Cite as: 517 U. S. 843 (1996)
Kennedy, J., dissenting
the wisdom of shifting from income to excise taxes, see Lugar, The National Sales Tax: Avoiding the Zero-Sum Scenario, 48 Tax Executive 26 (1996); Bartlett, Replacing Federal Taxes with a Sales Tax, 68 Tax Notes 997 (1995), we should not use shaky precedent to deprive Congress of important regulatory and revenue-raising options. As respondent conceded at oral argument, Tr. of Oral Arg. 31, the reasoning of Thames & Mersey invites claims by export service providers for exemptions from any number of federal excise taxes, for example, a challenge to the diesel-fuel tax, 26 U. S. C. § 4041, by truckers carrying export shipments. The Export Clause cannot bear this reading.
The protections of the Export Clause must extend, perhaps, somewhat beyond specific taxes on goods, for "[i]f it meant no more than that, the obstructions to exportation which it was the purpose to prevent could readily be set up by legislation nominally conforming to the constitutional restriction but in effect overriding it." Hvoslef, supra, at 13. As a result, the Court has found certain taxes to be proxies for taxes on the goods. See Washington Stevedoring, supra, at 756, n. 21 (discussing sales tax struck down in Richfield Oil Corp. v. State Bd. of Equalization, 329 U. S. 69 (1946), and the tax on a bill of lading struck down in Fairbank v. United States, 181 U. S. 283 (1901)). In Washington Stevedoring, we expressed some doubt that the tax on insurance in Thames & Mersey fell in this forbidden category, but, to avoid overruling the case, "note[d] that the value of goods bears a much closer relation to the value of insurance policies on them than to the value of loading and unloading ships." 435 U. S., at 756, n. 21.
The insurance premiums taxed here, like those taxed in Thames & Mersey, bear some relation to the value of the goods, but this does not make them a proxy for a tax on the goods. Premiums, i. e., the price of insurance, depend on risk of loss, and value of the goods is only one component factor of risk. So much is made clear by Stipulation 16 in
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