Court Opinion

ID: 9418731
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:37:29.97065+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:09.021333
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Holmes,
dissenting.
This is an appeal from a judgment of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin sustaining the constitutionality of a tax levied under the laws of the State. The appellant married a widow. Both parties had separate incomes, and made separate returns. A tax was assessed upon the appellant for the total of both, as if both belonged to *219him. By R. S. Wis. § 71.05 (2) (d), “In computing taxes and the amount of taxes payable by persons residing together as members of a family, the income of the wife and the income of each child under eighteen years of age-shall be added to that .of the husband, or father, or if he be not living, tp that of the head of the family and assessed to him except as hereinafter provided. The taxes levied shall be payable by such husband or. head of the family, but if not paid by him may be enforced against, any person whose income is included within the tax computation.” By R. S. § 71.09 (4) (e), “Married persons living together as husband and wife may make separate returns or join in a single joint return. In either case the tax shall be computed on the combined average taxable income. ,The exemptions provided for in subsection (2) of section 71.05 shall be allowed but once and divided equally and the amount of tax due shall be paid by each in the proportion that the average income of each bears to the combined average income.” The result of adding the incomes was to increase the rate of the plaintiff’s income tax and to charge him with a portion of-the tax otherwise payable by Mrs. Hoeper. He sets up the Fourteenth Amendment and says that he has been deprived of due process of law.
This case cannot be disposed of as an attempt to take one person’s property to pay another person’s debts. The statutes are the outcome of a thousand years of" history. They ■ must be viewed- against the background of the earlier rules that husband and wife are one, and that-one the husbandand that as the husband took the wife’s chattels he was liable for her debts. They form a system with echoes of different moments, none, of which is entitled to prevail over the other. The emphasis in other sections on separation of interests cannot make us deaf to the assumption, in the sections, quotéd, .of community when two spouses live together and when usually each *220would get the benefit of the income of each without inquiry into the source. So far as the Constitution of the United States is concerned, the legislature has power to determine what the consequences of marriage shall be, and as it may provide that the husband shall or shall not have certain rights in his wife’s property, and shall or shall not be liable for his wife’s debts, it may enact that he shall be liable for taxes on an income that in every probability will make his life easier and help to pay his bills. Taxation may consider not only command over,, but actual enjoyment of, the property taxed. See Corliss v. Bowers, 281 U. S. 376, 378. In some States, if not in all, the husband became the owner of the wife’s chattels, on marriage, without any trouble from the Constitution; and it would require ingenious argument to show that there might not be a return to the law as it was in 1800. It is all a matter of statute. But for statute, the income taxed would belong to the husband, and there would be no question about it.
I will .add a few words that seem to me superfluous. It is said that Wisconsin has taken away the former characteristics of "the marriage state. But it has said in so many words that it keeps this one. And when the legislature clearly indicates that it means to accomplish a certain result within its power to accomplish, it is our business to supply any formula that the elegantia juris may seem to require. Sexton v. Kessler & Co., 225 U. S. 90, 97.
The statute is justified also by its tendency to prevent tax evasion. • No doubt, if, as was held in Schlesinger v. Wisconsin, 270 U. S. 230, with regard to the measure then before the Court, there was no reasonable relation between the law and the evil, the statute could not be upheld. But the fact that it might reach innocent people does not condemn it. It has been decided too often to be open to question, that administrative necessity may justify the inclusion of innocent objects or trans*221actions within a prohibited class. Purity Extract Co. v. Lynch, 226 U. S. 192, 201, 204. Ruppert v. Coffey, 251 U. S. 264, 283. Hebe Co. v. Shaw, 248 U. S. 297, 303. Pierce Oil Corp. v. Hope, 248 U. S. 498, 500; Euclid v. Ambler Co., 272 U. S. 365, 388, 389. Tyler v. United States, 281 U. S. 497, 505. Milliken v. United States, 283 U. S. 15, 20.
Mr.- Justice Brandéis and Mr. Justice Stone concur in this opinion.