No more grants for the self-employed, Treasury says - Inside Israel

Treasury says the economy is back to normal.

The Treasury has announced that it will not be handing out another grant to self-employed workers, according to a report in Channel 13 News, with the stated rationale being that the economy has returned to normal.

This is despite the fact that many branches of the economy, and particularly those related to tourism, restaurants, cultural activities, and sport, have yet to reopen either in full or to any degree at all.

The Finance Ministry is apparently trying to minimize the damage done to the government’s sources of financing after the grants given in order to compensate businesses and workers for coronavirus-related losses led to a significant rise in the national deficit.

This is not the only piece of bad news for the self-employed. The state-backed loan fund for small businesses is also about to shut its doors to the self-employed, even though around 20,000 applications have yet to be processed.

Head of the Knesset’s Finance Committee, MK Oded Forer (Yisrael Beytenu) responded to the news, saying, “The bluff has been exposed. The Israeli government is continuing to make bombastic statements [about all the help it is extending] to small- and medium-sized businesses, when what it is really doing is running the Israeli economy into the ground.

“Hundreds of thousands of unemployed and poor have become just another statistic. They are the responsibility of every single government minister. One can sum up the economic policy of this new administration in just six words: ‘All talk, and nothing to eat,’” Forer concluded.