ABSTRACT
Major changes in government taxing and spending policies frequently mobilize the young and old alike. Combatants often cast government taxing and spending policies as zero-sum situations—us-against-them scenarios in which someone wins and, at the same time, someone else loses. As the United States population ages, tensions will probably escalate over the proper allocation of public funds and the tax policies designed to generate the dollars to cover expenditure demands. Fears of the future abound among all generations. The latest trend is to ask respondents trade-off questions linking taxing and spending or questions regarding spending cuts they personally find most unacceptable. In many instances, the grants-in-aid are pass-through tax revenues rather than nontax revenues. In some places, property tax revolts have led to restrictions on raising such taxes at rates faster than the rate of growth in the consumer price index or inflation.
