ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the degree to which municipal services are financed from (1) general purpose taxes, levied without close attention to the way in which the taxpayers benefit from public services or affect the costs of rendering them, and (2) specific taxes, fees, and prices that attempt to reflect these costs and effects more closely. To some extent the concern with bringing payments more closely into line with costs and benefits is related to concepts of equity, in that it is conceived to be in some sense proper that those who enjoy benefits or give rise to costs should, in the absence of countervailing considerations, pay accordingly. But more weight, on the whole, is given in the current investigation to the possibility that such correlation of charges with costs and benefits can be made to increase the efficiency with which services are utilized, prevent waste, and in general improve the patterns along which our mushrooming metropolitan areas will grow. Indeed, it is this latter consideration that leads to a dissatisfaction with a mere statistical or average balance or proportionality between benefits and contributions and an insistence on a greater precision of detail: situations can easily arise in which groups of more or less similarly situated individuals share a cost equally and hence no individual is in fact treated unfairly, yet if the institutions are such that no one person can reduce his share in the cost by suitably economizing or restraining himself, the amount of the service demanded and supplied may be grossly excessive.
