel to communicate its preferred framing of national questions directly to every household, and the media-buying and creative agencies that win the campaign contracts. The cost-bearer is every taxpayer, including those who disagree with the message their money is paying to broadcast. At roughly 4 million personal income tax filers, this single line costs each approximately 9,000 Ft a year of personal income tax — a small sum individually, a deliberate one collectively: it is a transfer from the general taxpayer to the incumbent's communication operation. There is a deeper point, and it is one a reader of any political affiliation can hold. A future government of any composition would inherit the same line, the same statutory basis, and the same temptation. The objection is not to who currently administers the budget; it is to the existence of a tax-funded mechanism for the executive to promote itself. Genuine government information — how to access a service, what a deadline is, a public-health instruction — is a small fraction of this envelope and can be delivered through the ordinary administrative budgets of the responsible ministries. Persuasion campaigns and consultation advertising are not government information; they are a political activity, and political activity is properly financed by those who choose to support it, voluntarily, not by compulsory taxation of those who do not. The classification is Immediate Cut; the year-1 saving is 39,470.0 millió Ft.