ABSTRACT
As an integral part of the Republican program for a New Federalism, revenue sharing embodies an important shift in political power and responsibilities: a movement to decentralize fiscal decision making in the U.S. federal system. Federal forms of governments, by their very structure, are characterized by a continuing tension among their various levels. At the topmost level, the central government constitutes a concentration of power capable of effecting change on a national scale and reaching beyond purely regional concerns; much of the twentieth century has, in fact, been a process of growing centralization of the public sector to cope with, among other things, sometimes massive fiscal dislocations.
