The Coalition for Missouri’s Future, a group organized to oppose efforts to eliminate Missouri’s income tax and replace it with a more broadly-based sales tax (a.k.a., The Fair Tax), has produced a series of papers questioning the benefits of the switch. The papers — currently there are five — have been written by Brian Schmidt, the former executive director of the Missouri General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Tax Policy, who is now doing private consulting. The papers raise some interesting questions and fair points, but they cannot be considered legitimate economic analysis. If the organization who commissioned the papers wanted useful propaganda, they got it. If they wanted any type of serious economic analysis, the papers fail completely in that regard.
Attacks on Fair Tax Are Propaganda, Not Economic Analysis
About the Author
David Stokes
David Stokes is a St. Louis native and a graduate of Saint Louis University High School and Fairfield (Conn.) University. He spent six years as a political aide at the St. Louis County Council before joining the Show-Me Institute in 2007. Stokes was a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute from 2007 to 2016. From 2016 through 2020 he was Executive Director of Great Rivers Habitat Alliance, where he led efforts to oppose harmful floodplain developments done with abusive tax subsidies. Stokes rejoined the Institute in early 2021 as the Director of Municipal Policy. He is a past president of the University City Library Board. He served on the St. Louis County 2010 Council Redistricting Commission and was the 2012 representative to the Electoral College from Missouri’s First Congressional District. He lives in University City with his wife and their three children.
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