The heads of the budget department in the former Treasury: "We turned from a start-up nation into lepers"

At this time, a panel of the former managers of the budget department in the Treasury was held in the Tsava hall in Tel Aviv, with the participation of Yarom Ariav, David Fogel, Ram Belinkov and David Milgrom.

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Yarom Ariav: "This is a real alarm. We are witnessing the destruction of the Zionist enterprise. The voices of the state are dictating. The government is completely hollow. The minister of finance is arrogant. The prime minister is leading us, while conflicting between the state and his personal affairs. Look at the treatment of the abductees and the treatment of the evacuees from the north and south. I don't start with the economic situation, because first we need to see who we are facing.

In this situation it is impossible to stay at home. There is a public here with abilities, experience, skills, and in the end they will ask us where were you during the destruction? There is a great opportunity here for a regional initiative, first and foremost Saudi Arabia – with enormous economic and regional significance, and it is not being realized, because of a conflict of interest in which the Prime Minister is. If we look back a year and a half, there is here the destruction of the value of the State of Israel. An example, for a leper country, dangerous. There has never been such a great destruction of such a large public by one person.

A financial economic crisis should be avoided. This can be done by changing the fiscal policy. We started with a deficit of 6.6%, it is necessary to return to the route of a responsible and reasonable economic policy. To tell the truth to the public. Economic consideration in war. In all military decisions today – there is no economic consideration at all. To this day, the doctrine There were short wars. There are serious implications for the high-tech industry and for tourism and other industries.

Another lost decade must be prevented. Compare the Yom Kippur War to today, when defense spending rose to close to thirty percent of GDP, and we got massive inflation. We need to stop the overflow of budgets for the military today. October 7th was not a budgetary event, simply the army was not there. A brain drain and a complete disintegration of the public system and all systems must be prevented."

Ram Belinkov: "What happened on the seventh of October was not really surprising. I think that Israeli society has been deteriorating for a long time. A hedonistic society, chasing money, positions, good life. The great economic success allowed us to finance increasingly exploitative goals, some of them anti-Zionist. It blinds the The Israeli Community.

As director general, I managed the team that made noise in front of the security establishment. David Brodt knows this well. The head of the military establishment as a lieutenant was Major General Herzi Halevi. Fifty percent of my time as director general of the treasury dealt with the salary conditions of the officers and the permanent staff. And only the other fifty percent of the time dealt with real matters. When it is said that a change needs to be made in Israeli society, it cannot be ignored by any factor, including the army.

If they increase the army budget, they will add colonels and more officers and positions. Why do we need military secretaries for the Prime Minister and the President? They are just passing notes. Why do they need an office and a secretariat and a surviving vehicle. They will say that I deal with the small money, I think otherwise that it is symbolic of a hedonistic company.

The important thing in my eyes is a fundamental change in Israeli society, and I am pessimistic. You hear people like Smotrich claiming that it is a discourse of October 6, but what is together?

In my opinion, the only way to change the discourse is also from the side of the traveling circus. We are the same people, talking to the same people, about similar things. We are the convinced ones. You have to work differently. I think we should stop donating to organizations that receive both donations and public funds. My message is that we need to stop being nice and stop being politically correct. The silence of the current budget department is obscene and will be remembered forever."

David Brodt: "Israel's economy is strong because we have a good foundation that we have built in place of the state, especially since 1986. We have done hard work, here many in this forum in the hall have been partners – in reforms, in building a magnificent hi-tech industry in regulation, in the financial system. We also have a private sector Strong. 2024 will also end with 24 thousand dollars per capita, but from the beginning of 2023 this situation changes.

The economy is still strong, but never resilient. In a situation where there are inappropriate appointments in the public sector, the police are political and more, this is a promise of a less good future. The civil and military expenses from October 2023 until the end of 2025 will reach NIS 250 billion. This year's deficit will be higher than 6.6%.

The 24th budget was built with a sectoral and sectoral perspective, because this government wants to reconcile the parties. It has no engines of growth and reforms. There is no organized plan to get out of the crisis.

Just as there is no plan for the day after on the military side, neither is there on the economic side. The lack of infrastructure has not been resolved, nor has the low productivity, nor the high-tech crisis that permeates us from the world, nor the housing crisis."

Aharon Vogel: "When there is a war, the duration and intensity are defined in advance. We try to calculate how much we will receive from the US, how much reserves in the Bank of Israel we can use. We have reserves of 250 billion dollars and the Accountant General makes a mistake when he sets out to raise money in the world for future generations. There is no problem for the economy to increase the defense budget by even one and a half percent of GDP, because our capabilities converge into the ability to grow.

An unnecessary office with an unnecessary minister – that's many billions, far beyond the one-time budget, we must have a policy of integrated growth, a fiscal and monetary policy, reference to the interest rate to the exchange rate, reference to a marginal tax of 60 percent excluding health. There is a problem today in making an integrated policy of growth on the part of the professional level. We have a tremendous opportunity to go to an arrangement led by the President of the United States. When we make a recovery plan for the body, we look at the management body. The President of the United States has the right to comment that we do not have a proper Prime Minister, when he gives us aid budgets."