The position of Minister of Finance is a thankless position.
If the Minister of Finance does a good job and increases the welfare of all the citizens of Israel, he is punished;
If he harms the well-being of Israeli citizens but cares for a small group of voters, he is rewarded.
Imagine two candidates for the presidency of the house committee: one candidate publishes a platform that does good for everyone, promises to take care of the cleanliness of the extension and the elevator;
A second candidate knows that he doesn't have to please everyone, but only win 51 percent, so he builds a coalition, promises to use public space as a bicycle storage facility, promises to attach public parking lots to the owners of large apartments, promises tax exemption for pensioners, and the garden?
Sorry, no left.
Who do you think will win the election?
Understandable - the one who divides the maximum of the pie into the smallest possible majority.
The general public always pays the price of supporting the pressure groups.
Most of the finance ministers of the State of Israel worked to preserve the power of the pressure groups, and these in turn knew how to hide under the guise of national interest.
Political pressure groups do not want to be known as such, their narrow interest is always disguised in the media as public interest.
Thus, the personal interest and greed of the owners of budget pensions is presented as the security budget - such 70-year-old permanent personnel are responsible for our security, not the soldiers at the border.
Thus, teachers with (political) seniority succeed time and time again in robbing the wages of young teachers, and opposing any reform to improve education.
Thus, industrialists avoid taxes and enjoy subsidies and other benefits under the lie of strengthening the industry.
Land owners pretend to be farmers to get protection from competition, while they import laborers and inputs from abroad and lie to us that they are "made in the country".
And the Histadrut, the most sophisticated extortion organization of all, manages to tell us that it "takes care of the workers", while it robs the money of the poor workers, and turns it into political capital that serves the powerful committees in the government companies and the civil service.
There are also unconscious pressure groups, and therefore they are exploitable.
They apparently enjoy political power, but it is used to weaken them.
These are the deceived pressure groups - bachelors, students, young couples.
Politicians who represent these groups apparently act in their favor, but in practice give them beautiful words and poor material.
An increase in the avrach allowance instead of a combination of Torah and work is a sentence of poverty for tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox.
Along with the lack of core studies, a poverty trap is guaranteed for decades to come.
Also lotteries of apartments for young couples, subsidized tuition for students in professions without a future, "discounted" housing - all these ensure constant poverty in exchange for political support.
Most of the ministers of finance for generations, perhaps with the exception of Netanyahu in 2003 and one or two others, have played this game.
Some of them succeeded in raking in the political capital, some of them failed, but as in the house committee - most of them tried to distribute the public purse to a coalition of small pressure groups.
We need a psychopathic finance minister, who will not try to buy votes, who will go against the coalition of pressure groups, against the poverty censors and vote contractors, against the Histadrut's panchayats, against coalitions of powerful industrialists and those with budget pensions.
We need a finance minister who will protect the public treasury from looters, whether they loot in their own name or in the name of the disadvantaged they seek to exploit;
We need a finance minister who will reform labor relations and strip the Histadrut of its Bolshevik power;
We need a minister of finance who will encourage going to work, who will work for an education system oriented towards work skills, and not seniority rewards for the holders of the Atina;
A finance minister is needed who will see the problems of the breadth of the State of Israel, and not the problem of the depth of the pockets of the political spies.
The outburst of the Histadrut chairman in view of the possible appointment of Smotrich to the position, convinces me that he is probably the right man.
were we wrong
We will fix it!
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