We retired Tax Justice Blog in April 2017. For new content on issues related to tax justice, go to www.justtaxesblog.org
Anti-tax lawmakers and activists in Kansas and Missouri continue to 
promote ideas to repeal their state income taxes and replace some of the revenue with a huge consumption tax. As ITEP’s Meg Wiehe explained in a recent Kansas City Star article, “A lot of education needs to happen around this issue. If you move to a consumption-based tax, the vast majority of taxpayers would likely pay more in taxes than they are under the income tax, except for the wealthiest.”
ITEP’s written testimony on one such proposal in Missouri explains that only the richest 5 percent of Missourians would see a tax cut if the state’s personal income tax was replaced with a broad based sales tax, leaving the other 95 percent to pay higher taxes.
The corporate-controlled, anti-government American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) says approvingly that “Kansas and Missouri are at the top of the list” of states considering such proposals. To ALEC, ITEP’s estimates aren’t devastating at all. They recently claimed that “the downside of the tax swap appears to be minimal, if not non-existent.”
As a recent Kansas City Star editorial, warns, “The blessing of the council, known as ALEC, raises a red flag.”
In Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback has long been a proponent of eliminating, or at the very least, drastically reducing the state’s income tax. The Governor’s budget director anticipates that his budget for the new fiscal year will show “some significant (income tax) cuts”.
Missouri lawmakers have tried for the past couple of years to pass legislation that would eliminate the income tax entirely, but the legislation has not successfully passed both houses of the legislature.
Since cooler heads prevailed in the legislature, mega-rich troublemaker Rex Sinquefield has filed 11 ballot initiatives with the Secretary of State’s office that all do basically the same thing — eliminate state income taxes and replace the revenue with a broader sales tax.
It’s expected that Sinquefield will eventually fund signature-collection for one of these ballot questions. If enough signatures are gathered, Missouri voters would likely be asked to decide about this radical shift in November 2012.
The proposals in Kansas and Missouri threaten those states’ ability to provide core and critical services because they would result in permanently lower revenue, while also tilting each state’s tax system even more heavily in favor of the well-off.
Photos via KDOTHQ Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0