450
Opinion of Breyer, J.
a "license . . . tax" or a "tax" on the "privilege" of engaging in a "vocation, occupation, calling or profession." Ordinance No. 1120, preamble. And its operative language speaks in terms of a condition imposed upon work, not of a tax upon income. It says that it
"shall be unlawful for any person to engage in or follow [with certain exceptions] any vocation, occupation, calling or profession . . . without paying license fees to the County for the privilege of engaging in or following such vocation, occupation, calling or profession . . . ." § 2 (emphasis added).
The state law that authorizes the county's tax describes its own purpose as one of "equaliz[ing] the burden of taxation," and it authorizes the county "to levy a license or privilege tax upon any person for engaging in any business" other than a business already subject to other state or county licensing fees, liability for which is triggered, not by income, but by engaging in the work. See 1967 Ala. Acts 406, §§ 3, 4; see generally Appendix, infra, at 458-464. Indeed, the Alabama Supreme Court has found as a matter of state law that a municipal tax very similar in substance to Jefferson County's tax was an occupational license tax, rather than an income tax. See McPheeter v. Auburn, 288 Ala. 286, 292, 259 So. 2d 833, 837 (1972).
Second, the tax, as measured, works more like a licensing fee than an income tax. On the one hand, the tax calculation does not include many kinds of income, such as retirement income, dividends, interest, or other unearned income, or earned income if that income is earned outside the county—irrespective of how much income is involved. See Ordinance No. 1120, § 1(F). On the other hand, by the terms of the ordinance, not only a county resident but also a non-resident who works some of the time in Jefferson County, §§ 1(B), 3, must pay the tax as long as he becomes "entitled to receive" pay for his work, even if he receives that pay
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