Analysis from Israel
Reduce the deficit and pare down Israel’s long-term debt.

This week’s publication of the National Insurance Institute’s annual poverty report, which found that the number of people under the poverty line increased yet again in 2005, has prompted predictable demands for more government spending to combat poverty. And though MKs and social activists usually try to avoid saying how such spending should be financed, if pressed, most will eventually propose raising the budget deficit. Yet any government that is serious about reducing poverty over the long run, instead of alleviating it temporarily while ultimately making matters worse, should do exactly the opposite: reduce the deficit and pare down Israel’s long-term debt. To understand why, consider the following figures: Over the last four years, interest payments alone on the national debt have averaged some NIS 32.1 billion a year; last year’s figure was NIS 36.1b. That same year, total education spending came to NIS 33.8b., the health budget was NIS 22.3b. and welfare spending totaled NIS 21.7b. In other words, Israel spent more last year just on interest on its national debt than it did on either health, education or welfare. And since it also spent NIS 59.1b. on payments of principal, 2005’s total debt servicing costs, including both interest and principal, came to NIS 95.2b. – more than the NIS 77.8b. spent on education, health and welfare combined. Nor is this atypical: Every year, debt servicing accounts for about one-third of the total budget, leaving only two-thirds for everything else, from welfare to defense. Thus reducing the national debt, by reducing these hefty annual payments, would free up billions for additional spending every year.

IN MOST Western countries, as former Bank of Israel governor David Klein noted in a recent article, the national debt is about 60 percent of gross domestic product, requiring annual interest payments of some 2% of GDP. But in Israel, whose debt is a whopping 100% of GDP – about NIS 550b. – annual interest payments consume about 6% of GDP. In other words, reducing our debt by 40&, to standard Western levels, would reduce our interest payments by about 67%. Applying that to the 2005 figures, that would mean annual interest payments of about NIS 12b. instead of NIS 36b. Thus reducing Israel’s debt to accepted Western levels would free up some NIS 24b, a year in interest payments – the equivalent of the total health or welfare budget. And this extra money would be available not just once, but every single year – enabling massive long-term investments in education, job retraining and other programs that could really reduce poverty, as opposed to merely providing temporary relief.

CLEARLY, PARING down debt involves short-term sacrifice: Some money would have to be taken from other projects and used for debt repayment instead. Equally clearly, the sums involved are too large to permit rapid reductions: A NIS 220b. debt reduction plan would have to be spread out over many years. Yet over the long run, interest savings of NIS 24b. a year mean that the plan would effectively pay for itself within 10 years of completion. And even in the short term, since every shekel of debt reduction lowers interest payments, less than a shekel must be taken from other programs in order to finance it. The ideal time to reduce debt is when the economy is growing rapidly, since rapid growth means higher tax revenues, and with more income at its disposal, the government can pare down debt without cutting as deeply into existing spending. And Israel is currently enjoying very rapid growth: GDP grew by an estimated 5.2% last year, and the Finance Ministry has forecast 3.9% growth this year. Yet instead of taking advantage of this to reduce debt, the government plans to increase our debt still further in 2006: The proposed 2006 budget calls for a deficit of some NIS 17.2b., meaning the national debt would be increased by that amount. As a result, annual debt servicing costs will also rise. In fact, Israel’s fiscal policy for many years now has been one of perpetual deficits: Regardless of whether the economy is booming or shrinking, the budget calls for a deficit of about 3% of GDP every year. And therefore, every year, the national debt increases. Granted, there are years like 2005, when the economy grew faster than the debt, meaning that even though total debt increased, it declined as a percentage of GDP. But there are also many years when the debt grows faster than the economy – which is why the national debt has been stuck at around 100% of GDP for years.

ONE DOES not have to be an economic genius to realize that an endlessly increasing national debt, with its concomitant increase in annual debt servicing costs, means that over the long run, the country will have less money available for other needs. In other words, reckless borrowing today deprives our children and grandchildren tomorrow, since it is they who will have to finance the ever-increasing debt payments by cutting back on other spending. If, on the other hand, we take advantage of the current economic growth to start reducing debt, the concomitant reduction in annual interest payments would free up sizable sums every year that could be used to increase spending on other programs. Poverty is a long-term problem; it cannot be eliminated overnight. And therefore, any successful anti-poverty program will require investments stretching out over many years. But financing such a long-term program requires a long-term source of income. And the only realistic source of such income is the annual savings that would be produced by a serious program of debt reduction.

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Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

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