'The solution stands in adequate infrastructures directly aimed at children and parenthood'
Photo: Ata Awisat
Payments for whom?
Instead of raising child allowances, government should provide better services
Child allowances have reemerged as a central topic of political discourse especially since Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni
started her efforts to form a new government. Shas
sternly demands increased child payments, especially for the fourth child and above, as a condition for joining the coalition. On this one, Kadima
and Labor
rather stand with Benjamin Netanyahu,
who during his tenure as finance minister significantly cut such allowances. With a recession in sight that most plausibly will generate more needy families, are child payments a necessary socioeconomic tool?
Contrary to economic theories that set the pace in the United States until a few days ago, in Israel
since time immemorial state and government do play a central role in balancing the fluxes of the free market. But, again from time immemorial, the question is what are the national priorities vis-à-vis the particular and opposed interests of different population sectors. These economic differences often reflect ideological tensions inherent in a pluralistic Israeli society.
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No matter how frequently the topic has been raised in public discourse, there is in Israel a surprising ignorance regarding the actual task of child allowances as a social policy tool. At first sight, such payments are aimed at aiding families that want to provide their children with better if not optimal conditions in the early stages of life course. Some also believe that child allowances may be a tool to raise the birthrate and influence the country’s demographic balance. Is that so? Recent research on the attitudes of Israeli families toward childbearing and childrearing shows that the public is far more astute than our politicians would like us to believe.
The economic framework is admittedly important in decisions about whether or when a new child will be born, under what conditions he or she will grow, and how will the existing sisters and brothers be affected. Variable level of child allowances indeed produced in the past some visible effects on the birthrate, though short-term and temporary. But the Israeli public does not demand money to be distributed to family by generic criteria and without controls.
Rather, the public demands three major child-oriented policy interventions:
- Developing services directly aimed at early childhood care. This requires expanding the existing nursery and kindergarten facilities and a significant lowering of their costs through public subsidy of the child in attendance. Another idea is recognizing household help as a tax-deductible expense for working women.
- Reducing the costs of education above early childhood, which are incredibly high for a country with “free” education. Education subsidy is necessary regardless of the child’s educational stream and framework, but with the clear proviso that subsidy will be given only to children that – among other materials – learn the basic tools that will help their personal human development and economic self-support later in life.
- And nearly at no cost, providing more reasonable and friendly work conditions to working women. It is demonstrable that in Israel no inherent contradiction exists between attaining higher education, joining the labor force, making a successful career, and motherhood. But it is unjustifiable and immoral to pretend that all the monetary and social costs be borne by the women, as the situation is as of now.
Child payments, especially above the fourth, raise the melancholic prospect that a child might be born in Israel only to provide parents with some income increase. There is no way of knowing whether that income will be fully used to the benefit of the newborn. And more seriously, we do not know how that newborn will grow: to a life of adequate training, personal achievement and economic independence, or to poverty and permanent dependency on other transfer payments all along his or her existence.
Childhood subsidy is a defensible social policy goal, provided it comes without intermediaries or strings attached. It is surely possible to solve the apparent conflict between preserving a decent standard of living and harnessing a growing family – particularly toward an approaching season of economic uncertainty. The solution stands in adequate infrastructures directly aimed at children and parenthood and not in transfer payments whose primary purpose is to embellish the political patrons of neediness.
The author holds the Shlomo Argov Chair in Israel-Diaspora Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is a Senior Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute
