Providing Local Public Services in a New Federalism Era (George Goldman, University of California-Berkeley, presiding) Advantages and Limitations of Using Traditional Methods to Provide Local Public Services in a New Federalism Era

Fiscal Federalism is the use of multiple levels of government to provide (finance and pro-duce, or have produced) those goods and ser-vices which citizens desire be provided by government or collective enterprises. In the United States the multiple levels of govern-ment consist of the federal government, state governments, local governments (county, municipal, township, and school), and in some cases regional governments or special dis-tricts. Throughout the history of the United States, the role of these various governmental units has varied. In the early days of the United States, state government was probably the most powerful politically. In terms of pub-lic revenues and expenditures from own funds, state-local government revenues and expenditures far exceeded federal revenues and expenditures until the depression years of the 1930s (ACIR, pp. 4, 55, 64). The advent of the federal income tax in 1913 provided the revenue base for rapid expansion of federal expenditures beginning in the 1930s (Break, p. 44). For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on four periods: (a) Pre-Depression (before 1929), (b) New Deal and Post-World War II recovery (1929-60), (c) the Great Society (1960-75) and (d) the New Federalism Era (1975-?). In characterizing these periods and in setting the dates for each, I recognize that many of the necessary facilitating policies of each period were implemented during earlier periods. For example, financing of the New Leroy J. Hushak is a professor of agricultural economics at Ohi