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Part Five - The Economic Plan

Budgetary responsibility and reducing the national debt

The Israeli government is run by budget deficits as a routine thing where the missing money for financing its activities is achieved at the expense of increasing the national debt. Zehut believes that this modus operandi is defective.

It is true that there are emergencies that justify taking a loan, but no economy, small or large, can run a deficit over time. Increasing the national debt slows down a country's economy, reducing the government's ability to borrow money in emergencies and constitutes a burden on future generations.

Zehut will demand that the government act according to economic responsibility. Zehut will not formulate a budget with a deficit unless there is an urgent need to borrow money – for example, in times of war. Zehut will require government ministries to demonstrate budgetary responsibility and perform their tasks efficiently based on the resources available to them. Instead of a government unable to meet this requirement irresponsibly borrowing more and more money at the expense of future generations, it will have to accept the budget shortfalls by finding other funding sources, so that it will be unable to avoid reporting to the public on its economic behavior.

Zehut will streamline the work of the government and reduce its costs. The largest budget requirements come from the regulation and bureaucracy ridden education system, and from the defense establishment, with the host of budget planning problems that characterize it. Zehut promises to take the necessary firm action to address them.

Zehut will set itself the goal of reducing the national debt. The aspiration when drafting the state budget will be reach a budgetary surplus that will serve to reduce the national debt, taking into account the economic viability of the step. We are committed to bringing reduction of the national debt into consideration when the budget is built.

We do not fear a reduction in the state budget. We believe that the key to the economic prosperity and welfare of the residents of Israel is not increasing the overall state budget – i.e., increasing the government – but rather the contrary. In most areas, a citizen can act to his own welfare better than the government. The citizen is the one who knows what his goals are and is also the most interested in achieving them. Increasing the state budget means the transfer of resources from citizens to the government, which will use some of them to finance its operations and invest what is left of them less efficiently than the citizens from whom the resources were taken would. Therefore, we aim to reduce the state budget, to leave more resources with the citizens, and to leave them the responsibility and the freedom to see to their own needs, in accordance with their worldview.

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