Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/954

918 9l8 HARVARD LAW REVIEW capitalizing the earnings from the business which it serves.*^ Even gross receipts from interstate conunerce may be taxed in the guise of a property tax where the result is no more than a fair equivalent for ordinary property taxation.^ The decisions sanctioning these results make it dear that a state which confines its taxation to levies on tangible property and on net income will have to take little or no accoimt of the commerce clause. When it imposes license or franchise or occupation taxes, or adopts any other revenue de- vices which are not certain to fall equally on all enterprise within the state, then it nms the risk of disappointment whenever it seeks to lay its hand on interstate conamerce. What the court is insistent upon is that there must be adequate safeguards against subjecting interstate commerce to heavier taxation than local commerce. It does not require the states to confer a bounty upon interstate com- merce by exempting it from burdens which competing business must bear. The substantial reason back of these decisions is that interstate conunerce is not prejudiced by a summons to bear its proportionate contribution to the treasuries of the states. So, too, the borrowing power of the United States is not interfered with by proportionate taxation of the obligations created by its exercise. Taxation of the full value of the shares of corporate stock, without inquiry into the character of the corporate property which gives that stock some or all of its value, can seldom, if ever, discriminate against part of that property in favor of another part. A corporation will be likely to buy the same amoimt of United States bonds whether the shares of its stockholders are taxed at their full value or are entirely exempt. Taxation of the shares is not, in form, taxation of the property of the corporation. Technically, therefore, such taxation does not fall on a federal instrmnentality, even when the corporation owns United States bonds. If, then, a tax on the shares does not actually place the United States at a disadvantage in marketing its bonds, there is no basis either formal or substantial on which to require the exclusion of the value contributed by such bonds from the assess- ment of the shares. A more difficult problem confronts us when we seek to distin- guish between a tax on corporate capital and a tax on a corporate franchise measured by the amount of the capital. The distinction " 32 Harv. L. Rev. 239-65. ^° 32 Harv. L. Rev. 377-416.