Court Opinion

ID: 9853062
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:41:52.344753+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:22:40.416839
License: Public Domain

HENRIOD, Justice
(dissenting).
I dissent. The main opinion seems to have decided this case by definition, pays lip service to a 22-year administrative interpretation as to what was a “commercial” or “industrial” operation, which the opinion says should be given great weight. It now says that the Tax Commission, although it was right for 22 years, is now right when it says it was wrong for 22 years.
I would like to ask how the main opinion and the Tax Commission could have arrived at the present conclusion in the 1860’s, when the U. P. was subsidized by the U. S. Government to provide an “industrial” project to link not only a transcontinental rail system but the social, political and economic welfare of this country. I would like to ask whether all those Chinamen and' Irishmen died in a “commercial” enterprise or an “industrial” project. Also, I would like to know whether, if the U. S. Government should take over the railroads in a rail-wage dispute (where rails are completely regulated as to the rate of profit they can make) the Government would have to pay the sales tax in this case because it was a “commercial” enterprise. Let’s be practical, as the Tax Commission was for 22 years. The next step, I suppose, would be to de*101clare Auerbach’s an “industrial” plant, immune from the tax.
The best argument against the main opinion’s strained conclusion, is that when the interpretation of a tax statute has to be strained, it is to be strained in favor of the already overburdened taxpayer. In tax matters, in the last few decades the so-called “modern trend” has reversed the presumption of innocence to that of a presumption of guilt, — that the taxpayer is wrong and has the burden to prove he is right when a paternal sovereign points its finger at him. This isn’t American. The case should be reversed.