carolineglick.com..
04 December '14..
Three days after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and leader of the Yesh Atid party and now former finance minister Yair Lapid failed to resolve their differences and so thrust Israel into an electoral season less than two years after the last election, the Left’s narrative is already clear. Netanyahu has forced unnecessary, costly elections on the country. He did so because his reactionary nature, overweening ego and thin skin made it impossible for him to handle a true reformer like Lapid, who was trying to push the country forward.
The actual situation is quite different. These elections are necessary. The up to NIS 1.2 billion that taxpayers will have to pay to finance the vote scheduled for March 17 is money well spent. And if the current polls are even close to what the election results will be three months from now, then the public understands that they are necessary and intends to elect a government that will serve it better than the one that just dissolved.
To be sure, Netanyahu is the one who decided to call elections. But the person responsible for making it impossible for the existing government to function is Lapid. Over the past few months Lapid has had the political equivalent of a nervous breakdown.
In 2013, Lapid ran as a centrist. The television celebrity’s new party, Yesh Atid, presented itself as the voice of the hard-working middle class whose members love this country and are tired of electing governments that trample their economic interests and take them for granted in favor of special interests, especially the haredim.
In other words, Lapid ran as his father’s son.
The late Yosef “Tommy” Lapid’s Shinui party also claimed to be the voice of the middle class and the ideological Center, fighting the special interests, especially the haredim.
But as economic commentator Rotem Sella explained Thursday on the NRG website, aside from boycotting the haredim, Lapid Jr. did not follow in his father’s footsteps after taking office.
Whereas Shinui was a liberal free market party that supported then-finance minister Netanyahu’s reforms that transformed Israel’s sclerotic, socialist economy into a rapidly growing free market, Lapid and his ministers from Yesh Atid exchanged their capitalist platform for socialist policies immediately upon taking office. In so doing they put Israel on a path to recession and social upheaval.
As Sella noted, among other things, shortly after taking office Lapid capitulated to the thuggish Histadrut labor federation and agreed not to touch the inflated salaries of state employees – paid for by the middle class taxpayers who voted for him.
His health minister, Yael German, took steps to wipe out private medical services through draconian taxation and paralyzing regulation of private medical services. Her actions didn’t rescue the bankrupt public health system. They merely served to deny citizens the right to pay for better healthcare and to deny doctors the opportunity to make a living even remotely commensurate with the value of their skills.
In recent months, Lapid’s signature policies were his decision to expand the deficit in order to increase welfare spending and his draft bill to cancel VAT for select first-time home purchasers.
The former policy has already damaged Israel’s international credit rating. The latter policy has been criticized across the board by economists as a populist move that will raise housing prices and waste NIS 3b. in taxpayer money – that is, well more than the cost of the elections.
Lapid’s refusal to reconsider his policies despite their self-evident foolishness was a key cause of the government’s fall. And his insistence that only mean-spirited reactionaries oppose his plans is evidence that he lacks the capacity to understand how people perceive his behavior.
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