Many Missouri lawmakers supporting Amendment 5, which would phase out the state’s individual income tax and allow lawmakers to broadly raise sales taxes to replace it, point to Tennessee as an example to follow.

Tennessee fully eliminated state income taxes in 2021. But critics of Missouri’s plan point to neighboring Kansas, which set out to eliminate its income taxes during the 2010s before some of the same lawmakers who launched the effort ultimately reversed course. The experiences of Tennessee and Kansas offer a glimpse into what could happen in Missouri if Amendment 5 passes.

“As much as Kansas and Missouri are rivals, mostly on the sports field, we have a lot in common,” said Paul Davis, the former Democratic minority floor leader in the Kansas House of Representatives.

He was serving in the Legislature in 2012 when, at the bidding of then-Republican Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, Republican legislators enacted massive income and business tax cuts.

“We saw no growth,” Davis said. “We just saw massive reductions in state services: funding through for K-12 education, universities, community colleges. Our transportation program (was) decimated, and really a lot of other state services were just sort of hanging on by a thread.”

State services were so underfunded that by 2017, just five years after enacting these tax cuts, a Republican-led Kansas Legislature voted to repeal them. Several of the same lawmakers who initially voted for the cuts initially later voted to eliminate them.

“When people talk about the Brownback tax experiment, they really see it as a dark point in the state’s history,” Davis said.

Revenue growth triggers tied to Amendment 5

In Missouri, Republican State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick said he doesn’t believe the state’s income tax elimination plan would unfold the way it did in Kansas.

“If we wanted to do what Kansas did, Amendment 5 would be unnecessary,” he said. “Because what Kansas did was they just went in and they whacked the income tax immediately — no revenue growth triggers tied to it.”

There are growth triggers tied to Missouri’s Amendment 5. For income tax rates to fall, sales tax revenue first has to go up. That was not the case in Kansas, where lawmakers implemented a flat-out income tax cut.

“That was just a bad way of doing it ... the way they managed that,” Fitzpatrick said. “They had to cut services. And, it’s not like you pull the tax lever and the economic growth lever is happening at the same time.”

“It will take time for this to work,” Fitzpatrick said of the Missouri plan.

Fitzpatrick, who is running for reelection, said he thinks Amendment 5 would make Missouri more closely mirror Tennessee.

“Our neighbors that are contiguous to us in Tennessee are doing very well without an income tax,” he said.

Missouri’s tax portfolio

Don Bruce, the director of the Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, explained that Missouri’s tax revenue portfolio is vastly different from Tennessee’s.

“I’m not going to point fingers at Missouri here, but I think there’s a lot more to the comparison that needs to be made very carefully,” Bruce said.

Tennessee lawmakers voted to incrementally eliminate the Hall Income Tax in 2016, and it was fully phased out by 2021. But unlike Missouri’s income tax, the Hall Tax did not apply to wages. Tennessee has never taxed income earned from wages. Instead, the Hall Tax was levied only on interest from bonds and notes and dividends from stocks.

“It was a very small tax,” Bruce said. “It only applied to a small number of Tennesseans. And typically this would have raised less than 2% of our total tax revenue.”

That is not the case in Missouri.

Individual income tax revenue in Missouri made up 61% of the state’s general revenue funds in the 2026 fiscal year.

“Simply changing the tax portfolio will not guarantee you the same results that you have in another state,” Bruce said. “So my advice always — and we’ve gotten this call all the time from states who are interested in repealing an income tax to have more emphasis on the sales tax — is to tread very slowly and very carefully, and take a very long view of this.”

Fitzpatrick argued Amendment 5 does that, since the measure would give lawmakers a five-year window to phase out income tax and impose new sales taxes.

“We can pass Amendment 5, give ourselves the ability to transition the way we fund state services and do it in a responsible way that allows, I think, to continue to lower our tax burden on citizens over time in terms of, in the state of Missouri, how much government is taking of people’s total personal income. Over time, we want that number to continue to go down,” Fitzpatrick said.

Nine states already don’t levy income taxes.

“All of them have other ways of generating large revenues that Missouri is not currently contemplating,” said David Gamage, a professor who specializes in tax policy at the University of Missouri School of Law. “There are states that have large natural resource revenues: Alaska, Wyoming, to some extent Texas. There are states that have large tourism revenues, Nevada and Florida.”

Gamage previously served as special counsel in the U.S. Department of the Treasury Office of Tax Policy from 2010 to 2012.

Considering Missouri’s economic profile and the conditions of Amendment 5, Gamage said there is no other state that has successfully eliminated income taxes in the way Amendment 5 would.

“I think the idea that Missouri could successfully replace its income tax with expanding its relatively high sales tax rate to services — I predict it won’t work,” Gamage said. “I predict it will be a political and economic disaster.” 

Amendment 5 and property taxes

Some TV advertisements supporting Amendment 5 claim it would lower property taxes. But that is not guaranteed in the language of the amendment.

Four amendments, including income tax changes and changes to the initiative petition process, are set for Missouri’s August ballot.

State lawmakers added a provision to the measure that effectively prevents local governments from earning more revenue than they already do if the state expands the sales tax base.

If Amendment 5 passes and state lawmakers expand the sales tax base onto services, then local governments would have to reduce either their property tax or sales tax rates to a degree that almost entirely offsets the revenue gains they would receive from taxes on new services.

Kansas City and St. Louis also have the option to lower earnings tax rates to offset the new sales tax revenue. Amendment 5, however, gives the local governments the authority to decide which tax rate they choose to lower. It is not mandated that they lower property taxes.

There is a provision barring local governments from changing their tax base in any way that results in less money going to public schools.

Amendment 5 will be on ballots statewide in the Tuesday, Aug. 4, election, alongside three other statewide amendments, including Missouri Amendment 4, which would make it harder for Missouri citizens to change the state constitution.