Patrick Ishmael of the Show-Me Institute writes about Missouri tax reform:
The great humorist and Missourian Mark Twain was not a fan of taxes. “What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector?” he asked in 1902. “The taxidermist takes only your skin.” He later joked that, in America, “we’ve got so much taxation, I don’t know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed except the answer to prayer.” (No one doubts the federal government would tax intangible, divine returns, too, and will when the technology allows it.)
Twain’s sardonic, salt-of-the-earth sensibility is emblematic of Missouri culture and politics, embodied most famously, perhaps, by congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who said in 1899: “I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.”
In 2022, the Show-Me State has more corn, (comparatively) fewer Democrats, and probably about the same number of cockleburs, whatever those are. But thanks to nearly a decade of concerted tax reform by legislators, state income taxes here are lower than they’ve been in over 50 years — and appear to be headed lower still, thanks to a fresh new tax cut passed earlier this month.
Read the whole thing here.