# Missouri Amendment 5 (2026) A ballot measure to **phase out Missouri's state income tax** and expand the legislature's power to raise sales taxes, rejected by voters on **4 August 2026**. It failed by a margin that is the story: roughly **82% against**, on more than 1.1 million votes. ## What it would have done The amendment gave the legislature **five years to enact a plan phasing out the state income tax**, with the phase-out keyed to revenue collected from other sources — principally sales taxes, whose base the legislature would have gained broad new authority to expand. Supporters framed it as letting Missourians keep more of their earnings and spurring growth. Opponents argued the arithmetic was not optional: replacing income-tax revenue means raising sales taxes, and sales taxes take a larger share of income from people who spend most of what they earn. A companion measure, **Amendment 4**, which would have restricted the initiative-petition process, also failed the same day. ## Why it matters for the KB **1. An 82–18 defeat in Missouri is a real signal, not a partisan one.** Missouri is a solidly Republican state that Trump carried comfortably. A tax-elimination measure losing four to one there cannot be explained by Democratic turnout. **Large numbers of Republican voters voted against eliminating the income tax**, which suggests the income-tax-abolition project — a long-standing goal in the vault's [[Tax Code Hub]] and state-policy material — is substantially less popular than its advocates' presence in legislatures implies. **2. The mechanism voters rejected was the swap, not the cut.** The measure did not simply cut taxes; it traded a progressive revenue source for a regressive one. When that trade was stated on the ballot in those terms, it lost overwhelmingly. That is useful evidence about which framings survive contact with voters: **"cut your taxes" polls well, "shift the burden downward" does not**, and the same policy can be either depending on whether the offset is visible. **3. Amendment 4's simultaneous failure is the second half.** Voters declined to make the initiative process harder to use in the same election in which they used it to reject a legislature-backed tax measure. The vault's direct-democracy material tracks the pattern of legislatures moving to restrict ballot initiatives after losing on them — Missouri voters saw both propositions at once and rejected both. **4. It connects to the 1860s argument.** The HCR letter that surfaced this measure braided it with Civil War income-tax history, where [[Justin Smith Morrill]] and others argued for taxation proportionate to ability to pay. The Missouri result is that argument tested by referendum 160 years later, with the same answer. ## See Also - [[Tax Code Hub]] · [[2026 Ballot Measures Hub]] - [[Morrill Land-Grant College Act]] — Morrill's other legislative legacy - [[William Graham Sumner - negligent shiftless inefficient silly and imprudent]] — the counter-tradition