Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

Missouri

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Missouri is Sleepwalking into a Half-Billion Dollar Tax Cut for the Rich

April 22, 2025 • By Carl Davis

Missouri lawmakers are debating a tax cut that will mostly benefit the wealthiest in the state, while relying on an unrealistic estimate of what it will cost.

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Advantaging Affluence: A Distributional Analysis of Missouri HB 798’s Uneven Tax Cuts for Wealth and Work

March 28, 2025 • By Aidan Davis, Carl Davis, Dylan Grundman O'Neill, Eli Byerly-Duke, Matthew Gardner

Missouri House Bill 798 would reduce personal and corporate income tax rates, fully eliminate taxes on capital gains income from sale of assets, and eliminates the state’s modest Earned Income Tax Credit that assists many working people in lower-paid jobs. HB 798 would radically transform Missouri’s income tax code into a system that privileges income from wealth over income from work, leaving many middle-income families to pay a higher income tax rate than wealthy people living off their investments.

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Proposed Missouri Tax Shelter Would Aid the Wealthy, Anti-Abortion Centers Alike

March 6, 2025 • By Carl Davis

In Missouri, donations to anti-abortion pregnancy resource centers come with state tax credits valued at 70 cents on the dollar. One bill currently being debated in the state would increase that matching rate to 100 percent—that is a full, state-funded reimbursement of gifts to anti-abortion groups.

ITEP Work in Action  

Missouri Budget Project: Special Session Tax Proposal Leaves Out 1/3 of Missouri Taxpayers, Weighted to Benefit Wealthiest

August 28, 2022 • By ITEP Staff

Governor Parson’s recently released tax proposal would leave out about one-third of Missourians, including many of those who pay the highest proportion of their income in state & local taxes, and set the state up for a Kansas-like budget bomb that would require significant cuts to schools, public safety, healthcare, and other critical needs. Read […]

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Missouri’s Creative Approach to Ending the “Race to the Bottom” in State Business Taxes

July 10, 2019 • By Matthew Gardner

Each year, state and local governments spend billions of dollars on targeted tax incentives—special tax breaks ostensibly designed to encourage businesses to relocate, expand or simply stay where they are. A law enacted by the Missouri legislature creates a template for states to work bilaterally to put the brakes on the “race to the bottom” in state business taxes.

ITEP Work in Action  

Missouri Budget Project: Senate Tax Bills Provide Unfair Giveaways, Leave Communities Reeling

January 16, 2019 • By ITEP Staff

An analysis by the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy found that 91% of the tax cut would flow to the wealthiest 20% of Missourians.

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Building on Momentum from Recent Years, 2018 Delivers Strengthened Tax Credits for Workers and Families

July 10, 2018 • By Aidan Davis

Despite some challenging tax policy debates, a number of which hinged on states’ responses to federal conformity, 2018 brought some positive developments for workers and their families. This post updates a mid-session trends piece on this very subject. Here’s what we have been following:

ITEP Work in Action  

Missouri Budget Project: Sales Taxes on Groceries & the Importance of a Refundable EITC

February 28, 2018 • By ITEP Staff

A state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), like the recently proposed Missouri Working Families Credit, could benefit as many as 515,000 working families with modest wages, providing hardworking families the ability to achieve a better future and a pathway to the middle class. By making the credit refundable, like the federal EITC and most other […]

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State Rundown 1/12: Tax Cut Tunnel Vision Threatens to Bore State Budget Holes Even Deeper

January 12, 2018 • By .ITEP Staff

As states continue to sift through wreckage of the federal tax cut bill to try to determine how they will be affected, two things should be clear to everyone: the richest people in every state just got a massive federal tax cut, and federal funding for shared priorities like education and health care is certain to continue to decline. State leaders who care about those priorities should consider asking those wealthy beneficiaries of the federal cuts to pay more to the state in order to minimize the damage of the looming federal funding cuts, but so far policymakers in Idaho,…