Protesters urge Lapid to safeguard the poor

Some 200 protesters gathered outside the north Tel Aviv home of Finance Minister Yair Lapid Saturday night in protest of potential budget cuts to social services.

Of the signs held aloft by demonstrators, some called on Lapid to provide funds for public housing, while others read “We are all Riki Cohen,” in reference to a fictitious middle-class Hadera worker created by Lapid in a Facebook post last week as an emblematic struggling Israeli, and “Yair, there are starving families.”

Earlier this week, Lapid wrote that his commitment as Israel’s newly inaugurated finance minister was to safeguarding the economic stability of the middle class, and therefore the country’s economy as a whole.

Israel’s budget deficit in 2012 reached 4.2 percent, more than double what the state originally projected. Officials have said new taxes and severe cuts in public expenditures will have to be made in the new budget to bring the deficit under control.

“As far as I’m concerned, Mrs. Cohen is the reason I came to the Finance Ministry. The Israeli economy — any economy for that matter — is based on the middle class. If you enable them normal living standards and make them feel like the government is behind them, they will flourish and the country will flourish along with them,” Lapid wrote.

One of the protesters who spoke to Ynet Saturday night urged Lapid not to forget the lower class in his bid to cut the country’s budget down to a manageable size.

“I want to go work and earn as much as possible,” Vicki Vanunu said. “I won’t need social security support. We came in order to guarantee that there won’t be a finance minister who’ll only serve the upper 10 percent.”

The protesters’ call for Lapid to be conscious of the lower class when dealing with budget cuts channeled the advice outgoing Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer gave Lapid earlier this week. Fischer suggested that Lapid should concentrate on trying to balance the budget or help the poor instead.

“There is much talk today about the middle class but it is no less important to talk about the poor in society and how they too can enjoy the growth in the economy,” Fischer said.

Lapid was widely criticized for his Riki Cohen creation, since he gave her and her husband a combined pre-tax income of NIS 20,000, which would put the family at a higher income than at least 70 percent of Israeli families.