The Tax Cut You Pay For
They call it eliminating the income tax. Look at what they wrote in to replace it.
📌 The Stakes Are HighAmendment 5, on the August 4 ballot, would phase out Missouri’s individual income tax and authorize the legislature to expand sales and use taxes to replace the revenue. The income tax scales with what you earn; the sales tax takes the same cut from everyone at the register, so the poorer you are, the larger the share of your life it consumes. The Defender urges a NO vote.
A family spending everything it earns to survive pays sales tax on nearly every dollar it has. A family with millions pays it on the sliver it spends and nothing on the rest. Eliminate the income tax and expand the sales tax, and you have not cut taxes. You have moved them, from the people with the most to the people with the least.
🔍 Peep GameThe ballot language sells the phase-out and buries the replacement. The income tax funds schools, roads, and healthcare, so when it goes, either services collapse or the sales tax grows to fill the hole. The amendment tells you which one they chose: the expansion authority is written into the text.
📜 The History They Hope You ForgotWe do not have to imagine this experiment. Kansas ran it in 2012, sold with the same arithmetic, and what followed was a collapse so complete that a Republican legislature reversed it over a Republican governor’s veto: four-day school weeks, credit downgrades, gutted agencies. Half this metro lived across the street from the wreckage. Amendment 5 runs it again at constitutional scale, where no legislature that comes to its senses can easily undo it.
🔭 Zoom OutNotice the pairing. Amendment 4 makes the constitution nearly impossible for citizens to amend. Amendment 5 pours a radical fiscal experiment into that same constitution. On one ballot, in one August: lock the door, set the fire. The two measures are one design.
🧢 Cap vs. FactsCoverage will call this “eliminating the state income tax,” full stop, because that is the headline it was built to generate. The fine print the headline omits: the same amendment authorizes expanding sales taxes to replace the money. It is not a tax cut. It is a tax transfer, and you are the destination.
🗝️ Defender Major KeyVote August 4. Bring the elders who remember the Kansas years, because nobody explains this amendment better than somebody who lived across the state line from 2012 to 2017.
