Just hold your nose and vote for Kansas City’s earnings tax | Opinion
An unlikely coalition is set to gather Tuesday morning at Union Station.
The Kansas City mayor and the Jackson County prosecutor — frequent punching bags of the city’s conservatives — will share a stage with the heads of the police and fire unions. Also on hand: the chair of the Civic Council, which represents the region’s largest companies, and the director of the Heavy Constructors Association.
Their kumbaya message: Vote yes on the earnings tax on April 7.
It makes me a little nervous. So does the recent spate of social media videos from City Council members endorsing the tax. The people who run this city are not acting like they think this vote is in the bag.
It would be very bad if it isn’t.
The earnings tax takes a flat 1% of wages for anyone who lives or works in Kansas City — same rate for a teacher as for a CEO — and funds nearly half the city’s general revenue. That’s police, fire, trash, roads, and a whole lot more.
People love to bag on the earnings tax. A guest commentary in The Star last week made a case against renewal that’s worth engaging. Patrick Tuohey of the Show-Me Institute argued the tax is regressive — true — and that it sustains a subsidy culture that funnels public money to developers while the city cries poor at election time. Also largely true. Tuohey pointed to an especially egregious example of civic hypocrisy, where Burns & McDonnell executives who once piously boasted about paying the earnings tax later negotiated to get some of it back to finance a new headquarters.
Tuohey’s solution — and the broader argument from the don’t-tax-us crowd — is to get rid of it and trust that Kansas City will build something fairer on the other side.
That assumes a lot.
A no vote, which would phase out the tax over the next decade, won’t produce a better city. It will produce a gigantic hole. A nearly $400 million hole. Take away the earnings tax and your options to fill that hole are sales tax increases, property tax increases or service cuts — all of which tend to hit lower-income residents at least as hard, and usually harder.
There’s also something worth noting here about Kansas City specifically. Yes, many other cities get by without an earnings tax. But this is a sprawling city with aging infrastructure and deep pockets of poverty, in a metro where plenty of people work here, use the roads and services, and then go home to Lee’s Summit or Overland Park or Liberty. The earnings tax is partly how we account for that. It’s not perfect, but it’s a reasonable solution.
What does bother me is the cycle. Since 2010, Kansas City has been required by state law to vote on the earnings tax every five years — the result of a statewide ballot measure pushed by Republicans who have long opposed the tax. A failed vote would permanently strip the city of its authority to levy the tax. The path back would be incredibly difficult. Analysts have suggested the city might need to double the local sales tax to 6.5% or quadruple property tax levies to make up for the loss.
But even those emergency measures face a legal wall — the 1980 Hancock Amendment to the Missouri Constitution bars local governments from imposing significant tax increases without voter approval.
If our city’s leaders are spooked even a little bit about a possible no vote, they should probably start thinking a little bit harder about what a fairer, more sustainable funding model actually looks like.
But that’s a conversation for the next five years. Right now, we have the city we have. I’m voting yes. I’d welcome a little more fiscal discipline at City Hall. But you can’t tighten your belt when your arms are amputated.
This story was originally published March 24, 2026 at 5:08 AM.
