Cite as: 516 U. S. 325 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
In principle, the door may be open for such an argument. It is well established that "the ultimate distribution of the burden of taxes [may] be quite different from the distribution of statutory liability," McLure, Incidence Analysis and the Supreme Court: An Examination of Four Cases from the 1980 Term, 1 Sup. Ct. Econ. Rev. 69, 72 (1982), with such divergence occurring when the nominal taxpayer can pass it through to other parties, like consumers. The Secretary's equivalence argument might work in the present case, then, if we could find that the economic impact of North Carolina's corporate income tax is passed through to shareholders of corporations doing business in state in a way that offsets the disincentive imposed by the intangibles tax to buying stock in corporations doing business out of state.
But there is a problem with this line of argument, and it lies in the frequently extreme complexity of economic incidence analysis. The actual incidence of a tax may depend on elasticities of supply and demand, the ability of producers and consumers to substitute one product for another, the structure of the relevant market, the timeframe over which the tax is imposed and evaluated, and so on. See, e. g., Commonwealth Edison Co. v. Montana, 453 U. S. 609, 619, n. 8 (1981) (determining "whether the tax burden is shifted out of State, rather than borne by in-state producers and consumers, would require complex factual inquiries about such issues as elasticity of demand for the product and alternative sources of supply").7 We declined to shoulder any such analysis in Minneapolis Star & Tribune Co. v. Minnesota
7 Other factors may also be important, depending on the particular case. These include "whether (1) the taxed product is a final or intermediate good, (2) the tax is large or small, (3) prices are rising or falling, (4) the costs of the taxed enterprise are increasing or decreasing, (5) the factors of production are mobile, (6) the taxed industry is subject to government regulation, and (7) in the federal system, the state imposing the tax dominates the market for the taxed good or service." Hellerstein, Complementary Taxes as a Defense to Unconstitutional State Tax Discrimination, 39 Tax Lawyer 405, 439 (1986).
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