Q&A: Calculating the Defense Budget
Calculating the Defense Budget
Question
In a discussion about Haredi society, the following argument came up: there was agreement that, in terms of fairness, if the Haredi population makes up, say, 15% of the population, then one should look at the state budget and make sure that the Haredi population is responsible for 15% of the state’s revenues. However, if the health, transportation, education, and similar budgets are services given to every citizen, and every citizen who uses healthcare, education, or transportation is in fact drawing from the resource, so that every person at every age has significance there, then with regard to the defense budget a debate arose: should we say, “protection for one is protection for a hundred” (let us assume there is no dispute about that, and from a security standpoint it is indeed so), and therefore each individual person does not matter, so we should look at it on a household basis, like in an apartment building where the maintenance fee is charged per household regardless of the size of each family? Or perhaps that does not matter, and it should still be viewed per person. I wanted to ask the Rabbi:
A. How does one approach such a discussion?
B. What is the Rabbi’s view?
Thank you!
Answer
I did not understand the question. Defense expenses should be divided among the citizens like any other expense. “A lamp for one is a lamp for a hundred” is nonsense in this context. Any citizen could say “a lamp for one is a lamp for a hundred” and not pay.
Discussion on Answer
If children have no civic obligation, then the parent has a greater obligation corresponding to the number of children. One has to think about how they would make an agreement when joining together in advance to form a state.
“A lamp for one is a lamp for a hundred” certainly cannot stand as an argument for exempting oneself from payment. But it can indicate that the nature of payment for defense expenses is not per person, but rather the result of civic obligation, and therefore one could say that children do not yet have a civic obligation, so the payment demand applies only to an adult. This is unlike a situation in which the child, even though he has no civic obligation, still has a usage cost—that is, use of transportation, healthcare, and education—which creates the obligation to pay because of the very use of a limited resource.