MOST ECONOMISTS IN the United States would now include flexible taxes and transfers in their ideal fiscal programs. Widely differing emphasis would be given their role, however. Not only are various views held on how heavily economic stability should be weighted among various policy goals, but also divergences in opinion arise over the efficacy of automatic fiscal changes in promoting such a goal. In contrast to this present concern with automatic stabilizers, discretionary fiscal changes would have dominated, if not completely occupied, the stage only a decade ago. And if we go back two decades, the preponderance of professional opinion would have favored insensitive taxes and transfers. Indeed, the major works on tax sensitivity up to the time that Bretherton made his important contribution' were motivated by the search for taxes that were insensitive to national income and would thus not unbalance depression budgets.2 Such a major change in attitude raises the interesting question of how and why it came about. It depended, of course, on the development of an adequate body of theory to point toward and support a changed position on fiscal policy, the high spots of which are reviewed in Section II of this paper. But the appeal of automatic stabilizers also depended on failures of discretionary policies, discussed in Section III. With this ground cleared, we then detail, in Section IV, the gradual appearance of automatic fiscal stabilizers in policy statements on governmental fiscal policy. A discussion of this sort cannot help leaning heavily on personal judgments. Yet the dominant pattern reveals itself clearly enough, I think, to minimize differences in personal interpretation.