necessity of restoring both our depleted rural areas and our devastated
cities, restoring them not only physically but also to new health and
hope. And we must restore the confidence of Americans that our
country has the capacity and the will to solve the incredibly difficult
problems of this and future years.
This is not a task for government alone—it requires the commit-
ment and involvement of all our people in private as well as public
capacity. But some of the most stubborn problems lie in the sphere
of government.
We know the difficulties:
1. Separatism within the federal system which fragments our
revenue producing potential and the decisions concerning how
public revenues shall be spent.
2. The great variations in the capacity of states and localities to
meet their public needs.
3. The political problems involved in shifting resources from the
relatively well-to-do areas to the needy areas.
4. The continuing dialogue, which is resolved in different ways
in different states and localities, concerning whether particular
problems should be dealt with in the private or public sector
and, if the latter, at what level of government.
In an effort to overcome these difficulties, for more than one
hundred years we have accepted and implemented the proposition
that the federal government should supplement the resources of the
states.
This development has accelerated since World War II, because it
is at the state and local levels that the great growth in the civil functions
of government has taken place. In response to pressures on state and
local government, federal grant-in-aid programs have risen from
$894 million in Γ946 to some $17 billion in 1967. It has done some-
what better than keep pace with the rising burden at the state and
local level.
These programs have supplemented state and loôal resources in
the fields of education, highways, hospitals, health, economic develop-
ment, pollution control, and welfare, among others. These have been
major pressure areas of need.
The grant-in-aid device achieves the following:
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