Business owner filed constitutional challenge to town’s business license tax ordinance, which required businesses within the town to pay an annual license fee based upon business’s classification and gross income. The Circuit Court entered judgment finding the ordinance valid. Owner appealed.
The Supreme Court of South Carolina held that the business license tax ordinance was not unconstitutional.
Business license fee was a tax on the privilege of doing business within the town, and therefore, it was the manufacturing activity of taxpayer’s business which occurred wholly within the town limits, and not its receipt of income or sales of its products in interstate commerce, that was the business activity being taxed.