Meeting the Needs for State and Local Revenues in the Postwar Era

W. Brooke Graves and Karl W. H. Scholz

American Political Science Review, 1944, vol. 38, issue 5, 904-912

Abstract: “The financing of government in the South presents an important field of study. The needs in relation to sources of revenue are greater in the South than in other parts of the nation. The South has relied heavily on the property tax to meet these needs, but it has also experimented widely with other forms of taxation. It has depended on federal grants to a great extent, though it has had difficulty in meeting certain conditions set up for some of these grants. The whole subject of government finance needs to be further studied and the experiences of the various states in the area need to be compared and contrasted. Materials will be found in state reports, in the reports of federal agencies which distribute grants-in-aid, and in the findings cf various groups which have studied the general problem, as, for example, the Advisory Committee on Education which reported to the President in 1939, and the Committee on Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations set up by the Department of the Treasury.”Much of the foregoing comment by a group of Southern political scientists with special reference to the Southern region is equally applicable to states in other sections of the country. It has often been alleged that the American tax system, in so far as it may be called a system at all, is a survival of the horse-and-buggy age. The thousands of small local taxing jurisdictions existing throughout the country—some 165,000 of them—are striking evidence of our antiquated methods of levying and collecting taxes. In Pennsylvania alone—and many other states are in a worse condition—there are approximately 5,200 local units of government, half of them school districts, and all of them with the power to tax and to incur debt.

Date: 1944
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:38:y:1944:i:05:p:904-912_04

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().