Once a year, every year, Israel holds its annual poverty celebration. The National Insurance Institute (Israel’s social security cum welfare office) publishes its annual poverty report. This enables the politicians, the bleeding hearts, and the caring academics to exhibit compassion through wringing their hands about the plight of the poor for several weeks.

There are lots of problems with this of course. The poverty stats are highly problematic. There are serious technical problems in their computation. People are listed as poor who are in fact retired, not in the country, not in the labor force because they are studying, and so on. Even more serious is the problem that the poverty stats are based on reported income, and Israel - being a Mediterranean country - has oodles of unreported income. Then there is the problem that "poverty" is defined in a meaningless way in the surveys, having nothing to do with hardship or deprivation. While many of those listed as poor are, others live in single-family houses with two cars and a jacuzzi. There is no "means test" for being included as poor. Finally, the "poverty line" is defined in such a way that around 20% of the population will always be defined as poor. Even if everyone in Israel were to hit an oil gusher in their yards, 20% would still be counted as poor by the National Insurance Institute. And so it is unsurprising when each year the bureaucrats shock everyone by disclosing that 20% of Israelis are poor.

In any case, the annual revelation allows all the leftists in Israel to declare that there exists poverty in Israel because Israel has abandoned the 19th century socialist policies that they favor and has moved in the direction of market economics. In reality Israel is still largely subordinated to old-style socialist dirigiste policies, but thanks to high-tech the country is growing in spite of this. So the real question all these bleeding hearts should be asking themselves is how come after 53 years of Israeli Labor Party socialism there is still so much hardship and poverty in the country. In any case, very few of these same recreational-compassion posturers complaining about income inequality in Israel are giving away their property to help the poor. They want the poor helped as long as the government takes away someone ELSE’s property to help them.

But this year is a bit different. You see, on the very same night that the Poverty Celebration began, the commission set up by Ehud Barak to study university tuitions recommended cutting these tuitions in half.

Now I mention this because I cannot imagine anything that would be more effective in widening the wealth inequality in Israel than this proposal, made the very same day as the release of the poverty stats. The proposal of course is Barak’s sop to the students a few weeks ahead of the coming election. But university students are the middle and upper income classes of tomorrow. They are already getting 85% of their college education paid for them by others, mainly the taxpayers. This means that in Israel, people who do NOT go to college and consequently earn far less on average end up subsidizing yuppie college students who will be earning far MORE on average. And as an election gimmick, Barak wants to increase the subsidization even more.

All of which suggests a good election slogan for the Labor Party under Barak: "Make Inequality Greater - It is the SOCIALIST Thing to Do."

Copyright © 2000 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission