So Minister of Finance Yair Lapid is concerned about Ruth Cohen from Hadera. During a meeting in the Finance Ministry about budget cuts and finding ways to cover the deficit, Lapid interrupted and expressed how important it is to end the dependence on the middle class, lessen the burden they carry in the form of taxes and high prices, and find ways to make their lives better. He did this by using Ricki Cohen of Hadera as an example.
Real or fictitious I do not know, but Mrs. Cohen and her husband, an employee in the hi-tech sector, earn together 20,000 NIS monthly, according to Lapid. Tragically, they have not been able to travel to the United States for a vacation in two years and even more tragically will not be able to afford to purchase an apartment for any of their three children at some point in the future.
If you have opened any Israeli news website, or Israeli commentary site, or turned on the radio or television, you will already have heard the criticism of Yair Lapid. You will have heard how by his example he has shown how disconnected from reality he is. You will have heard how he does not even realize who the middle class is, the middle class he promised to fight for, the middle class that saw him as the best option and voted for him. You will have seen the charts showing that the Cohens are really pretty close to the top 10%, extremely upper-middle-class people. The real people struggling are the people making far less than 20k NIS monthly, the people who find it difficult to pay the ever-increasing electricity and water bills at the same time as paying the mortgage or rent and the ever-increasing food bills. They do not even consider trips abroad for vacation, and their biggest fear that is relevant on a day to day basis has nothing to do with the lack of ability to buy an apartment 15 or 20 years down the road.
Personally, I have not traveled to the US in 6 years, despite most of my family living there. It is not much of a concern for me, and I have sense of urgency to visit the US, and I, at this point in my life, only plan to visit should there be a significant occasion such as a family simcha. I am happy with vacationing in Israel, and have easily come to terms with the fact that it is too expensive to fly my family abroad for vacations. We pay a mortgage, have all those bills, have 8 kids (keneina hara, ben porat yosef, tfoo tfoo tfoo), have no expectation of being able to afford to buy 3 apartments in the future for our kids, let alone 8, and I think we are still in a pretty decent situation. There are people earning far less than what we earn, there are people struggling much worse than us and Yair Lapid needs to figure out who it is that is really struggling, and not just dramatically help those, via dramatic announcement in ministry meetings and on Facebook posts, whose biggest concerns seem to be, at least in Lapid's words, that they cannot take their foreign vacation and buy 3 more apartments at some point in the future.
That being said, I reject the sharp criticism of Lapid as well. Yes, there are people, the majority of the country actually, earning significantly less than the Cohens, struggling far more, and pining for more modest vacations and more modest wedding packages for their kids. Their struggle is with the rent/mortgage on a monthly basis, with filling the car at the gas station 3-4 times a month, with paying the electricity bill, despite making a semi-decent salary by Israeli standards. Perhaps the Cohens from Hadera should not be Lapid's main concern, but the problem he mentioned is a big problem.
It also does make me wonder - if the Cohens can't make it, earning about 20k per month with 3 kids, how is the average Israeli family getting by on so much less? The average Israeli household income is, I think, 12k. Sure, plenty are in overdraft at the bank, but most people are getting by, even if just scraping by. And even more so, how do haredi families get by, with far more kids, on average, and much less income. And even more so, how do kollel families get by, with even more kids and even less income???
The Cohens suffer from the same problem that the rest of us suffer from. Taxes are high, Costs are high and ever-increasing, and he should make it the concern of the ministry, as a top priority, to make people's lives easier. If salaries would go up, if taxes would go down, if the electric company would be reined in, if the water companies would be brought under some sort of control (suddenly charging VAT, paying high salaries, charging increasingly high prices for water, even with record setting winter rains), it would ease the burden on the backs of a tremendous percentage of Israelis. And, who knows, maybe then the Cohens and others will even be able to travel abroad and buy apartments for their kids!
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