Netanyahu, Lapid Punish Families With Children and Bennett is Silent

Only the wealthy won't feel Binyamin Netanyahu and Yair Lapid's latest budget cut, which reduces "child allowances" to a pitiful joke. 

Where just a few years ago families received as much as NIS 400 per child, the payments for children will fall to NIS 140 (less than $40) per child per month... Arutz 7

Contrary to Lapid's rantings, it's not the lazy unemployed sector that will feel it the most.  Those families with almost no income get various welfare subsidies; it's the working poor, who even with the previous child allowances barely finished the month. 

I have no idea how Lapid has come up with his so-called facts:

“We will help needy families and set aside hundreds of millions [of shekels] to make sure no children go hungry, but [the cuts] are a historic move from a culture of allotments to a culture of work.”
Beginning on August 20, parents will receive only 140 shekels per month for each child born after June 1, 2003.
According to Lapid, National Insurance Institute (NII) child allotments perpetuated poverty instead of stopping it.
“There is only one thing that allows families to get out of the cycle of poverty – work. The poverty rate in families with two working parents is under 5 percent.” Indy News of Israel

Apparently, Yair Lapid is just as anti-religious and anti-chareidi as his father was.  He just packages himself differently. 

For Haredi families, this severe cut in income comes coupled with a severe curtailing of funding for yeshivas and kolelim—by 30 percent this coming year, and by 60 percent the following year. Jewish Press

Lapid's timing is extra cruel considering the season.  Summer is extremely, unbearably expensive for families with children, no matter what their income.  Children on vacation from school need to be minded, cared for which is expensive.  Summer camp, vacations, babysitters, bathing suits, crafts etc. are difficult for many parents to pay for.  You see many parents taking their children to work, because there's no alternative especially when they are working at low wages.  Sometimes it costs more to go to work than to stay home.  By reducing child allowances it can become completely financially impossible for both parents to work.

Even before these new child allowance cuts, parents were finding it difficult to pay for school supplies, books and the expenses for the upcoming Jewish Holidays.

Israel doesn't have much of a parliamentary opposition, but I hope this latest government move galvanizes them to action.

“It injures where it’s supposed to heal. Once again, [Finance Minister Yair] Lapid is taking advantage of and encouraging a mistaken and inciting idea that haredim and Arabs are the only ones who are harmed by budget cuts. First of all, a child is a child is a child.”
According to Yacimovich, the average family will lose NIS 2,000 per year because of the allotment cuts.
The Labor issue took with a statistic Lapid cited – that only five percent of families where both parents work are poor – and said that 65 percent of poor families are working families.
She added that there are 870,000 poor children in Israel, more than any other Western country.
“This is an economic and national mistake, evil for its own sake, and a total detachment from people’s regular lives,” Yacimovich wrote.  Jerusalem Post

But my big question concerns to silence from Lapid's buddy, Naftali Bennett. A large portion of Bennett's NRP-aka Bayit Yehudi voters will be losing thousands of shekels a year in this government decision.  Ignored by Lapid, Netanyahu and Bennett, who is also in the government coalition, is the fact that many, many families that will be losing thousands of shekels a year are from the dati Le'umi, national religious portion of the population.  They voted on the whole for NRP and Likud.  There's a good chance they won't be able to afford to make that mistake again.

Yair Lapid's Economic Scare Mongering

What's behind Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid's scare mongering?  What's his true agenda?

Yair Lapid: Deficit could cause collapse

Finance Minister: The austerity measures will stop Israel reaching the conditions in Europe with high unemployment.

2 July 13 12:42, Moshe Golan

"The idea that we have people here whose lives are at risk because they are doing their jobs is intolerable in a proper democracy," said Minister of Finance Yair Lapid in his opening remarks at the Union of Local Authorities in Israel, referring to the "loathsome" economic measures he has taken. He said that without these measures, the deficit would balloon to NIS 70 billion within two years.
"We must make changes together. We must do this in two stages. The first, and short, step is to emerge from the deficit. The steps we've taken are painful, I admit it. Raising VAT is painful, raising income tax is painful, but you are people who understand budgets, so it is easy for me to explain this to you: the deficit is not a one-time event, it's structural. If we don’t stop it now, it will continue to grow and grow until it buries us," Lapid said.

