In August you rejected one plan to end state taxes. Amendment 7 is another, with a hundred-year timeline.

What does it promise?

Someday, no more state taxes. It creates a permanent state savings account, invested in the stock market, and says state taxes will be canceled once the investments earn enough to pay for everything the state does.

What is the catch?

It puts no money in the account. Any public money in the fund would come out of the same budget that pays for schools, healthcare, and roads. The Missouri Budget Project estimates the fund would need more than $600 billion to replace the taxes it covers. The state’s whole general budget is about $13 billion a year.

Why can’t it be fixed later?

It goes into the state constitution and bars the legislature from touching the fund. Once it passes, undoing it takes another statewide vote.

Who pays?

The people who use public services most: families with kids in public schools, people on Medicaid, anyone who relies on a clinic, a bus, or a road. They pay now, in cuts. The tax cut, if it ever comes, arrives decades later.

Missouri runs schools, Medicaid, roads, and everything else on roughly $13 billion a year in general revenue. Amendment 7 does not put a dollar into its fund. It writes into the constitution an instruction to move money into the stock market, with a promise that someday the returns will replace your taxes. The Missouri Budget Project estimates it would take a fund of more than $600 billion to replace the taxes it covers, and the amendment caps what can be drawn from the fund each year. Meanwhile the state auditor already projects a general revenue shortfall of about $370 million by fiscal 2028.

• Sponsored by Sen. Adam Schnelting of St. Charles; it passed the Senate 22 to 7 and the House 85 to 56.
• The fund would be invested in S&P 500 index funds, forever, with whatever the legislature chooses to appropriate.
• Every dollar appropriated to the fund is a dollar not appropriated to a classroom, a clinic, or a bridge.
• The tax-elimination promise is the bait. The diversion is the product.

In August, Amendment 5 asked you to swap the income tax for sales taxes. You killed it 83 to 17. Kansas ran its own version of this experiment in 2012 and broke its budget so badly its own Republican legislature reversed it. Amendment 7 is the same project with a longer fuse: the services get starved now, and the payoff is promised to people not yet born.

“No more state taxes” sounds like relief. Ask who pays when the fund comes up short in a recession, and what gets cut while the state waits a century for the market to cover the bill. The answer is the same people who always pay: the ones who rely on public schools and public healthcare.

Vote no, and tell everyone who voted no on Amendment 5 that this is Amendment 5 again. The trick only works if you forget August.

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