Last update - 01:52 05/11/2006
Money to burn
This week the Knesset will vote on the 2007 budget. The first reading of the budget bill will kick off the season when every party and Knesset member competes to see who can exert the greatest pressure and demand the biggest budget increase.
Not a single MK will propose ways to save money, but here are a few suggestions:
It was so easy to buy off Amir Peretz. They gave him and the Labor Party a deputy defense minister, and put him on several committees, and he immediately forgot all about principles and commitments - and he now sits in the same cabinet as Avigdor Lieberman.
And what is the Labor Party fighting over? Who will be the next cabinet minister in place of Ophir Pines-Paz, who at least proved he stood for his principles - and quit?
Peretz certainly has not thought about giving up the extra minister. That's how it is in a huge, overly convoluted cabinet. Even without Pines-Paz, the Labor Party has six ministers and one deputy, which is way too many for a party with only 19 Knesset members.
All right, we are not demanding Peretz behave like Lieberman, who is the only member of his faction taking a cabinet seat - even though he represents 11 MKs.
But maybe, in any case, just a little consideration for the taxpayer.
If we are already talking about the taxpayer, it is appropriate to report on the proposal of MK Avigdor Yitzhaki to get rid of the future generations commissioner.
Yosef Lapid came up with the idea for the position, under the belief that it would help weed out populist proposals by MKs - in order to guard the interests of future generations, who would foot the bill through higher taxes.
Therefore, the commission should have objected to all bills that increased spending and deficits. Commissioner Shlomo Shoham should have expressed strong opposition even to expanding the cabinet.
But the commission has not been doing its job at all.
It has not protected future taxpayers, and therefore Yitzhaki's proposal to disband it came at just the right time, maybe even a bit too late.
The proposal to do away with the commission will even benefit future generations - a few million shekels a year will be saved by eliminating several jobs. These are a few million shekels that future generations will not be stuck paying for.
No one knew the police had a chief rabbi, until Yaakov Gross become involved in the affair of improperly issuing diplomas to rabbis and had to retire from the police force. As a result of his retirement, a battle broke out between the rabbis of the various police districts who wanted the plum job.
But who really needs a chief rabbi for the police? And who needs rabbis for each region, each of which employs many more rabbis?
Is the country so big that every little hole needs its own rabbi? Why can't the Tel Aviv rabbi perform the secret rabbinic operations in Haifa?
The police commissioner could have taken advantage of the opportunity to get rid of the entire superfluous division and instead rely on the civilian Chief Rabbinate for services. Instead, Commissioner Moshe Karadi decided he knew better than everyone else, and replaced the outgoing rabbi with two rabbis. One will be the chief rabbi of the Israel Police, and the other will be the rabbi of the National Police Headquarters.
Both will soon be promoted to the rank of chief superintendent, and we will continue to pay for the wastefulness.