Oregon Waste Systems, Inc. v. Department of Environmental Quality of Ore., 511 U.S. 93, 6 (1994)

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Cite as: 511 U. S. 93 (1994)

Opinion of the Court

The prototypical example of substantially equivalent taxable events is the sale and use of articles of trade. See Henneford, supra. In fact, use taxes on products purchased out of state are the only taxes we have upheld in recent memory under the compensatory tax doctrine. See ibid. Typifying our recent reluctance to recognize new categories of compensatory taxes is Armco, where we held that manufacturing and wholesaling are not substantially equivalent events. 467 U. S., at 643. In our view, earning income and disposing of waste at Oregon landfills are even less equivalent than manufacturing and wholesaling. Indeed, the very fact that in-state shippers of out-of-state waste, such as Oregon Waste, are charged the out-of-state surcharge even though they pay Oregon income taxes refutes respondents' argument that the respective taxable events are substantially equivalent. See ibid. We conclude that, far from being substantially equivalent, taxes on earning income and utilizing Oregon landfills are "entirely different kind[s] of tax[es]." Washington v. United States, 460 U. S. 536, 546, n. 11 (1983). We are no more inclined here than we were in Scheiner to "plunge . . . into the morass of weighing comparative tax burdens" by comparing taxes on dissimilar events. 483 U. S., at 289 (internal quotation marks omitted).8

B

Respondents' final argument is that Oregon has an interest in spreading the costs of the in-state disposal of Oregon waste to all Oregonians. That is, because all citizens of Ore-8 Furthermore, permitting discriminatory taxes on interstate commerce to compensate for charges purportedly included in general forms of intrastate taxation "would allow a state to tax interstate commerce more heavily than in-state commerce anytime the entities involved in interstate commerce happened to use facilities supported by general state tax funds." Government Suppliers Consolidating Servs., Inc. v. Bayh, 975 F. 2d, at 1284. We decline respondents' invitation to open such an expansive loophole in our carefully confined compensatory tax jurisprudence.

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