The Israeli economy is one of the healthiest in the western/developed world?

Israeli Unemployment

European unemployment

The euro area1 (EA17) seasonally-adjusted2 unemployment rate3 was 12.1% in May 2013, up from 12.0% in April4. The EU271 unemployment rate was 10.9%, stable compared with the previous month4. In both zones, rates have risen markedly compared with May 2012, when they were 11.3% and 10.4% respectively. These figures are published by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union.

Eurostat estimates that 26.405 million men and women in the EU27, of whom 19.222 million were in the euro area, were unemployed in May 2013. Compared with April 2013, the number of persons unemployed increased by
16 000 in the EU27 and by 67 000 in the euro area. Compared with May 2012, unemployment rose by 1.324 million in the EU27 and by 1.344 million in the euro area.

United States unemployment

Unemployment fell in May from a year earlier in two-thirds of the nation’s 372 metropolitan areas, but 27 still had jobless rates in excess of 10%, the Labor Department said Tuesday.
Eleven of these areas were in California, the country’s most-populous state, which continues to grapple with fallout from the housing-market downturn. El Centro, Calif., had one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates, at 22.8%, surpassed by Yuma, Ariz., at 30.8%.

Maybe we've been doing something right, and if we take those drastic  measures Lapid is recommending things will get worse...  Most of Lapid's economic changes affect the poor, the minimum wage and lower middle class much more than they affect the lives of the wealthy.  And those in the middle-class, from whom Lapid got most of his votes, will feel poorer, rather than more comfortable.

Unlike most developed countries, Israel has a population growth rate in the educated classes of society.  And davka, this important index will suffer the most from Lapid's policies.  Population growth is a key to a healthy society.  All of the old age benefits, pensions, private and governmental are based on the pyramid principle.  The young people pay for the pensions of their elders.  If those young people don't have enough children, then there won't be enough new money in the system when they are no longer able to work.  There's nothing evil in this aspect of the pyramid system; this is just a fact of life. The more children, the more growth the stronger the economy will be in the future.

Such irony, davka, Yair Lapid's political party is called Yesh Atid, There is a Future.  His economic policies endanger the future for Israelis.

Who in Israel Really Needs "Open Skies?"

My husband is one of those whose trip abroad this week may not happen.  Israel's new Finance Minister Yair Lapid campaigned to help those he calls "middle class," those making, like his Riki Cohen family, almost five times minimum wage and just over double average wage for a couple. 

Riki Cohen, a widow from Hadera, earns NIS 4,500 ($1,234) a month. She can only dream of earning NIS 20,000 ($5,485) a month, like the fictitious family of 'Mrs. Riki Cohen,' mentioned by Finance Minister Yair Lapid in his controversial Facebook post.
In his post, Lapid also said the 'Cohen family' travels abroad once every two years. "Is he serious? I've never been abroad," the real Riki Cohen told Ynet Tuesday.

Yair Lapid's concept of a "middle-class salary" is upper class, according to the real financial statistics here in Israel, especially considering that Riki Cohen's family can afford to travel abroad every two years.  Lapid doesn't consider that frequent enough and in one of this new government's first big moves is to open Israeli skies to the very competitive airfares.

In response, the Israeli airlines, including El Al are striking.  My husband, not being among the privileged, sophisticated frequent travelers didn't realize that he should have cancelled his El Al ticket and quickly bought one from a different airline. Reports are that the airport will start shutting down tomorrow.  This is not good for Israel.

Considering that another of Lapid's, and no doubt we should remember that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu must certainly approve these moves,  budget changes is cutting child allowances which seriously affects the lower and true middle class families.

Those spending cuts include NIS 4b.-5b. from the civil service, NIS 3b.-4b. from defense, with an equal amount from child allotments and NIS 2b.-4b. from infrastructure spending.
Yet a representative for Lapid would disclose only that the budgetary framework includes new taxes on affluent goods such as luxury apartments and cars.

So, I guess we can conclude from those budget changes that Lapid puts children in the same unnecessary or optional category as luxury cars.  Does he expect Israelis to somehow down-size their families by "deleting" some of their children?

It seems pretty obvious that this is a Marie Antoinette  government whose theme is:

"Let them eat cake."