The thing Missouri voters weren’t confused about is whether replacing a 4.7 percent state income tax with a higher, broader sales tax was good for them. Daniel J. Pilla, writing in “Why Missouri Declined to Abolish Its Income Tax” for National Review, blames the lopsided 83-to-17 defeat of Amendment 5 on voter aversion to “uncertainty” — no specified sales-tax rate, no list of newly taxed services, no menu of spending cuts. He’s blaming the messenger. The message was the giveaway.
Concede the kernel: yes, voters rejected the amendment, and yes, the proposal was deliberately vague on the rates, the base, and the cuts. Pilla is right that they weren’t shown the math. He’s wrong about what they would have done with it if they had been. A consumption tax is a real theoretical option; the Nordic countries run broad-based value-added taxes at roughly 25 percent. They pair them with progressive income taxes and universal services — and have for decades. That pairing is the part Pilla’s piece skips past, and it is the only part that makes the consumption tax work for the people paying it.
A 4.7 percent income tax is already a low top rate, and it kicks in only above a fairly high threshold. The people writing real checks into it are people with real income. A “broad-based sales tax” is a tax on every grocery run, every utility bill, every plumber who shows up to fix the pipe. The piece calls the income tax a burden on “production, the engine of economic growth.” Remind me which worker the income tax was actually burdening, exactly. The Missouri family earning $80,000 a year is not a factory. The retiree on a fixed income is not the engine of economic growth. The actual engine of growth in Missouri — the corporate sector — pays its own state corporate income tax that Amendment 5 wouldn’t have touched. So the swap isn’t “growth” versus “anti-growth.” It’s “tax people with money to spare” versus “tax everyone who buys anything at all.”
You can’t, on one page, call the income tax a brake on working families’ prosperity and on the next page call the regressive tax that replaces it the path to that same prosperity. Pick one.
Missouri’s income tax raises about $8.5 billion a year. To replace that with consumption taxes, you need a higher rate, a much wider base, or both. If the expanded sales tax reached groceries, utilities, and other necessities, it would land hardest on the families least able to absorb it — the same families the piece never names once. The piece treats the “essential services” warning as another uncertainty voters had to absorb. It is not an uncertainty. It is the question. If $8.5 billion a year stops coming from people who pay 4.7 percent on their income and starts coming from people who pay a sales tax on what they buy, something has to give: a regressive tax shift, spending cuts to the schools and services Missouri voters actually use, or the supply-side promise that growth will fill the hole.
That last option Pilla names as settled economic fact — “taxes on consumption are generally more favorable to growth.” The empirical record is more contested than settled. The 2017 federal tax cut was the largest recent supply-side experiment; corporations used the savings for trillions in stock buybacks, and wages grew with the economy rather than outpacing it. That is what “growth will fill the hole” has actually delivered. Voters were weighing a contested promise against a documented pattern.
Anyway.
What gets built on the ground where Amendment 5 stood? Missouri keeps its 4.7 percent income tax and uses the existing base to do two things at once. First: a state-level Earned Income Tax Credit — the cleanest refundable tax credit for low-wage workers, costing the treasury relatively little and disproportionately helping the working families a sales tax would now hit. Minnesota has had one since 1991; New York’s dates to the 1990s. Both states manage to fund schools and services Missouri voters say they want. Second: a refundable, per-child, monthly child tax credit, paid for out of the revenue the amendment would have erased, with the rest of the base continuing to fund the schools and services voters were afraid of losing. A modestly progressive income tax, a state EITC, a child tax credit, and a sales tax base that excludes groceries and rent — that’s the boring, plainly mathed-out alternative Pilla is asking for, except aimed the other way.
Alaska’s Permanent Fund has paid every resident a yearly dividend out of resource wealth since 1982, in a red state; nobody calls Juneau the Kremlin. The Nordic countries pair their 25-percent consumption taxes with progressive income taxes and universal services, so the same family that pays the sales tax doesn’t have to choose between a doctor’s visit and a grocery run. None of these require abolishing an income tax to work. They require building on the one Missouri already has.
The “devil voters know” is also a state that ranks near the bottom in teacher pay and per-pupil funding. He is not as well-dressed as the author thinks. Missouri voters are not fools for refusing to sign a blank check on a tax shift whose whole point is to make the wealthy pay less and everyone else pay more. They read the document. Pilla reads the vote and sees a marketing failure. The vote was a math verdict, and the math works against the people the author claims he wants to help. The boring alternative the piece won’t name — and that legislators could still pass — would have won the math. It might still, if Missouri decides to offer it.