Imagine for a second the schedule of the Minister of Finance: he gets up in the morning, brushes his teeth, stretches, drinks coffee, eats breakfast, puts on a suit and arrives at the office.
then what?
Not so simple, right?
Surely you will say he is responsible for the treasury, what can be so complicated.
In our collective imagination he sits in a vault full of gold coins, tax officials bring buckets of money in and ministers go out with money, and the Minister of Finance decides how much everyone gets.
He can be generous and help the weak, and he can be harsh and stingy and say "mine", like Gollum from "The Lord of the Rings".
Well, not exactly.
Although most of the population holds - as well as most of the politicians - a view similar to the description I proposed, the main contribution of the Minister of Finance to the country is not in the collection and distribution of money.
It is possible with the same tax rate, and even with the same tax mix (ie the ratio between VAT, income tax and corporate tax), to achieve very different results for achieving the main goal of the Minister of Finance and the government in general.
And what is that purpose?
Increasing the welfare of the citizens of Israel.
A good treasury minister gets up every morning and thinks about how all Israeli citizens will live better today than how they lived yesterday.
It can be called in terms such as the standard of living, or the lack of cost of living, or the milky protest, or why housing is expensive, and the like.
Examples are not lacking.
Of course, this does not mean that there is no place to make deep and necessary reforms in the tax or welfare system, but these are not the big mines.
There are countries with higher tax rates and larger welfare systems, and they are still richer than us, and by a lot.
In order to make the citizens of Israel richer we need to understand what produces the national and private wealth, and the answer to that is not a money tree from which the Minister of Finance harvests the fruits of growth.
Norway has such a tree in the form of huge oil fields, but we don't.
We have to generate our own wealth.
A good measure to measure our ability to enrich ourselves is called "labor productivity" or "product per working hour": the total things we have - apartments, hamburgers or hospitals - are the result of the total work in the economy.
Looking at the economy through labor productivity presents a very bleak picture: as of 2020, the GDP per working hour in Israel was 22% lower than the average in the OECD, and 40% lower than the countries we want to be like.
The salary is derived from the productivity of the work, and in everyday language - the Israeli worker works too much and earns too little.
The main role of the Minister of Finance is to increase labor productivity.
Imagine the Israeli worker as a swimmer in a pool.
In Europe and the USA the pool will be full of water, in Israel it will be full of syrup. No matter how talented and muscular the Israeli worker is, his ability to compete is very low.
Years ago I met an employee of one of the largest and most innovative telephone companies in the world.
He told me that in order to work on their prototypes they have to smuggle the models into Israel.
At every period of time, an employee of the company would smuggle an advanced cell phone into Israel, just so that the development workers could continue to develop the next model. The reason for this is the bureaucracy of registering devices that would take months. Apple would close the development center if it had to go through the route. The Green Bureaucracy and regulation are the syrup through which the Israeli worker swims, or at least tries to swim.
Every morning the finance minister has to ask himself how many regulations and bureaucracies he can dismantle today, how much he can make easier for the worker collapsing under the loom.
Of these regulations, the most destructive is the labor regulation, a 70-year-old wage structure, the result of the Histadrut's involvement in everything.
Dozens of laws and regulations, and the draconian employment costs, especially those that fall on small businesses, harm the work productivity and well-being of all of us to this day.
The Minister of Finance must deal with them first.
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