Budget blues /How not to answer Israel's needs - Haaretz

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Thu., October 18, 2007 ,

Israel Time: 01:30 (EST+7)

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Budget blues /How not to answer Israel's needs

By Roby Nathanson

The budget for the year 2008 is disturbingly like its predecessors. As usual, it has several warts that will doubtless be excised before its final vote by the Knesset into law. For instance there's that business of making housewives pay health tax, and abolishing the discount on electricity for the needy. In parallel, it increases the defense budget, attesting that the good old priorities of yore remain unchanged.

Therefore, we should be examining the 2008 budget not by what it has, but by what it doesn't have. Delving into the fine print draws a stark picture: this is a budget that lacks social policy, caring for the people, despite the crying need for care.

Take the education system. Ostensibly education is the one area where there's news, namely a significant allocation to raise teachers' salaries. But here too there's no actual initiative, not even a decision to implement the Dovrat reform. It's an arbitration ruling achieved after a protracted battle between the teachers and government, a sort of stand-alone anecdote, not a result of a bird's eye view of what the education system really needs.

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Where is money to expand the long study day program? Where is the NIS 2 billion promised to the universities, time and again, because of student strikes? Where are the plans to build up educational facilities outside of central Israel?

The 2008 budget promises one thing: that the ills of the education system will remain in place for at least one more year. Granted the teachers get NIS 182 million for their wages, but that comes from cutting millions of shekels from projects for the needy in the periphery. The education budget for 2008 assures that nobody will be pleased and our children will be ignorant.

Nor can we expect a good year in employment. The government is not really discussing ways to create jobs. There is recognition of outlay on day care for children, which is necessary to get young mothers to work, but that assistance is minimal and meaningless. The suggested ways to increase employment among the ultra-Orthodox won't go anywhere this year either. And regarding budgets to encourage capital investment and aid small businesses, forget it: this year, too, the sums remain laughably small.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. For the first time in Israeli history, the government set for itself targets regarding employment and poverty reduction, based on recommendations by the socioeconomic panel headed by Manuel Trajtenberg.

The decision could have been important, if we could find its spoor in the budget proposal. But the budget shows no evidence of any real attempt to try to meet these goals. The government stated that it would increase employment by 2.5 percent, but it doesn't have a magic wand. Without concrete decisions on actual steps, and appropriate budgeting, its just bluster.

For the most part, the 2008 budget is flying on automatic pilot. True, the economy is taking off, but Israeli society is heavily overloaded with social and economic problems. We need a bolder budget, a budget with vision, that gives the passengers that warm feeling of safety, knowing the government is being flown along the route of directed policy. You can't get that kind of feeling from the budget that's about to be debated by the Knesset Finance Committee.

The author is the general director of the Macro Center for Political Economics.

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