The race to gut public services is accelerating, and it is a suicidal competition for the rich. The next state on the track may be Missouri, where voters will decide on Aug. 4 whether to phase out the revenue source that funds their schools and roads.
Amendment Five would change the Missouri constitution to lock in a permanent starvation diet for the public sector — once the income tax is eliminated, the constitution would ban reinstating it, a windfall for the wealthy that can never be undone. The measure would also force local tax cuts whenever sales tax revenue ticks up, and would empower lawmakers to jack up sales taxes on groceries, clothes, and gasoline, shifting the burden from the wealthy onto everyone who buys the basics.
Missouri’s income tax generates some $9 billion a year, about 61% of general revenue that pays for classroom teachers, troopers, and the work of fixing what a state owes its people. Amendment Five aims to phase out that vital funding, replacing it with regressive sales taxes on a schedule that could hit as soon as 2032. It forces lawmakers to set triggers that automatically slash income taxes the moment state revenues cross some arbitrary line, a constitutional straitjacket so no future governor or legislature can undo the damage.
Since 2021, 23 states have bent to the donor class by cutting their top marginal income-tax rates, according to the Tax Foundation, a coordinated project to shift the tax burden downward. So far in 2026, South Carolina, Utah, Arkansas, Georgia and West Virginia have again showered tax cuts on the wealthy. Georgia, West Virginia and South Carolina have baked in triggers to mandate even deeper giveaways, each cut making the next one easier to justify and harder to reverse.
The amendment’s defenders swear it will help ordinary Missourians. Do they think a household that makes more than $9,436 a year is rolling in it? That is the income at which Missouri’s top 4.7% rate kicks in, a laughably low “top” bracket. Under Amendment Five, a millionaire will pocket tens of thousands in tax savings at that 4.7% rate, while those with capital gains and dividends walk away untouched, and a working family will face higher sales taxes on every trip to the store. That is not tax relief. It is a wealth transfer from the bottom up.
It is true that broadening the sales tax to services currently untaxed, dry cleaning, landscaping, personal training, would touch higher earners. But the real revenue will come from raising rates on the goods working families already buy, while small businesses that pay individual income tax get a paper windfall, and the workers they employ pay for it at the register. Lower-income families already spend a larger share of their paychecks on taxed goods; Amendment Five will push that share even higher.
Slashing the income tax will send Missouri into a race to the bottom with neighboring states that already starve their public sector: Nebraska (top rate 4.55%), Oklahoma (4.5%), Arkansas (3.9%), Iowa (3.8%), Kentucky (3.5%), and South Dakota and Tennessee, which have no income tax and, not coincidentally, must fund government through regressive levies that fall hardest on those with the least. The fantasy that income-tax cuts will “spur growth” and pay for themselves has never survived contact with the real world. Tax-shift states simply push the bill onto those who can least afford it.
Opponents rightly note that sales tax rates will have to jump to cover the lost income-tax revenue. Amendment boosters point to eight states, Texas, Alaska, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Wyoming, that have no income tax and supposedly similar sales tax rates. But those states still must fund government, and they do it with higher property taxes, fees, and other regressive levies that take the biggest bite out of the poor. New Hampshire, with no sales or income tax, has among the nation’s highest property taxes as a share of income, a hidden burden on homeowners and renters alike. The promise of lower taxes is a mirage that working families pay for at the register.
What Amendment Five’s corporate backers really want is a handcuff on democracy, a constitutional weapon designed to keep the state from ever again asking the rich to pay their share. Gov. Mike Kehoe has held the line on public investment, but there is no guarantee his successors will be allowed to try, which is exactly the point of making the cuts irreversible.
Amendment Five is a suicide pact that will permanently wreck Missouri’s capacity to invest in its people, a permanent guarantee that the wealthy pay less while everyone else pays more.
