The migration from well-funded to austerity-stricken locations continues, and more states are trying to reduce or abandon their income tax to accelerate the race to the bottom. The next may be Missouri, where voters will consider a ballot measure on Aug. 4 to cripple public investment.
Amendment Five would change the Missouri constitution to require lawmakers to cut the income tax whenever the state collects enough money to actually fund its schools, roads, and services. The measure requires lawmakers to create revenue targets and a trigger mechanism tied to a phase-out schedule aimed at eliminating the tax ideally by 2032 — a constitutional straitjacket that locks in the donor class’s windfall and slams the door behind it. Once the tax is gone, the constitution would permanently prohibit reinstating it. The measure would also require local tax rate cuts “if local sales tax revenue increases” and let lawmakers expand state sales and use taxes — shifting the burden from the rich onto everyone else.
Missouri’s income tax generates some $9 billion a year, or about 61% of general revenue — the money that pays for classrooms, bridges, and public health. Amendment Five aims to gut that revenue stream and replace it with regressive sales taxes that fall heaviest on the working families who can least afford an extra dime at the register.
Since 2021, 23 states have slashed their top marginal income-tax rates, according to the Tax Foundation — a race to the bottom that benefits the donor class at the expense of the common good. So far in 2026, South Carolina, Utah, Arkansas, Georgia and West Virginia have cut income taxes. Three of those — Georgia, West Virginia, and South Carolina — embedded trigger provisions to mandate further reductions when revenue targets are hit, proving the mechanism is spreading. Each state is a laboratory proving that the rich get richer while the rest get poorer services and higher regressive taxes.
Progressive groups and government unions say the amendment will cut taxes for the wealthy while raising them on lower- and middle-income folks. They are correct. The 4.7% top rate kicks in on income above just $9,436 — a threshold so low that nearly every Missourian pays the top rate. That means eliminating the income tax primarily benefits those whose income dwarfs that threshold; the savings scale with wealth, making it a massive giveaway to the top while doing little for the working family scraping by. The claim that households making more than $9,436 a year are not “rich” is a deliberate misdirection — the point is that this threshold is so low it captures the working poor while the benefits flow to those at the top.
It’s true that lower-income people spend a relatively larger share of earnings on goods, because they have no choice — their entire paycheck goes to survival, and the goods they buy are for the most part already taxed. So any additional sales tax burden is a direct hit on their already stretched budgets. Broadening the sales tax to services currently untaxed, such as dry cleaning, landscaping or personal training, is a targeted tax hike on working families. Small business owners will see a windfall since they pay individual income tax — a direct subsidy from the public treasury to the owning class, not the working class.
Reducing the income tax will make Missouri “more competitive” with other states in the heartland — Nebraska (4.55%), Oklahoma (4.5%), Arkansas (3.9%), Iowa (3.8%), Kentucky (3.5%), and tax-free havens like South Dakota and Tennessee. The original touts this as a selling point, but note that the rates of neighboring states are already low, making the savings marginal for anyone but the top bracket. The promise of “economic growth” always follows, but after years of tax cuts across dozens of states, the original offers no evidence that wages rose for anyone below the top bracket — putting the burden of proof back on its own argument. Missourians across the income spectrum will bear the cost of slashed public services.
Opponents say sales tax rates will have to spike to offset the lost income-tax revenue. And they will. The original claims that eight states including Texas, Alaska, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Wyoming have no income taxes and their sales tax rates are similar to those of income-tax states. Their sales tax rates may look comparable, but they mask crushing regressive burdens elsewhere — their residents pay dearly in other ways, for education, for infrastructure, for the social fabric. New Hampshire has no tax on sales or individual income, yet the state must lean heavily on local property taxpayers to fund what its neighbors pay for through their state budgets, exposing the model for what it is: a shift of the bill, not its disappearance. Gutting the income tax will make Missouri less able to fund its schools, roads, and healthcare, mirroring the hollowing-out of public goods in those low-tax states — a disinvestment that will be felt for generations.
What the amendment’s backers really want is to permanently cripple the state’s ability to fund its own future. They call it “spending discipline” — the rest of us call it a starvation diet for public services and a constitutional lockbox on inequality. Gov. Mike Kehoe has held the line on starving schools and services, and Amendment Five is designed to make sure no future governor can reverse the starvation, restricting the ability of future governments to raise income taxes to fund education, healthcare, and infrastructure.
This amendment is an insurance policy for the donor class against the public good — a constitutional graft device designed to make it permanently hard for ordinary Missourians to fund the public goods their own wealth creates.
