By Sharon Roffe Ofir
If all goes well for the government and things proceed according to plan, by the time this column is published, the state budget for 2023 - 2024 will have passed. Beyond the disputes within the coalition, the tendency of each party to pull in its direction and try and get a bigger slice of the cake, beyond the numbers and charts, beyond the headlines, the budget book tells a story, one in which numbers, unlike words, cannot lie, and the story does not have a happy ending.
To simplify the picture without having to dive into the numbers, imagine that you have a sum of money in the bank today that you would like to use for investment. After you look carefully over your bank statement, which includes your expenses and revenues, you search for the investment options that can deliver a maximum return. Your goal is to take care of your children’s future; their education, weddings, or helping them buy an apartment. At the same time, you want to make sure that your retirement is also taken care of.
It sounds simple, but if we seek to apply this same logic to the state budget presented to the Knesset, we will see that the current government has its own rules. If the train continues at high speed down the current route, we will all end up in the abyss. Or to put it differently, everyone gets wet when it rains.
The planned state budget for 2023 is NIS 484 billion and NIS 514 billion in 2024. Before we look at where the money is going, and who the state has chosen to invest in, let's recollect where the money comes from.
The bulk of the state budget comes from us, the citizens who work and carry the burden on our shoulders, with about 300 billion NIS in state revenues coming from taxes. The equation is simple -- the less economic ability Israel’s citizens have, the greater the harm to the State of Israel -- and that is without even addressing the issue of risk-averse investors, who have identified problematic trends and are pulling their money out.
The Chief Economist at the Finance Ministry, Shira Greenberg, recently released a report warning of the dire consequences for the Israeli economy resulting from the way the budget is being distributed. Among other things, she wrote that these decisions would increase the gaps in Israeli society and discourage people from joining the labor market. Greenberg referred to the fact that growth in Israel is expected to fall by 3.1% in 2023 and that state revenues are expected to be NIS 5.3 billion short of the original forecast. The loss of GDP resulting from the failure to employ the ultra-Orthodox will hit NIS 6.7 trillion over the coming decades, inflation will exceed the annual target, and the uncertainty produced by the judicial reform may also exacerbate the current situation.
Greenberg is a professional appointment, and she is looking at the numbers with great concern, while asking the government to bring the train to a stop. Yet instead of pulling the brakes, it is rushing ahead. The ultra-Orthodox party leaders who have become accustomed over the years to the patent of someone else carrying the economic burden are insatiable. Appetite comes with eating.
Where is the money going? Torah-study institutions will receive an additional seven billion shekels, about four billion will be allocated for benefits for married religious scholars, NIS 125 million will go to support ultra-Orthodox Jewish culture, NIS 600 million for family purity programs, half a billion to religious state education budgets, NIS 279 million to the Ministry of Religious Affairs, of which NIS 67 million will be used to hire more rabbis. Four million shekels will go to paying for religious legal rulings for overseas communities (yes, you read that correctly). Religious institutions that are exempt from teaching the core curriculum will also receive millions of shekels in additional budgets.
What about the middle class, you may ask? Where has the promise of free education from the age of 0-3 gone, what about the cost of living, investment in the geographic and economic periphery, strengthening the Negev and Galilee regions, reinforcing border communities against rocket threats, domestic security, providing for the elderly, students, directing resources to economic growth engines such as high tech and artificial intelligence? The answer will surely be that Israel is a Jewish state and that without its wise religious scholars, we have no right to exist.
Those who provide that answer, however, will forget to mention that an economy that lacks bread will also have no Torah.
Sharon Roffe-Ofir served as Knesset Member in the 24th Knesset. She has served as a deputy local council head at Kiryat Tivon, and has worked as a journalist and as a senior lecturer in academic institutions for 24 years. Read full bio here.