Eisner V. Macomber - Issue

Issue

Essentially, therefore, the question in Macomber was not whether the shareholder had gain in an economic sense, but whether in legal or accounting terms the stock dividend was to be regarded as a taxable event. ... Stripped of its Constitutional element, the issue in Eisner v. Macomber in the end comes down to a "battle of similarities." Is a stock dividend (as the majority held) "more like" a situation in which a corporation simply accumulates its earnings and makes no distribution at all? Or is it (as Brandeis thought) "more like" the receipt of a cash dividend which is followed by a reinvestment of the cash received in additional shares? —Marvin Chirelstein, Federal Income Taxation, A Law Student's Guide

Read more about this topic:  Eisner V. Macomber

Famous quotes containing the word issue:

    “We have nothing to do, but to choose what is right, to be steady in the pursuit of it, and leave the issue to Providence.”
    —Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)

    “I don’t have any problem with a reporter or a news person who says the President is uninformed on this issue or that issue. I don’t think any of us would challenge that. I do have a problem with the singular focus on this, as if that’s the only standard by which we ought to judge a president. What we learned in the last administration was how little having an encyclopedic grasp of all the facts has to do with governing.”
    —David R. Gergen (b. 1942)

    “If the issue doesn’t matter a whole lot, just drop it. You don’t have to win every fight ... and you will not have lost any of your authority by giving in when it doesn’t matter very much.”
    —Lawrence Balter (20th century)