Hungarian economy minister slams Budapest’s finances, offers ‘expert help’ to fix budget
Márton Nagy, the national economy minister, on Thursday said the Budapest administration had “failed” when it came to finance and solidarity, and offered to lend the metropolitan council budget experts “to fix the city’s chaotic finances”.
Budapest on the “brink of bankruptcy”?
Nagy said in a post on Facebook that at 168 percent of the European Union’s level of development, Budapest was Hungary’s and one of Europe’s most developed areas. He said that despite the city’s local business tax revenues having reached almost 300 billion forints (EUR 744.9m), the city administration had pushed Budapest “to the brink of bankruptcy”.
Meanwhile, the minister said that if Budapest was questioning or refusing to accept its responsibility in helping to develop rural Hungary, it was “acting against the interests of the provinces”. The solidarity contribution paid by the wealthier localities is a “big help” for the poorer local councils, he said, arguing that the richer municipalities had received hundreds of thousands of forints in support for investments and developments.
The Budapest administration “cannot be above the law”, Nagy said, stressing that the city had an obligation to pay the solidarity contribution. “For years we have been hearing that basic developments are being cancelled because Budapest doesn’t have money,” Nagy said. “Yet we have learned in connection with the Rákosrendező development project that the city council does in fact have tens of billions of forints to purchase the area, remove the waste from the site and depollute the ground.”
Nagy called on the Budapest administration to meet its payment obligations and pay the purchase price of the Rákosrendező area before cleaning it up and paying the solidarity contribution. “The city’s finances are chaotic,” he said. “If necessary, we can lend them the right budget experts to fix things.”
Karácsony’s response: Budapest has to pay 18 times the amount it had to in 2019
Budapest’s mayor, Gergely Karácsony, said the dispute was not over the solidarity tax itself but the amount paid. In a statement responding to Nagy’s Facebook post, Karácsony said that in István Tarlós’s final year as mayor Budapest paid 5 billion forints in solidarity contributions, while this year it had so far paid 89 billion forints, 18 times that amount.
The state auditor found that Budapest was a net contributor to the state budget, while the Constitutional Court ruled that this was contrary to the local government financial autonomy enshrined in the Fundamental Law, Karácsony said. The Metropolitan Court also ruled that the tax was “confiscatory” and the Metropolitan Court of Appeal found that money from Budapest was “in the state’s pocket unlawfully”, and 28 billion forints of the 2023 monies should be returned to the city, he added.
Commenting on how the solidarity tax helped out poorer local councils, the mayor noted that the contribution was 27 billion forints in 2017 when it was introduced and would rise to 360 billion forints this year. Citing a European Council report, he said the tax in its current form was “not directly linked” to redistribution measures to which financially weaker municipalities were entitled. Budapest, he added, was the motor of Hungary’s economy. “If that motor stops, progress also stops,” he added.
Read also:
A Commie mismanaging public finances.
Imagine my shock.
Show me one place in the world ruled by socialists that prospered. Heck, forget “prospered.” A place that just kept its head over the water for any longer period of time.
When you waste taxpayers’ forints on dumb, “woke” causes that yield no value–even incidentally–instead of adding and generating value, you’ll go bust once the honeypot runs out. It’s not rocket science. But, then, socialism is a truly retarded ideology, and its votaries much more so. You have to be touched in the head to espouse a creed that has been an abject failure in every single place, every single time it was put into practice.