The return of death and taxes

Friday’s headlines prove Benjamin Franklin’s proverb about the certainty of death and taxes to be true, with the top stories dealing with the Finance Ministry’s proposals for balancing the budget and the commemoration of Memorial Day on Sunday night.

Taxes

It’s a numbers game for the newspapers on Friday after Finance Minister Yair Lapid presented a series of budget cuts and tax hikes to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which aim to reduce the country’s deficit.

Yedioth Ahronoth says “all Israeli citizens will feel” the new measures. It picks out one aspect of the proposal which, the daily says, will hit every Israeli’s pocket significantly: raising income tax by 1% across the board. Upping the value-added tax (VAT) by 1% receives equal scorn. The hikes will also increase taxes on luxury products such as cars, planes, apartments, furs, jet skis and cigars.

Yedioth quotes opposition leader Shelly Yachimovich criticizing the plan as “a ridiculous and populist attempt to convince the Israeli public that the solution to the deep deficit will come by taxing luxury cars.”

For Israel Hayom, the question is whether or not Lapid’s austerity plans will actually amount to taxes on the wealthy. The paper writes that the estimated income from the tax hikes is projected to be around half-a-billion shekels per year, and that “the tax package will hit middle-class families for NIS 2,400 per year.”

It quotes “tax experts” who say that taxing private jets and the ultra rich will not do very much good, and that the move smacks of Israel’s fiscal austerity of the 1950s. “There are only four corporate jets in Israel today, and even the yachts of the Israeli rich are registered in the tax havens of Greece and Cyprus,” the experts say.

Israel Hayom reports on the rumors of “a dramatic cut in child subsidies, which will stand at NIS 150 per child, regardless of the number of kids in the family.”

Whereas the other papers, by and large, make it seem as though the fiscal measures are a fait accompli, Maariv mentions that the meeting between Lapid and Netanyahu ended without any finalized decisions, and that the two are set to reconvene on Sunday. “Netanyahu sent the finance boys off to do their homework and submit changes to the new cuts and taxes,” it writes.

The paper notes that the resort city of Eilat was especially outraged by a proposal to revoke its status as a tax- and duty-free city. According to Maariv, “the concern is that canceling the exemption will bring about a dramatic increase in the price of hotel costs, a drop in demand for rooms and the layoff of thousands of workers in the hotel industry. Harm to clothing and food shops are also expected, and after them restaurants, clubs” — in short, the collapse of the town’s economy and utter chaos.

Haaretz lays out the figures in black and white. The proposal expected for Sunday’s meeting will feature NIS 30 billion in cuts to government spending — NIS 10 billion in the second half of 2013, and NIS 20 billion in 2014. In revenue, the tax hikes aim to rake in NIS 3 billion in 2013 and NIS 6 billion in 2014.

Unlike the other papers, Haaretz notes that “in general terms, the new budget layout is not foreign to Netanyahu, for it is based on the Finance Ministry’s proposals from last summer and fall for the 2013-2014 budgets.” It mentions that the elections were the only reason those measures didn’t take effect.  

Death

With Memorial Day around the corner, some of the dailies start their coverage of the national holiday a few days early, commemorating the men and women who died serving the state. In a style identical to its coverage last year, Yedioth Ahronoth devotes Page 2 to the memory of the fallen, and its simplistic headline merely features the official tally of 23,085 — up just shy of 100 since last year. It writes that, while most of the country pays homage to the fallen one day a year, those who’ve lost loved ones are reminded of the pain “daily, hourly.”

Maariv features a story about firefighters who died in the Carmel fire disaster of December 2010, and how they are, once again, not being recognized at any official Memorial Day ceremony.

“Like always, they’ve thrown us to the dogs,” said the father of a firefighter who died in the fire. “I am ashamed that every year I must speak of this anew. They debase us.”

The paper also features an article quoting a professor and bereaved father saying the unthinkable — an inversion of a patriotic Zionist motto purloined from Horace: “It is a bad thing to die for one’s country.”

“We don’t demand our soldiers die for the sake of the country; we demand that they fight appropriately, but a human life is sacred in a Jewish and democratic state, and it is only permissible to endanger it when there’s no other choice and in an intelligent fashion,” said Professor Asa Kasher, author of the IDF code of ethics.