654
Opinion of the Court
Ga. Code Ann. § 48-8-110 (Supp. 1994) (requiring the enactment of a local use tax to be coupled with the adoption of an equivalent sales tax).
B
As our discussion above makes clear, Missouri's use tax scheme impermissibly discriminates against interstate commerce only in those localities where the local sales tax is less than 1.5%. Apparently hoping to obtain a refund for all moneys paid under the use tax, however, petitioners seek to have the tax struck down in its entirety. They urge us to hold that the tax is facially invalid in every jurisdiction because there is no countervailing statewide sales tax and no legislation ensuring that local sales taxes will always equal or exceed the use tax. The evil of the system, under this view, is not merely the actual discrimination that results in some localities, but the potential for discrimination in every locality. Indeed, the logic of petitioners' theory suggests that the potential for abuse would make Missouri's use tax scheme impermissibly discriminatory even if every political subdivision had chosen to impose a sales tax of greater than 1.5%.
But we have never deemed a hypothetical possibility of favoritism to constitute discrimination that transgresses constitutional commands. On the contrary, we repeatedly have focused our Commerce Clause analysis on whether a challenged scheme is discriminatory in "effect," see, e. g., Bacchus Imports, Ltd. v. Dias, 468 U. S. 263, 270 (1984), and we have emphasized that "equality for the purposes of . . . the flow of commerce is measured in dollars and cents, not legal abstractions." Halliburton, 373 U. S., at 70. See also Gregg Dyeing Co. v. Query, 286 U. S. 472, 481 (1932) ("Discrimination, like interstate commerce itself, is a practical conception. We must deal in this matter, as in others, with substantial distinctions and real injuries"). A purely nominal distinction in a State's statutes between the methods of
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