86
ments by 6 of petitioner's subsidiaries) with id., at 76a-79a (listing petitioner's 86 nonwholly owned subsidiaries). Without some greater detail, I think it is impossible to conclude that the Iowa taxing scheme would have such real and substantial effects that it could never survive constitutional muster.
Finally, I cannot agree that, even if the dividend payments made taxable by the Iowa scheme are foreign commerce, that Iowa impermissibly discriminates against such payments. To be sure, two Iowa corporations, one with a foreign subsidiary and one with a domestic non-Iowa subsidiary will in some cases pay a different total tax. But this does not constitute unconstitutional discrimination because, as far as the record demonstrates, Iowa's taxing scheme does not result in foreign commerce being systematically subject to higher tax burdens than domestic commerce. Given that 45 of 50 States tax corporations on their net income, ante, at 80, n. 22, in deciding to tax only a foreign subsidiary's dividend payments, rather than the subsidiary's total income, Iowa assures that the subsidiary's tax burden is less than that faced by its domestic counterpart. The deduction that Iowa extends to domestically based dividend payments simply helps to avoid what would otherwise be the near certainty that the domestic income would be doubly taxed—once when earned as income by the subsidiary and a second time when paid to the parent corporation.
But Iowa's attempt to take account of this near certainty with respect to domestic earnings does not in turn require it to make a similar assumption with respect to income earned by foreign sources. As amicus United States correctly points out, "[t]he record in this case fails to indicate even the existence, much less the nature, of such local-level foreign taxes . . . . Nor is there any evidence to reflect the credits or reductions that foreign local governments would apply or allow." Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 15, n. 21.
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