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Although the Legislative Reference Service in the Library of Congress has existed for a good many years, it was not until 1946 that increased financial support and increased staff made it possible for "L.R.S." to render the service that friends of the legislative reference idea had long felt that it should. Under Section 203 of the Legislative Reorganization Act, the Service was authorized and directed to appoint senior specialists in various fields "to be available for special work with the appropriate committees of Congress, and upon request to advise and assist any committee of either House or any joint committee in the analysis, appraisal, and evaluation of legislative proposals pending before it, or of recommendations submitted to Congress, by the President or any executive agency, and otherwise to assist in furnishing a basis for the proper determination of measures before the committee.' The services of such staff members are available also for members of Congress individually.Before proceeding further with the discussion of the expansion of the Service made possible by recent legislation, it may be desirable to outline the nature of the existing organization, and to indicate briefly the character of the services which it renders. The Legislative Reference Service as a whole is one of the departments of the Library of Congress. It functions under Dr. Ernest S. Griffith, who has been Director since 1940. For administrative purposes, the work has been divided among six different sections, each of which has its own different and peculiar responsibilities.

"The financing of government in the South presents an important field of study. The needs in relation to sources of revenue are greater in the South than in other parts of the nation. The South has relied heavily on the property tax to meet these needs, but it has also experimented widely with other forms of taxation. It has depended on federal grants to a great extent, though it has had difficulty in meeting certain conditions set up for some of these grants. The whole subject of government finance needs to be further studied and the experiences of the various states in the area need to be compared and contrasted. Materials will be found in state reports, in the reports of federal agencies which distribute grants-in-aid, and in the findings cf various groups which have studied the general problem, as, for example, the Advisory Committee on Education which reported to the President in 1939, and the Committee on Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations set up by the Department of the Treasury."Much of the foregoing comment by a group of Southern political scientists with special reference to the Southern region is equally applicable to states in other sections of the country. It has often been alleged that the American tax system, in so far as it may be called a system at all, is a survival of the horse-and-buggy age. The thousands of small local taxing jurisdictions existing throughout the country—some 165,000 of them—are striking evidence of our antiquated methods of levying and collecting taxes. In Pennsylvania alone—and many other states are in a worse condition—there are approximately 5,200 local units of government, half of them school districts, and all of them with the power to tax and to incur debt.