ABSTRACT
Government, like individual citizens, must have regular income to pay bills and maintain credit. Government programs cost money, whether in building aircraft carriers, sponsoring cancer research, or maintaining national parks. Moreover, government must have coercive power to collect taxes. The Constitution declares that taxes are of two kinds and sets forth briefly the rules by which Congress may use each. In due course, the Court evolved a more effective technique for imposing limitations on the destructive use of the federal taxing power for social and economic regulation. In the years since the New Deal legislation of the 1930s, Congress has employed its spending power to achieve various policy objectives by allocating billions of dollars in grants to state and local governments, private organizations, and even individuals. The 1980s witnessed efforts by Congress to cope with alcohol-related traffic accidents by imposing indirectly a national drinking age through conditional spending.
