Retired Politician Struggling To Spend Only Own Money

“I don’t know how anyone does it,” he confessed.

Savyon, May 24 – A former government official, since retired from a career in public service, acknowledged today that he still must remind himself almost daily that he no longer works in his pre-retirement capacity, and as such must stop using funds that do not belong to him personally.

Amnon Stern, a two-term legislator for the Labor Party two decades ago and who held posts in various government ministries over the course of his adult life, admitted in an interview Wednesday that old habits die hard: he still struggles to keep his hands off of other people’s money, having spent other people’s money more or less every day during his political career.

“It’s still tough to get used to, even though I retired from politics six years ago,” he conceded. “It can get embarrassing sometimes, and it takes me up to three or four minutes before my wife has to explain what I’m doing wrong.”

Stern recounted with chagrin an episode just last month when he got up to leave a restaurant in Tel Aviv without paying, following the pattern he established years ago when he had a staff to take care of paying such bills, at taxpayer expense. The waiter chased him down and reminded him he must pay.

“That was awkward,” he recalled, shaking his head. “I didn’t understand him at first. This it dawned on me, and I went back and paid with my own credit card. It still takes some getting used to.”

Stern served in the Ministries of the Interior, Agriculture, Culture and Sport, and Health during Labor-led governments of the 1990’s. He held a Knesset seat for Labor during 2006-2009, and then resumed life as a bureaucrat during the short-lived Labor-Likud unity government of 2012-2015. The party’s poor showing in subsequent elections led him to quiet retirement in this upscale Tel Aviv suburb – but decades of living on the public dime and viewing fiduciary taxpayer expenditures make adapting to self-funded private life a constant challenge.

“I don’t know how anyone does it,” he confessed. “There just isn’t enough at my disposal if I’m restricted to what’s in my personal accounts. Travel, fine dining, good whiskey, big-ticket cultural events – how am I supposed to have all that without being able to include it in a ministry budget or write it off as fact-finding expenses? This is no way to live.”

“I’m almost out of the cigars I used to get as gifts,” he lamented.

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