COLUMN LEFT/ BERNARD SANDERS : Now They Want to Add Insult to Injury : Guess who’d benefit from the budget amendment being pushed by the ‘Reaganomics’ crowd.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan-Bush team, in alliance with corporate America and some congressional Democrats, successfully adopted “Reaganomics� as our national economic strategy. Reaganomics included huge tax breaks for the rich, a massive binge of military spending and serious cutbacks in federal aid to cities, to education and to a host of human-service programs. Reaganomics also brought us savings-and-loan deregulation .

Ten years later, we are reaping the harvest of Reaganomics. The incomes of the richest 1% of our population have doubled at the same time as the median personal income--without even accounting for inflation--has declined in more than half of our states. The wealthiest 1% of the population now owns more of the nation’s wealth than the bottom 90%. Our cities are in ruin and our health-care system is disintegrating. As many as 2 million of our citizens, half of them children, sleep out on the streets.

Now, to add insult to injury, they’re at it again. The same people who brought us Reaganomics and S&L; deregulation have a new gimmick: a constitutional amendment to require balanced budgets. They once again want to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of working people, the elderly, the poor, the sick and our children.

No Reagan-Bush Administration ever submitted a balanced budget. In the last dozen years, the national debt has soared from $1 trillion to $4 trillion. This year’s deficit alone is projected at $400 billion.

The dangerous and shameful national deficit has a cause. Presidents Reagan and Bush, along with the leadership of Congress, ignored desperately needed and fundamental changes in four major areas of the federal budget: tax policy, military spending, the S&L; bailout and health care. Led by Bush, proponents of the balanced-budget amendment have rejected every serious opportunity to reduce the deficit.

Despite the fact that the wealthiest people in our country have gotten much richer, and have enjoyed hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks during the last decade, the President and the leadership of Congress have refused to raise taxes on the rich and the large corporations.

Despite the fact that military spending was increased by 50% in the 1980s; despite the fact that the Cold War is over and the Warsaw Pact no longer exists; they have refused to make the sizable cuts in military spending that we can now afford.

They have refused all efforts to deal with the S&L; bailout on a pay-as-you-go basis, dumping the entire $500-billion bailout into the deficit.

And they have refused to develop an effective strategy to control health-care costs, despite proposals for a universal single-payer national health-care system. While this nation spends more per capita on health care than any other on earth, 85 million Americans go without adequate coverage--and our Medicaid and Medicare budgets soar.

The balanced-budget amendment advocated by the nation’s leadership will no doubt “solve� our deficit crisis as effectively as Reaganomics and deregulation solved tax inequity and the S&L; situation. It is being proposed by true paragons of courage, “leaders� who refuse to address the budget now but are only too ready to let the budget amendment go into effect a number of years from now.

What will be the impact of this administrative and legislative cowardice? Clearly, it will mean devastation for the elderly, the sick, the poor and working people, because the budget will be balanced on their backs. Cutting spending without taxing the rich and slashing the military budget will require Draconian reductions in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing, mass transit, health care, veteran’s benefits, college loans and virtually every program that benefits ordinary Americans. And if taxes must be raised, Congress is likely to use the amendment as an excuse for instituting regressive taxes, which fall most heavily on working people and the middle class. A balanced-budget amendment will only accelerate the nation’s rapid move toward an oligarchic structure, where the rich and the powerful control nearly every aspect of American life.

Should the President and Congress address the deficit issue? Absolutely. But they should do so in a fair and progressive way, not by preying on the weak and the vulnerable. The budget can and should be balanced through a radical reorientation of our priorities in four key areas, not through cowardly constitutional gimmickry. Without courage, without real and very rare political leadership, Congress and the President will simply perpetuate the increasingly discredited political status quo. It is time to put aside the hoax and get down to serious work.