344
Opinion of the Court
All other things, of course, are rarely equal, and investors may wish to invest in corporations doing business in North Carolina for any number of reasons, perhaps affecting the degree to which the corporate income tax is or is not passed through to shareholders. Our point, however, is simply that there are reasons to doubt the Secretary's contention that the corporate income tax amounts to a clear equivalent for the burden on shareholding imposed by the intangibles tax, and these doubts are dispositive. After all, "the concept of the compensatory tax . . . is merely a specific way of justifying a facially discriminatory tax as achieving a legitimate local purpose that cannot be achieved through nondiscriminatory means." Oregon Waste, supra, at 102. As with any other defense of a facially discriminatory tax, the State has the burden to show that the requirements of the compensatory tax doctrine are clearly met. Cf. Chemical Waste Management, Inc. v. Hunt, 504 U. S., at 342-343 (noting that " 'facial discrimination invokes the strictest scrutiny of any purported legitimate local purpose' ") (quoting Hughes v. Oklahoma, 441 U. S. 322, 337 (1979)). While we doubt that such a showing can ever be made outside the limited confines of sales and use taxes, it is enough to say here that no such showing has been made.
IV
Our finding that North Carolina has failed to show that its intangibles tax satisfies any of the three requirements for a valid compensatory tax leaves the tax unconstitutional as facially discriminatory under our modern tests. The Secretary argues, however, that our decision in Darnell v. Indiana, 226 U. S. 390 (1912), compels us to sustain the North Carolina statute. The statutory scheme at issue in Darnell taxed all shares in foreign corporations owned by Indiana residents as well as all shares in domestic corporations to the extent that the issuing corporations' property was not subject to Indiana's general property tax. Writing for the Court, Justice Holmes found that "[t]he only difference of
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