Rational scaling of design earthquake ground motions for tall buildings is essential for safer, risk-based design of tall buildings. This paper provides the structural designers with an insight for more rational scaling based on drift and input energy demands. Since a resonant sinusoidal motion can be an approximate critical excitation to elastic and inelastic structures under the constraint of acceleration or velocity power, a resonant sinusoidal motion with variable period and duration is used as an input wave of the near-field and far-field ground motions. This enables one to understand clearly the relation of the intensity normalization index of ground motion (maximum acceleration, maximum velocity, acceleration power, velocity power) with the response performance (peak interstory drift, total input energy). It is proved that, when the maximum ground velocity is adopted as the normalization index, the maximum interstory drift exhibits a stable property irrespective of the number of stories. It is further shown that, when the velocity power is adopted as the normalization index, the total input energy exhibits a stable property irrespective of the number of stories. It is finally concluded that the former property on peak drift can hold for the practical design response spectrum-compatible ground motions.