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Show OPPOSITION TO CORPORATION TAX. The San Francisco Chronicle is opposing the federal corporation tax law, and, commenting on the suit begun to test its constitutionality, constitution-ality, says : "The discussion in the law journals has for the most part centered cen-tered around the meaning of the word 'excise' as used in the Constitution. Con-stitution. The law designates the tax as an 'excise' to be levied on the 'income of all corporations. The Constitution empowers Congress Con-gress to levy 'excise' taxes and it has often done so. But it forbids the levy of 'direct' taxes except by apportionment among the states according to population. A direct tax i3 the ordinary property tax as levied in this and other states that is, a tax ad valorem on real and personal property. A general income tax was held unconstitutional unconstitu-tional on the ground that to tax the income from real and personal property was to tax the property itself, which certainly seems clear enough to the ordinary sane mind. Apparently in contesting the corporation tax the lawyers will lay most stress on the fact that, this being a tax on the income derived from real and personal property, prop-erty, it is unconstitutional according to the decisions of the Supreme Court. The Government, on the contrary, will insist that it is an 'excise tax' on the carrying on of an occcupation, to which it will be rejoined, that if so, it is unconstitutional because not 'uniform' as th Constitution requires, because individuals carrying on the same business are exempt. If, finally, the Government is driven to contend con-tend that it is not a tax on carrying on an occupation which is constitutional if uniform but an excise on the right to exist as a corporation, the opposing contention will be that the Supreme Court has already held that a state cannot tax a United States corporate cor-porate franchise, or the corporate franchise granted by another state, for the reason that it would be in derogation of the sovereign rights guaranteed by the whole people of the sovereign rights guaranteed ! by the whole people to the United States and the states respectively. And it is along these lines that the battle of law books and precedents will wage. "The legal fight must be left to the lawyers. The secular press can intelligently discuss only the policy. And it is a policy which should be resisted by every inhabitant of every state who does not desire to see the United States turned, into a centralized and despotic des-potic government. If the states cannot tax an instrumentality of the United States, but the United States can tax an instrumentality of a state, w are already a centralized government and the guarantees guaran-tees of the Constitution are a farce. The objections to the corporation corpor-ation tax are, first, as a matter of principle, its destruction of the authority of local governments; and secondly, as a matter of public finance, that it is a reaching out of the federal government to wrest from the states sources of income which they now possess and which they need." |