Lapid calls budget ‘greatest robbery in the history of the country’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is contemptuous of the middle class, declares Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, reiterating his previous assertion that the budget bill constitutes “the greatest robbery in the history of the country.”

“Your rulers are rogues and cronies of thieves, everyone avid for presents and greedy for gifts,” Lapid declares, citing the book of Isaiah. The rest of the verse goes on to say that said leaders “do not judge the case of the orphan, and the widow’s cause never reaches them.”

The government, he continues, is “stealing the money and the future of the Israeli middle class, the productive public, who works, pays taxes, enlists in the army, whose children enlist in the army.”

“In a normal country, during a war, during an economic crisis, the government does not have two ministers in the Ministry of Education, two ministers in the Ministry of Finance, two ministers in the Ministry of Defense,” he continues.

“A normal budget does not take 1.3 billion shekels in convalescence benefits from working people, including people who earn minimum wage, including people who have done 200 days of reserve duty this year, and transfer it directly into the pockets of people who do not work and do not enlist,” Lapid rails.

“A normal budget, during a war, does not add another 5 billion shekels of coalition funds to the 8 billion you transferred last year. Because people are being killed and injured here because the middle class is collapsing because you have lost all shame.”

Lapid insists that “the government doesn’t care about” the citizens but rather “despises your values, it openly belittles your efforts, it doesn’t work for you, it just takes advantage of you.”

“What the Israeli middle class needs is a government that works for them,” he concludes, calling on lawmakers “to vote against this terrible budget.”