Fränkle ”Background

nances are one of the best starting points for an investigation of society.. We may surely speak of a special field: fiscal sociology, of which much may be expected. " (Schum-peter, 1954 7). Unfortunately, there is scant sociological literature on the aggregate economic dimensions of society. We will focus on fiscal sociology relating to govern-ment spending and taxes. •We have two goals: 1) to present a summary of conven-tional views on the role of government and its effects in the distribution of aggre-gate income; and 2) to argue that in a mature capitalist society, there are struc-tural barriers such that government inter-vention cannot produce a significant redis-tribution of income. The conventional view on the govern-ment role in income distribution is sup-ported by various hypotheses that the rise in government budgetary and other activities should produce a change in income distribution (Kusnets, 1955; Musgrave, 1976; Boulding, 1972). However, the only fairly consistent time-series data on the size of distribution of income in the United States suggest that aggregate income dis-tribution has not changed significantly since World War II, as shown in Table 1 (U.S. Census Bureau, 1976). The lowest 1/5 of the population received 5.1 percent of the total income in 1947 and 5.4 per-cent in 1974. Likewise, the top 1/5 re-ceived 43.3 percent of the total income in 1974 and 41.0 percent in 1974. During this same period, the size of government expen-ditures rose from 17.6 percent of the gros