Labor party chairperson MK Shelly Yachimovich today unveiled her party's economic manifesto. The plan comprises five main building blocks.
1) Bringing back basic services - using tax revenues to increase civilian expenditure and provide free quality education, cheap but good health services, and more reliable public transport.
2) Fair salaries for hard work - drastically reducing the number of contract workers, increasing enforcement of labor laws, reducing salary differentials and raising the minimum salary, effective regulation of the capital market and greater state responsibility in looking after the public's pension savings.
3) Lowering apartment and food prices by building and selling thousands of new homes, and lowering food prices through price supervision and lower VAT.
4) Fair competition - fighting concentration in the economy, encouraging manufacturing industries, and intensive investment in small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs).
5) Fair taxation - raising taxes on the richest and the very largest most profitable companies, reducing indirect taxes (VAT on basic products), raising taxes and royalties on national resources, using profits from the state's minerals for the benefit of all citizens.
Policy on the capital market includes: limiting the ability to raise capital for those imposing debt haircuts; restraining parties at interest deals; limiting salaries of senior executives of public companies; restricting dividends for financing leveraged acquisitions; breaking the linkage between controlling owners and value assessors; breaking up pyramid structures.
Yachimovich plans setting up a national fund for natural resources to develop the economy and society. The taxation plan includes amending companies tax to companies differential tax; collecting tax on trapped profits; tax on profits from natural resources; raising income tax for those with salaries over NIS 50,000 per month; equalizing capital gains tax to tax on work; imposing a 5% inheritance tax on estates above NIS 15 million; and cancelling the lowering of customs duties.
The Labor Party's fiscal policy includes cancelling responsibility for expenditure limitations; raising the annual hike in civil expenditure in financing the tax system; an annual 3% deficit ceiling; and an option of raising the deficit during a recession.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on December 4, 2012
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