Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/671

635 INDIRECT ENCROACHMENT ON FEDERAL AUTHORITY 635 burden upon plaintiff's interstate business as to amount to an uncon- stitutional interference with or regulation of commerce among the States. It was measured not by the gross receipts, but by the net pro- ceeds from this part of plaintiff's business, along with a like imposition upon its income derived from other sources, and in the same way that other corporations doing business within the State are taxed upon that proportion of their income derived from business transacted and prop- erty located within the State, whatever the nature of their business." * These portions of the opinion, taken alone, would confine the decision to the point that a domestic corporation, engaged in both local and interstate commerce, cannot exclude interstate income from a tax on net income from all kinds of business which is im- posed equally on other corporations doing business in the state. This was as far as the court had to go to dispose of the contro- versy before it. It was not called upon to say whether the result would have been the same in the case of an individual, a partner- ship or a foreign corporation or of a business that was exclusively interstate. It might, however, have narrowed its decision still further, as we shall see later.^ While the decision involved a domestic corporation and the court confined the case to such a corporation, there is no intima-^ tion in the opinion that an individual or partnership or foreign cor- poration would have occupied a more favorable position. Indeed, there are hints to the contrary. It is thought important to men- tion that the plaintiff was taxed "in the same way that other cor- porations doing business within the State are taxed, . . . whatever the nature of their business." ^ The incidence of a similar burden on other corporations is one of the reasons why this corporation cannot complain. The reasonable inference is that the court, in seeming in part of the opinion to confine the decision to the kind « Infra, page 643-45. ^ 247 U. S. 321, 329, 38 Sup. Ct. Rep. 499 (1918). This statement as to other corporations is not literally true, for, as we have seen from Northwestern Life In- surance Co. V. Wisconsin, 247 U. S. 132, 38 Sup. Ct. Rep. 444 (1918), 32 Harv. L. Rev. 4o8_/., a gross receipts tax was levied on insurance companies in lieu of all other taxes except those on real estate. Public utilities are also excluded from the provisions of the income tax law and subjected to ad valorem assessment (note 34, infra). These exceptions, however, do not appear important, since the other methods of assessment are regarded as imposing burdens substantially equivalent to those which would result from subjection to the income tax.
 * 247 U. S. 321, 328, 38 Sup. Ct. Rep. 329 (1918).