It is a truism that the mere act of carrying on business in interstate
commerce does not exempt a corporation from state taxation. "It
was not the purpose of the commerce clause to relieve those engaged
in interstate commerce from their just share of state tax burden
even though it increases the cost of doing the business." Western
Live Stock v. Bureau of Revenue,
303 U.S. 250, 254 (1938). Accordingly, decisions of this Court,
particularly during recent decades, have sustained nondiscriminatory,
properly apportioned state corporate taxes upon foreign corporations
doing an exclusively interstate business when the tax is related
to a corporation's local activities and the State has provided benefits
and protections for those activities for which it is justified in
asking a fair and reasonable return. 6
General Motors Corp. v. Washington,
377 U.S. 436 (1964); Memphis Gas Co. v. Stone,
335 U.S. 80 (1948). Cf. Spector Motor Service v. O'Connor,
340 U.S. 602 (1951). General Motors Corp., supra, states the
controlling test:
"[T]he validity of the tax rests upon whether the [421 U.S.
100, 109] State is exacting a constitutionally fair
demand for that aspect of interstate commerce to which it bears
a special relation. For our purposes the decisive issue turns
on the operating incidence of the tax. In other words, the question
is whether the State has exerted its power in proper proportion
to appellant's activities within the State and to appellant's
consequent enjoyment of the opportunities and protections which
the State has afforded. . . . As was said in Wisconsin v. J.
C. Penney Co.,
311 U.S. 435, 444 (1940), `[t]he simple but controlling
question is whether the state has given anything for which it
can ask return.'"
377 U.S., at 440 -441.
[Colonial
Pipeline Company v. Traigle, 421 U.S. 100 (1975)]