"Managing the national economy is like managing a household. You must balance expenses and income, you cannot spend on everything, you must choose, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting today with Minister of Finance Yuval Steinitz and officials from the Prime Minister's Office and Ministry of Finance, ahead of Monday's cabinet meeting.
Netanyahu continued, "In the past year, we chose to invest in halting illegal migrants, and we succeeded to a great extent in stopping the wave that flooded the country. We decided to invest in firefighting, including aerial firefighting, and to a great extent, we succeeded. We're putting out all fires, as you can see. We're dealing with security challenges in view of the changing reality. All this costs money.
"We cannot spend on this and on all the rest. That is why the cabinet will make adjustments on Monday. We'll decide to focus on this at the expense of other things. Not at the expense of education or at the expense of welfare, for which we make exceptions. First of all, balance the budget, do not exceed the budget, that is the first thing.
"The second thing is to keep the general framework of revenues, because that is the way we preserve the Israeli economy, unlike what is happening in Europe and in other places in the world. We'll only be scratched by the global economic crisis. It has not yet been harmed, and we won't let it be harmed. As a result of this, the rate of employment in the Israeli economy is greater than in almost any other Western country, our unemployment rate is low. We don’t want hundreds of thousands of unemployed, we want Israelis to work and earn a living, and that is what we are doing with a responsible policy, as will be expressed by the cabinet next Monday."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 25, 2012
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