Wealth & Money Quote by Shimon Peres

Peres is doing the politician’s hard magic trick here: reframing an unpopular policy not as a blow against an enemy class, but as a betrayal of the virtuous. The line pivots on a quiet moral reclassification. “Capitalists” is shorthand for the usual target in populist tax rhetoric - powerful, faceless, politically expendable. Peres swaps that figure out for “the people who have saved, trusted,” turning a fiscal lever into an ethical transaction. Saving becomes civic behavior; “trusted” implies an implicit contract with the state. If you tax that, you’re not just raising revenue, you’re breaking faith.

The subtext is defensive and strategic. He’s signaling that capital isn’t an abstraction floating above society; it’s the accumulated restraint of ordinary households, the pensioners and small savers whose stability anchors a country. In Israel’s late-20th-century economic story, that matters: periods of high inflation, austerity, and market reforms made trust in institutions a scarce resource. A state that punishes savings teaches people to flee to consumption, hard currency, or informal markets. Peres is arguing for credibility as an economic policy.

“It was very controversial” compresses the political pain into a single shrug of inevitability, then “finally, it worked out” claims vindication without litigating the costs. That’s classic statesman rhetoric: acknowledge dissent, imply responsibility, assert outcomes. The intent isn’t to win an academic debate about taxation; it’s to inoculate a technocratic decision with a story about loyalty, reciprocity, and the fragile psychology of a modern economy.