Excessive regulation, rising food prices, high taxes, and government waste threaten the stability of Israel’s economy. Yair Lapid, the outgoing Treasury Minister, rode into office promising to ameliorate these problems; instead, he wasted political capital on reforms that could not make it through the Knesset, accomplished little, or were simply counterproductive—leaving the Israeli economy in worse condition, according to Shoham Wexler, than it was two years ago:

The tax burden is scaring away investors and leaving the private sector in the lurch, which has already been buried under the weight of taxes and regulation. As Treasury Minister, Lapid wasted hundreds of billions of our taxpayer dollars. Rather than invest the money in reducing the tax burden on businesses, the stock market, and companies, and providing credit for small businesses, Lapid preferred to invest the money through the public sector. The enormous budgets of the Transportation Ministry continued to become more bloated, and the same is true for the boondoggles of Education Ministry reform and the government companies.

Lapid is a grave disappointment with zigzags, unsuccessful reforms. The Treasury Minister who declared “I am not a socialist” failed to understand the important principle of capitalism: entrepreneurship. Rather than encourage it, he crushed it. Rather than release the public’s money back to the public by reducing taxes and government intervention, he increased government involvement in the economy, dissuading both investors and consumers from increasing their activity.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.