Professor Manuel Trajtenberg decided not to rock the boat in his much-anticipated press conference on Monday. Instead, he chose to try to put Israel back on course before it plunges headlong into a socio-economic reality of rampant injustice. While the social justice protesters are disappointed, Trajtenberg has stopped short of providing them with a pretext for a direct attack on him. Daphni Leef acted wisely, limiting her reactions to a short interview where she politely expressed her reservations and vowed to provide an official response before noon on Tuesday. She conceded that different people may draw different conclusions from the report. The committee subscribed to a balanced worldview, perhaps even to a fault: Finance Ministry officials and the tycoons rightly claim that economic growth is the key to success; but there are other measures that can reflect economic progress, such as giving people their fair share of the economic pie, something that the protest leaders found very appealing. Trajtenberg proposes spending NIS 60 billion ($16 billion) over five years on creating a more balanced cost of living, and the particular focus is on education. This is indeed the crux of the matter. This is NIS 12 billion ($3.2 billion) a year. This would come alongside shifting some NIS 5 billion ($1.34 billion) earmarked for national security, namely the defense budget, to bolster people's economic security. The professors who endorsed the protesters, including Professor Yossi Yonah and former Deputy Bank of Israel Governor Professor Avia Spivak, called for an annual NIS 20 billion ($5.37 billion) in spending increases. This is NIS 8 billion ($2.15 billion) more than Trajtenberg was willing to accept, and this would breach the budgetary framework. They suggested offsetting the resulting deficit by increasing the tax burden on the tycoons. But one should keep in mind that in both cases -- the NIS 12 billion suggested by the committee and the NIS 20 billion that the protest's economists wanted -- we are talking about significant sums of money. The social justice movement cannot credibly claim that the Trajtenberg Committee's recommendations are worthless. Its only valid argument would be that it may offer a more effective plan. This is a new undertone to this controversy, one that sounds different from the protest rhetoric of the summer. Should the tycoons eventually return some of their bloated wealth to a society that even Trajtenberg and his panel members found undeserving; and if the large sums become earmarked for education spending and parents with toddlers, if the disenfranchised are empowered, and most importantly, if ultra-Orthodox men and Arab women join the workforce rather than freeload off working people, then we would be able to declare the Trajtenberg Committee, a product of the protesters tent encampments this past summer, a success. But there are hidden dangers. This plan, and even the upgraded plan offered by the alternative professors' committee, might be co-opted by the strong forces in the government and the Knesset; it might end up as nothing more than a decoy, and the government might subscribe to deceit and bias along the way. But all the talk of change comes against a government about-face. The government has also recently made statements, reneging on its promise to follow the path set by the Brodet Committee, which studied the defense budget in the wake of the Second Lebanon War. At that time, the government vowed to bolster national security over the course of a decade as part of a compromise. The IDF was promised a decade free of budgetary uncertainty, and in turn, the IDF said it would provide a number of reforms and sacrifices. But now, rather than collecting tax revenue and expanding the budget in a moderate way and sending the freeloaders back to work, the government has chosen to compromise security and distance itself from a former pledge. Foul play leads to more foul play; breaking a promise leads to more promises being broken.
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