On video: The government approved the state budget for 2024 15.01.2024/Video (upload): Omer Miron / L.A.M., Sound: Ben Peretz / L.A.M.
The Knesset plenum approved the state budget for 2024 this evening (Wednesday) in the first reading.
This is the largest budget in the country's history - totaling 582 billion shekels, an amount 68 billion shekels higher than the initial budget established in May last year as part of the biennial budget.
The budget includes significant cuts in government ministries, apart from the defense and yeshiva budgets.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich presented the bill in the plenary at the beginning of the debate and said that "the budget is necessary at this time", and also called it "a responsible budget, a budget of unity. We have spread the burden among everyone and no one is left under the stretcher. Everything is balanced and I am proud in so doing".
Smotrich/Niv Aaronson
The budget includes increasing the defense budget to NIS 99 billion, but also tax increases for next year.
Among the items that increased regardless of the war: subsidies for public transportation operators (3.24 billion shekels), the Israel Police (about one billion shekels), loans to civil servants (half a billion shekels, Israel Railways (700 million shekels), local authority elections (657 million shekels), service The prisons (560 million shekels), higher education (430 million shekels), and development of housing infrastructure (243 million shekels). The
budget also includes coalition funds, such as the yeshiva budget which has increased by 65 million shekels, two billion shekels will be allocated in total for ultra-Orthodox education When the budget will include an increase in the salary of teachers in the ultra-Orthodox sector. The vote in the second and third readings must be held by law by Monday, February 19. If the new budget is not approved by then, a proportional part of the NIS 67 billion budget cut will take effect in all government ministries' budgets, until the date of its approval. The final version of the budget, which may be postponed for two weeks.
Opposition Leader Yair Lapid said in the plenary debate: "The budget that is being presented here today brings us back to everything that led to the events of October 7 - the rudeness, the complete indifference to the other side, the purely political consideration, the world where you know the government doesn't care From you, you know that the government only deals with what is good for it, you know that it is totally cynical."
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