Hannah Rejali remembers what happened in Kansas. When Republican Governor Sam Brownback slashed the state's income tax a decade ago in hopes of turbocharging the economy, the result was a $900 million budget hole. In 2015 alone, at least eight school districts had to cut their academic years short. "You say Brownback to anyone on the Kansas side, and they shudder," said Rejali, a mother of four who now lives in Kansas City.
Now Missouri is asking voters to do something similar. Republicans in the state are pushing a constitutional amendment to eliminate income tax altogether, making Missouri the first state in over a century where a legislature has put such a measure to voters. The parallels to the Kansas experiment are making Rejali and other critics nervous.
Proponents argue the move would attract businesses, spur job growth, and let residents keep more of their earnings. The amendment would likely be paired with a sales tax expansion to replace lost revenue. But economists and tax policy experts are skeptical that the promised benefits will materialize, especially given what happened just next door.
Carl Davis, research director for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, has studied these claims repeatedly across different states and at the federal level. "The claim being made is that those high-income people will grow businesses or create jobs and the benefits would trickle back down to everybody else," Davis said. "The reality is, this has been done at the national level and in many states, repeatedly, and it doesn't work that way."
The Missouri push is part of a broader Republican strategy. States including Georgia, South Carolina, and West Virginia have also recently approved bills to phase out income taxes. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded advocacy group, has been a major driver of these efforts nationwide.
In Missouri, billionaire investor Rex Sinquefield has been a key backer. He previously funded the push for Kansas's income tax cut in 2012, predicting back then that companies would relocate en masse, creating "a cloud of dust at the Missouri-Kansas border." More recently, he donated millions to Republican Mike Kehoe's successful 2024 campaign for Missouri governor. Kehoe has written that eliminating income tax would make Missouri more competitive and let workers keep more of their earnings.
Advocates often point to states without income taxes like Florida and Texas as proof of success. Dennis Ganahl, founder of Mo Tax Relief Now, recalled convincing his own son to stay in Missouri by promising to deliver zero income tax. But skeptics note that Florida's beaches and climate give it advantages Missouri cannot replicate. "We're not seeing folks necessarily flocking to South Dakota, for example. South Dakota doesn't have an income tax either," Davis pointed out.
The Kansas experience offers a cautionary lesson. Even with promises of long-term gains, the immediate pain proved too much. Five years into Brownback's "march to zero," the Republican-controlled Kansas legislature voted to reverse most of the tax cuts, overriding the governor's veto. "The core reality here is that state income tax cuts necessitate tradeoffs," Davis said.
Missouri's backers claim they have learned from Kansas. They argue that their amendment ties tax elimination to revenue growth, so the state won't simply eliminate income taxes without finding replacement funds. Ganahl downplayed concerns about sales tax increases, suggesting the state could instead close loopholes. But there's a catch: in 2016, Missouri voters approved an amendment blocking the state from adding new sales taxes to services or transactions. "The only reason for them to have this amendment is to allow for the sales tax to be greatly expanded; otherwise they don't need it," said Amy Blouin, president of the Missouri Budget Project, which opposes the measure.
If sales taxes do expand, the burden will fall disproportionately on lower and middle-income residents, who spend a larger share of earnings and currently pay less income tax. An analysis by Davis's institute found that people earning between $49,000 and $80,000 would pay roughly $535 more annually if the state raised sales taxes enough to replace income tax revenue. Elderly residents and others not paying income tax would face additional costs with no offsetting relief.
The ballot measure includes language about protecting local school funding, but critics say it's misleading. The amendment only prohibits local governments from reducing local tax rates, not the state itself. It says nothing about education funding from state coffers, which are already strained.
A more recent warning comes from North Carolina, which has gradually reduced income taxes since 2012 to avoid a sudden shock like Kansas experienced. That approach hasn't saved education. State funding per student dropped from $9,053 in 2003 to $7,869 in 2025. The state also became the only one to cut teacher salaries between 2024 and 2025, prompting thousands of educators to rally at the state capitol demanding higher pay and more school funding.
The gradual approach creates a different problem, Davis said: deteriorating services happen slowly enough to avoid a crisis moment, but the damage accumulates. "It amounts to basically a frog in boiling water," he said. "You are ratcheting the income tax rate down and the quality of services gradually degrades, but it's in a less noticeable or flashy way than what we saw happen in Kansas."
Author James Rodriguez: "After a decade of watching Kansas implode and now seeing North Carolina deteriorate, Missouri seems determined to run the same experiment again. The only question is whether it will be sudden or slow-motion agony."
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