Budget cave.

• Position: Budget agreement really helps only about top 1% - Column

When the budget agreement was announced this summer. President Clinton hailed it as the "achievement of a generation." Trent Lott said it ushered in "a new era of freedom." Evidently, this generation doesn't have much to brag about, for the new era looks a lot like the old one.

The budget gave a few scraps to the poor, a few more scraps to the middle class, and a slab of T-bone to the rich.

According to Citizens for Tax Justice, the top 5 percent of taxpayers stand to gain about 50 percent of the tax benefits. The average tax cut for the middle class will be about $200; for the top 1 percent, about $16,000.

The rich. and only the rich, will benefit from lowering the inheritance tax.

John Kasich, Republican of Ohio, said that people should be able to leave their loved ones some money when they die. But even before the budget agreement, the wealthy were allowed to give $600,000 tax free, upon their deaths, to their heirs. Only the top 1 percent of Americans have that kind of cash lying around when they die.

But that wasn't enough. Over the next ten years, the exemption will gradually rise to $1 million.

Or take the capital-gains tax break. Again, the lion's share of this giveaway goes to the top 20 percent of Americans, who stand to gain $8,000 annually from this alone, while the rest of America gets to see only about a $37 annual raise from it, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.

Here's how this tax break works: When people buy stocks, and then sell these assets after eighteen months at a profit, they will no longer have to pay 28 percent to the government. They'll be able to sneak off paying only 20 percent til the year 2000 -- and 18 percent after that. (Clinton proved such a congenital compromiser that he couldn't stop himself once he got going. He gave the Republicans a bigger break on capital gains than they'd even asked for.)

Corporations also came in for a windfall, as Congress took the teeth out of the Alternative Minimum Tax. As a result, many corporations will be able to skip out on taxes altogether.

And a few companies, like Amway, were able to shoehorn some particular benefits for themselves into the budget accord -- payback for donating heavily to the Republican Party.

Meanwhile the Pentagon keeps hoarding a huge percentage of the budget, with outlays starting at $269 billion in 1988 and rising to $290 billion by the year 2002.

"Overall, it's a good bill for Wall Street," The Wall Street Journal reported. "The biggest...