‘Such assets as described above were not included in the inventory for the purposes of valuing the inventory in order to compute the tax.’
You mean to say that if Wal*Mart keeps a million dollars worth of medicine and/or food on stock that is not tallied as ‘assets’?
No, that's not what I am saying.
"Inventory" is a subset of "assets".
Under California's inventory tax law, which I believe no longer exists, businesses would have to periodically count their entire inventory and pay a tax based on the value of the inventory. Other types of assets would not be included for the purposes of calculating the inventory tax.
For all other purposes, inventory would simply be treated as other assets would.