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income tax paid by corporations doing business in North Carolina and that the state service supported by the corporate income tax is the maintenance of an intrastate capital market. This Court, however, has recognized the danger of treating general revenue measures as relevant intrastate burdens for purposes of the compensatory tax doctrine. Oregon Waste, supra, at 105, n. 8. Moreover, it can reasonably be assumed that the State's blue sky laws, not its general corporate income tax, provide for the capital market's upkeep. Thus, the Secretary has pointed to no in-state activity or benefit that justifies the compensatory levy. Pp. 334-336. (c) The second condition requires that the tax on interstate commerce approximate, but not exceed, the tax on intrastate commerce. Oregon Waste, supra, at 103. The relevant comparison—between the size of the intangibles tax and that of the corporate income tax component that purportedly funds the capital market—is for practical purposes impossible. The corporate income tax is a general form of taxation, not assessed according to the taxpayer's use of particular services, and before its revenues are earmarked for particular purposes they have been com-mingled with funds from other sources. Hence, the Secretary cannot show what proportion of that tax goes to support the capital market, or whether that proportion represents a burden greater than the one the intangibles tax imposes on interstate commerce. Pp. 336-338. (d) The third condition requires the compensating taxes to fall on substantially equivalent events. The purpose of this requirement is to ensure that the actual payers of each tax are members of the same class, so that the effect of the compensating tax is to enable in-state and outof-state businesses to compete on a footing of equality. Henneford v. Silas Mason Co., 300 U. S. 577. Evaluating whether this requirement has been met will ordinarily require an analysis of the economic incidence of the respective taxes, an issue usually unsuited for judicial resolution. Here there are reasons to doubt that the relevant taxes have the same incidences, and while it is unlikely that a State can ever show that two taxes are equivalent outside the limited confines of sales and use taxes, it is enough to say here that no such showing has been made. Pp. 338-344. (e) Darnell, supra, does not dictate a different result. That case appears to have evaluated a compensatory tax scheme under the rational basis standard generally employed under the Equal Protection Clause. In that respect, Darnell, along with Kidd v. Alabama, 188 U. S. 730, has been bypassed by later Commerce Clause decisions, which require discriminatory restrictions on commerce to pass the strictest scrutiny. Pp. 344-346.
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