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Dec 28, 2021
everyone suffers from the disposables tax
In last night's special Knesset session discussing the new tax on disposable paper goods, MK Yisrael Eichler (UTJ) pointed out some statistics regarding this issue.
According to what Eichler said, the official stats say that 9% of the State being Haredim are consuming 27% of the disposables. Eichler pointed out that this means more than 70% of the pollution is being caused by the non-Haredim using disposables.
Yet Eichler, and MK Gafni as well in his speech, went on to say that the tax is directed specifically at the Haredi community.
So, if 73% of the consumption of disposable goods is in the general public, and everyone has to pay the tax on disposable goods, not just Haredim, how exactly is the tax directed specifically at the Haredi community? Yes, Haredim use a lot of disposable goods and will suffer financially from the new tax - but so will everyone else, as the rest of the country uses these disposables as well, even if Haredi are punching above their weight in this realm. This tax hurts everyone, not just Haredim even though they made it personal. You can debate whether it is worthy tax or not, whether the State should be educating or training its citizens in proper behavior via taxes or not, but it is not a tax on Haredim, it is a tax on everyone.
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The fact that Hareidim *as a whole* use less than everyone else *as a whole* is irrelevant. On a per-capita basis, Hareidim use far more. (Just as the total pollution from private planes may be far less the total pollution of commercial planes, but the pollution per person per distance travelled is much higher for the private plane people.)
ReplyDeleteIn this case, for every 100 disposable items per 100 consumers, 27 items are consumed by 9 Hareidim, and 73 item are consumed by 91 non-Hareidim. In other words, 3 items/Haredi as opposed to 0.8 items/non-Hareidi. Hareidim are using disposables at a rate which is almost 4× the rate of all non-Hareidim.
So it's fair to say that Hareidim are disproportionately affected by this tax. Whether it's intentional or fair is a different question. But in terms of numbers they are correct.