The Less the Merrier

We have a mailing list in our town. Its called, inventively enough, the raananalist (you need to sign up). Anyone in Raanana who has something to sell, is lacking something, needs a plumber or a ride posts to the list. Most of the list posters are Anglos (native English speakers from US, UK, CA, SA, AUS or NZ), and because of Raanana's demographics, most of the posters are religious.

Today someone posted to the list expounding the virtues of a "Zahavi" card. This card (at the cost of 60NIS) gives discounts on "chuggim, tutoring services, at stores and more". The catch is you need to have four or more children to be eligible. This is blatantly unfair. What about all of us with less than four children. Not only are we not over-populating the world with our offspring, we can give each of them the attention they deserve. Why are we discriminated against?

The Betuach Leumi (National Insurance) gives a child allowance for each child in your home under the age of 18. For the first and second child you get 152NIS ($46) each a month. Then the per child amount increases as you have more children, so that if you have 12 children you get 3519NIS (293NIS per child) monthly. These child allowances are the source of much coalition strife. The allowances were cut severely by Natanyahu as Finance Minister (one of the few things he did right) and the religious parties are fighting tooth and nail to reinstate the disparity. Why is the twelfth child worth nearly double your first two?

I think the time has come for a discount card for families with three or less children. We can get discounts when buying smaller, less polluting cars and when ordering a single large pizza. We need to band together to fight the fertile taking over our world!