Budget Flimflam

As a gifted communicator, President Reagan has the remarkable ability to continue his impassioned plea for a balanced-budget constitutional amendment at the same time he has submitted five federal budgets with a built-in total deficit of nearly $1 trillion. That’s trillion , or $1,000,000,000,000.

Even the National Governors Assn. endorsed the concept this year, in an apparent effort to rationalize its demand for a 1986 budget freeze that would spare several state-aid programs from the Reagan budget ax. Going back into the 1970s, legislatures of 32 states have adopted resolutions endorsing the amendment. Fortunately, the California Senate Rules Committee did not fall for the balanced-budget shell game, and refused this week to speed the measure along to a Senate committee-of-the-whole for an exercise in demagoguery.

Instead, the committee sent the resolution to the Judiciary Committee, where, if common sense prevails, it will languish through the rest of the state Legislature’s two-year session. There is a chance that Michigan will become the 33rd state to call for a constitutional convention this year. California should not suffer the ignominy of becoming the 34th and last state that is needed to assemble the first convention in the 196 years since the U.S. Constitution was ratified.

As in the past, the argument has been made that since virtually every state must have a balanced budget, why not the federal government? In fact, California and most states are not required by their constitutions to have balanced budgets--only that their governors submit budgets that theoretically can be balanced by tax increases, spending cuts or other means. Additionally, most states are not debt-free. The 1986 budget submitted by Gov. George Deukmejian lists, on Page 129, the state’s authorized general-obligation bond debt at $16.4 billion, of which $7.4 billion is outstanding.

There is nothing in the world to prevent Reagan or any President from presenting a balanced budget to Congress each and every year. The President could withdraw his budget today and submit a new one that is balanced. If Congress sent it back unbalanced, through a series of “budget-busting” appropriation bills, Reagan could veto them, just as he has promised to do so many times.

Legislators in 32 states have demonstrated how easy it is for a state lawmaker to cast a throwaway vote for a simple little resolution to Congress and then to wash his hands of any responsibility for the outcome. So far, California has resisted that temptation, and should continue to do so.