Constitutional history -- United States -- Sources; Constitutional law -- United States
In framing a government for posterity as well as ourselves, we ought,
in those provisions which are designed to be permanent, to calculate,
not on temporary, but on permanent causes of expense. If this principle
be a just one our attention would be directed to a provision in favor
of the State governments for an annual sum of about two hundred
thousand pounds; while the exigencies of the Union could be susceptible
of no limits, even in imagination. In this view of the subject, by what
logic can it be maintained that the local governments ought to command,
in perpetuity, an EXCLUSIVE source of revenue for any sum beyond the
extent of two hundred thousand pounds? To extend its power further, in
EXCLUSION of the authority of the Union, would be to take the resources
of the community out of those hands which stood in need of them for the
public welfare, in order to put them into other hands which could have
no just or proper occasion for them.
Suppose, then, the convention had been inclined to proceed upon the
principle of a repartition of the objects of revenue, between the Union
and its members, in PROPORTION to their comparative necessities; what
particular fund could have been selected for the use of the States,
that would not either have been too much or too little too little for
their present, too much for their future wants? As to the line of
separation between external and internal taxes, this would leave to the
States, at a rough computation, the command of two thirds of the
resources of the community to defray from a tenth to a twentieth part
of its expenses; and to the Union, one third of the resources of the
community, to defray from nine tenths to nineteen twentieths of its
expenses. If we desert this boundary and content ourselves with leaving
to the States an exclusive power of taxing houses and lands, there
would still be a great disproportion between the MEANS and the END; the
possession of one third of the resources of the community to supply, at
most, one tenth of its wants. If any fund could have been selected and
appropriated, equal to and not greater than the object, it would have
been inadequate to the discharge of the existing debts of the
particular States, and would have left them dependent on the Union for
a provision for this purpose.
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