Edward Douglass White

“ But this merely asserts a right to take the taxation of mining corporations out of the rule established by the 16th Amendment when there is no authority for so doing. It moreover rests upon the wholly fallacious assumption that, looked at from the point of view of substance, a tax on the product of a mine is necessarily in its essence and nature in every case a direct tax on property because of its ownership, unless adequate allowance be made for the exhaustion of the ore body to result from working the mine. ”

“ In other words, we are here dealing solely with the restriction imposed by the 16th Amendment on the right to resort to the source whence an income is derived in a case where there is power to tax for the purpose of taking the income tax out of the class of indirect, to which it generically belongs, and putting it in the class of direct, to which it would not otherwise belong, in order to subject it to the regulation of apportionment. ”

“ Because all other individuals or corporations were given a right to deduct a fair and reasonable percentage for losses and depreciation of their capital, and they were therefore not confined to the arbitrary 5 per cent fixed as the basis for deductions by mining corporations.
(2) Because by reason of the differences in the allowances which the statute permitted, the tax levied was virtually a net income tax on other corporations and individuals, and a gross income tax on mining corporations. ”