If implementation the recommendations of the Trajtenberg committee is to be based mainly on transferring money from the defense budget to social spending, the committee may as well disband right now. They are wasting their time.
Even if NIS 3 billion are cut from the defense budget, or NIS 2 billion, it's all cosmetic. For every shekel cut today, two shekels will be restored tomorrow. That's how it is. Fact. Every amount cut from the defense budget up to now has been returned with compound interest.
The problem is neither financial nor budgetary. It is clear to everyone, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to Professor Manuel Trajtenberg, who was a member of the Brodet committee on the defense budget, to Minister of Finance Yuval Steinitz, to Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, and it is absolutely crystal clear and known to the defense establishment people themselves, that there is a great deal of excess money in that establishment, alongside a great deal of sleight of hand and manipulation, designed to keep that money where it is.
Anyone who knows the defense establishment knows that under headings like "re-arming", "war", "geopolitical risks", and even "Ahmadinejad", "missiles", and "Hamas", billions of dollars a year go to matters that have nothing whatever to do with readiness for war.
The problem is that the moment someone dares to make a cut, the first thing to be reduced is the small proportion that actually is spent on war-readiness. Immediately, tanks are mothballed, purchases of jet-fuel for combat pilot training are stopped, exercises are cancelled, and we are told that the money has run out for Iron Dome or for the new combat aircraft. It's just like city mayors who demand more money, and to cause a scare cut meals for the elderly. Neither the military nor the mayors take the trouble to do what needs to be done.
Our present prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, knows all this no less well than his predecessors. The problem is that the threat to the prime minster is a real threat. W.A.R. No Israeli prime minister has ever been thrown out ignominiously because children had no food or because of families without roofs over their heads. Not even when 350 people are slaughtered on the roads every year, and certainly not when Israel's children fail PISA tests time after time.
But prime ministers have been thrown out, and will be thrown out, because of a bungled war or a military operation with scores of casualties. Because then, as always with failures, the army will point to the excuse - no money. You took the money from us.
There is therefore no chance that the prime minister will press for a substantial and genuine cut in the defense budget, certainly not an ongoing, multiyear cut. He will not even do it with the proviso that everything will change if war breaks out. So the Trajtenberg committee's task is not to rest on the plump defense cushion, because that will never reach any social need. The committee's task is to expand the state's revenue base, to deal with the black market and the blacker than black guys of the economy, to point out and reach all the centers of distortion of wealth, whether governmental, public, or business. To clear out the rampant lawlessness and waste, and to make the right use of the money that is released.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on September 14, 2011
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